Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • When Beauty Stops Telling the Truth

    When Beauty Stops Telling the Truth

    In “I Was Lucky to Be Alive. But I Missed Being Pretty,” Hannah Viederman chronicles her move to New York at twenty-two to become a bar-mitzvah motivator. The job is essentially that of a party entertainer, making sure everyone in attendance is dancing, socializing, and participating in the festivities. Parents who pay good money for this rite of passage want a heightened fantasy that justifies the expense.

    The job was a welcome improvement over her exhausting schedule of working from five in the morning until eleven at night, juggling catering, babysitting, and staffing jobs at SoulCycle while trying to make it as an actress. As a woman in her early twenties, she was already learning that youth, glamour, and beauty are a kind of drug, and that administering this drug to others can bring success and a sense of self-worth.

    To become a bar-mitzvah motivator, Viederman had to audition against fifty other contenders in tip-top shape, most of whom were professional dancers. She got the job and was delighted. The attire was skimpy, consisting mostly of “too-tight shorts and cheerleader costumes.” She loved the attention the job brought her. She writes, “No matter what happened in the real world, I could stand on a podium in a flash of white lights, looking like the love child of a camp counselor and a prostitute, and feel the desire of a surging crowd.” Staying in shape and performing as a glamorous entertainer gave her a simple, comforting narrative that aligned with the work ethic: Work hard, play the role assigned to you, and reap the rewards.

    But her delight in the limelight came to a sudden halt at twenty-five when she suffered a stroke. She learned from medical experts that strokes among people in their twenties are more common than most people imagine. She also discovered how dramatically a stroke can age a person. She writes, “Having a stroke is like aging 60 years in the course of a few days.” She couldn’t shower on her own. She needed frequent naps. Her vision was blurry. Her hair fell out. She had tremors. The brutality of this new reality brought her dream world to an end. She writes, “Getting sick strips life of its fantasy, like sheets pulled from a mattress for the wash.” I would add a corollary to that insight: Getting old can do the same thing. Youth and beauty are part of a seductive dream, but it’s a confectionary dream that offers few tools for living when things get rough.

    Five years have passed since her stroke, and Viederman has made significant improvements. Her tremors are gone. Her vision has returned. Her face is no longer bloated from steroids. Those years have also given her time to reconsider a distorted value system that made her equate self-worth with the desire her good looks inspired in others. She writes, “I was sick, and now I am better, and I know that youth and beauty are unreliable narrators.” Her job is no longer to be a beautiful body for others to admire and behold. Her new task is to discover what reliable narrator might replace the unreliable one.

    What is the reliable narrator for all of us, sick and healthy, young and old? Perhaps there is no narrator, per se. Perhaps there is a principle worth living by.

    I’m thinking of attorney Reggie Williams, whose story I recently heard on The Moth Radio Hour, in an episode titled “On the Job.” In a story worthy of a screenplay, Williams recounts being unfairly fired by a successful attorney at a time when he and his pregnant wife were struggling financially. Years later, in an ironic reversal, that same attorney had fallen on hard times. Disheveled and desperate, he came to Williams seeking legal advice.

    Williams faced a choice. Should he help the man who had betrayed him when he and his wife were most vulnerable? He decided to help.

    Why? Because Williams had grown up believing that we all encounter other people as we move through life. There’s nothing remarkable about that. What matters is whether those people are better off for having known us.

    That principle offers a more durable foundation for self-worth than youth, beauty, or the admiration of strangers. Viederman’s glamorous appearance could inspire desire, admiration, and envy, but those reactions told her little about her worth as a person. Williams offers another measure: not how others respond to our appearance, but how our actions affect their lives.

    There is also something demanding about his principle. It’s easy enough to be generous toward people who admire us, flatter us, or treat us well. Williams extended his generosity to a man who had treated him badly. He had every reason to refuse, yet he chose to help. His decision suggests that character becomes most visible when doing the right thing offers no obvious reward.

    I don’t think Viederman needs to apologize for missing her beauty. Nor should any of us pretend that aging, illness, and the loss of physical attractiveness are painless. But if youth and beauty are unreliable narrators, perhaps the answer is to stop asking them to tell us who we are. We might instead judge ourselves by a more difficult standard: whether the people who pass through our lives are better off for having known us. That seems a worthy ambition at twenty-five, at sixty-five, or at any age when the mirror begins telling a story we no longer want to hear.

