Why I Dream of Life Without Email
Urgency culture is out of control and email is its most potent weapon
What would it be like to not have email?
This is what I daydream about these days.
It’s funny that imagining an existence without a nonstop bombardment of electronic messages now seems luxurious, when it was the norm for me up until around age 30.
Email itself is not really the problem, per se. There are clearly good uses for it.
The problem is how it is used in a culture that treats routine issues with a ridiculous level of urgency.
In the old days, you had to pick up the phone and call someone to make a request of them, which made the likelihood you would make the request much lower. And if you did make the request you would not be so quick to just “ping” them to remind them to respond to you.
You would seem kooky if you kept calling someone you barely knew (or possibly didn’t know at all) for an answer to a question or a request made only hours or days before.