"Rage bait" is the 2025 Oxford word of the year. What would Jung say?
What this year's winner says about 2025 as a cultural moment-- and how we are called to respond.
This started as a note, but it just got too long. This fall, I’ve been following along with Satya Doyle Byock and friends as we “slow-read” Jung’s Undiscovered Self. When I read yesterday about Oxford’s word of the year— and its runners-up— I was struck by how much of Jung’s 1957 work spoke directly to the cultural implications, and wanted to share some thoughts. I look forward to hearing what you think, too.
The results are in, and the 2025 Oxford word of the year is “rage bait.” Are we surprised?
Even if you’ve never heard the term, you probably know what “rage bait” is. It’s those all-caps, adrenaline-inducing headlines that get your blood boiling. How dare they, you think, as you read about what they’ve done this time.
Rage bait is defined by the organization as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.”
They also note that usage of the term has tripled over the past 12 months— not entirely surprising, but, wow.
The two other terms that made the short list are also telling: “aura farming” and “biohack.”
“Aura farming,” Wikipedia says, is “the act of cultivating an appearance of effortless charisma or ‘coolness’, often through repetitive, stylized actions.”
The other contender was “biohack,” which really struck me, because I think and write about this a lot.
Oxford defines “biohack" as: “To attempt to improve or optimize one’s physical or mental performance, health, longevity or wellbeing by altering one’s diet, exercise routine or lifestyle, or by using other means such as drugs, supplements, or technological devices.”
From a Jungian viewpoint, as modern humans have become more industrialized, we have divorced ourselves from our instincts.
Rather than listen to our bodies and psyches, we spend countless hours and dollars attempting to control and optimize ourselves through biohacking.
Jung believed this led to serious imbalances:
“Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side”1
In tandem with this, the deliberate cultivation of persona-- “aura farming”-- has taken on disproportionate importance. While persona is a necessary part of any healthy psyche, over-identification with our persona is dangerous to ourselves and others. Not knowing who we are, we become imbalanced, inflated, and more prone to dangerous action:
Jung: “In this way (man) slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively take the place of reality.”2
How does this relate to “rage bait?”
Jung said, “The dammed-up instinctual forces in civilized man are immensely destructive and far more dangerous than the instincts of the primitive, who in a modest degree is constantly living out his negative instincts. Consequently no war of the historical past can rival in grandiose horror the wars of civilized nations.”3
This is true not only on the larger-scale level— for example, in the US, war crimes are being committed casually as I write this— but on the macro level. Violence and death have become so commonplace that we barely blink at the latest mass shooting. And on an individual scale, each of us, if we continue to be divorced from our own instincts, from our sense of Self, are increasingly volatile; vulnerable to emotional manipulation:
“In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control,” Jung said, “We stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections.”4
What’s a girl to do?
Social media and the technological world we live in are becoming increasingly more sophisticated in splitting us off from our instinctive selves, and from authentic connection with the world and communities we live in.
This has deadly ramifications, not only for ourselves, but for those around us and the world we want to live in.
In this light, self-knowledge-- not necessarily “self-improvement” (which can easily veer into the “biohacking” realm), but really coming to know ourselves-- is not a luxury pastime.
I was tempted here to frame it as a moral imperative (a different kind of “aura farming” on my part, maybe), but I had to laugh as I paged through Jung’s Undiscovered Self this morning and it fell open to the passage where he tells me not to bother:
“There is no sense in formulating the task that our age has forced upon us as a moral demand. We can, at best, merely make the psychological world situation so clear that it can be seen even by the myopic, and give utterance to words and ideas which even the hard of hearing can hear. We may hope for men of understanding and men of good will, and must therefore not grow weary of reiterating those thoughts and insights which are needed. Finally, even the truth can spread and not only the popular lie.” 5
What does it mean to be a person of “understanding and "good will”? Each of us has to find our own path. Journaling, art, dancing, time in nature, therapy, indigenous healing practices, less time online, attending to the needs of your body and psyche in whatever way you are called to do. I’ll wrap this up with one more Jung quote— this one more hopeful.
“What does lie within our reach, however, is the change in individuals who have, or create for themselves, an opportunity to influence others of like mind. I do not mean by persuading or preaching— I am thinking, rather, of the well-known fact that anyone who has insight into his own actions, and has thus found access to the unconscious, involuntarily exercises an influence on his environment.”6
What we each do makes a difference.
CW 10, para 558
(CW 10, para 557
CW 6, par 230
CW 10, para 493
CW 10, par 570
CW 10, para 583