I was checking my email this morning — as I do pretty much every morning — and it struck me just how much of what was in my inbox could be described as pure false advertising.

Or maybe we should even say clickbait, because so much of the content of the actual emails bore little to no resemblance of what the subject line was.

While I have pretty good spam filters set up, I invariably end up with quite a bit of garbage because I am engaged in online commerce for a living. As soon as one data broker has your info, it seems they all have, regardless of the eternal "we will never sell your information" promises.

As I contemplated the flood of garbage and sent it to the recycle bin, I found myself wondering whether any of the senders of these nonsense messages actually believe their own bullshit.

I mean, why do you even bother sending this stuff? Or are you trapped so far down inside your attempts to get money-for-nothing that you'll let in pretty much anything that you see?

I suppose planet Earth has always been plagued by what used to be called "snake oil salesman" in olden times; those itinerant salesman who offered miracle cures for anything from gout to hair growth and they clearly offered little more than colored water with a bit of vinegar and other scents to give them a weird-ass flavor.

What sort of person does this?

I'm envisioning people sitting around the dinner table and the kid goes "Mom! Dad! I have found my calling — I'm going to rip off people for a living!"

Do the parents beam proudly and exclaim "Wow, that's our boy! Good work son, we're so proud of you!"

While it's pretty well documented that criminals — on average — have lower intelligence and the general population, there is little evidence to suggest that there is a connection between intelligence and morality or ethics.

Way back in another life I did quite a bit of investigative reporting in the realm of network marketing, and while there were some very honest and sincerely hard-working people in that industry, the common factor of those who were there looking for quick and easy money was a high level of naivety and gullibility.

Could be that I'm just too cynical for this world because I look at those kinds of things and the only conclusion I can come to is that if it promises anything better than mediocre results it has to be a lie. Maybe that's my own cognitive bias because historically my outcomes in life have typically been very mediocre... so I expect that to be the standard.

But getting back to my deceptive email subject lines I just find it extremely frustrating because it wastes so much time to wade through everything to determine what is real and what is not, and to discover that the "special offer" inside is anything but a special offer and was only put in that subject line to trick you into opening an email that offers nothing whatsoever.

Makes me pause and wonder whether this is really the best the world has to offer? In that case we really live in a sick sad world.

Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!

As always, a 10% @commentrewarder bonus is active on this post!

=^..^=