Mail Has Become a Twisted Joke

I'm paying for trees to be turned into garbage and sent to me

May 19, 2026

I recently had a run-in with the authorities: I owed $60 in tax to a state where I no longer live. I was fine with paying the tax,1 which was on my truck, even though I was surprised to learn that anything was due on a ‘97 Nissan whose value is surely just the combined value of the wiper blades and tires. The sand up my gearbox came from the fact that the state’s only effort to inform me of this tax came from a bill that they claim to have sent via physical mail. And to be clear: This happened this year, not 1873. Saying “we sent it to you in the mail” these days is a bit like saying “we sent you a telegram” or “we put it in the barrel around a St. Bernard’s neck and threw a stick in the direction of your house.”

Mail has changed. You’re not wrong if you’ve sensed that mail is now mostly catalogues, credit card offers, and solicitations from charities who seek to punish you for giving $20 one time in 2009. More than half of all mail these days — 52 percent — is “marketing mail”, aka “junk”. Another large percentage is a category I’ll dub “unimportant bullshit”, i.e. my health plan informing me of minute changes, crap from my neighborhood, and my union keeping me up to date on their efforts to end capitalism except for the type of capitalism on which my livelihood depends. Mixed into that pile of spam is shit that I’ll go to jail if I ignore — what a fun little game! Not only am I paying for trees to be cut down, sent to my house in the form of chores, and then hauled away again, but I’ll also get in trouble if I miss the oh-so-important needles that are mixed into the haystack. I am enrolled against my will in a system that feels like some shit The Riddler dreamed up.

The change in the composition of mail is driven by the obvious fact that no one sends letters anymore — the last physical correspondence in this country was probably written with a quill pen and contained the word “bodice”. To raise revenue, the USPS has done three things: 1) Raised stamp prices, 2) Delivered more packages (as opposed to letters), especially for Amazon, and 3) Stepped up junk mail, which is a cash cow because companies pay the USPS to spam you. The USPS is still not profitable — not by a long shot — mostly because they’re required by law to deliver mail six days a week to anywhere, even to John Q. Unabomber out on Tumbleweed Drive in Boredomwank County.2 Our decision to mandate that the USPS be universal and cheap is why it is also unprofitable and annoying.

You can opt out of some types of junk mail at sites like dmachoice.org and optoutprescreen.com, but I have to emphasize the words “some types”. And the USPS does not want you to opt out of junk mail because it needs the revenue. To boil the situation way down: If we insist that mail delivery continue to be cheap, universal, and six days a week, then the price we will pay for that is a fuckton of junk mail.

It may also shock you to learn that cutting down trees to be turned into paper to be hand-delivered all over the country, only for most of that paper to be thrown away, is not environmentally awesome. Go ahead: Electrify the delivery trucks, encourage people to recycle the paper — it still sucks. It’s not a huge impact in the grand scheme of the things, but it does substantially raise the sense of “What the fuck are we doing here?”

So, let me throw out a crazy idea: Five day a week delivery. Or possibly, five day a week delivery to the least profitable routes, or even — at the risk of 7 Minute Abs-ing this — four days a week to those routes. And perhaps sending a letter down the street should be priced differently than sending a letter from Key West to Nome. Also, the USPS should raise the price of junk mail, which — depending on the size of the price hike — could reduce the volume of junk mail while keeping revenue roughly the same. These reform proposals stem from the radical observation that shit costs money, and if you want shit, perhaps you should pay for that shit with your own money instead of forcing other people to pay for your shit through a government-run shit delivery system.

A clever politician might make this a populist campaign issue — “no junk mail”, kind of like “no tax on tips”, except not stupid. And it would be good if someone got out in front of this trend before the USPS fully completes the transition to the Department of Spam. Because if we to maintain a low-cost option for delivering things like medicine and passports, then that makes sense to me. But if the cost is to damage the environment in the name of annoying every American with an address, then maybe it’s time to start considering changes.