My Virtual Reading Room

So I was intrigued by the title of this article in The Washington Post: How to get rid of notifications for unread emails and texts


The article begins thus:

"The numbers inside the angry notification bubbles on our phones and computer screens have become meaningless.

I have 66,394 unread emails, 416 unlistened-to voice mails and 316 alerts from my bank. There are push alerts, piling up for everything from old grocery orders to breaking news. Sometimes, just for fun, I’ll hit mute and let the Slack notifications pile up.

I’m not even the worst offender. A survey of friends and co-workers found unread text messages, social media notifications and DMs in the double-digits. Two people had more than 300,000 ignored emails."

...Frankly, I'm a bit puzzled--are people not at all concerned about missing an important message? Besides, do they not find it annoying...?

P.S. I decided to risk taking a look at the comments for this article, and I see many of the commenters are equally puzzled.