The dances I do in my inbox: unsubscribing as a yes to my dreams
are you tangoing with the future taunters?
Howdy!
I’m nourishing myself with a lot of content right now… You can find the juicy deetz at the bottom. I hope this piece itself proves nourishing too, or at the minimum, gets you thinking about unloading some mental baggage.
(!!) I’ll soon be taking a few beta clients for a 1:1 identity exploration coaching program launching in 2024. If you’re interested in a spot, simply reply to this email to stay in the loop!
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Swipe left to archive. Tap to open. Swipe up to close.
Swipe left to ignore but leave the door open to future emails.
Tap to read.
Swipe up to close and leave emails in the ambiguous land of “might read later,” the home of 100-200 emails that are neither important or interesting enough to read immediately, nor unimportant or uninteresting enough to archive immediately.
taking a stand, sort of
I run into all sorts of characters in my inbox: restaurants I ate at once four years ago, food delivery services luring me in with discount codes for football Sunday, live event companies letting me know who’s playing “near me” in Denver because I went to a concert there two years ago, stores I shopped at once and would’ve otherwise forgotten, stores I love, stores I wanted a discount code from that I never used, masters programs I considered, job alerts I set, newsletters from dietitians and health coaches I used to follow, newsletters from writers I currently follow, acquisition emails from marketing companies promising “thousands of followers overnight,” my parents, and, of course, the unfamiliar creeps who got my email from a database I didn’t know I was consenting to join when I gave my email to one of the prior characters.
In other words, my inbox is the Mean Girls lunch room, full of my past and present vying to be friends with my future.
Irrelevant messages from past-life characters are always annoying, but I keep them around hoping the next email will be relevant. I don’t live in Denver, but I could make the trip if an artist I love is performing. I’m not planning to order food this Sunday, but maybe I will when they send the next discount code.
When I moved to Amsterdam, however, all hope was lost. Offerings from past-life characters became more of an impossibility, and so their messages moved from annoying to intolerable. Opening my inbox felt like opening a mailbox full of the prior tenant’s mail. You start with excitement that maybe there’s something interesting for you in the pile, but letter by letter, the excitement wanes and you realize all you received is some clutter to decorate your kitchen counter. I started archiving around 90-95% of my daily emails, up from 75-80%.
Intent on being present in Amsterdam, I started ruthlessly unsubscribing, which, if you’ve ever attempted to do in mass, is a heroic effort: scroll at least five full scroll bars to the very bottom to find the tiny, almost illegible, “unsubscribe” link, sometimes kindly highlighted and underlined in link-blue text and other times sneakily disguised in matching black text, surrounded by dozens of wordy disclaimers, or, in a worst case, contained in a separate link outside the inbox version of the email because somebody couldn’t decide what to cut from their too-long email.
Absent a few companies who refuse to accept my breakup texts (which, I think, is illegal?), my inbox is a little less noisy, backward-looking, and New York-centric. I sometimes even open my inbox to find no new emails. Eerie!
But I’ve been resistant to address one category of email. I will call these emails the “future taunters.”
ah, the future taunters
The future taunters are pesky little emails from organizations like LinkedIn, Columbia University, and NYU.
They come with subject lines like:
“10 new jobs for you with ‘marketing manager’ in the title”
“Fall 2024 application deadline approaching”
“Join our virtual open house”
“Hear from our alumni on what they’re doing now”
They remind me of futures I once voluntarily considered, and now, on a daily basis, often multiple times a day, must involuntarily reconsider.
How I react–archive, ignore, or read–is a signal of how I’m feeling about my current path:
Confident: archive immediately.
Moderately unconfident and intrigued by the subject line: ignore and send to “might return to later” land.
Completely unconfident: open immediately. Just a little squint here and ignorance over there, and voila! I found an interesting role with a clearly defined path full of things I might enjoy, or if not enjoy, be good at.
But regardless of how I react on an email-to-email basis, failing to hit the atomic “unsubscribe” button is a daily vote of no-confidence in myself as a coach, writer, and whatever else may come. I stay prepared to jump back on other trains in case the one I’m on crashes, but, ironically, the one I’m on is much more likely to crash if I’m constantly looking away from the path ahead.
the great escape
Yesterday, I got an email from Collabwork, a LinkedIn-esque hiring platform. While distracted by an ongoing conversation, my fingers scrolled to the very bottom and walked–or rather, danced–through that pesky aforementioned unsubscribe flow, as if my subconscious, like a little ninja, noticed its captor was distracted and snuck out of its cage to take care of the task it’d been plotting for months.
When I finished the conversation, I realized what my fingers did.
I smiled.
I voted in favor of my dreams.
I voted for trust and patience after months of willing myself to release doubt and fear.
I voted to help people live happier, healthier lives through identity exploration and transformation.
I voted to take my eyes off those other paths. I don’t want to be a marketer (... or computer scientist, policy expert, or dietician). I don’t like marketing! There isn’t anything wrong with me for not liking marketing. I tried it. I learned so much from it, and beautifully, I carry all that I learned with me. The best parts of my marketing experience surrounded the marketing–the wonderful teammates, extracurricular mentoring, team culture building, and relationship-building skills–but I needed to do those jobs in order to be in those environments, surrounded by those people and resources.
dear future Syd
I am writing this for future me: the one who I know will, at some point, lapse back into the doubtful states of mind that trigger inbox reactions #2 and #3. I know this way I’m feeling–good, confident, belief-full–will become more frequent the more intentional I am about surrounding myself with nourishing, encouraging voices, but I know there will inevitably be the doubting moments too, no matter how far this train goes.
so, future Syd,
keep going. that confidence is inside of you. you have gifts and you do a disservice to the world by hiding those gifts.
go on. go shine. go share your light with the world. one small step at a time.
the small steps add up.
and don’t forget to play.
how about you?
On my last team at Google, we went through an exercise of punting and cutting projects every quarter. My manager accurately referred to low priority, repeatedly punted tasks as “mental baggage,” so it was incredibly relieving when we simply cut projects that were punted a few quarters in a row.
Whether it’s a tab in your browser, a 6-month-old to-do list item, or, like me, past-life characters in your inbox, you might not realize how much mental baggage you’re carrying.
What can you say goodbye to? What might it feel like to let go of that mental baggage?
How I’m nourishing myself right now:
Listening to
Healing Harps playlist on Spotify (still!)
Adam Grant on the Huberman Lab podcast
Dr. Paul Conti on improving the subconscious mind on The Mel Robbins Podcast
Watching
Curb Your Enthusiasm. (cannot. stop. laughing.)
Reading
life is a classroom (Substack post by
)
Mantras
I allow for peace.
I take myself less seriously.
I am grateful.
I am the vision of my best self.
80% is perfect.
Sending you love and light,
Syd