In early March, Alex Goldman, a thirty-five-year-old podcast host who looks like he might have once played guitar in a pop-punk band, received an e-mail from a friend with whom he once played guitar in a pop-punk band. The band was more or less defunct—jobs, wives, children—and the group’s drummer was writing to say that she was moving from Brooklyn to Kentucky. The e-mail, addressed to Goldman and the band’s two other members, proposed getting together for “one more kick-ass goodbye bonanza.” The lead singer responded within hours, followed by the bassist a few days later. They sent e-mails back and forth discussing dates, venues, the set list, and where to find a functioning drum kit. “Goldman, what say you?” the rhythm guitarist wrote. A month later, filled with what he described as the “anxiety of having to say yes,” Goldman still had not said anything at all.
Goldman is the host of Reply All, a podcast about life on the Internet. Earlier this month, inspired by his e-mail-induced anxiety, he and his co-host, P. J. Vogt, announced the creation of a new holiday: E-Mail Debt Forgiveness Day, which was held yesterday, on April 30th. Everyone has e-mails to which he cannot bring himself to respond, for reasons of anxiety, speechlessness, or cowardice. These e-mails get marked as read but linger in our mental in-boxes, haunting our minds. On E-Mail Debt Forgiveness Day, Goldman and Vogt urged everyone to go ahead and respond to e-mails he had been avoiding, regardless of how many days, months, or years ago the reply should have been sent.
They also asked listeners to call in and tell stories about their e-mail experiences. “I just listened to a bunch and they’re really hard to listen to,” Vogt said, at the podcast’s office, in downtown Brooklyn. A woman whose father had died did not know what to do with the outpouring of digital condolence in her in-box, while another had been drafting a resignation letter every day for three weeks but could not bring herself to send it. A woman who had recently given birth could not find a way to respond to her mother-in-law’s note of congratulations. In California, a photographer had left a note on a parked camper van that she wanted to buy. The owner wrote to say that the van had belonged to her husband, who had died, and she couldn’t bring herself to sell it. But her husband loved fly-fishing, and the owner wondered if she might like to go fly-fishing with her sometime. She had no idea what to say and never wrote back. She felt terrible.
“I actually have a pretty gruesome one right now,” Goldman said. He had recently skipped a friend’s wedding for a work commitment, and had tried to call the friend to explain, but they kept missing each other. Now he felt like he should probably just send an e-mail.
“So you would prefer to talk by phone?” Vogt said.
“Honestly, I’d prefer not to have the conversation at all,” Goldman said.
This often seemed to be the case: most of the problems that people expressed had less to do with e-mail specifically than with the difficulty that many—most? all?—humans have expressing certain thoughts and feelings via any form of communication. E-mails are no easier to send than texts or phone calls or snaps. (Goldman, in addition to his e-mail anxiety, has a hundred and five unheard voice mails.) The mechanism and the form may be different, but the emotional complications remain.
“The idea that there should be different channels for different levels—different DEFCONs in our emotional lives—is a very modern idea,” Goldman told me. “I mean, in 1800, you would get informed that your husband had died in war via mail, which is basically like a text.” In its beginning, e-mail was a format for which the appropriate protocol had not been established. Norms had since begun to emerge, but no one could point to any definitive rules. How terse can a reply be without being inappropriately short? Since e-mails could be sent instantaneously, did they have to be written instantaneously? Was it acceptable to break up with someone that you had gone on several dates with over e-mail? To offer condolence? To send bad news? E-mail correspondence is now, in most relationships, the least personal, most formal communication two people can have. Texting feels more intimate, even if it is simply a terser cousin of e-mail, though even that intimacy has limitations. Vogt pointed out, for instance, that there is not yet an emoji for “I have inexpressible feelings about something.”
E-mail is also a medium that demands a response: Gmail’s first option upon receiving an e-mail is “Reply.” You have to scroll halfway down the list to find “Delete,” which is just above “Report spam,” which many people wish they could do even for e-mails from senders they know. The back-and-forth makes e-mail one of the few remaining forms of interpersonal communication that is delivered in alternating monologues—the only place where the high-school-essay writing style can prevail. “We lock into this five-paragraph structure: ‘In closing, I would like to say,’ ” Vogt said. Phone calls offer a chance for interruption, and no one can filibuster for too long via text.
