The Inbox That Ate My Life

The first time I felt afraid of email, I was standing in a grocery store staring at a wall of cereal. I had one hand on a box with a cartoon mascot and the other hand in my pocket, where my phone kept buzzing.

I told myself I’d put the phone away until I checked out. I lasted eight seconds.
By the time I reached the cashier, I had answered three messages and forgotten the milk.

It went like this for years. A little buzz at the crosswalk. A little buzz as the kettle sighed. A little buzz as I tucked in my kid and tried to be quiet enough not to wake them.
The buzz became a part of the room, like a refrigerator hum you hear only when it stops.

Silence felt wrong. Silence felt like I had missed something important, and missing something important felt like a kind of small failure I could avoid if I just checked one more time.

Most days began with a number. 87. 142. 203. I would open my inbox and get a measurement of my worth — or at least that’s what I believed at the time.
I did HVAC work by day and built little software ideas at night, which is another way of saying I had the wrong kind of hope.

I believed if I became faster — at replying, at scheduling, at smoothing users’ worries — I might earn my way to rest.

I wrote to clients from the van in parking lots. I wrote to suppliers in the line for coffee. I wrote to strangers at midnight, with one eye closed against the blue glow.
I thought speed was salvation. But the faster I got, the more the world expected.

Like a magician sawing herself in half, I had volunteered for a trick that only worked as long as I didn’t cry out.

It wasn’t just work. Email was invitations I didn’t know how to refuse.
It was newsletters I meant to read but didn’t. It was warnings about passwords, discounts expiring, notes from the school about lunches I forgot to pack.
It was everything I was supposed to be, shoved into a white rectangle I could never empty.

One night, after a day of sprinting between job sites and inboxes, I stared at the blinking cursor of a draft and wondered if this was how people disappeared — not in some grand act, but in small keystrokes, vanishing into the folders of other users’ priorities.
I closed the laptop and sat in the dark, waiting for a quiet that wouldn’t come.

That was the night I admitted to myself that my life was no longer mine. It belonged to the inbox.

The strange thing is, salvation came not from quitting email but from building something for it.
I began writing little scripts, then bigger ones, until I made a tool that suggested replies for me.

At first it felt like cheating, but then it felt like breathing. I could spend ten minutes with my kid before bed without twitching toward the phone.
I could stand in a grocery aisle and remember the milk.

What I built became a product. Other people started using it. They told me they felt lighter, as if some invisible weight had been set down.

I realized I hadn’t been chasing speed all along.
I had been chasing silence — the kind that makes space for a laugh, or a pause, or just the pleasure of being unreachable for a while.

I still get the buzzes. But sometimes I let them wait. The inbox may have eaten years of my life, but I am learning, slowly, to take them back one by one.

This story is part of the SkyntCo Journal, where we explore the ways technology shapes our lives. Discover more at EmailResponder for Gmail™.