During a recent holiday, the combination of rare free time and my in-laws’ reliable wireless service, mixed with an unusual obsessive-compulsive surge of my own, allowed me to achieve a jaw-dropping feat—I cleared out my Gmail inbox. That’s right—zero messages. Call it what you like: e-mail erasure, server nirvana, correspondence kenosis, or inbox enema. I highly recommend it as a way of beginning a new season in a refreshed, liberated way. But beware: Although it may usher in a weirdly calming white-out effect, it won’t last.
Can you even remember a time when there was nothing in your inbox? Just white space? I couldn’t. Seeing that familiar screen with no names, addresses, subject lines, or time stamps was a bit like experiencing the digital equivalent of Into the Wild—all that vast, barren solitude. What to do now?
I had never done it during years of using Gmail. Before that, I vaguely remember changing accounts, but e-mail baggage followed me, appearing instantly in its new place. Maybe I need to revisit the mid-90s, when I created my first Pine account, to find a precedent.
Everyone at first has a pristine “pre-e-mail” account, which vanishes with a tap of the “send” button. That folder will never, or rarely, be empty again. Messages stack up, and complicated ones linger. This largely explains the thrill I felt when I reached that ecstasy of zero—it was a condition I hadn’t experienced since I was a 20-year-old student. My young adulthood—relocations, marriage, children—and thousands and thousands of e-mail messages—all still lay ahead when that screen was last blank.
Deleting every message from my inbox did not require a Herculean effort. I usually have 40 to 50 unread messages, depending on how often I’ve checked my account and how much time I’ve devoted to reducing the volume. Scrupulousness is my default because e-mail unchecked, to me, becomes menacing, especially when it accumulates while you’re off-line. I have been using a smartphone since early last fall (a late adopter, always), and so the ability to dispense with unimportant e-mail a few times a day has taken the edge off that sense of menace, but not entirely eliminated it. Whenever faced with a few days so busy that I can hardly check messages and delete mass notices, work-related announcements, Listserv detritus, and other chaff, I begin to feel something between anxiety and dread.
So I had to be diligent in my replies and deletions for only a few consecutive days. I also benefited from the relatively reduced flow of messages during the holiday, when people are traveling, or at least forcing themselves, for propriety’s sake, to stay off of e-mail. To open your account then, after a long day off-line, and to see only a couple of new messages—it’s like a gift you weren’t expecting.
I am close to people who comfortably live with an inbox hundreds-of-messages deep, who often don’t answer their messages. Good for them. But I can’t ignore e-mail. I would find it maddening, like being lost in a dark wood of text or buried alive. My laptop would feel like a slender metal sepulcher.
As my inbox messages decreased, approaching that magic number of none, I confess I cheated a little, or at least it felt like cheating. I recklessly trashed a few messages that I probably should have kept (it felt so good!). To a few I sent curt answers, written with ruthless, “almost there!” execution. Others clearly demanded my attention, so I filed them, or placed them lamely in a “to print” folder, which I would still have to face. Only those sleights of hand permitted the semblance of no waiting e-mail.
I fear that this reflection will make me seem more antisocial than I actually am, not to mention obsessive-compulsive. I guess we seize our little masteries where we can find them. Even as I write this, I am betraying that part of my computing life that looks forward to scanning messages and welcomes correspondence and updates. I am definitely not the “Hell is other people” type. That quotation from Sartre’s No Exit also recalls the great misanthrope of English poetry, Philip Larkin, whose sour outlook is articulated nicely in the opening of “Wants": “Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.”
About a year and a half ago, the novelist Jonathan Franzen recovered from a book tour by staying on an island far off the coast of Chile. In his essay “Farther Away,” he ponders the paradoxical alienation of life spent increasingly on the Internet. His respite seemed to make literal or reverse that paradox. During Franzen’s self-imposed alienation, no doubt the messages in his inbox kept increasing, demanding even his lauded powers of attention.
I didn’t share his hunger for solitude when striving for my Gmail equivalent of the via negativa. The empty inbox simply gave me a pleasant sense of control in at least one area of life, out of many that typically felt frenzied, chaotic, and overwhelming. My computer screen became a portal to some undiscovered country of greater poise. Finally, sure, there was also relief at forgoing the drudgery of replying to messages when you just don’t feel like it. Hell may not be other people, but I suspect we can all relate, when opening our e-mail to find 100 new messages, to Sartre’s character Garcin and his resigned comment that serves as No Exit‘s final line: “Well, well, let’s get on with it. ....”
Predictably, my relief was short-lived. Maybe that was a good thing. After achieving total e-mail emptiness, I responded to clusters of newly arrived messages with an inordinate, wild-eyed sense of eventfulness and obligation. Nonessential re-sent messages, even ones I expected, unsettled me or even made me angry. And as soon as the latest scheduling request appeared, I felt that I had to answer right away, even more quickly than I usually would. By the end of the holiday, in a kind of boomerang effect, I would drop everything to do so.
In other words, I began to feel more unhinged, and not free at all. I felt like Richard III or Macbeth, who really freak out once they seize their crowns. They fear losing them more than anything. In my case, I think I feared that my little achievement would be utterly ephemeral, impossible to maintain. Of course I was right.
An empty inbox is simply too vulnerable, porous, and doomed to cherish for very long, although for a few days there, I did experience a sense of satisfaction I wasn’t expecting. Whenever I checked Gmail and dispensed with the half-dozen newly arrived messages, I experienced again the thrill of seeing the inbox screen go blank. Zero messages! Each time, I could almost hear applause erupting from a grandstand somewhere.
But those few encores spelled the end of the experiment. While my family and I drove home on Sunday, the relentless pace of life resumed. Later that night, 60 freshly sent messages appeared in my inbox. The white field, and the imagined hermitage beside it, receded into the foggy distance, as the words and colors and screens and links and attachments once again closed in around me.
