Done with email

Apologies for sending you this one…which will be the last! At least on this platform anyway

Photo by Nat Weerawong on Unsplash

Last week, I spent about two days clearing out my inbox. Apparently, I hadn’t done it since 2023, as evidenced by the oldest email. Like you, and like many people, I’ve simply let my inbox accumulate over the years. I’d check an email here and there, skim through (sometimes I would read half an email, hooray), let it sit and never look again. At least, that’s the majority of my inbox experience, one of several I learned while embarking on this massive and tedious task.

I never once believed in the zero-inbox phenomenon, but I hadn’t realized how beholden I was to my inbox. Every day, I’d check it religiously hoping for something important to come. Sometimes it does, but rarely. Most of the emails I get come from my husband, and he doesn’t even send me that many emails! (We see each other every day, so there’s no point in sending emails too). The rest of my emails come from people I don’t know — single individual publications, most of them on Substack.

Then there are email lists I signed up for, subconsciously and unconsciously, throughout the years. The pandemic certainly accelerated this email influx. Stuck at home with not much else to do, I ruminated on many different things and found “solutions” to those things — people who were writing about such things. I signed up for their newsletter. And through the power of algorithmic recommendations, I got more newsletters presented to me…and signed up for those too. It got to the point where I wasn’t necessarily reading all of them (who has time anyway?) but rather scrolling through using the five-second rule and telling myself to check on it later, only to never do it.

Did it ever occur to me to unsubscribe to these email lists and/or mark them as ‘junk’ so it no longer appears in my inbox? Yes and no.

I spent a period of time unsubscribing to everything…only to experience FOMO and re-subscribed to the same lists several months later. But did I read these posts on a more regular basis the second (or third) time around? Nope.

Part of the reason is because many of these articles (again, most on Substack) are long and invite further reflection, which my brain cells were furiously working overtime to decide where to focus my attention to — real life or digital life. While I love longform articles, I just didn’t (and still don’t) have time to read them all.

I also realized that despite my best intentions, I still really like reading books. Physical books, mostly. I’m a tactile person; I love the touch and smell of paper, the sound of flipping through the pages. I love that reading a book transports me to that one story and one story only, whereas reading online one can easily open up another tab to Google something and then click on something else and then end up never finishing the article that one started in the first place.

Another realization I had is that there is a small, limited number of people whom I’ve never met in real life who I actually read all the time. It’s about 5 or 6 people. I like each of them for various reasons, but perhaps the main reason is because they seem like they write for the joy of it, not because they’re trying to project a particular message or gain more subscribers. They’re simply sharing bits of their thoughts and lives online while keeping it neutral and pleasant.

If I’m being completely honest, I’d say that Substack newsletters had something to do with it. I’m not trying to blame the platform, per se. It’s just a platform…and yet, it does something to people. If you’re a creator/writer you may be aware that Substack came into the spotlight in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. With many thoughts and time at home, many people including myself channeled those thoughts into newsletters and invited people to subscribe.

So it became a “thing” to have a newsletter. Then it became a thing to have more subscribers. The platform is all about numbers and gains — your dashboard is littered with numbers and there are recommendation tools and social media buttons to encourage people to do more. Subscribe. Share. Restack. Heart. In short, it became an all-you-can-eat buffet of writing coupled with constant CTAs, or call to action buttons.

I’m tired of CTAs. I used them myself because that’s what people did. Now, after realizing that I was just following the herd, I’m here to say that I no longer want to follow the herd. In the past few years, so many creators (people who have an extensive following elsewhere) migrated over to Substack, making it extremely crowded. This, I suspect, makes it difficult for a reader to truly engage with a publication…especially since almost every publication is asking for your money. You can’t possibly subscribe/pay for every individual publication because it would be thousands of dollars every month!

You have no idea how many months I spent contemplating how I’d create a niche publication that people might possibly pay for, how I could inch my way into your hard-earning wallet. But in the end, all I want to do is share bits of my life. Things I read and loved. Places I visit and what I learned from it. Personal projects I’m working on. Now people are charging for that too!

**

Recently, I discovered two delightful free blogs, both on Wordpress. These are two different women sharing their lives. One writes about unique places she visits in the UK and Europe; the other lives in the UK and writes about everything from travel to food to hobbies.

The more I read their posts, the more I find myself lost in their world, but in a good way. I read through the comments people left on their Wordpress and it dawned on me — these are people blogging and commenting the way it used to be. Their posts are not littered with Call to Action buttons but rather bits of information they learned and what they observed. And readers, in return, enjoyed the posts enough to actually leave comments, but rather than expel 4-5 paragraph diatribes about all the things that’s going wrong in the world, they’re keeping it positive and complimentary. “Thanks for sharing. This is great!” versus “I’m so mad about [insert topic about the economy/politics/neighbors/the world here] and I just want to vent…blah blah blah.” You have no idea how delightful that is to me. Writer Kyle Chayka said it best when he wrote:

“Whereas social media in the early twenty-tens tended to be a hobby or a personal passion project, today the relationship between follower and followee has become rampantly commodified.”

This is the kind of relationship I want with writing and reading online. A gratuitous one. Not a transactional one bounded by email and how many people open it. That’s why I’m moving over to Wordpress, where I’ve secretly had an on-and-off again blog for years. I’m not making any promises about posting schedules or types of content. I will only write when I feel like I have something nice to share. But here’s a sampling of what you might find should you choose to visit Wordpress yourself:

• Places I visit and liked + observations about such places

• Updates on what it’s like to live in Florida

• Scenes from a morning walk series, which are photos of my morning walks

• Books I read and loved

• My attempts at baking / learning to cook better

• Other personal projects + updates (think: book writing)

• Anything else on my mind but no more long rambling posts like this one 🙂

I’ve decided not to move my email list of subscribers over mainly because a) there’s a certain process and I’m too lazy to figure it out and b) I want you to decide for yourself. So if you still want to hear from me — as in, actually receive an email whenever I post — then feel free to go to this site and click on the Subscribe button. Otherwise, it is not required.

Thanks for reading!

Hoang