How Your Email Found Me
My alarm has made a decent living out of yelling at me at 8am throughout the week. It has long been my least favorite coworker yet also my most reliable one. After successfully dragging my feet out from under the warmth of my comforter, I find myself once again at my desk with my coffee mug and day planner on which the phrase “productivity is a mindset” is sadistically adorned. If I’ve put my hair up in a clip, I mean business. My email inbox is inundated with project updates, upcoming tasks, and accompanying reminders.
“Good morning, Anna. I hope this email finds you well.”
Actually, this email found me in absolute shambles, thank you very much, I mouth as I hit the “reply” button to acknowledge receipt of this message.
The rhetoric we use at work and within corporate life is so uniquely hard-hitting, in the worst possible way. We count the number and frequency of exclamation points we’ve used in a single email as to maintain a positive yet not overly cheery tone; we keep phrases like “let’s circle back to this,” “let me know if you have any questions or concerns,” “let’s pencil in a time on our g-cals” on constant rotation. It’s all so painstakingly devoid of authenticity, and yet it remains so pervasive in the way we communicate at work. This seems almost chicken-egg-esque in that, on one hand, we create our own corporate realities through the language we use to describe it; on the other hand, perhaps we use this kind of language to navigate a generally emotionless environment. Regardless, I think I speak for most of Corporate America when I say it makes me want to pull my already-sparse-and-thinning hair out.
Believe it or not, this has all just been one lengthy preamble to my primary topic of discussion: the concept of fulfillment. Bear with me here. As someone who graduated college a little less than a year ago, has since started working full-time, and moved back to her hometown, I can’t help but wonder if I’m making the most of my time here. I’m thinking this dilemma has something, at least in part, to do with work-life separation. But how would I even begin to mentally differentiate between the constant cycle of “circling back” with colleagues and occasional catch-ups with friends, especially when the former makes up the majority of my social interactions nowadays? More importantly, how do I find something that might replace that faint alarm in the back of my mind, urging me to write an essay or complete an assignment that doesn’t actually exist anymore?
Ironically, I find myself thinking back to that phrase I’ve come to hate so much: “productivity is a mindset.” I’ve realized that subscribing to this ideology is an act of self-sabotage when it comes to work-life balance. Humans aren’t meant to be productive––to try to optimize every little process we encounter in our day-to-day lives––and it’s almost antithetical to seek fulfillment in that. And as I’ve spent increasingly more time letting myself idle and play, doing activities for the sake of my own pleasure and enjoyment rather than for external validation, it’s become clearer to me that fulfillment begins in knowing who I am when there are no boundaries, schedules, or calendar invites weighing me down. What does all this have to do with corporate lingo, you may ask? In this case, the rhetoric I use at work actually helps me draw the line between my work day and the rest of my life. It provides a linguistic disguise behind which I am able to conserve my time and energy for the activities that remind me why I love being alive.
Do not be fooled––I am not writing this in defense of corporate lingo. I hope that much has been made clear. This is all just to say that the next time someone hopes their email finds you well, I hope it finds you playing in a sandbox.
