Imagine There's No Email

For people of a certain age, you're supposed to sing that title to the tune of the John Lennon song that uses the word "heaven" instead of "email."  The other day our wireless hub here at home went out, and it took a day or two before we could get a new one going.  In the interim, my wife, who was initially distressed at her lack of connectivity, remarked that actually it was a refreshing thing to go without email or looking at the Internet for a couple of days.  Without meaning to, we accidentally endured what you might call a period of fasting from email and the Internet.  And we found that it wasn't all that bad.

Mention the word "fasting" to most people, and you may conjure up images of scrawny half-crazed religious fanatics who lived a long time ago.  Or if you have had personal experience of fasting, it was probably just an unpleasant prelude to a medical procedure.  The whole spirit of the age militates against voluntarily refraining from consumption of one kind or another, which is all fasting is.  We are told without letup that we live in a consumer-driven economy, and so it's positively unpatriotic to consume less if you can consume more.

Well, if it's so economically harmful, why do people do it at all?  What is the point of fasting?

Theologians have an umbrella word for fasting, abstinence, and other kinds of things discussed in magazines with titles like A Simple Life, The Simple Things, or just Real Simple.  The word is "simplicity."  Simplicity is a type of spiritual discipline, meaning that it's a habit you can practice that will make you a better person if you get better at it.  Or at least, it stands a chance of doing that.  What is certain, is that if you don't practice the discipline, it won't do you any good.

You don't have to be a theologian, or even a religious believer, to benefit from spiritual disciplines, especially fasting.  The reason is that human nature is meant to be a certain way, and habits that make us more the way we were intended to be have benefits, whether or not you believe there is a God that designed you to be a certain way or not.  The habit or discipline of fasting helps the rational part of you gain mastery over the less-rational part. 

All of us have what some sociologists refer to as a "lizard brain":  a primitive part of the brain that we appear to share with lower animals such as lizards.  Lizards are good at what they do.  We have bright-green anoles around our yard here, and they move in a way that I have to admit is quite human:  slowly, guardedly creeping up on a bug until it's within reach, and then snatching it before the bug can figure out what hit him.  But lizards are slaves to their instincts.  When they're hungry, they hunt.  When it's breeding time, they breed.  You don't see lizards wearing little hooded robes and rope belts around their waists refraining from eating juicy bugs right in front of them.  At least, not outside Geico commercials.

But humans can voluntarily refrain from consuming or doing something that is otherwise good, helpful, or even necessary, simply to practice what you might call ordinate self-control.  Take email as an example of such a thing.  Some small fraction of what most people with email accounts receive is worth reading:  it's from a person you know, or your boss, or your long-lost Cousin Max, and you get a benefit or pleasure from reading it.  But the temptation of email, at least for me, is to jump on the computer every time that little bing goes off and see what the newest email is.  If I give in to the temptation to monitor my email more or less constantly like that, I will get little if anything else done. 

An occasional fast from email can teach me several things.  One is, I won't die or lose my job (not necessarily, depending on the job) if I don't read my email for a couple of days, with the proper preliminary precautions and notices to others.  Another lesson is, life without email is not only possible, but has advantages too.  I can spend hours reading a book, for instance (remember books?—the paper kind, I mean).  Or I can take a walk in a park and observe, really observe, nature and its manifold wonders—not just treat it as some green-screen CGI background to the movie of my life. 

Much as engineers like rules, there are no universal rules for fasting (aside from rules promulgated by various religions for their members, that is).  If you want to try it, think of a bad habit you have that you'd really like to be able to control, a habit that involves something necessary in its proper amount, but something that you find yourself going overboard with.  I'm not trying to start a twelve-step program here, I'm simply suggesting how you can pick a feature of your life that you might consider fasting from.  Then decide on some period of time in which you could afford to stop or reduce that activity, and try to stick to it.  If it's something you really think you can do without altogether, go slow at first.  Trying too much too soon is a classic mistake of novice fasters.  If you can do without the thing for an hour, or a day, do it, don't be too hard on yourself if you fail, but if you succeed, try two hours or two days next time.

Fasting is currently a countercultural thing, and except for the magazines I've mentioned and some books I will refer to below, you won't find much support from other people if you decide to fast.  They may secretly feel jealous or threatened by your abstaining from what they view as a normal, healthy part of life.  They may even tell you you're foolish or going to cause yourself trouble, and you should at least listen to them.  But if you've made up your mind to try a fast, go ahead and try it.  The worst that can happen is that you find out the thing has got a tighter grip on you than you thought—and that's worth knowing too.

Sources:  I have found very helpful a couple of books that relate to fasting, simplicity, and related spiritual disciplines.  Richard J. Foster's Celebration of Discipline:  The Path to Spiritual Growth, 3rd ed. (HarperCollins, 1998) is a classic that treats many types of spiritual disciplines, including fasting, in an organized way that respects a wide variety of religious traditions.  For a more personal take on how a very busy wife, mother and author up the road here in Austin implemented seven types of simple living in her household, I recommend Jen Hatmaker's 7:  An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess(B&H Publishers, 2012).

