Does your out-of-office reply say you’ll have ‘limited access to email’? Dream on | Jean Hannah Edelstein

We all warn we wont be able to access the internet when we are away. The truth is, unless we are staying in a treehouse in the Galapagos, we probably can

My favorite literary form of the summer of 2016 is the automatic email out-of-office message. When future scholars of literature reflect on the way that we wrote in this tumultuous, steaming-hot summer, what will they focus on? Perhaps it will be the way these utilitarian missives shifted towards a particular kind of magical thinking.
Im away, these out-of-office messages say, dropping into my inbox one after another, and I have limited access to email.

Limited access wasnt always our collective ambition. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, when Wi-Fi was but a dream for the masses, I recall a television commercial that often aired during my fathers favorite basketball games. A tropical beach, a sleeves-rolled-up business executive kicking back with a clunky, black-box laptop. This was the exciting future of work: going somewhere beautiful but still being able to show everyone how important you were by bringing your 30lb ThinkPad, kicking back with a couple of spreadsheets and a pia colada.

Now, a generation later, with unprecedented portability, connection, we feel the urge to note our limitations, or the ones that wed like to envision that we have. We are world-weary: with staring at screens, yes. But also with anticipation of how important well feel when we look at our inbox after two, three hours away, note the stack of communiques at which we will sigh, with which well reluctantly cope.

This is progress: the demonstration of status not through our ability to work wherever we go, but our inability to work. Our distance. Our ability to divide between the mundanity of day-to-day life and the sublimity of vacation. Our genuine and admirable devotion to personal time and space. Or at least our desire to have that devotion: our understanding that it is something to aim for. A wish.

Limited access to email, we write, wilfully overlooking the existence of smartphones, playacting as if every hotel in the world doesnt place the Wi-Fi password in our sweaty palms along with our room key cards. We are aloof, too good to feel a thrill at the buzzing notification that our high school friend has posted a 20-year-old photo of the time that we all went to a water park.

This is magical thinking because everyone knows that with rare exceptions we are perfectly able to access our email whenever we feel like it. And we always want to, pretty much: when we announce via Twitter that we have too many emails, that were tired of them all, its because we want people to know of the demands on our time: our significance to other people, even when most of the other people are the Bed Bath and Beyond 20% off coupon.

Limited access to email means: Im at my moms condo in Miami, but I could be in a treehouse in the Galapagos. It means: I did not just look at my ex-boyfriends Instagram while eating cured meat for breakfast with my new, possibly less good-looking boyfriend. Its dignity, its distinction, its self-control.

Its I have limited access to email but you, the person reading this email, have plenty of access to email. You have access to this very email that is telling you that I do not have access to email. But its also: I have limited access to email and you have plenty of access to email, a wealth of access, a surfeit. But you know that Im reading this, in case its important. Just in case. Just in case.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/09/does-your-out-of-office-reply-say-youll-have-limited-access-to-email-dream-on