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Met a guy at the laundromat who had 4,000 unread emails and said he felt 'peaceful' about it

He just shrugged and told me 'I only open the ones from my boss or my mom,' which made me wonder if organizing everything is actually the hoarding problem itself, anyone else find a weird peace in letting some of the digital clutter just sit?

3 comments

3 Comments

mason_reed472d ago

I heard someone on a podcast say that the average person has something like 6,000 unread emails at any given time, so 4,000 is actually kind of normal. It got me thinking about how we treat our inbox like a physical closet that needs to be tidy, but the point of it is just to get info and then move on. I've got a folder with 900 unread promotional emails from stores I never even bought anything from, and I just ignore them because deleting them feels like a chore that doesn't matter. The guy at the laundromat probably has the right idea, honestly. Letting digital junk just sit there is like leaving old paint cans in the back of the garage, they don't hurt anything if you don't touch them.

laura_black1d ago

The guy at the laundromat had 4,000 unread emails, not 6,000 which is a pretty big difference actually. I've got about 5,200 right now and most of them are from stores I bought one thing from five years ago. Deleting them feels like a pointless chore, like sorting through old junk mail that already went in the trash. Inbox zero people are just trying to feel superior when really they're just wasting time on something that doesn't matter. Those paint cans in the garage analogy is perfect, they just sit there and do nothing.

jordan_henderson132d ago

Wait isn't that basically what email filters are for? Like why stress over 4000 unread emails when most of them are garbage you never asked for in the first place. I have my spam folder set to auto delete everything older than 30 days and I forget it even exists. The whole "inbox zero" thing is just a flex for people who have nothing better to do with their time. If the emails actually mattered someone would text or call you instead. Digital clutter only hurts you if you let it live in your head rent free.