A few weeks ago I tried a small exercise. I opened my inbox and scrolled back, trying to find the last email that came from an actual person, written to me, for no reason other than to say something. Not a receipt. Not a newsletter I forgot to unsubscribe from. Not a “quick check-in” from someone who wanted something.
It took longer than I expected. And when I finally found one, it was over a year old.
I don’t think this says much about me in particular. I think it says something about what the inbox has quietly become for almost everyone.
The paralysis is not laziness
There’s a term I keep coming back to, coined by Anne Helen Petersen in a piece that, years after publication, still gets passed around: errand paralysis. The strange inability to do small, low-stakes personal tasks — return a package, reply to a friend, fill out a simple form — not because we’re lazy, but because we’re already spent from doing the exact same kind of task all day, for work.
Writing a real email to someone you care about is, mechanically, identical to writing a work email. Same box, same keyboard, same little rectangle asking for your attention. So the task quietly loses. It’s not that people stopped wanting connection. It’s that the form connection has to take got buried under everything else using the same form.
Attention became the thing being sold, not the thing being shared
L.M. Sacasas has spent years tracing the history of “attention discourse”, and one point he keeps returning to is simple but easy to forget: online, information was never the scarce resource. Attention is. Everything in your inbox — marketing, notifications, artificial urgency — is competing for the same few minutes you have before you close the tab.
A personal letter has no algorithm rooting for it. It doesn’t A/B test its subject line. It just waits, patiently, to be noticed by someone who isn’t being paid to notice it. In an inbox built to reward whoever shouts loudest, that’s a strange kind of disadvantage.
Writing was never meant to just fill out forms
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who writes the Ness Labs newsletter, once made a point that stuck with me: writing is the one tool humans have for actual clarity of thought, and most of us only use it to send work emails and to-do lists. A tool built for reflection, reduced to logistics.
I think the same thing happened to the inbox itself. It was never designed to be a marketplace. It became one, gradually, because that’s what most of what flows through it is for.
Why this matters
None of this is really about email as a technology. It’s about what happens to a very old, very simple human need — writing to someone, for its own sake — when the only place left to do it is the same place where everyone is trying to sell you something.
There’s a small, scattered movement of people trying to push back against this, in different ways — Dense Discovery is one example, built around the idea of resisting “attention merchants” a week at a time. One Reader is a much smaller, much more specific attempt at the same thing: one letter, one reader, nothing being sold.
So, genuinely: when was the last time you got one?