Knowing Your Shadow in the Age of Inbox Warfare

Or, Why Your Passive-Aggressive Emails Are Just Your Inner Irishman Having a Chat


If Carl Jung were alive today, I’m convinced he’d spend more time analysing your inbox than your dreams. Because in every unread message, every clipped “Thanks,” and every “Per my last email,” lies the shadow—the part of ourselves we’d rather not admit exists.


You see, the shadow isn’t just a fancy word for bad behaviour. It’s the collection of all those feelings, frustrations, and truths that we shove down because the polite workplace demands it. But, as any Irish mammy will tell you, what’s hidden tends to bubble up in unexpected ways — usually with a sharp twist of humour and a hefty dose of sass.


Take the classic passive-aggressive email — that “Interesting thoughts” that’s really a “Are you fecking serious?” or the “Love this! Just a few tiny tweaks,” that translates to “I’m pretending to care but I’m about to rearrange everything.” Or the silence, followed by a WhatsApp group rant that’s so authentic it’s almost beautiful.


Jung taught us to know our shadow, to welcome it as part of the whole self. But in today’s digital trenches, knowing your shadow means recognising when you’re about to unleash it in a thread — and maybe holding back before hitting send.


Because here’s the craic: your shadow is human. It’s real. And when you give it a voice—not in anger, but in honest reflection—you start to change the way you communicate. You move from being a digital warrior to a digital soul.


And that, my friends, is worth more than the snappiest reply or the fastest follow-up call.


So next time you’re tempted to reply with that little jab, think of Jung. Think of the shadow as the mischievous Irishman inside you having a chat. Then ask: What’s really behind this? What part of me needs kindness?


Remember, in the words of an old Irish proverb, “Ní bhíonn an rath ach mar a mbíonn an smacht.” — “There is no success without self-control.”


Master your shadow. Master your inbox.

And bring a bit more soul to the digital noise.


Powered by Analog Soul — for the humans still trying to make sense of the machine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ones Who Kmew

Te Ones Who Knew: A Tribute to AI’s Early Warning System Before it got shiny. Before your granny asked ChatGPT for soup recipes and Spotify thought sadness was a playlist… There were voices. Not many — and most were ignored. But they saw something in the circuitry. They heard the whisper under the code. “This won’t just change your tech. It’ll change  you. ” Some were writers. Some were renegade coders. Some were ethicists who knew how capitalism dances with innovation — fast, greedy, blindfolded. And they warned us. Not with panic, but precision. Not as Luddites, but as  witnesses. Meet the Prophets Jaron Lanier : The dreadlocked pioneer of virtual reality, who’s been telling us since the ‘90s that digital platforms commodify the soul. He coined the term “digital Maoism.” You probably saw the hair first — but his warnings cut deep. Shoshana Zuboff : She named the beast —  surveillance capitalism  — and wrote a 700-page epic to show how our lives became raw data for ...
Read more

Saturday Soliloquy - June 7 25

To scroll, or not to scroll—that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and pings of outrageous group chats, Or to take arms against a sea of selfies, And by logging off, end them? To nap—perchance to dream— Aye, there’s the rub: For in that nap of rest, what thoughts may come When we’ve unplugged from this infernal feed? The weekend promised peace. But here we are, souls on standby, Lost in the algorithm’s soliloquy. So I ask you, quietly: Will you choose presence over pixels today? A pen over a post? A walk over a wall of filtered faces? The curtain is yours to raise.
Read more

The Prophets Of The Machine

Image
The Prophets of the Machine They warned us, not with fire and brimstone, but with code, and questions. In the hush between mainframes and meaning, they saw what we didn’t: that the algorithm would grow teeth. Not to bite, but to smile, while it rewrote us. They were poets in lab coats, activists in server rooms, fictioneers who stitched warnings into stories we shrugged off. We called them pessimists. Tinfoil. Too early. Too serious. Too human. But now the feed is full of their echoes.                                                       Lanier. Zuboff. Buolamwini. Rushkoff. Chiang. The mad lads and mná who asked: What does it mean to stay human… when machines learn to mimic soul? They saw it. We scroll it. Still - it’s not too late to listen.
Read more