I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
Donald Knuth posted this a long time ago, and I wonder whether he has been able to continue an email-less existence. Could you even sign up for basic utilities these days without having an email address? Asking for … myself, though as social media implode and the internet necrotizes email increasingly seems like a great technology. Still, I have for many years dreamed of imitating Knuth’s fellow computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra and just mailing out handwritten letters to interested parties.
By the way, Knuth has been trying out Claude.