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.

But with email, the barrier to entry is lower, and that’s a problem.

When I decided a few years ago to try and live a less stressful life, I knew that I had to reject urgency culture, which was leaving me drained and burnt out.

So I turned off app and email notifications and gave up doomscrolling the news. I said no to nonstop work to meet arbitrary deadlines and stopped driving myself in to the ground in an effort to get through my always metastasizing to-do list.

I stopped surfing the Internet and started reading books again. I decided that I actually did not have to respond to every single email sent to me because if I did I would never have any time to do things I actually cared about.

What I forgot to factor in was that while I was making big changes to my life, most other people weren’t.

I don’t know if email seems more invasive to me now because it’s the last remnant of my hyper-connected life, but I’ve realized that something is very off about they way this technology is used in our culture.

In just the last few days I’ve had people suggest that I was going to send the wrong message (not enthusiastic enough about a deal) because of my slow response to an email. In one case, a single hour had passed since I recieved the email. In the other—which was a detailed financial deal that required careful consideration—it had been a few days.

Late last year, a former CNN colleague contacted me with a vague request to call him because he had a question for me. I didn’t respond, because I was with my dying mother. When I finally got back to my phone a few weeks later, there were multiple messages and texts with increasing levels of urgency. He finally explained in the last email (which I saw months later) that he was re-releasing an old podcast episode with me, and he wanted me to update him on information about my move to Italy that is actually available on this Substack.

This doesn’t exactly rank as an emergency in my book.

Mind you, I’m not talking about a bad person. If I told you his name, you might know who he is and probably like him, at least as a public person. It’s just that urgency culture has made people feel justified in making demands that they have no right to make.

It doesn’t seem to occur to them that people go on vacations, have dying relatives, get depressed or burnt out or whatever would cause a person to fall behind or be unable to respond to email messages.

You might think I should have just replied and told him I wasn’t available. I’ve learned from doing this in the past that it is a mistake. Once you let certain kinds of people know you are seeing their emails or texts, they will use it as an opening to get what they want (or get it on behalf of their monster of a boss who won’t take no for an answer).

They’ll tell you they are so sorry your mother is dying or that you are recovering from surgery, but if you could just answer a few questions, that would be great. People engage in this behavior without any self-awareness of how awful it is because it’s been so normalized.

I’ve toyed with the idea of deleting my email—and maybe I will.

But I’m realistic that it wouldn’t solve the primary problem of a false sense of urgency and the inclination to treat inconveniences as catastrophes.

For now, I will strengthen my digital boundaries and toy with ways to go more analog in a way that isn’t too disruptive to my life or the lives of those around me.

Stay tuned.

Recommend Changing The Channel with Kirsten Powers to your readers

New York Times bestselling author Kirsten Powers offers fresh thinking about how we can make big changes in our lives, communities and country.