98,673

I discovered I had 98,673 unread emails.

Not approximately 98,000. Not "a few thousand".

98,673.

There is something quite liberating about reaching a number at which the concept of keeping up has ceased to be relevant.

It wasn't, incidentally, the total number of emails in my inbox. There were all the ones I'd opened as well, sitting there having been dealt with in the highly technical sense that I had looked at them. So there was the unread population, and then there was everybody else.

I have no idea when this became normal.

At some point, email stopped being correspondence and became weather. It just happened around me.

Messages arrived and accumulated. Occasionally I opened one. Occasionally I answered one. Some disappeared into the electronic equivalent of a drawer containing old batteries, instruction manuals and a key nobody knows the purpose of. Others remained because I might need them.

This is one of the great lies of modern life:

I might need this.

Apparently I might need almost everything. Receipts, booking confirmations, things I once bought, things I considered buying, things telling me that something I bought had been dispatched, things telling me it had been delivered, things asking me how I felt about having received the thing.

Things from people I had never heard of who were nevertheless extremely keen to speak to me.

And somewhere amongst all of this, actual correspondence.

The remarkable thing about 98,673 unread emails is that the number itself becomes meaningless. At 300, you still have a problem. At 3,000, you have definitely got a problem. At 30,000, the problem has become an aspect of your personality.

At 98,673, you are simply a woman with an inbox.

Once I'd looked at the number, I wanted to know what was actually in there. There were things I had forgotten, things I was pleased to find, things I had absolutely no recollection of and things I had apparently considered important enough to retain but could now not explain at all.

It was the digital equivalent of clearing out a cupboard and discovering that you have been preserving a receipt for something you bought in 2017 because, at the time, it seemed quite likely that you might one day need to prove you owned it.

This is apparently called organisation.

I think it may actually be hoarding with a search function.

There is something peculiar about discovering the sheer quantity of your own digital past. Not the dramatic stuff. The ordinary stuff. A thing ordered. A thing cancelled. A question asked. A question never answered. A person you haven't thought about for years appearing suddenly in an old thread.

A piece of your own life sitting there in black and white, preserved without your permission and with absolutely no obligation to remain interesting.

It is an odd archive, made odder by the fact that, unlike a cupboard, it doesn't look untidy.

That's perhaps the most sinister part.

You could not conceal the physical equivalent of 98,673 unread emails. It would require rooms. Possibly an outbuilding. There would be leaning towers of paper and unopened envelopes forcing their way out beneath doors.

But 98,673 emails can sit behind a perfectly respectable little number in the corner of a screen. Nothing spills out. Nothing falls over. Nobody visiting your house knows.

You can continue to behave as though you are a functioning adult.

Until you look.

I looked.

And now I know.

Which, frankly, was probably a mistake.