But e-mail affords the ability to say nearly anything, at any length, which is liberating in theory but dangerous in practice. “Since e-mail is unlimited, it gives people enough space to say all of the awkward, unfortunate, hurtful things that they want to say without actually having to say it to your face,” Goldman said. The fact that many different thoughts and feelings can be packed into a single e-mail also heightens the tension in every back-and-forth volley: Vogt described the process of sending an e-mail, then waiting for a reply, and imagining what the other person is thinking while they craft a reply, as “an imaginary roller coaster of emotions that no one else was feeling.”
In 2011, Choire Sicha and Sara Vilkomerson, of The Awl and Entertainment Weekly, started a service called Shame Begone. Their project had started out small, after a friend had found himself paralyzed at the thought of finally responding to a friend whom he had been blowing off. Eventually they started a Web site where, for a fee, they would write e-mails on behalf of anyone incapable of doing so themselves. Vilkomerson’s specialty was wedding R.S.V.P.s, while Sicha handled intra-family disputes. The e-mails were simple to send in the way that problems of others always seem easier to solve than problems of our own. But soon things got darker. One person didn’t want to e-mail a suicidal roommate about moving out; another didn’t know how to tell his father that he loved him but didn’t want to donate his kidney to him. This fearful donor was willing to pay a hundred bucks.
Our problem with e-mail largely derives from the fact that people use e-mail for conversations that should probably not happen over e-mail. “A lot of the ones we got were like, ‘Oh, send it, everyone’s going to forgive you,’” Vogt said. “But then, a lot of them, it’s actually, like, ‘No, the thing you think that person is going to be mad about, they’re definitely going to be mad about. You’re not going to get resolution, and you’re going to get another fucked-up e-mail that you’re also going to feel like you can’t respond to.’ Sometimes the reason things are easier to do in person is just because we can bungle them and time moves on and nobody notices.”
Sicha and Vilkomerson shut down their service when the volume of e-mail became too much to bear, but even the sheer volume of one in-box can present enough problems. “There’s a time of day when you would go check your mail,” Vogt said. “But with e-mail there can be something at any moment of the day—things you have to deal with in that instant, and things that are huge and loaded. That feels fundamentally broken.” He had recently changed his e-mail signature to say that his messages were being sent from his phone, even when he was writing on a computer, so he could send shorter replies without raising eyebrows. (For particularly fraught work e-mails, he often asked Goldman to draft them for him.)
Mat Honan, BuzzFeed’s San Francisco bureau chief, decided that the burden of personal e-mail was simply too heavy to bear. E-mails sent to his personal account now get a response saying, “I no longer use personal email. Please contact me via another method.” One Reply All listener, who confessed to a certain level of obsessive-compulsive behavior, said that he had once stared anxiously at the number in the top left of his Gmail in-box: he had 9,999 e-mails, and wondered if Google had coded enough room for another digit. Google had, but Apple hadn’t, and the zeroes on his iPhone were replaced with an ellipsis. In the latest iOS update, Apple added room for the fifth digit. “They felt totally relieved,” Vogt said. The person has since accrued a hundred thousand unread e-mails. Apple hadn’t thought of that, and the ellipsis had returned.
I have zero unread e-mails, which is its own kind of obsession—I subscribe to the school of merciless unsubscription—but I do have 1,078 unsent drafts. A skimming of the most recent ones revealed a chain about a party that I did not wish to attend; an e-mail I started writing but turned into a phone call; an attempted answer to a computer question for a technologically challenged relative that became too complex, so I gave up; another with the subject line “gossip”; many aborted jokes; and a non-response to a friend’s bad suggestion for a story I should write. One e-mail, from a different friend, had the subject line “unfortunate turn.” I even found a note of pure praise that I had decided not to send, in part, I told myself, because e-mail etiquette would require that the person respond.
In honor of E-Mail Debt Forgiveness Day, I sent that one. The holiday has passed, but Vogt and Goldman encourage people to celebrate any day. They had already heard from several people who felt relieved after sending their e-mails, like an atheist who had sent one to her church-going family, explaining her beliefs. “The moral of the story is nobody cares as much as you think they care,” Vogt told me. “Just write back. It’s O.K.” Goldman, for his part, finally decided to respond to his bandmates, six weeks after the farewell show was first proposed. “I have taken a long time to respond to these emails. Mostly out of anxiety,” he wrote. “But here I am.” He hit send, and the reunion was on.
