Untitled 2020-06-15

The following is the email I sent to iwant@hey.com to convince them to give me an invite.

===

Hey,

I don't go to the gym, and I don't eat healthy. I don't call my mom nearly as often as I should. But one thing I do is keep a meticulously manicured email inbox. It's inspired by, but not quite equivalent to, Inbox Zero.

This system works great, but there is something of a flaw. It's not a flaw in the inbox system. Actually, it turns out 80% of the email I get is not only crap, but crap from mailing lists and such that I can easily unsubscribe from anytime. About five years ago, I realized this. I resolved that the very next email I got from some dumb email list that I don't read, like GAP or iTunes or something, I would immediately unsubscribe. I did this for a few weeks.

Pretty soon, as you'd expect, the garbage (not quite junk, not quite spam) emails stopped. Entirely. I stared into the gaping void of a pristine email inbox and did I feel triumph? Did I feel joy? No, I felt dread. More than anything I felt lonely. I realized that some amount of my self worth was tied to the subtle, subconscious idea that I was a real person, with feelings (and at least a credit card) who, in some capacity, was worth emailing. Even if it was an ad or some dumb newsletter I didn't really want, someone out there cared enough to send it to me. In the isolated, alienated, cyberjunk dystopian present that we live in, that mattered to me.

So I went back and resubscribed to the newsletters (or at least, stopped unsubscribing to new ones). And I felt better. It's kind of like those vacuum cleaners with fake noise added so that people believe they're working (look it up on YouTube).

It's not a flaw in the inbox system. No, it never was. The flaw is the frailty of human emotion and the failings of constant attention seeking.

I’d like to try Hey, because I’d like to maybe finally come to grips with those feelings, that flaw.

Thanks, -Travis