Recently, I lost access to my Google Workspace. Emails, documents, messages, contacts, and notes- all gone.
It is one of the best events to occur in the long span of my “digital existence.”
Email reduces productivity. Email makes us miserable. Email has a mind of its own. If you don’t believe me, read best-selling author Cal Newport’s prescient work on a World Without Email. These three claims are simply chapter titles in his larger argument.
We’re pointed a new direction in the internet age. With the dawn of personal AI chatbots, virtual reality poised within each major player’s arsenal, and Web 3.0 seeking new direction and a capstone innovation, the stage is set for the reinvention of that central aqueduct through which all traffic flows online. A reinvention that (hopefully) aligns humanely with our internal wiring…
In recent years, neuroscience has established an interesting link between downtime and social groups. The defaults pathways of our brain that are returned to when we end an activity but before we begin another are those same pathways neural nets that light up when we are prompted to think about personal connections. The insight and translation is that email is not just the default modality for work but for life. We no longer just complete tasks and communicate cross-network through Gmail. We think, eat, and sleep with the cocoon of our inbox and social networks at the front of our unconscious mind.
For this reason, I’m beyond grateful for the chance to detox. Social media, email, and messaging are the go-to activity of our age. Tech companies have achieved planet-wide dominance because they tap into our natural wiring so well (I won’t retread here the gamification, limbic hijack, and network effect design intentions that hold us captive). Add to this biological reliance a social and, quite often, financial reliance to platforms like LinkedIn and Outlook, and we have a culture entirely addicted with no way to come clean.
This email example that started my thoughts may seem like a benign parallel that holds little weight in our discussion of the broader impacts from social platforms. In truth, its centrality to our crisis illuminates a hidden insight: we have created technology to disrupt our anthropology. Too many of these anthropomorphically-designed tools and interfaces hold captive our hearts and attention. Too often are we fooled into believing our online world is “real” (that it creates connection, cultivates virtue, and can chart a course for our life). Too soon have we accepted the fate our commanding inboxes, virtual teams, and remote jobs offer us in the time of the soul lost among digital giants.
So I’ll take a hiatus from some tools of the lifestyle that commands I place my worth in my network, my resume, and my title.
I’ll join this world without email.
