I’ve finally been getting around to unsubscribing from all of the many email lists I am on. Until now I had just ignored them, but once you start noticing these things, they become hard to ignore.
It’s kind of like cleaning your house. Once you start to clean one room, you really want to finish the job and clean all of them.
Now that I’m finally noticing them, I am astonished at how many email lists I’ve ended up being on. They come from all sorts of places, from political groups to restaurants to hotels to airline to arts and theater organizations to professional societies I’ve never heard of.
All of these people clearly think that I need to be kept up to date on whatever they are selling. There is a part of me that is flattered, but another part of me that knows they are less interested in me than in my credit card.
And every time I hit “unsubscribe” I get the same message: Sorry to see you go.
I am starting to suspect that there is one company that sets up these things for everybody, which is why they all say goodbye in the same way. But how exactly then should I parse that message?
Just who, exactly, is sorry to see me go? Is it the restaurant or theater or airline, or is it the company that they are all paying to spam everyone?
If it’s the latter, then that would make me very happy. If I can do something to make those people sorry, that will make my day just a little bit brighter.
An highschool teacher once told us something akin to “Politness is a social construct against savagery”. It puzzled me for a moment but I guess it made sense after all, as we are way more emotional thant those fictional Vulkans, we need a good story more than logic in our relations. Albeit not always genuine, politness seems to comfort us in the stability of our social fabric and its surrounding narrative.