Opinion Today: Ann Patchett writes, “I love email, and I hate email”

The acclaimed novelist reflects on her fraught relationship with her inbox.

View in browser|nytimes.com October 15, 2024 By Cornelia Channing Editorial Assistant, Opinion I recently read a somewhat nauseating statistic. The average person spends approximately six and a half hours a day on the internet, which means, if trends continue, that typical high schoolers today will spend somewhere around 17 years of their lives online. Seventeen years. It seems an impossible amount of time. I'm hardly a purist. I use and (mostly) love the internet. It's full of information and beauty and life. But still — 17 years? Doesn't the sheer immensity of all that time raise the question: Are wasting our lives scrolling on our phones? In the second installment of our series How to Live With Regret, the author Ann Patchett grapples with similar questions in reflecting on her relationship with email, which she describes as both a source of joy and as "a black hole where time goes." Unlike me, Patchett actually is a purist. She does not have a cellphone or use social media or watch television. And as the author of more than a dozen books, I would argue that she has made more meaningful use of her time on earth than most of us. And yet even she sits up late at night staring down an ever-refilling inbox. This tension between the incredible power and incredible time-sucking mindlessness of technology is, I think, a central and unavoidable conflict of modern life — and one often discussed in the pages of this newspaper. But Patchett's essay approaches the subject in a way that feels both refreshing and personal. It might just be the kick you need to change your own internet habits, or at the very least, it could inspire you to put down your phone and instead spend the afternoon with one of her richly imagined novels. You won't regret it. Read the guest essay: Kristina Tzekova Guest Essay Ann Patchett: I Signed Up for Email in 1995. I Still Regret It. 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