Opinion | The Kids Are Right About Email, Too – The New York Times

My children never got the chance to know the pleasure of a heartfelt exchange that traveled with the speed of a text but nevertheless carried the soul of the sender. All they have known is what email has devolved into: reply-all responses to bulk messages, shipping notifications, fund-raising pleas, systemwide reminders and, of course, spam. Email is now just a way to be at the beck and call of anyone, and any robot, with an internet connection.

True, the real problem is the other notifications, all more urgent than anything that arrives in an inbox. Our phones vibrate incessantly with alerts that make us feel bad in a dozen different ways. The planet is on fire. Nuclear war may be imminent. A calamity that happened to someone we dont know feels personal because it is happening in real time. All day long, tragedy after distant tragedy arrives to break our hearts. The whole world is right there, buzzing in our pockets.

Of all the available online depressants, email is the easiest to ignore, but digital natives never paid attention in the first place. For them, email isnt annoying. It simply doesnt exist.

Is it any wonder that minimalist tech is making a comeback among people too young to remember when minimalist tech was all we had? It doesnt take a degree in sociology to guess why the #flipphone hashtag on TikTok has more than 346 million views or why the Gen Z artist Lorde disabled the browser on her phone and started reading Annie Dillard.

There are ways to break the tyranny of the inbox, as Cal Newport, the author of A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload, calls it. People who email the scholar Ther A. Pickens get a thoughtful auto-response explaining that she is writing a book and has limited time for additional projects. If you receive silence in response to your request, know too that is also a kind of speech, Dr. Pickenss message reads.

I tell myself that ignoring email isnt an option for me, but the truth is that I effectively ignore the vast majority of the messages I get anyway, not because they dont matter but because I just dont have time to respond. Feeling bad about not answering has become the only response I can manage.

I once told a friend of mine, a retired Episcopal priest, that I still had unanswered emails in my inbox from 2016, and he immediately closed his eyes, made the sign of the cross in the air and started mumbling. Are you absolving me of the sin of unanswered emails? I asked. He smiled, nodded and kept on praying.

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Opinion | The Kids Are Right About Email, Too - The New York Times