Smoking, lottery tickets, and drugs cause negative effects in people's lives.

Using gmail has caused me no negative effects. It may not be ideal, but it works and has a reasonable set of tradeoffs.

I think it's more like renting vs buying or building from source vs compiled binaries than it is a crippling substance addiction which will ruin your health and relationships.

You, on the other hand, sound like a very not-sad person.

To know the world is to be sad.

I wouldn't put it that strongly, but I tend to agree. With the amount of almost daily news/leaks/... it should be a no brainer to not use these advertising platforms made by advertising companies IF you are tech savvy. It is hard for others as they have to give up some convenience. And to the person calling you 'sad', I find it hard not to be when people react that way.

Well, what else would you use?

I'm using Office 365 myself, because I hate google's datamining but Microsoft isn't much better. The added benefit for me is that I work with M365 at work and having an unrestricted tenant for myself helps me understand it better (to see the options available that I don't have access to in the admin console at work).

But I don't know what else I'd use. I don't like proton very much as a company either (purely personal opinion), and I don't know anyone else that has good mobile syncing.

I don't use calendar or email that much. When I do, Google does fine.