Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
The end result is the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram (the global average) complains that she has “no time” for reading.
Fahlman’s creation took on a life of its own, along with a suddenly spastic use of exclamation marks, as people figured out how to communicate via the oft-problematic medium of email. Angry or inappropriate emails sent before the sender had time to think, passive-aggressive emails, and emotionally ambiguous emails were—still are—common inbox issues. (I’ve spent hours angsting over the meaning of a “Thanks.” What is it about the period that makes it sound so insincere?) But Fahlman wasn’t exactly pleased with the popularity of his invention. In the early ’90s he told the Boston Globe: “I had no idea that I was starting something that would soon pollute all the world’s communication channels.”
Sometimes I’ll get a call or email from someone five years after the last contact and I’ll think, oh right, I hated that person. But they would never have known, of course. Let’s see if I still hate them. Very often I find that I don’t. Or that I hated them for a dumb reason. Or that they were having a bad day.