I have over 50 thousand messages in my inbox. Most of them unread.

Cheryl makes fun of me for it because she manages to keep pretty close to “inbox zero.” But I think she’s more the exception than I am.

It’s all FOMO. For example, I just deleted hundreds of message from Glassdoor. But I’m hesitant to completely unsubscribe. What if I missed the perfect job or bit of career advice? It could be like leaving money, or my happiness, on the table.

Heck, I don’t want to unsubscribe to coupons I might get. I just got an e-mail from a certain business and was reminded to use a $20 promotional gift card before it expired. Score! If I delete promotional offers what I end up needing what they’re promoting? Unsubscribing from Constant Contact with its “SafeUnsubscribe” is especially fraught. It make is hard for a company to add you back to a list, even if you want them to, without an extra opt-in. I suppose the one time it happened (that I wanted to restart getting news from a certain company) it worked out but….

Of course, the thing about FOMO is that it’s not humanly possible to keep up with everything. By definition, you are missing out on 99.99% of what is going on in the world. If you’re a big media junkie, 99.98%. (Not exact numbers, but you get the point.)

The interesting thing is that we ever think we weren’t missing out on most of everything. There is this expectation that we are supposed to be keeping up with everything. For my parents’ generation, that was watching the nightly news. Which has turned into having CNN on, all the time.

The usual fiction goes like this: there is normally nothing going on and if there is, then we hear about it and do something about it. For example, if there’s a murder or an accident in our community, we expect to turn on the news or open the paper and hear about it. And there’s a response, and then things would recover and go back to normal. I don’t think I’m the only for whom that’s the expectation of normal, even though I know that not every disaster in someone’s life is actually in the news.

Presumably there is some weird mash-up of human brains evolved to participate in communities of hundreds or thousands of people, and technology that makes a small world out of millions or billions of us. I may lead a someone privileged life, but in a community of thousands—a college campus, my office building, the public schools on my side of town—this pattern holds. Emergencies happen once in a while, and we notice them, and respond, and recover.

It is so hard not to apply that principle to the whole world. Something terrible happened somewhere, we’ll see it on TV or the Internet, respond, and things will go back to normal.

It is so hard to really believe that the world as a whole is so big. That the one-in-a-million event in a small community is a daily event in the world, and the pattern of news, response, and recovery doesn’t apply.

The irony is that fear of missing out on everything doesn’t mean I’m not missing out on something. How do I not miss out on what I really don’t want to miss out on?

Yesterday I got an e-mail from a recruiter; I get these pretty typically:

I came across your resume in a file of ours…. I am not sure if you are looking around anymore or not but I just partnered up with the company searching for a .NET engineer…

I am long over identifying as a “.NET engineer.”

Let me tell you how I got into this business. First, I taught myself Perl from a book—back when Perl was cool! Then, I taught myself Microsoft Access from book, and also from learning relational databases from the academic side in graduate school. With that I became a citizen developer, learning the programming language that came with Access, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). I leveraged that experience into jobs that required more serious development on the Microsoft stack, first in Visual Basic 6 and then in C# with the advent of .NET.

C# in particular is a great language and Microsoft despite all the criticism they’ve taken has made some great software. But while I’ve made actual money using Microsoft technologies, I’ve always envied the cool kids working on a LAMP stack or Plone or Django or Ruby on Rails. That is where this work becomes an art form. Or building iPhone apps.

Over the past few years I’ve gotten back to what first got me into technology in the ’90’s, web development. And, finally, I’m at a job where I’m not at all a Microsoft developer; I’m still running IIS but, conspicuously, without ASP.NET.

So no, I’m not interested in your old resume on file that says I’m a .NET Developer. Besides which if you can’t even look me up on LinkedIn and see what I’ve been doing since I talked to your agency ten years ago you’re not a very good recruiter anyway.

Oh, and that first database was to track custom imprinted B’Kol Echad orders. So that I was ever a Microsoft-stack developer was all caused by that other domain I am still passionate about.