The Weekly Edit: Unsubscribe Summer

May 19, 2020

Is anyone else’s inbox flooded with unwanted e-mail?  Retailers that you’ve never shopped with.  Brands you’ve never heard of.  Even names you know have turned their weekly e-mails into daily ones, sometimes multiple times per day.

I used to open my e-mail in the morning to 10-15 new e-mails.  Now, it’s 30+.

Spending 15-minutes every morning hunting down the ‘unsubscribe’ and ‘e-mail preferences’ buttons has become my equivalent of morning coffee.  Purging the unwanted internet chaffe is my catharsis.

I’ve also unfollowed dozens of people on Instagram.  Cut down on my weekly e-mail newsletters.  Deleted podcasts I’m not listening to from my list.  Donated books that I haven’t picked up.  And started snoozing all of the people in my social media feed who have decided to break out their Facebook J.D.s to argue the constitutional law of pandemic re-opening plans.

So it looks like this is going to be an unsubscribe summer.  Because my plate is already full enough with anxiety, stress, and extra headaches.  I don’t need to spend my morning deleting e-mails from mountain bike companies and nail polish brands or explaining to my former co-worker on social media that he can’t sue the local hardware store for requiring customers to wear masks.

I need less, not more.  I just wish they would make the unsubscribe buttons bigger.

Every day, I like to take a long walk.  It’s the only peace and quiet I get when my husband never leaves, my dogs are clingier than ever, and the Montana primary election is 14-days away.  Sometimes I listen to a podcast or music, but mostly, I just enjoy the quiet.

My uniform for these walks is my Lululemon leggings + a Daily Ritual sweatshirt + my Adidas + and a ball cap.  But I needed a baseball cap that didn’t say anything, so I picked up this $9 hat from Amazon.  It’s simple, it doesn’t rub my forehead raw, and it comes in a bunch of colors and prints.

‘My Boss Assumes I’m Slacking Off When I Work From Home’

I had this boss.  When he would leave town, he would call to check-in.  He wouldn’t call me, he would call my assistant.  He would ask him questions about who was in the office, how long we’d been gone to lunch, what we were doing.  He turned a 24-year-old into his personal eye-in-the-sky.  It was madness.

I can only imagine how he’s coping now with everyone working remotely.  As my friend K once said, “There are managers and there are supervisors.”  Managers trust people to do their jobs with reasonable direction.  Supervisors are task masters, you are just cogs in their machine, and without their input, you are nothing.

My body hurts.  The sitting.  The stress building up in my muscles.  My entire body just feels like lead.

The Jane bath cubes in muscle ache and less stress are helping.  I turn on my portable white noise machine and try not to think about anything for a few minutes.

Also helping is my acupressure mat and my foam roller.  The mat takes a while to get used to.  But once you feel how it relieves tightness in your back after a long work day, you won’t care that it pinches a bit.

I love Naan.  I would rather eat Naan than any other type of bread.  The soft interior, the pockets of crispy, charred exterior, the buttery goodness.  It’s just the best.  But since our favorite Indian restaurant has closed, we’ve been relegated to the dry, flavorless grocery store naan.  Or have we?

Gimme Some Oven has an easy Naan recipe.  I ‘m going to use our shallow griddle pan to make the naan.  The shorter sides should make it easier to handle the bread as it cooks.

I work in politics, so I rarely want to listen to it in my free time.  But Pantsuit Politics has interesting content that you won’t see everywhere.  For example, I joined their Patreon channel so that I could hear their take on a SCOTUS decision that impacts my hometown.

Growing up on a lake of mine waste and playing in slag piles, you don’t think about the longterm implications of all that toxic refuse.  But with the mine cleanup entering it’s fourth decade, some of my former neighbors sued for the right to demand more of the mining cleanup than the EPA felt was necessary.  It’s an interesting case about federal regulations, the environment, and just how far private property rights go.

{this post contains affiliate links that may generate commission for the author}

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  1. Monica T says:

    Was just thinking I need a new baseball hat to cover up my grown out roots and home cut bangs that have grown out awkward! I have this prAna trucker hat in blue and love it, I need a black one now I think! Perfect shape and depth of the bill.

