Email makes us rude, but resistance is not futile

Hello, I wish to register a complaint:

People don’t answer their goddamned emails.

I’m not talking about messages they get from internet randos who would like them to subscribe to this newsletter, and/or reveal the secrets of the globalist conspiracy. I’m talking about carefully crafted, politely phrased, eminently reasonable requests asking them for this or that piece of information, or for their opinion on something . Or emails that offer to share a manuscript that the sender has a legitimate basis for believing would interest the addressee. Or that propose an article that the receiver’s publication might wish to publish. Etc.

Look, I realize people are “busy.” Here’s the paradox: when back in the day responding to these kinds of messages required typing up a physical letter, putting it in an envelope, addressing it, finding a stamp, taking it to a mailbox, and so forth — in other words when responding to these sorts of messages and requests took approximately 100 times more effort than it does to respond to an email — people were better about actually responding.

Now why is that? One obvious reason is that sending people requests of various kinds is also 100 times easier than it used to be, so people get buried with requests for responses, many of which are not reasonable. But I’m stipulating that we’re talking about requests that in the abstract everybody agrees should generate a response, even if the response is just to say sorry I can’t do what you’re asking me to do right now but thanks for writing. That takes ten seconds!

Another reason people don’t do this is precisely because it is so easy, it’s also therefore too easy to put it off, because I’ll get to it this afternoon or tomorrow or later this week, and then of course I don’t (I should have made clear earlier in this post that I’m guilty of what I’m describing here on a regular basis).

I sense this is getting worse all the time, because as we get more and more used to not getting answers to emails we send that really should be answered, and to not answering emails we really should answer ourselves, it becomes ever-easier to normalize blowing people off because everybody does now.

But we shouldn’t normalize it. We should cast a glance back at our ancestors, who wrote hundreds of letters every year, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.

But to do all this, and to do it right, and to do it before this decade is out, then we must be bold.