You’ve got mail... and more junk

Somebody told me that the email was “dead”, but every day I am spending hours trying to free my inbox from the clutter of electronic garbage.

Social media experts had earlier hinted that with the advent of instant messaging, where you can send rapid communications to your friends, and even to your enemies, as to what you are having for breakfast, baby pictures of your supposedly cute baby, a recorded message dissing your manager, that the pervasive email, which had helped your evil boss destroy your happy marriage, was now finally a dinosaur.

But that is not the case in the real, non-VR, physical world. Every morning my Smartphone would tell me gleefully that I have 89 new email messages, even while I tried to blissfully sleep to the tune of the “ding” of my inbox while slamming my fist on the snooze button of my alarm clock. (Yes, I still own an alarm clock, one with a luminous dial).

It is not as if I am running a thriving freelance business where vendors, suppliers and mysterious venture capitalists in search of money-making start-ups were all vying for my attention. Every morning, I would click open the inbox hoping that some senile multimillionaire media mogul who had married a women half his age, had finally seen my writing and was offering me tonnes of money to sit at home, drink my herbal tea, look out of my window and think of erudite things to discourse.

The emails would unfortunately be from eager people trying to help me become more productive. When I clicked on one message it took me to a video and a man saying that he was sorry for me for wasting my life away in an inbox, so he was going to tell me five ways how to free myself from these invisible shackles.

I have found after my very own extensive research that involved questioning my wife and kids, that to live in today’s society, you have to be a multitasker who can manage several “projects” at one time, and that at the same time it was dangerous for your health to be stressed and that you need to relax, calm down and to meditate.

I keep getting WhatsApps from friends on how to meditate, such as inhaling from one nostril while looking at your navel, but when I looked up the sayings of Buddha, I found that he too was a nervous wreck and most probably a hypertensive: “I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done” — Buddha.

The man on the video said it would be overwhelming if I tried to tackle all my email at one time. Put away some that can be read and replied to later, he said. For some reason my friend who is sitting somewhere in Saudi Arabia keeps sending me really risqué jokes about elderly men and women that I just have to forward to some of my shocked friends here, and that takes an hour or so every morning.

Some smart guy in an organisation must have sold my email address to real estate salespersons, because every day I get offers to buy a Dh1.7 million villa on some hill. That stresses me out, because can you imagine how much it costs per square foot to maintain such a place and such a lifestyle?

I was following the Instagram account of the Rich Kids of Dubai, and it freaked me out. I can barely buy organic potatoes and other healthy groceries, while these kids have Lamborghinis in their flooded garages.

I am now unsubscribing all the newsletters I receive and it is a very emotional time. I am getting sad-faced emoticons and passive-aggressive emotional blackmail not to send them into oblivion.

Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai.