I’ve been deep in an email purge lately. Archaeology of the digital kind. Dusting off threads, deleting ghosts, time-traveling one subject line at a time. Somewhere between “unsubscribe” and “why did I save this,” I stumbled on an email I sent to myself back in October 2022 with a subject line energy of chaotic neutral.

The article? A Doug Ramsey headline about a Beyond Meat executive allegedly biting a man’s nose during a road rage incident. Yes, you read that correctly. The COO of a plant-based company biting flesh. You really can’t workshop irony like that.

Apparently, I thought it was hilarious enough or maybe poignant enough to preserve for my future self. A little digital breadcrumb like: “In case you forget, the world was like this.” And honestly, past me wasn’t wrong. It is funny. It’s also a tiny, absurd snapshot of a time when everything felt just slightly unhinged. Like we were all one minor inconvenience away from becoming a headline we didn’t intend to star in.

There’s something oddly human about it. Not the nose-biting (let’s not normalize that), but the slippage. The moment where identity, whether professional, ethical, or aspirational, cracks under pressure. Plant-based executive, carnivorous impulse. We contain multitudes and apparently, molars.

What struck me most wasn’t just the absurdity. It was the fact that I emailed it to myself like it meant something. Maybe it did. Maybe it still does. A reminder that even in our most curated, mission-driven selves, we’re still just people in traffic who are hungry, reactive, and occasionally ridiculous.

Anyway, back to deleting 8,000 emails. But I’m keeping this one. For research purposes.