In the vanished era of physical correspondence, mail arrived once or twice a day. It was carried by a postman in a heavy blue mac, dropped through a brass letterbox with a satisfying clatter, and opened at leisure over breakfast with a bone paper-knife. One had time to digest its contents, reflect upon the phrasing, and draft a considered response to be posted the following morning.
Today, electronic mail arrives every four seconds with the relentless, unyielding cadence of a dripping tap. Small, aggressive red badges hover in the corner of our screens like persistent hornets, demanding that we drop whatever we are doing—whether contemplating the meaning of life or buttering a piece of toast—to read a limited-time offer on discount footwear.
We have somehow fallen for the bizarre modern delusion that to answer an email within three seconds is a mark of supreme professional competence. In truth, it is merely a sign that one has completely lost control of one’s day.
The result of this madness is the total fragmentation of the human mind. It is now virtually impossible to read a long article, or even finish a decent cup of tea, without checking a glowing glass rectangle four times mid-paragraph to see if a stranger in California has sent an urgent update regarding a privacy policy update.
We no longer control our own time; we merely react to a series of digital pings engineered by twenty-four-year-olds in Silicon Valley. Our minds, which ought to function like quiet, mahogany-lined private studies, have been converted into noisy public hallways where any passing double-glazing salesman is permitted to wander in and shout at the furniture.
I attempted recently to implement a bold new policy of total inbox neglect. I decided to let the messages accumulate, turn off the chime, and treat my email account with the cold, distant indifference it so richly deserves.
The experiment lasted precisely forty-eight minutes. At which point the little red circle informed me I had forty-three unread messages—forty-two of which were notifications from a professional networking site informing me that someone I haven’t spoken to since 1994 had recently updated their job title.
We are told that technology was invented to save us time. Yet I spend half my waking life moving unwanted digital envelopes from a folder called “Inbox” to a folder called “Trash”—an administrative task of such breathtaking futility that even the Ministry of Works in 1952 would have rejected it as overly bureaucratic.
Right. I am shutting down the computer and turning off the phone. Though if history is any guide, I shall probably log back in six minutes from now just to check if anyone has emailed me about shoes.