What is going on with email prose?

Jul 07, 2025

One good thing about fake email jobs, which is only good if you care about things like corporate culture or shareholder value, is that work stuff mostly unfolds as work stuff always unfolds. This does not mean senior leadership fabricating a sense of urgency or blatant mismanagement forcing you to work overtime, either. That’s absolutely part of it, but there are subtler tasting notes to be found in this particular sloshing highball full of poison. There’s the tendency to go beyond your paygrade in hopes of a promotion, and more broadly to default to your boss’s strange and specific neuroses because it’s easier to acquiesce to whatever dumb shit they’re doing. And there is also the fact that, once every quarter, your CEO threatens to redeem what usually seems like poignantly misplaced roadmaps in the form of all-staff meetings.

None of this is good for the human psyche, really, but we will wind up exactly back at our desks and cubicles despite these arbitrary white-collar rituals shedding years off our life expectancy. This doesn’t even remotely tell the story of how degrading work can be. You can only avert your eyes from the horror for so long; sure, rounds of mass layoffs will linger in the back of your mind every time a project is dumped on you at 4:50 PM, but at least you earn enough money to treat yourself to some mild substance abuse in response to these slight inconveniences. We devote both a sufficient and wholly inadequate amount of time to these stunning and stunningly wrongheaded approaches to work, and sometimes we neglect an aspect of office culture that appears to be industry-proof. When did we decide that our default email prose is an avant-garde impression of a passive-aggressive white girl?

I am a grown-ass man in his 30s, but when Outlook loads, I transform into a marketing major at the University of Michigan named Kayleigh sipping on bubble tea. Anytime I feel like rolling through a scorching romp on a bunch of incompetent idiocy, I’ll be typing goofy shit like Just Circling Back or Just following up or Per my last email. The only person who should be allowed to say per in polite society is Birdman. My email signature should include a Project Pat quote just to balance out the cringe.

I don’t even say thank you or regards in most of my emails—I just say best. Best what? Best stop sending me an email.

Your emails will never find me well. I want to correspond with my coworkers in a way that is more in tune with my actual feelings when I’m in the office: Angry and seconds from dumping hot coffee on someone.