Greg Bruce asks what the way we end our emails says about us.
Taking into account holidays and periods spent working in largely email-free jobs, I estimate I've sent 52,000 emails in the last 25 years, almost every one ending with the word "Cheers". For very official communications, I have occasionally written "Regards" and to very close friends I've recently started writing "Cheerz", so let's say the real figure is closer to 50,000.
Reduced to a bald number like that it's startling and quite embarrassing. What does it say about me? It says I'm the sort of person who doesn't like to make decisions, nor spend time thinking. It says I'm the type of person who thinks the word "Cheers" says something specific about me. It's hard to say exactly what that might be because it's a decision I made 25 years ago, but my guess is I thought it demonstrated the carefree, uninhibited personality of someone undaunted by authority - things I wasn't then and still aren't.
So much of life is unexamined, but none more so, until recently, than my use of "Cheers". Now I look closely, I can't help but wonder what its endless, mindless repetition throughout my adult life has cost me. What if, every time I had come to the end of an email, instead of writing "Cheers", I had instead learned a word in a new language? Or done a nice thing for someone? What if I had done something as simple as coming up with a new sign-off each time? Opened the creative tap and seen what came out: snippets of song lyrics, self-help maxims, proverbs, personal revelations. What if I'd allowed that sort of creative spirit to course through me? Who might I have become, had I engaged in 50,000 such tiny acts of creativity over the past 25 years? It's hard to say but I surely would have been writing something more interesting than this.
What is life but freedom? What is 50,000 repetitions of the same empty word, but the denial of freedom, and therefore the denial of life? In this sense, my commitment to "Cheers" has been death by 300,000 boring keystrokes.