Crawling out from under an email avalanche
I’ve experienced some poor health recently which prevented me from working as much as normal, and even having a few full days away from computer and mobile screens. And while I’m now recovering and slowly crawling out from under an email avalanche, it’s made me reconsider a few things.
The first is that I’ve always been an information junkie. In the ‘old days’ when I discovered a hobby, I’d want to read every magazine available, whether that led to a pile of guitar magazines, or White Dwarf when I discovered Warhammer. And I’ve held onto many of them, despite very few actually being useful in the years since. Alongside a constantly expanding library of books.
In the modern world, that meant spending a lot of time reading blogs, newsletters, and social media. In the past, it would often spark a blog post, article, work project or an idea for the future. But at some point, I started reading much more than actually doing.
The replacement of Twitter by an increasingly useless propaganda machine, and the influx of AI generated posts and replies elsewhere has helped me cut down on social media, whether I wanted to or not. But the stress of seeing my email inboxes overflowing with often generic or irrelevant emails has made me realise I need to perform a similar cull on my subscriptions. The FOMO if I don’t see something, particularly when I’ve worked as a news journalist, has been slowly replaced by the knowledge I’m getting older, time is finite, and my collection of stuff ‘to look at when I have some spare time’ is covered in virtual dust and cobwebs.
In just a week or two, my email accounts can collect hundreds, or even thousands, of emails. And a very small percentage were from clients, or actually contained anything that was entertaining, useful, or actionable.
So it’s time to cull anything I’m not actually getting some value from.
The second is that my stress and frustration at not being able to work was eased by having some great and understanding clients. But not being able to actually create anything for either paid projects or my own sidelines soon became a massive issue.
Despite the best efforts of Generative AI, Google, and other factors, writing and working on new ideas and projects is what brings me joy. Whether that’s blogging here, creating a long and detailed guide for a client, or getting back to contributing to Peterborough STEM Festival.
I’m not the only person wondering how the rise of Gen AI will impact mental health for humanity. Whether that’s AI chatbots, or in my case, finding it harder to justify taking the time to craft something from scratch and reach an audience when it will probably get buried by plagiarised autocomplete-generated cobblers in search results, and demoted by the walled gardens of social media if I dare to link to it. Considering human creativity dates back 45,000 to 64,000 years with cave paintings, the urge to create and share art, stories, music etc isn’t going to disappear from human nature just because someone can replicate it with a couple of lines of prompts. All the talk around AI tends to focus on the output and whether it can match humans in quality, not questioning why we want to replace something that benefits our mental health, thought processes, and understanding of the world with a tool which mainly rewards the same rich tech oligarchs who already exploited the web.
And lastly, I’ve been inspired to think about how I want to spend the next decades of my life, and how to make them as good as possible in terms of both work and personal time. How can I do more of what I enjoy, even if it means finding alternative routes to reach people who still want human content or connections. What can I do to be more proactive in ensuring my health is as good as possible, and spend my time with friends and family more meaningfully. And how to invest my love of researching and discovering new information and knowledge more productively than clearing out hundreds of emails, of which only a small percentage bring me joy, entertainment or worthwhile knowledge.
(originally posted at https://danthornton.net/2024/11/crawling-out-from-under-an-email-avalanche/)