  • The Day I Refused to Laugh

    The Day I Refused to Laugh

    I suspect that had Augustine grown up in Manchester in the 1980s, he would have been a diehard fan of The Smiths. Many of the band’s songs, driven by Morrissey’s forlorn persona, explore feelings of alienation, melancholy, and longing. The narrator of “The Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” sees the world as a forsaken place where estrangement from its relentless barbarism seems inevitable. The narrator of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is broken and restless, aching to find some ultimate source of peace. “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” expresses the raw pain of feeling like an incurable misfit.

    Augustine as a misfit is a powerful theme in Catherine Conybeare’s biography Augustine the African. Conybeare emphasizes that Augustine was African, not Roman in the sense of being a native Italian. He spoke Latin, but he could not hide his accent. He was insecure about his heritage and wrote and thought as an outsider in the Christian world. He never felt at home in Italy, where he spent five years of his life. Most of his life was spent in what is now Algeria and Tunisia. Feeling out of place in a world dominated by Rome had a powerful influence on how he approached his faith and argued with others.

    In modern parlance, we might say Augustine had a chip on his shoulder. Feeling embattled can make us surly and unpleasant, but it can also give us an advantage: We never get too comfortable in the tribe. We never become complacent, drinking the same Kool-Aid as everyone else inside the same silo. We may share some beliefs with these people, but we remain inclined to push back against their conventions.

    In some cases, our perennial identity as the misfit may sharpen our critical thinking skills. We benefit from what might be called Outsider Consciousness: a heightened awareness of society’s assumptions, contradictions, and unwritten rules that develops from living within a culture without feeling fully accepted by it. Belonging can make us feel cozy, but that comfort sometimes comes at the price of conformity and complacency. Estrangement, on the other hand, keeps us uncomfortable enough that our default setting becomes one of scrutiny.

    Feeling like an outsider reminds me of 1973, when I returned to California from Nairobi, Kenya, and attended Earl Warren Junior High. The drinking and pot smoking at Earl Warren were a sharp contrast to my life at Nairobi International School, where I had played with the British version of G.I. Joe dolls, called Action Man.

    One afternoon, four boys approached me, and their leader, Kent Daniels, said he wanted to share a joke. He proceeded to tell a long, tedious story that made no sense, after which he and his friends laughed heartily. I stood there and said, “I don’t get it. It’s not funny to me.”

    Kent patted me on the back and said, “You passed the test. We wanted to see if you’d laugh just to go along with the group. We wanted to make sure you weren’t a chump.”

    By refusing to laugh at something I didn’t find funny, I had established credibility. I was accepted by the group precisely because I hadn’t tried too hard to please them. Kent and his friends were smart. They didn’t want just anyone in their fold. A person had to be intelligent, adhere to an honor code, and perhaps bring something of value through his Outsider Consciousness.

    To this day, I remain fascinated that Kent and his friends had devised a way of testing another person’s authenticity. That I passed their test remains a badge of pride. I suppose Morrissey would have appreciated the occasion, though he might have found something more tragic in it than I did. After all, I was simply a twelve-year-old boy who refused to laugh at a joke that wasn’t funny. Never was. Never would be.

  • In Defense of Halloween

    In Defense of Halloween

    A few days ago, my daughter asked me if I liked Halloween.

    “No,” I said. “It’s gauche.”

    She wasn’t surprised by my predictably grumpy answer. I dislike Halloween, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because I can be more sour than is healthy for a human being. In fact, I’m sour on all holidays because I resent consumer society dictating that I must be ebullient about something I don’t particularly care about.

    But if I’m honest, Halloween can and should be defended. The spectacle of children ranging from three to thirteen going door to door in strange neighborhoods is more than quaint. It’s a ritual in which suburbanites acknowledge that hiding inside their comfortable enclaves is unhealthy and reflects a primitive fear better suited to terrified peasants hunkering down in their potato cellars during shortages and outright famines. Halloween issues a beckoning call: “Hey, suburbanites, it’s time to crawl out of your potato cellars, show some generosity, and engage with the world.”

    Halloween is really about resisting the impulse to hide inside our drywall cocoons and tell the rest of the world to fend for itself. It reminds suburbanites that they need to emerge from their proverbial Bat Caves and acknowledge the existence of their neighbors.

