The email sign-off: Goodbye to 'Cheers'

A farewell message, with a difference. Photo / Getty

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.

The reason for all this introspection about a seemingly innocuous word is that a couple of months ago I received an email from someone who signed off: "Best light." Those two words were so shocking. They jolted me from my complacency. Based on nothing more than those words, I thought: "This is an interesting person." Not that being interesting is everything, but what do people think about me when they read "Cheers"? At best, they think nothing. Is that the impression I want to leave people with? Is that who I am? I have long suspected the answer to be yes.

Something strong and not entirely conscious within me has always believed the unthinking use of "Cheers" is part of a good life, that it saves me something, but it's now clear it has cost me much. What emotional uplift would I now feel, looking back on the past 7300 days, knowing I had stood strong in the face of my raging need to conform? Would that have helped me avoid the many emotional and psychological setbacks that have beset me? Would I have flourished like a beautiful butterfly (average lifespan two weeks)?

The thrill of creating, of not being stuck in a rut, of constantly becoming yourself: this is life. A commitment to being creative in one's email sign-off, therefore, is non-trivial: it is simultaneously the signal of a will that won't be restrained and the enactment of that will. If I write at the bottom of my next email "C ya!", it might not appear from the outside that my life has changed, but of course, it will have because the act itself is the change.

I'm aware all this sounds like a Tony Robbins-style motivational seminar. That's because what's embodied in the rethinking of an email sign-off is far more than just communication: it is power. When you examine your life, you change your life. After reading this article, if you feel the power, take off your shoes and socks where you stand, ṭurn your underfloor heating up to max, then walk across the tiles as if they're only mildly warm, then send me $2000.

The possibility of the enactment of a new life is inspiring, but it's much easier to talk about how we should have done something 50,000 times in the past than it is to do it even once in the present. When I scroll back through my emails over the past few weeks, I've sent some regards, a few bests, and even a couple of thanks, but mostly I still am, and presumably always will be, a guy who finishes with "Cheers".