Happy 20th anniversary, Gmail; I’m sorry I’m leaving you

There is so much I loved in those archives. There is so much I would delight in rediscovering. But I can’t find what matters in the morass. I’ve given up trying.

A few months ago, I vowed to take back control of my digital life. I began with my email. I subscribed to Hey, an email service that takes a very different view of how email should work. Gmail and virtually all of its competitors assume anyone should be able to email you and then you should store and sort and search and categorize those messages. Hey assumes that only the people you want email from should be able to email you.

The first time anyone sends you a message, it goes into what’s called the Screener and you have to whitelist or blackball the sender. If you blackball the sender, that’s it. You never see email from that address again. It also has another feature I love: a clean screen for replying to emails, so you can think and compose without the visual clutter common to so many other services.

Hey forces me to make choices rather than encourage me to avoid them. I constantly have to ask whether I want email from this or that sender, and if so, where it should go. Which is not to say Hey is perfect or even that it fully solves the problems I’m describing. Its search is far inferior to Google’s. It’s too hard to rediscover mail that I’ve viewed but took no action on. There’s no way of sorting different kinds of mail that come from the same address. It has trouble threading long conversations with many, many participants. I miss the easy integration with all the other Google products I need to use.

But for me, for now, the friction is what I’m looking for. I am grateful – genuinely – for what Google and Apple and others did to make digital life easy over the past two decades. But too much ease carries a cost. I was lulled into the belief that I didn’t have to make decisions. Now, my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combining maximal storage with minimal intention.

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have stored everything and saved nothing.

I do not blame anyone but myself for this. This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself. But I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to be a garden I tend, snipping back the weeds and nourishing the plants.