Honey, Your Rage is Showing: Lessons from Episode 1

Well, that got deep pretty fast.

What started as a question about snark, turned into a meta level analysis of five sentences– and we didn’t even get to all of them. Though, 30 minutes of listening to Mandy analyze and interpret my email was all I needed to confirm a long-held hunch: emails are rife with subtle information clues and revealing truths about human relationships in the digital age. With more than half of the world’s population communicating via email, this has some important implications for how we build systems for deeper connection. For one, email etiquette is critical to establishing positive relationships.

If you know me, you know that I hate people until I love them. That is, I’m respectful and generally pretty warm with people, but make a point to keep my distance until I think you can responsibly engage in a connection with me. If life has taught me anything, it’s that we are only the person we believe ourselves to be when that self is reflected back to us by the people around us. So, when you tell me that we have a lot in common, I’ll give you enough time for that truth to reveal itself, rather than get caught up in your fast talk.

Episode 1: Why do people send me rude emails? – The Gall! Podcast

For episode 1 of The Gall! Podcast, I read an email from a sender whose bad manners and disrespectful tone made me want to throw my laptop across the room. Instead, I decided to analyze this stranger's message with my good friend and Oxford-trained linguist, Mandy Pipher, to see what we could learn about this rude sender. A Little Backstory: Five years ago, I launched GoFundMe's most successful viral education campaign. Over 1000 (closer to 1400) people from around the world showed their support and sent me their money and well wishes to pursue my dream– graduate school at Harvard. I was featured in the Boston Globe, on MTV, and CNBC… I went proper viral.  Now, 5 years later, I'm heading back to graduate school– something I would have never imagined before my crowdfunding campaign. This podcast episode is inspired by a message I shared with my supporters about the good news. Show Your Love on Patreon I looking for 25 people to support this podcast. If I hit 25, then I know I'm on to something and release the remaining episodes. Patreon supporters will get commercial free podcasts, as well as perks like a t-shirt, and the chance to hang out with me a few others on Zoom once a month. Help me join the ranks of #blackpodcasters! Support the show here.

The upside of this approach is #nofakefriends. All the people I am lucky enough to call friends are incredible humans– seriously. Across every dimension you can think of, they are beautiful, affable, magnanimous, and lovable people. Also, they take no shit. My friends, from Toronto to Singapore to North Carolina to D.C., are all versions of the person I aspire to become. I read somewhere that we usually befriend people for two reasons: 1) We want to be more like them or; 2) We like the person we become when we’re around them. For me, it’s a little bit of column A and mostly column B– my friends afford me the safety and the confidence to be my full self. The problem is it takes time to find friends like that.

So, while #nofakefriends is a winning strategy for anyone who has time and a good BS meter, there are those instances where my timeline is accelerated and I need to make quick decisions about who I’m going to treat like a friend, hoping I made the right call. And it is often over email.

This is how I ended up with this rude email sender.

Here is a recap of the lessons I learned in my 30 minute conversation with Mandy about human connection, communicating in the digital age, and living your values:

1. Your email reveals more about you than you realize

My email exchange contained five sentences. By the third sentence, we could determine the age, education, region, and social class of the sender. How’s that for a read? Not only that, but we also gained some insights about the sender’s unsurprisingly problematic views about altruism, philanthropy, and money.

What I found most fascinating about this whole exchange and analysis was realizing just how much the email revealed about the sender’s ego and sense of entitlement. The formal communication style and the self-congratulatory declaration about being a good person, coupled with a thinly veiled demand to answer their questions at once took me out. Like, it’s not an exaggeration to say the first two sentences had me ruminating for hours– not because my feelings were hurt, but because I started to wonder who else this person has spoken to in this sanctimonious tone.

The nerve… the gall!

I’d be lying if I didn’t say this particular revelation personally triggering. Working in non-profit spaces for over a decade has sensitized me to the culture of entitlement that abounds in philanthropic spaces. This behavior is usually among middle and upper-middle class folks who subscribe to white liberal ideas: respectability politics, model minorities, gentrification under the guise of “embracing diversity”. If there’s anything I detest in the social change sector is the oppressive nature of good intentions and faux altruism.

2. There are ways to smile in an email exchange with a complete stranger

Mandy made an excellent point about how to communicate with people when you don’t know them personally and can’t see them– we can smile with our words. I know I’ve been guilty of sending an email or two that was so direct it sounded harsh– even though none of my words were emotionally charged.

Let’s be clear: smiley faces are not smiles. Benevolence isn’t something you can convey through emojis. It’s your word and punctuation choices– and knowledge of modern communication norms– that will convince the person on the receiving end of your message that you mean well.

Opening your email with “Dear”… doesn’t engender warmth. Choosing direct language, while effective in some contexts (legal writing, for example), comes across as harsh. Consider couching your language with phrases like “I was wonder…”, “I noticed that…”, “Would you mind clarifying…” Otherwise, you’ll sound like an arrogant jerk and push someone to make a podcast episode about your distasteful email etiquette.

Ha-ha.

3. We can tell when you’re “rage typing”

When Mandy said this, I immediately pictured the sender emailing me like…

Then I thought about all the petty things I wanted to say in my response:

But I didn’t. I kept it professional in the email… and started a podcast instead.

How was Mandy able to detect that the sender was probably rage typing?

Context clues.

Context clues always matter in electronic correspondence, but they especially matter when a response doesn’t match the message.

Before I go any further, I need to be honest here: When I sent the initial message that sparked this email exchange, I did it under the guise of “pseudo friendship”. I made the assumption that the people who contributed to my crowdfunding campaign in 2015 were like my friends. That’s because my initial supporters were my friends.

That all changed when my campaign when viral.

I should’ve known better than to treat 1300 complete strangers as friends, but have you ever raised $100K in 48 hours from complete strangers to achieve a lifelong dream? Wouldn’t you call those kind souls your friends for believing in you? Is it unreasonable to think that any of them would harbor negative feelings about you, like you’re untrustworthy “I want to make sure the money is going to the right person”?!?

So, perhaps I was a little naive when I sent that good news update. The spirit and tone of my message was positive and pretty chipper– and for the most part, this energy was reciprocated. This is also what made it so easy for Mandy to detect the sender’s rage.

If you ever find yourself in an email exchange with someone who has pissed you off to the point of rage, take a walk. Seriously… because if you send a response when your emotions charged at peak levels, it’s going to come through in your email– whether you know it or not.

The Last Word.

This was a super interesting exercise. I have a few other emails that I can’t wait to have friends and other special guests analyze in future episodes. Also, I can’t wait to hear your responses! Thanks to everyone who indulged me in this wild and totally random idea.

I think we’re on to something.