I'm Ignoring My Inbox

On my Promotions tab and making room for more through less

I’m noticing more and more these days how much of my inbox is filled with promotions. I delete at least twenty emails every day, each one vying for my attention and attempting to pry open my wallet.

They all use different variations of the same headline:

HURRY!

NOW!

ALMOST GONE!

SALE!

Some of them even use my name, which almost gets me until I see who the sender is. It’s of course especially bad this time of year with Christmas around the corner. It’s also arguably my fault for signing up for so many email lists (what can I say, I’m a sucker for that 10% off, especially when trying a new product). But just because I know it’s coming doesn’t make it any less exhausting.

Many of them are using scare tactics – scarcity tactics, rather – telling me there are only a few items left or available for a limited amount of time. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I fall for it. My relationship with money, which I undoubtedly inherited from my mother’s mother, a French Canadian Laura Ingalls Wilder who was a teenager during the Great Depression and a mother of four in the fifties, tells me I shouldn’t buy anything at full price. It says if I do, it was a waste. Therefore, I occasionally succumb to the clamor. However, a majority of the time – in their frequency and quantity – these emails succeed only in blending together and overwhelming. They exhaust me.

Opening my email feels like plunging into a pool of piranhas, each wanting a piece of me. Luckily Gmail has a separate tab for promotions that filters most of them out of my main inbox, but if I don’t check it regularly they only continue contributing to the scary red notification bubble I can never seem to suppress.

Then why don’t you unsubscribe, Lauren? you might ask. It’s a logical question to which I have a highly illogical answer.

There’s an abstract satisfaction I glean from deleting these messages en masse.

It’s like writing something easy on your to-do list so you can quickly check it off; it’s a fallacy of productivity but psychologically, it motivates. It’s a kind of Girl Math principle (if you know, you know), which tells me I’m saving money just by deleting these emails. Sure, I'd be saving money if I wasn’t on these lists to begin with, but like a tree falling in the woods, would I even know I was saving anything if I wasn’t actively turning it down? You see, there’s power in the choice, even if it comes with overwhelm. (With great power comes great responsibility and all that.)

Still, the real question remains: Why do we let it be like this? Why as a society do we make everything about the newest or the next thing? Why do we encourage each other to spend rather than savor? Why do we muddy the water with money, making everything a transaction or a marketing opportunity?

Why is there so much want?

It’s not just during the holidays anymore, either. My inbox is proof that it’s every day, multiple times a day. It’s everywhere, all the time. It’s in our faces, always.

It’s suffocating.

And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Maybe not about email marketing specifically, but society as a whole. There are a number of writers here on Substack I’ve found who talk about a topic that has become increasingly more interesting to me: slow, intentional living. Stacey Langford and Charlene Storey to name a couple. I’ve also seen social media influencers like The Bachelor franchise’s Abigail Heringer talk about their decisions to move out of crowded cities and into smaller communities away from the hustle.

Our culture might paint this approach as the path to ruin, but the number of voices speaking up on a variety of platforms are clearly proving it wrong. From where I sit, it appears more and more people are living their lives on their own terms and are all the more successful for it. I would even venture to guess they feel a whole lot more fulfilled.

That is, after all, why I left my nine-to-five in the first place over a year ago. I wanted to dictate my own schedule, choose my own work, and spend my time in ways that felt good to me. It’s also why – now in my thirties – I’ve found myself gravitating toward the people who fill my cup rather than deplete it. Energy, I’ve found, is a precious resource – even more so than money.

So perhaps I should take my own learnings from other aspects of my life and apply them to my inbox. Maybe I shouldn’t just delete or ignore these emails. Maybe it’s time to unsubscribe from all the noise (without worrying about all the potential money I could be “saving”) and leave room for the things that speak to me; the quiet, patient, inspiring things.

Things like the posts I find here on Substack.