(This post delayed by putting my money where my mouth is. What a pain.)
Junk emails: a case study.
How do you handle your busyness?
I try to remind everyone I know once a year to unsubscribe from junk emails.
On the one end of the email spectrum is mail you actually want; on the other end is spam.
Some people handle their junk emails programmatically, that is, according to a program. They will set up rules that send their junk emails to trash to a separate folder, or even set up a separate email to give out when businesses ask for an email.
The emails are still there, but don’t need to be looked at or reviewed.
Some spam emails are unavoidable. Currently, technology allows spammers to send mass unsolicited emails without many consequences. The spam emails you receive may not be legal, but the technological workarounds for legality are relatively easy and cheap.
Preventing the average email user from being overwhelmed by spam is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than it is to spam. And spam filters cause all kinds of new problems, too.
Good marketing emails are valuable for both the sender and the receiver. In general, exchanging goods and services for money or other resources should benefit all parties to the exchange.
Spam does not.
But we’re not talking about spam; we’re talking about junk emails, the ones that fall between the emails you actually want and spam.
Marketing emails, mostly.
Why would you spend any of your valuable time unsubscribing from marketing emails that you no longer find valuable?
Why not treat them like spam?
At one point you consented to those emails, either explicitly or implicitly.
The ones with implicit consent—where any contact with a business is treated as consent for anything that business chooses to send you—fall in a gray area. Did you fully, consciously give consent to those emails? No. Those businesses take advantage of loopholes between full and active consent and full and active denial of consent, hoping that you will give them your attention and resources—without first having to obtain your full and active consent.
Even when you send those emails to spam or other folders, your resources are still tied up: email space, cost of setting up filters, cost of setting up more filters as the senders figure out how to get around the first filters, looking for the one valuable email in a mass of spam, the cost of important emails that you missed entirely.
When you handle marketing emails you no longer want, you aren’t choosing busyness versus efficiency.
You are choosing to observe and maintain consent versus violation of consent.
Lack of consent can easily mask itself as efficiency or expediency.
“It’s not that important,” you tell yourself. “I don’t need to waste time combing through my trash folder, figuring out how to unsubscribe from these damn things. I’ll just get more of them. Why bother?”
…Because unsubscribing reminds you that you can choose to withhold your consent.
Again: how do you handle your busyness?
Do you find ways to minimize the effects of being pressured or manipulated into giving your consent? Or do you pay attention?
When people say, “It’s not that important” or “It’s not worth my time,” they are minimizing their discomfort with the situation. They don’t like the junk emails; rather than handling the junk emails, they choose to overlook their discomfort.
Saying “it’s not that important” when you’re not comfortable with something is building a narrative, that is, a story that we tell ourselves to explain the situation.
Here’s what the narrative is really saying: “I’m strong enough to handle the irritation of junk email. We live in a society where getting mad about every violation of consent we experience means being exhausted and angry every waking moment of the day.”
In the narrative, we are strong enough to allow other people to cross our boundaries—but not strong enough to allow ourselves to feel righteous anger.
So. Here’s your reminder: unsubscribe from any marketing emails you no longer wish to receive. Check your trash and spam folders, too.
Some sites will resist letting you unsubscribe easily or cleanly.
Observe their lack of respect for your full and active consent.
You can find the first post in the series here.