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DGTV7LK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

    On unsubscribing…I need this for in-person conversation. I know everyone is stressed and under a lot of pressure, but the negative vibes are really hard to take when EVERY conversation turns to their opinion about re-opening or the conspiracy theories about it being from a lab in China etc. It’s amazing how many people are experts on the Constitution and how it relates to pandemics. My standard response now is, ‘I guess I’ll read the book in 20 years about what went right and what went wrong’, because it seems like even the experts don’t know enough about this virus or what will happen to the economy to make definitive statements.

  2. TheLOOP says:

    The Naan recipe links to Lululemon. Could you update it, please?

  3. Nicole says:

    Thanks for the podcast recomendation! As someone who also works in politics, I prefer non-political content in my free time too. With your recomendaiton though, I will have to give it a go.

  4. CJ says:

    Y’all have to try Unroll.me – all the listserv emails collected into one, with a bulk unsubscribe feature. Lifesaving!

    • H says:

      FYI Unroll.me works but they are owned by a market research company and a few years ago they got caught monitoring users’ inboxes for emails unrelated to unsubscribing and selling your data – things like telling Uber when you signed up for Lyft etc. Then in December they settled with the FTC for lying about it. They may have changed their practices since then but I’m not going back. I do a batch unsubscribe every few weeks and find that it’s not perfect but good enough.

      • CJR says:

        Wow – thanks for sharing. I just checked my preferences and opted out of having ads and data tracked and sold. Seems like they must have updated since the lawsuit – thanks again for flagging!

    • Ana says:

      Yes, I’m with H on this one. I got on the unroll me train a few years ago when it seemed like everyone was recommending it online. But recently it seemed like it was hurting more than helping. Important emails were getting rolled up and it’s getting harder to unsubscribe through their platform because not everyone uses a good description for what their email list is. I stopped using it altogether once I realized they were selling my info and screening my emails. I’ve been doing the manual unsubscribe and it’s tedious but better in some ways. And important things that I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting them (hello professional association event invites that I actually care about) are back in my inbox. I think I roll me is just too much hype for a mediocre service

  5. Elz says:

    I’ve loved Pantsuit Politics for years. I tell everyone about them. It’s such a nice summary of current issues, events, and Political machinations.

  6. Staci says:

    I don’t recall having to unfriend people on social media like I’ve had to do this last year. It started with politics. Having an opinion is fine. Having an opinion that is different than me is fine. Posting 20+ memes a day (mostly full of false info, sometimes bordering on racist)not fine. Unfriend.

    COVID has started a whole new chain of unfriending: microchips in vaccines, constitutional rights, a worldwide hoax, government control. People I thought I knew are writing posts saying grandpa just needs to get over it and die.

    Social media should be a place to unwind. It shouldn’t be adding to stress. I want more pictures of dogs and videos of dancing. It should not be a place where one of my aquatintences that works in fast food is debating another that is a doctor about medical issues. Yet, here we are.

  7. GF says:

    This Weekly Edit in particular spoke to me — I, too, am doing the Unsubscribe from all these seemingly random mass emails as my morning coffee, and I currently have that “boss who thinks we are slacking off when we work from home,” it’s rough (though seems to have calmed down on the boss front now that we’re in month 2 of remote working, thankfully)

  8. Mel says:

    I do mass unsubscribes. It is cathartic. I also do a regular Facebook unfollows. High school classmate who is either angry all the time or sanctimommy – girl, bye. White cis-male who regularly mansplains feminism and LGBT rights? I don’t have time for your co-opting of issues that aren’t yours. In reddit, I have a one in one out policy. If I add a new sub, I delete an old one from my feed.

  9. caitlin says:

    Hoo, yeah. Even retailers I normally like (DSW, for instance) have ramped up their emails to several per day and it’s getting to be way too much. I can’t help but feel that the surge in emails isn’t helping their sales and is turning people off. Thankfully I unfriended or muted most of the worst people in 2016, but it’s still an effort.

    On a more positive note, am absolutely looking into those bath cubes. Thanks, Belle!

  10. Anna c says:

    I’m so sick of the emails!! I had been using Unroll.me, but after seeing that they’re selling my data, I deleted my account. I skimmed through the daily email anyway, and was missing things that I probably should have looked at. So now, like others, I’m just going through and unsubscribing as emails come in.

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