February 22, 2026
How many unread emails do you have in your inbox? Some believe you can tell a lot about a person based on this figure. Sure, I’ll bite:
If it’s in the hundreds or even thousands, does it mean that we’re lazy or that we’re just too busy doing actual stuff to be checking our emails anymore?; have we become experts at sifting through the nonsense or is it more an indication that we subscribe to far too many things that catch our attention and then ignore their constant, irritating presence?; and If the number is zero at 3 PM on a Wednesday, then surely we’d have to be either a toddler or a serial killer.
If that sounds overly dramatic, the image of the number 9,743 inside of a red bubble, hovering above an icon for an email app, on a phone that we pick up and look at more times in a day than we look other people in their eyes (and the fact that some children actually have digital accounts, Facebook or otherwise), is dreadfully real.
The Graveyard Shift
Clicking the “Mark As Unread” tab after briefly viewing an email message, while procrastinatory, is definitely a bit more proactive than ignoring our accounts all together; although I have been at a point where the few “Read” emails (no longer in bold print) actually stand out more amongst the sea of fat-fonted, unwelcomed messages and are thus, easier to locate; my partner tells me you can set it so “Unread” messages automatically appear at the top– in case I want to prioritize the items that I’ll never look at again.
Even a person who goes out of their way to avoid stepping in the dung of annoying ads and updates still has to spend a fair amount of time keeping up with it all–and that’s just their “Personal Inbox”: it’s not uncommon for someone to spend two or three hours of their day just on work-related emails. Given the sheer amount of time an individual may spend attempting to fend off such a behemoth, the efficiency of this technological system appears to have been waning for quite some time.
Questionable data-driven marketing practices are having their way with our mental and emotional capacities by flooding our attention; meanwhile the emergence of sleeker, fancier and less susceptible information sharing platforms, such as Dropbox, Sharepoint, WhatsApp, Confluence, and Slack, threaten the very legitimacy of what appears to be a rapidly aging email system. As more and newer data exchange stations gain traction, I’m imagining that in 10 or 20 years, entire email networks will become a digital graveyard of classified ads, junk mail and a few forgotten followups– oh, and just a couple tax forms, personal documents, photos, attachments and some other boring stuff.
Why should we care about what happens to all this crap? With an actual landfill, we can physically see it, we can map out and study its impact on the earth and we can (I hope) plan accordingly. Yet, while many people still don’t give a shit about what happens to their garbage or even their house, once they’re done with them, that doesn’t mean these things cease to exist.
Our steadily declining interest in something doesn’t make it go away; just like our collection of Blu-ray Discs and Beanie Babies, these systems of technology will all eventually find their way to some digital version of an abandoned shopping mall, a Blockbuster Video store or haunted amusement park– a Cyberfill. The difference is, even though we assume cyberwaste ends up in some virtual ‘hole’ that nobody wants to look at, it actually follows us around, everywhere. We can only imagine what it’d be like if our physical trash did that– now there’s an idea to tackle global warming, as we’d certainly be more wasteless.
Hasta la Vista, Baby
Our inability to reign in this level of consumption is a sure sign that we are in way over our heads when it comes to modern technology. If we look at what humanity has done to itself in the natural, physical world, it’s quite terrifying to imagine what we’re capable of doing to ourselves in the digital realm; and while there have been plenty of sci-fi/horror movies to depict this nightmare (thank you Mr. Governator), these are movies, not necessarily premonitions, so most people continue to dismiss many of the philosophical theories surrounding the idea that what we are creating, is the very thing that will destroy us.
We rationalize this erosion of ease by listing every little great problem that has been solved by technology; but when we’re looking at real solutions to real problems being engineered by brilliant professionals every day, us amateurs use this to justify habitual joyrides through cyberspace, as we slowly sever the connection between who we are and how we behave. (If this false sense of entitlement sounds familiar, look no further than the opinions and the behavior of the many jangoist, disgruntled citizens who were born and raised in this country).
While the printing press took decades to roll out (actually pretty quick back then), it never reached a point where everybody got to have one. Advancements in digital technology have had quite a fast and efficacious impact on civilization, relative to past innovations and discoveries. There are a lot more people today and information travels much faster, but is this the impact that’s going to carry us sure-footedly into the next 200 years and beyond?
The way that certain technologies have been introduced to the masses today is like learning how to make personal rocket ships, but instead of training a select few how to fly them, we just make a bunch of them and hand every person the keys to one– as long as they create an account and agree to terms and conditions, which include automatically opting to receive promotional email notifications.
The reason we shouldn’t all have personal rocket ships (other than certain and instant death) is the same reason we should care about what happens to all this crap: there will always be a life’s worth of truth and consequences contained within these systems that we don’t actually know anything about. What’s dangerous is the level of unearned accessibility: like we’re only using it simply because it’s there.
Despite our personal efforts to mitigate tech overwhelm through the discovery of clever features, such as “Spam” filters and “Unsubscribe” options, it remains relentless. The question then becomes: how swift and how hard will this fall be? When are we to turn and burn off? Is it when we hit 30,000 “Unread Messages”, 100,000 emails ignored?; I guess it would certainly have to be once our cyber-assistant murders us in our sleep.
The Need to Know
Steve Jobs, the man who pioneered the boom in mobile technologies and personal computing, famously never allowed his children to use the products he and his company were developing, at least not until they were old enough to understand how it all worked, the good and the bad. “But we’re talking about the iPad, iPod and the freaking iPhone!”. Well, he may have herded millions of sheep, but it was only his fatherly duty to rear, protect and provide for a few of them.
New tech now provides us with something we “need” to look at, in a conveniently pocket-sized device. To take it a step further, we then need that device in order to find more things we “need” to look at; but is it really our personal obligation to be enslaved by our own digital accounts or to know what Kid Rock is up to today? In both instances, we have nothing to offer but complaints, so one doesn’t have to look far to know just whose needs we’re satisfying, in lieu of our own.
Perhaps the screen addictions, endless flooding of emails, mental health decline and a collective deterioration of a moral sense of self are the cost of doing business with a person powerfully brilliant enough to change the world with their ideas. For my simpleton brain, what’s occurring throughout this Information Age seems entirely convoluted and discordant with our natural state of existence; and it has me wondering what word will be used to describe the next period of humanity: The Automation Age, The Interstellar Age, The Quantum Age, The Age of Mis-Information?
Decades from now everyone will be laughing about these stupid little tech conundrums; but they’ll be toiling with some other big-ass genius invention that’s being produced for everyone, yet has become completely unmanageable. Whether it will be Dark or Enlightened, the next era in succession will undoubtedly be driven by technology, so it seems as though we better learn to warm up to it; or at least keep it within reach- with the caution of a delicate fawn.
We may someday have to apply or subscribe to the stores where we buy food; we might need to be carrying a personal tech device (futurePhone) in order to travel internationally or even state-to-state; shit, it may be required that our social security numbers be stored in our necks. I guess this works– that is, until we need to pay for sunlight or register for fresh air. That is definitely where I would draw the line, because life, at that point, would simply be a prison.
For now, those natural gifts are free and we don’t have to be overwhelmed by the fact that there are so many more stars out there than unread messages, that we can count sheep to relax and not have to count followers to feel good about ourselves, or that developing a digital application means nothing if its users don’t develop love and compassion for one another, as living beings, not bots.
Part of what makes wildflowers and forests and streams and mountains so beautiful, is that they don’t need our attention and our focus in order to exist. I think you can tell a lot about a person by how they define and demonstrate their needs…and maybe just a little by how they react to:
**Message Not Delivered**