I Hope this Email Finds You in Hell

The most hated form of modern communication (except for everything else)

Jason McBride
5 min readJul 6, 2023

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Picture of a devil in a gray business suit pointing to you standing in front of the fires of Hell. The image has the words “I hope this email finds you in Hell” at the bottom.
Image by Jason McBride

You hate email. You receive far too many emails each day. You hate email so much that you only look at the average email for nine seconds before moving on to something else. You also love to complain about how many emails you receive.

If you’re a millennial and you’re neurotic, you obsess about inbox zero, cursing every time you have to delete, move, or mark an email as spam so that you can keep your inbox empty and your email app free of notifications.

If you’re a member of Gen Z, you are overwhelmed by the notifications on your email app, which is currently displaying a four-digit number of unread emails. You treat email like you do phone calls, only checking and responding if you are already expecting a message from someone.

If you’re a Gen Xer or a Boomer, you have a warm nostalgia around your first email address and are appalled at the effort millennials spend on achieving inbox zero and the sheer volume of unread messages Gen Z tolerates. You also remember the good old days of RSS feeds.

Despite how much you hate email, today, you will probably give some company permission to email you as you join a newsletter or sign-up for a coupon. You tell yourself you…

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Jason McBride

Freelance Writer & Illustrator | Poet & Visual Essayist | Amateur Human | he/him https://weirdopoetry.com