About ten years ago, I found myself standing on the sun-scorched lawn outside the campus library, chatting with a colleague who was edging into his sixties. I was freshly minted into my early fifties, just far enough along to start scanning the horizon for signs of irrelevance. Naturally, our conversation slid into that black hole topic older academics can’t resist: retirement—or, as my colleague eloquently rebranded it, “a form of extinction.” According to him, the day you stop teaching is the day your name starts sliding off the whiteboard of history. You don’t just stop working—you vanish. The world changes its locks, and your keycard stops scanning.
From there, the conversation took its next logical step—death. And that’s when I said something that was equal parts earnest and glib:
“Even at my lowest, most gut-punched moments, I’ve always had this strange, burning desire not only to live—but to never die.”
Why? Because I am possessed by a compulsive need to know how it all turns out.
On the grand scale:
Was Martin Luther King Jr. right? Does the moral arc of the universe really bend toward justice—or is it more like a warped coat hanger, twisted in a fit of cosmic indifference?
Will humanity eventually outgrow its primal stupidity and evolve into a species guided by reason?
Or will we just become meat-bots—part flesh, part firmware—hunched under the cold glow of the Tech Lords who now sell us grief as a service?
Will thinking, one day, come in capsule form—a sort of Philosophy 101 chewable tablet for those who can’t be bothered?
But my curiosity isn’t all grandiloquent and philosophical. I want to know the dumb stuff, too.
Who’s going to win the Super Bowl?
What will dethrone the current Netflix darling?
Who will succeed Salma Hayek as the reigning goddess of unattainable beauty?
Like every other poor soul conscripted onto Planet Earth, I didn’t ask to be born. But now that I’m here, uninvited and overcommitted, I can’t help it—I want to see how this mess plays out.
Still, I sometimes wonder: Am I just a naive late bloomer clinging to a plot twist that isn’t coming?
Is there some ancient nihilist out there—smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and muttering aphorisms in a grim little café—who would look at me and sneer, “What’s the fuss, kid? It’s all the same. Same story, different soundtrack.”
Maybe.
But I think there’s a stubborn ember in me that keeps expecting irony to trump monotony, that believes the cynic’s spreadsheet of life’s futility has a few formula errors. Maybe my refusal to give up on surprise is what keeps my inner candle burning.
And maybe, just maybe, that makes me an optimist in exile—still walking the fence between wonder and weary resignation, while the true cynics stand on the other side, arms crossed, whispering,
“Don’t worry, you’ll be like us soon enough.”
Cinemorphosis 
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