The other day my wife went to lunch with a longtime friend—call her A—and, as women do with admirable efficiency, they covered marriage in a single sitting. A complained that her husband had been drinking more, growing possessive, increasingly controlling. During the meal, he called her three times. By the third interruption, my wife said, the phone might as well have been sitting at the table demanding a chair. When she told me the story later, I said it reminded me of the Tears for Fears song “Woman in Chains.” She didn’t hesitate. “That’s her life exactly,” she said.
After a pause, the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to me. “I told A you don’t drink,” my wife said. “You’re not jealous or possessive. But you won’t leave the house. You’re a shut-in.”
“Doesn’t he go to the gym?” A asked.
“Not for twenty years,” my wife replied. “He does yoga and kettlebells at home. He’s been trapped in the man cave ever since. And what scares me,” she added, “is that he’s happy.”
I’m not entirely sure I am happy. I just know my tolerance for annoyance is perilously low, and it drops another notch with each passing birthday. I also know that my friends from my formative college years now live scattered across the country, like artifacts from a previous civilization. We’ve grown apart without drama, which is to say, efficiently. Locally, I have two friends. Tom, a wrestling coach, is either teaching or in Santa Barbara with his girlfriend. I see him about once a year, usually when he drives me to Home Depot so I can transport oversized items back to my cave. My other friend, Pedro, is an engineer who is thirty years younger than I am. The generational differences are… pronounced. We have lunch about four times a year. Add it up and yes—half a dozen social encounters annually qualifies me as a shut-in. Which makes me, by default, an authority on a condition many men my age quietly acquire: Domestic Hermit Drift.
Domestic Hermit Drift is the gradual, mostly unintentional retreat of a married man from friendships and public life into the managed comfort of home, where routine, hobbies, and solitude replace the effort and risk of maintaining relationships. It isn’t fueled by hostility or misanthropy but by convenience, irritability, fatigue, and the slow atrophy of social muscles. As his world contracts, his wife’s often expands, creating an asymmetry in which she carries the invisible labor of social connection, public presence, and emotional buffering. The genius of the drift is its stealth. No announcement is made. No door slams. The man simply mistakes peace for fulfillment and stability for sufficiency.
As an expert in Hermit Drift, allow me to identify the warning signs.
First, your sleepwear, gym clothes, and home clothes become indistinguishable. You sleep in gym shorts and a workout shirt, wear them around the house, exercise in them, shower, and rotate in a freshly washed identical set. You call this efficiency. You experience genuine pleasure in this loungewear optimization and feel morally superior to the sheeple who change outfits multiple times a day. Minimalism, you insist, is a virtue.
Second, while your wife and her friends design custom T-shirts and handmade signs for rock concerts in the desert, you remain home on a Saturday night swapping straps on your diver watches. You build watch-rotation calendars. You track wrist time. You rank your collection by annual usage. The fact that you know you wore your Seiko Marine Master for exactly 863 hours last year strikes you as reasonable, even impressive. Others find it alarming.
Third, because your tolerance for irritation is low, you shop only at dawn, when grocery stores are nearly empty and the few people present are still half-asleep—docile, unthreatening, manageable. You take pride in shopping before the rat race wakes up. This dovetails nicely with your time-management philosophy: bed at nine, up at five. By the time the world stirs, you’ve had your coffee, your steel-cut oats, your kettlebell workout, and your canvas grocery bags—your weekly macros—put neatly away. You are, in your own mind, winning.
The rest of the day unfolds under a regime your wife has named Captain Cancel. Every proposed outing meets a veto. You can’t attend a concert because it might rain, despite cloudless skies. You can’t go to a restaurant because parking is inadequate, and when your wife reminds you of the new parking structure, you explain that it’s widely known to be contaminated with asbestos. A comedian you once loved is playing in Hermosa Beach, but you inform her he hasn’t been funny since the Reagan administration. A trip to Maui is ill-advised due to avian flu, especially dangerous during air travel. A beach picnic is canceled because of a sewage spill that, you explain, has compromised not just the water but the atmosphere. You agree to Taco Tuesday at the local brewery, but it’s too loud. You stuff toilet paper in your ears, announce you’re unwell, and Uber home. You are never invited again. This makes you smile as you drift into a deeply satisfying sleep.
If you recognize any of these traits, congratulations. You are anti-social. You are Captain Cancel. You have chosen your isolation, locked yourself in your cage, and—most importantly—convinced yourself it was the sensible thing to do.
Cinemorphosis 
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