You run into all kinds on social media. I spend time on certain platforms partly because of the friends I’ve made there, and partly because of my job. But many others are there to claim expertise, justifiably or otherwise. Among the “otherwise” set are platform users who frequently reference the teachings of the undeservedly immortalized, simperingly celebrated Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. I recognize the “otherwise” Jung-quoters as such by their posted stews of blundering misapplied Jungian buzzwords enmeshed in contradictory, obtuse amalgams of personal beliefs, dimly-glimpsed, misinterpreted offscourings of academic acumen, vituperative rantings, and photos of recently fired AK-47s or AI generated imagery of wrathful imaginary entities. Normally, Jung should be harmlessly banal and easily enough dismissed when his baseless theories, in and of themselves, are disseminated from within the controlled parameters of a legitimate academic forum. But his flaccid nonsense in the hands of the misinformed becomes potentially hazardous. It’s like giving a Nerf football to a toddler: no windows are going to get broken, but the kid can still knock a lamp off the living room end table with it. Glass can still get broken, and someone could step in it and end up with an infection.

Last week, I inadvertently encountered some of this misunderstood/misappropriated Jungian jumble in a post that inexplicably drifted through my X/Twitter feed, and, as a result… my Ring Doorbell all at once plumbed the malefic emotional depths (and took some pretty clear pics) of the idiot porch pirate who stole my Amazon delivery and got picked up by the cops yesterday. It was uncanny… the ease with which that doorbell navigated the darkest terrain of the human soul… Camus himself could not have done it better.

The doorbell’s name is Albert now. Al for short. And, abruptly, this fact has gotten me thinking… Its name might be Albert, but is the doorbell really a dude, or is it female? Is “Albert” just a conscious projection of its animus? And I wonder if the idiot porch pirate and I are connected unconsciously (it’s a shadowy kind of thought, but it’s there). Is the leak I was taking when Albert notified me of the thief’s presence on my porch invisibly tethered somehow to the Subway Surfers game his accomplice was playing while waiting for him in the getaway car?

So, you get it. I’m starting to seriously overthink things, and it’s getting weird. I hate it, and I blame none other than Carl Jung himself for all of it. It might have been the uninformed wielding of his crap on X/Twitter that flitted across my Android’s screen and halfway planted the pernicious seed, but it’s Jung’s inane theories themselves (of archetypes, introversion/extraversion, synchronicity, anima/animus, and blah blah blah blah blah) – each one more nebulous and unprovable than the next – that are the fundamental head of steam behind this rolling trainwreck of thought.

Jung’s a butthole for what he’s doing to my head right now. I was never interested in the guy’s blowhardery, and I’m still not. Back in my undergrad days, I registered for a psych course featuring promises of Jung ‘s hogwash right there in the syllabus (which I obviously didn’t read), and I dropped it immediately after the first lecture and sold the textbook for beer money. I’ve also personally known any number of legitimate Jungian proponents (credentialed academic types) over the years, and I’ve done my best to tune them out. But my very limited exposure to the Jungian bowel-snippets from these sources, catalyzed by my recent unfortunate social media encounter with the spouting off of some low-gear-only Jungian wannabe, is evidently taking its toll.

And there it is. Because of my role as innocent bystander and/or non-contributing passive non-listener, the insipid Jungian jargon to which I’ve been only minimally subjected and have tried hard to shut out (I really thought I was mostly asleep during the Jungian part of that first and only psych lecture) has evidently somehow had an osmotic effect on me. And thanks to my recent exposure to a vapid, seemingly benign social media vector, I’m only just now becoming aware of it. Like flatulence under the bedcovers, it’s become impossible to ignore, and its overpowering fetor lingers long after its foul expulsion from its originating orifices.

My ostensibly innocuous exposure to Jung’s nonsense is infecting my perception of the world around me.  My mind heaves with the swells of neuronal inflammation, and I create analogies, craft metaphors, draw parallels. My gray matter and my five senses, they take all that’s before me in, as well as all that’s not, and it gets plucked and parsed and manipulated. A continuum of objects and organisms, concepts and constructs, actions and inactions, oranges and orangutans, philosophy and fast food, ethics and kitchen appliances – it permeates as a dexterous flow that drafts rhomboids and lines and loci and transversals on my intracranial grid. Every one thing can be compared to every other thing. They are related by connection as well as by separation.

This psychosensory churning transforms a doorbell into a proponent of Existentialism. It allows that my shoes, covered in the dog shit I literally just stepped in, yet shielding my feet, are as the Knights Templar, and serve as both emissaries and protectors of my mortal realm’s sanctity (also, I somehow dimly remember trying to convince some swarthy bearded guy of certain of my beliefs with a mace – but only when I’m asleep, I think). It tells me, as I remove a discarded 3 Musketeers wrapper from some bushes in my front yard, that the bush and I are connected as one on some unguessable level, and that the absent candy bar itself is not only likewise connected as one with its unknown devourer, but is simultaneously connected as one with its erstwhile wrapper, and in its chocolatey-nougaty-delicious absence, is also connected to me as him to which its absence was first revealed. And as for the fate of the former 3 Musketeers bar, the denouement of its anonymous consumption and its ultimate archetypal form and corresponding connection to what’s on the bottom of my shoes is undeniable. I don’t need to be unconscious to know that shit is shit, but I do wonder if this knowledge is of an extraversional nature.

Thinking too much about things that don’t matter, and doing it largely as a result of being caught in the sinus discharge spray of Jungian babblings is where I’m at, and it’s a bad thing. And Carl Jung himself is a butthole for coming up with this injurious slop-trough of hyper-fictitious, untenable, and empirically unwarranted hooey in the first place. But the end to all of this – my overthinking and Jung and his baloney – is in sight.

Because, just like not saying anything to your neighbor the first time he lets his dog crap on your lawn and doesn’t pick it up, letting fevered-but-entirely-baseless Jungian-accentuated thinking continue is incredibly bad policy (the two actions are connected). And it’s just got to come to a stop. Irresponsible dog-crapping management is, well, bullshit. And so is any drivel issuing from Carl Jung, who, as it’s been established, is a butthole. (A dog crapping and Jung spouting off? Again with the synchronicity shit. I’ve really gotta get a grip.)

So, for me the imperative calming of my mind now begins, and it coincides with the closing of my eyes. I don’t think about anything. My eyes remain shut while, over the course of several minutes, my breathing deepens and steadies. My mind empties entirely. I open my eyes to a restored clarity of thought, and realize that I’m standing in the middle of my back yard, exactly where I was when I decided to write all of this down. There’s still dog shit on the bottom of my shoes, but in light of the relief I now feel, it’s a trifling concern. I scrape it off on the steps of my porch and enter my house. I’m in the kitchen now, and my phone’s on its charger. I unhook it and the dark screen lights up when I do. I see there’s an app update available. It’s Subway Surfer. I tap “Install Now,” set the phone down, open a cabinet, help myself to a 3 Musketeers bar and unwrap it. Then I enjoy its chocolatey-nougatey-deliciousness while Subway Surfer installs. I throw the wrapper in the garbage can. I wouldn’t want it to end up in the bushes.

Auf wiedersehen, Carl Jung, du arschloch.