The reign of junk mail
How might it impact a mind?
Dear readers: Thank you again for being here! We are now three months in to The Matriarchy newsletter, and you all have made it such a joy!
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—Rae
My husband and I are awful at bringing in our mail. We basically don’t look at it until the mailbox is overflowing and envelopes are beginning to pile up on the ground. When the situation becomes dire and embarrassing, one of us trudges to the mailbox to begin the long process of throwing in the recycling bin almost every piece of mail: the catalogues and the promotions, the credit card offers and the pamphlets of real estate agents vying to sell our house. We sort the whole mess down into three items of mail worth opening, two of which end up being statements for healthcare bills that we already paid online.
It was after one of these mail disposal sessions that we had a realization: if we consider our major channels of communication, almost all of them are now majority junk and spam, mostly advertisements of various types. That really hit me hard. The majority of communication I receive is advertisements. Our paper mail is obviously completely compromised. Our email inboxes are packed with promotions and fundraising emails with a sprinkle of messages from people we actually know (in no small part thanks to the email style of the democratic party, which I still can’t believe is effective, and which is so incredibly grating. If you feel this way too, you will take great joy in reading this article, which I discovered through comedian Chris Duffy’s great newsletter Bright Spots.) Even our incoming phone calls have now tipped into mostly spam territory. And texts, while still majority from people we know, are edging the junk direction, the volume of junk texts notably increasing each year. The only sacred spaces left in my communication life are WhatsApp and Discord, which account for only a small fraction of my correspondence.
Any attempt to quell this invasion of spam communications is, it feels to me, completely futile. Junk mail can be left to sit idly in the mailbox, emails can be punted to low priority inbox, calls can be ignored, but still they come, and they come, and they come, and they are inescapable. I am sure there are solutions out there, along the lines of unroll.me, but it sure feels whack-a-mole. I tried the free version of unroll.me once, and after I was successfully automatically unsubscribed from a few marketing emails, I was asked to pay. While this may very well be worth it, I just…like…ugh…come on…there is something about paying to be unsubscribed from company promotions that I never signed up for that just feels wholly wrong.
How crazy is it that this is the default state? Simply by living for thirty-four years on this earth, by going to school and working and buying things and donating to some politicians (who have very nearly made me regret it…please guys, come on), the natural state of being me is a daily deluge of shit communications that are one way or another trying to get me to spend money. They are voluminous, unstoppable, demanding over and over to be read, a real-life version of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts acceptance letters, but evil.
I think that the results of this reality are more sinister than just the annoyance of having a lot of emails to wade through or a lot of paper mail to throw out (and for the paper mail, aside from the sheer wastefulness of it, which is sickening). If I receive that many junk communications, primarily urging me to buy things, some are going to make it through constant junk background noise to my brain. I can’t help but glance at the cover of a catalogue or see the sender of an email and be reminded about this or that brand. Checking my email becomes a tiny tickling of my brain, "remember this brand you bought something from? Think about that for a second!” EVERYONE SHOULD OWN A PAIR OF THESE proclaimed a recent subject line in my personal inbox; THESE JEANS = INSTANT SUPERMODEL said another. These were two of hundreds. All of this must add up, and I wonder how much of my thinking time each day is related to my junk mail, and how much those little tickles affect my behavior.
Of course, this attempted penetration of the mind is nothing new, it has been going on since the advent of advertising. In his wonderful book Status Anxiety, Philosopher Alain de Botton reports the following anecdote from the early days of mass media: “At his newspaper’s launch in 1896, Alfred Harmsworth, the founder of Britain’s Daily Mail, candidly characterized his ideal reader as a man in the street 'worth one hundred pounds per annum’ who could be enticed to dream of being ‘tomorrow’s thousand pound man.’” This project has been going on for a very long time, and of course had been supercharged by the internet and social media.
But there is something about having the tentacles of advertising reach into my home in the way it now does, something about the rate that the junk advertising arrives and the fact that it is physically in my house and intermixed with emails from my mom, something about the image of hundreds of thousands of companies sending millions of unwelcome missives every day, every hour, the spray of junk mail arriving unbidden in mailboxes and inboxes everywhere, something about that situation feels to me particularly invasive, disturbing. It almost certainly contributes to my vague, general, constant sense of being trapped in something chaotic and manic, this overwhelming tornado of demands to buy. It gives me a distinct feeling of losing control over the contents of my own mind (a favorite topic). And I just wonder how big an impact that all has on me, particularly as a highly sensitive person. I wonder how big an impact it has on all of us collectively. Maybe we can be forgiven, in such a context, for feeling frazzled and not knowing exactly why.
What might it be like, I wonder, to receive no junk mail via any channel? How might that open up a little space, or reduce just a little the sense of overwhelm, or increase slightly a feeling of peace in my environment?
I’m curious to hear how you think about this—is this a thing for you? It is concerning or not? Tactics for junk mail removal are also welcome :)