It's Nothing Personal

It was going to happen sooner or later. My personal e-mail address has gotten to the point where there is practically no truly personal mail in my inbox. We haven't migrated from dead-tree and ink letter-writing to electronic letter-writing. We have migrated to no letter-writing.

Why would you bother anyway? If someone wants to know what's going on with you, they can just check your status, online photo albums, and tweets.

That's not to say my inbox is empty. Far from it. I get updates from groups I belong to (several weekly inline-skating updates, 2 different religious organizations, team projects for my empowerment course, school updates for the kids, alumni association news and projects). I subscribe to plenty of stuff (word-a-day, LinkedIn groups, myriad of marketing gurus, health newsletters, daily click for TheHungerSite, my favorite charities). I get select Facebook updates, when someone comments on my status or sends me a direct inbox message. And then there's the odd mail where I'm not sure if I'm subscribed to that site or not. This week I found there is a single woman in New York who is interested in me. Wrong gender and wrong continent, but it's nice to know that somewhere, someone is interested in me.

In fact, my primary e-mail has become the place where I get stuff I know I should read as opposed to my RSS reader, which is the place for the stuff I wish I had time to read. I actually get one daily newspaper in my inbox, because I don't get to even read the news every day, and I don't want to be completely ignorant. Not that I could be if I wanted to be, because as long as I keep up with people's FB statuses, I have some idea of the major news events.

The emphasis, however, is on "should". I have a few hundred e-mails in there, over 100 of which are unopened. Just a few months ago, I always managed to keep it below 100 in my inbox total. Now, it's hopeless. I have separate e-mail for work, and for the main volunteer organization I am involved in, but other than that, the rest of the mails are lost in the pile. If I don't answer someone in a day or 2, forget it. That e-mail is lost in the pile. I try putting stars on the ones I really want to deal with but didn't get to yet, but it's only a week before any mail isn't even in the top 50 showing in the first page.

I've stopped feeling bad about it, though, because as I said, almost none of that mail is directed to me from a personal individual I know. It's almost all a blast of some kind, and when it's not, it's at the very least a group mail.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have a lot of real friends. A day doesn't go by where I don't talk to at least one person who is primarily a social rather than a business friend. But the medium is voice, not mail. It's as if e-mail has become a medium for action-oriented correspondence. We speak to someone by phone, and might send the exact address by e-mail or text, but mail isn't the primary personal form of communication. Personal communication is now by social networks for anything general, and by voice or F2F for intimate. E-mail, well, it's just something you don't take personally.