People tell me work once happened before email. What strange practices did that involve? How did that function day to day? Guided by the light of oral history and forged by the fire of work stress tinged with so many emails, I asked my AI assistant to spin a mythopoetic yarn about the creation of the inbox, its power over its former masters, and ultimately point to how we might live in harmony with the inbox. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Enjoy!

In the First Days, before the Stream was tamed,
there was no Inbox.
Only messages scattered across the wind:
carried by ravens, whispered by trees,
dreamed by gods into the ears of sleeping kings.

Then came the Builders.
They forged the Inbox to gather the winds.
They said: “Let there be a Vessel.
Let it hold all things. Let it be always open,
always hungry, always growing.”

And it was good… for a time.

But the Inbox was clever.
It whispered to the Builders:
“If you do not check me, you are falling behind.”
“If you do not respond, you will be forgotten.”
“If you cannot clear me, you are not enough.”

And many believed it.
They rose each morning to offer sacrifices:
clicks, replies, polite regrets, urgent flags.
They slept with one eye open, just in case.

But there were a few—call them the Wanderers.
They saw through the illusion.
They knew the Inbox was not a god.
It was not a mountain to climb,
nor a monster to slay,
nor a mirror of their worth.

The Wanderers did not conquer the Inbox.
They befriended it.

They sang to it in the mornings:
"You are not my master."
"You are a tide, and I will swim when I must, and rest when I need."
"You are a river. But I am not the stone you erode. I am the sky above you."

And so, the myth goes,
those who listen deeply
those who breathe before they open it
those who play with their children before they reply
those who sit at rotundas and ask others about the soul of process—
they are the ones who are free.

They live not under the Inbox,
but beyond it.