The Two-Edged Sword of Email Archives

Lois Lerner, former head of the U. S. Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations Division, is a lawyer by training.  Don't forget that fact, which is significant for what follows.  When her division came under fire for selectively persecuting conservative organizations with everything from delays in processing tax-exemption applications to leaks of confidential donor lists, she refused to testify before a House of Representatives investigative committee, claiming the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against self-incrimination.  The House later voted to hold her in contempt of Congress.  And more recently, investigators working the scandal have learned that Ms. Lerner's emails for a critical period ending in 2011 are probably lost because the hard drive she had them on crashed and was thrown away.  Besides throwing a big monkey wrench into the investigation, this fact highlights a question of interest to engineers who design information systems and everyone who uses email:  what do you do with old emails?

Anyone reading this blog is very likely a daily user of email.  Email has been a routine part of life for so long that it is hard to imagine a time when it was available only to a select few computer scientists and physicists in the 1970s.  The transition year for my use of email was 1993.  Here is an excerpt from my journal for Oct. 2 of that year:  "This is the year I have gone whole-hog into email.  Before . . . a year ago I hardly ever used it, but now it’s a rare day I don’t get at least three or four email messages, and send almost that many."  Ah, the good old days.

Most emails, like most conversations, are fleeting in significance.  Once the meeting is set up or the news is shared, the bits representing the message have served their purpose, and you face the problem of what to do with them.  Some people just let the stuff accumulate in their inboxes as close to forever as the operating system permits, using search engines to locate the occasional old email that needs to be found.  A subset of these folks end up declaring "email bankruptcy," which is a term attributed to Lawrence Lessig for a person who gets overwhelmed by email in a given account, ignores it while it piles up to intimidating proportions, and then flushes the whole thing.  Others keep old emails until some external factor intervenes, like a hard-drive crash or a notice from IT support saying their inbox is full.  And then there are the email packrats like me.

Once a month, I go through my email inbox and pitch emails I no longer need.  This is the majority of them, because even after my university's spam filter has disposed of the worst offenders, I still get hundreds of emails every month from conferences I will never attend, organizations I will never join, and product and service providers whose products or services I will never need.  When I encounter an email I would like to keep, I sort it into a folder in my Mac Mail application, which physically resides on my computer.  (No email clouds for this guy—not yet, anyway.)  This tedious task takes me the better part of an morning or afternoon each month, but at the end of it I have the satisfaction of a clean email inbox and the knowledge that I can find any important emails I need without using a search engine, which I've never found that helpful for emails anyway.  Together with regular backups to an external hard drive, this process allows me to locate, or at least have possession of, any email I have received going back as far as 1998, and earlier if I cared to dig up some legacy email software.  It's not quite true that I still have the first email I ever received, but I've got some pretty old ones in there.

Now if I were a lawyer, this clinging to old emails would be unwise behavior on my part.  Why?  Because, as a patent lawyer once told me when I asked whether I should email him or phone him about a delicate and confidential matter, "emails are discoverable, and phone conversations aren't."  "Discoverable" means if somebody sues or indicts you and sends you a subpoena, they can legally grab documents of all kinds, including emails.  But if you happened to have a phone conversation that wasn't recorded, there's nothing to discover, and they have to use oral questioning to grill the participants' memories, which can be conveniently feeble at times. 

It is not for me to say whether Lois Lerner's conveniently-timed hard drive crash and disposal were just the normal way the IRS did business, or whether there were more nefarious things going on.  Experience has taught me that for every bad thing that happens due to evil intent, six or eight bad things happen due to simple incompetence.  It turns out that the IRS's email system managers kept tapes of all emails, but these were routinely erased and reused every six months because they were backups kept for emergencies, not archives retained for permanent storage.  Investigators have turned up thousands of Lerner's emails preserved on the machines of people she sent emails to, so that is something, but the electronic records will never be as complete as they might have been if Lerner had been more of an email packrat.

But if she had been, she probably would have gone into some other field than law, like engineering, and nobody would care about her old emails.  Lawyers know that old records of all kinds, not just emails, can be both helpful and harmful.  The IRS people in charge of email may have made a considered judgment not to keep old emails longer than a certain time.  Or it may have just been up to the individual employee.  At any rate, the lesson from this situation is that old emails are two-edged swords.  If you get rid of them, your life is simpler, but you may be called to account for doing something like purging old emails, that you didn't consider was wrong at the time.  But if you keep them, they may come back to haunt you.

Sources:  I referred to these news stories describing the details of Lois Lerner's hard-drive vicissitudes:  from Politico at http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/irs-lois-lerner-emails-108044.html from USA Today at http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/06/17/how-the-irs-lost-lois-lerners-e-mails/10695507/, and from National Review Online at http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362667/investigation-ids-irs-leaker-eliana-johnson.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on email, Lois Lerner, and the 2013 IRS scandal.