Your Email Is Making You Look Old

Look, I always thought my email address was a point of pride. It’s just my name—clean, simple, efficient. Not an embarrassing relic from my past like Hotmail or (shudder) AOL. No unnecessary numbers, no awkward underscores, no random birth year that outs me immediately. It was sleek. It was minimalist. It was professional.

Turns out, it was also a dead giveaway that I’m ancient.

According to Gen Z, if your email address is just your first and last name with no added fluff, you’re basically a digital dinosaur.

Because only those of us who were early to the email game snagged such pristine handles. Apparently, the cool kids today are rocking usernames that resemble CAPTCHA codes because all the “normal” ones were long gone by the time they logged in.

So let me get this straight. I spent years smugly looking down on people with usernames like DaveSmith1978 or CoolChick42, only to find out my “refined” email address is actually the biggest red flag of all? I am horrified.

And it gets worse. Because this doesn’t just mean I’m old. No, no. It means I’m exactly the right age to have signed up for Gmail back when you could still get just your name. Which puts me in a very specific, very “seasoned” demographic.

And let’s be honest, at least I have Gmail.

The real relics among us are still clinging to their @earthlink.net and @comcast.com addresses.

Or worse—the ones who just got online a few years ago and are now emailing from an account that sounds like a forgotten relic of the dial-up era.

So what am I supposed to do? Change my email to something more complex? Throw in some unnecessary numbers? Add a weird character or two? No thanks. I’ve been using this email since the early 2000s, and I’m too old to remember anything new.

Guess I’ll just have to accept my fate as an email elder. But if anyone needs help resetting their password or finding the “reply all” button, you know where to find me—at my perfectly respectable, shamefully obvious, extremely old person email address.