A little anarchy, but not the hurting kind...

This morning I received an automated email reminder from my bridge club of my Wednesday evening bridge game. I signed up for those games when they resumed after Covid. (I'd also been signed up for the equivalent game pre-covid.) I have never accidentally missed a session, and I or my partner have always emailed the directors in advance when we had to miss one for any reason.

These reminders are new this week. My reaction was to see the reminder as one more unneeded interruption, like the five emails I now get each time I'm fool enough to order anything on line. Fortunately there was an unsubscribe button, and it seems to be specific, rather than likely to cut off all contact from the bridge club. So away it went.

I then followed up by muting yet another Discord channel. I'm also using Do-Not-Disturb mode ever more liberally, though it was somewhat difficult to re-locate the setting on my Mac, as they currently choose to call it "focus".

All this is on top of extremely long term habitual use of ad blockers.

Clearly all the suppliers are adapting. To get their particular thing noticed, they feel a need for a constant stream of emails, texts, etc. How else can they be sure a frazzled customer or potential customer will notice them? How can they expect a club member to have a calendar that produces customized reminders of their attempts, that they will routinely notice? Far better to send reminders, and then reminders of the reminders.

Of course each one who adapts in this way makes the situation worse for their frazzled users, leading to more failure to notice the suppliers' repeated messages, leading to a felt need to increase their number.

With me at least, this also leads to decreased energy, and hence less use of any of the interruption-generating activities and products. How long until I cancel a Wednesday bridge game because I'm exhausted from a busy day deleting unwanted emails, just trying to keep the number of unread emails constant? (And no, I'm not referring to outright spam - my ISP does an excellent job of segregating that, without triggering any notifications for it.)