I suspect this is a common experience, especially in the services industry.
Every day I spend ten to fifteen minutes reading emails from people I do not know. They are pitching services, products, or simply “reaching out.” I have never interacted with them, never asked for information, never given consent. Yet they arrive.
It is not only a matter of time, although ten or fifteen minutes a day add up to many hours over the course of a year. The real issue is cognitive load. Each unsolicited email requires a small but real decision: who is this, is it relevant, did I miss something, should I respond, ignore, unsubscribe, block? These micro-decisions accumulate. Attention fragments. Focus shifts. Energy dissipates.
At least in Europe, this practice is often unlawful. The usual justification of the sender is “legitimate interest.” From a legal standpoint, that argument is fragile, particularly in the absence of a prior relationship or a properly documented balancing test. Sometimes the explanation is even simpler: “I didn’t know.” I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know consent was required. I didn’t know this could be intrusive. But lack of awareness does not transform intrusion into respect, nor does it convert inconvenience into legitimacy.
Still, the emails keep coming.
Why?
Because almost no one acts. And I include myself in that. A few times, out of frustration, I copied the Italian Data Protection Authority in my reply. But doing this systematically would require time, documentation, follow-up. Enforcing your rights consumes resources. Reacting costs energy. Deleting is easier.
I sometimes mark them as junk and refine my spam filters. That helps, partially. I could also set up AI agents to pre-screen and filter everything for me. Technically, that is possible. But agents are not yet fully reliable, and my inbox contains confidential material, sensitive exchanges, sometimes privileged information. Delegating that layer of judgment to an automated system is not a neutral decision. It introduces new risks in the name of managing an old irritation.
So I still read them.
The model works precisely because recipients are busy and unlikely to file formal complaints over a single unwanted email. A small percentage probably converts, and from a purely economic standpoint that may be enough to justify the strategy. Now imagine scaling that logic with a swarm of autonomous agents operating globally, scraping, drafting, sending, optimizing. t is not difficult to foresee a worsening of the situation.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if we collectively decided to reclaim those ten minutes a day, to treat unsolicited interruption not as background noise but as something that deserves a boundary, even if only a silent refusal.
Perhaps nothing would change. Or perhaps we would slowly remember that attention is not an open resource and not public infrastructure available for capture. It is a choice. Trust begins with asking.
And I would like mine back
