i don't really have the words for it but i'd come home from school and watch my mom sort our mail - junk, junk, junk, bills, junk. it used to pile up on our counter; day after day. i remember how much of it went right into the recycling bin.
email was huge when it really started being available to us all. i know that's wild to say to someone who was raised after AOL but "checking your email" used to be a big deal. i now have 2,521 unread messages; and that's after a deep clean last january. most of it is just spam. it just sits in my inbox, unanswered and unopened - draining whatever arbitrary amount of digital space i have in this world.
i don't check my voicemail, it's usually a scammer. i don't check my instagram notifications either - half of them are someone trying to sell me something from a pyramid scheme. the other half are bots. a girl recently held my phone for a fraction of a second and almost passed out - how do you have 356 unopened texts? i shrugged about it. how many of those were just the average i have a job opening for you scam-type shit.
discord now forces an ad when i open it. youtube forced me to uninstall my adblocker (yes i switched to firefox). i hate "smart" versions of things; but you can't always escape them. why is my own computer pushing me advertisements for things? why is my TV trying to get me to download a gambling game? why do i need to see an ad to fucking access my fridge?
i block, unsubscribe, avoid. i cannot tell you how many times i have entered [email protected] as my email so i can view one particular recipe on one particular blog. i cannot tell you how many times i reply "STOP", i refuse to give my number - i am a master at this infinite dodge. and still. still!
it's just... clutter. it isn't sitting in my brain, glistening. it's just noise.
for a long time i used to open and read a newsletter from a community center down the street - it used to have fun tips, announcements. cute things. recently they must have gotten a new copywriter. it's all just - while you're here, have you thought about purchasing?
yesterday i went out to collect the mail; most of which will end up in the recycling. a single piece blew out of my hands; i had to chase it down the street. i still have no idea what it was even for. it means genuinely nothing to me.