    Halloween is about trust. You trust strangers to walk onto your property in a polite, civil manner. In return, these strangers trust that the candy you give them is, aside from its potent diabetes-inducing properties, safe for human consumption. Pleasantries are exchanged. The ritual of giving and receiving unfolds with good cheer. For one evening, we affirm the principle that a healthy society depends on cooperation, generosity, and trust among its members.

    Halloween is about love. About a dozen times during the evening as I hand out candy, a precious three or four-year-old will struggle to carry an oversized candy bag to my doorway and is so shy that he or she can barely manage to say “trick or treat.” I look at the child and then look at the doting parents standing by my front gate. I know that look. My heart melts because I am witnessing the most precious thing on earth. My inner grouch has been wonderfully annihilated.

    Halloween, then, is an antidote to suburban cynicism, withdrawal and misanthropy. The problem isn’t that we celebrate Halloween on October 31 and open our doors to the world. The problem is that we open our doors only once a year.

  • The Consumer Shangri-La

    The Consumer Shangri-La

    Much to my chagrin and consternation, I have been on a quest for the Consumer Shangri-La, a tiny world in which I surround myself with products that are not only the best in their category but somehow elevate me to a state of transcendence. I’ve become obsessed with coffee rankings involving the seven brands of dark roast sitting on my kitchen counter; fortified soy milk and the way it symbolizes virtue and health in Trader Joe’s recyclable, Edenic green-and-white carton; Greek yogurt and kefir with their magical, life-renewing probiotic properties; oatmeal and buckwheat groats mixed with hemp seeds, promising fiber and a nutritional bonanza; creatine with its supposed power to ward off depression and grant me eternal youth; my half dozen solar Multiband 6 G-Shocks and the comfort of reliable atomic time; my stable of Brooks Ghost Max walking shoes, which make me feel as though I’m floating on clouds while commiserating with the gods; and padded noise-canceling headphones that transport me into the paradise of Baroque oboe concertos, soothing the savage beast inside me.

    All of this is nonsense, of course. To my credit, I’m trying to break free from my consumer obsessions and make room in my brain for heavier intellectual pursuits, such as tackling the newest biography of Augustine, an irascible chap with little tolerance for anyone who deviated from his orthodoxy. I’m also two-thirds finished with my book, but for the last forty-eight hours, I’ve had difficulty writing. I wrote a chapter for my book and a blog post two days ago, but since then, my consumer obsessions have gotten the better of me.

    The good news is that I haven’t been spending time on social media, a hellish place I refer to as the dopamine farms. Unfortunately, abandoning those farms has not diminished my consumer obsessions, as I had hoped. I suspect these preoccupations are distracting me from the emotional challenges of turning sixty-five two days ago and watching so many friends develop cancer and other serious ailments. I wonder whether these late-life chapters generate an anxiety that compels me to retreat into a consumer bubble.

    This retreat may be explained by something that afflicts many of us as we grow older: Terror Management Theory. As the reality of our inevitable death becomes more immediate, we seek refuge in systems that promise certainty, permanence, and protection against the chaos of existence. By elevating our beliefs, values, and possessions into seemingly unquestionable sources of security, we construct psychological bulwarks against the terrifying realization that our bodies will deteriorate, our lives will end, and much of what we cherish lies beyond our control.

    I’m sixty-five, and more and more of my friends are developing serious illnesses or passing to the other side. Yet there I was this morning, standing at my kitchen counter, listening to my Ninja coffee maker make its final gurgling sounds before beeping to announce that my dark roast was ready. I poured it into my giant cream-colored mug, added a generous splash of fortified organic soy milk, and contemplated whether I had finally found the perfect coffee. I knew, of course, that none of these products could protect me from the indignities of aging or the certainty of death. But for the next fifteen minutes, I had a perfect cup of coffee, and that seemed to be enough.

  • Four Things I Would Tell a New College Writing Instructor

    Four Things I Would Tell a New College Writing Instructor

    If I were giving four pieces of advice to a new college writing instructor, I would say this:

    1. Use popular movies to introduce writing themes because movies reflect shared obsessions, anxieties, and concerns that will resonate with your students.
    2. Since your course content and grading will be on Canvas, give your students feedback as quickly as possible. Don’t make them wait more than 24 hours. Prompt feedback shows students that they matter, especially when you see them only once a week in a hybrid class or not at all in an online course.
    3. Show students how AI can produce lame, overwrought writing that is mostly fluff. At the same time, demonstrate how AI can be a useful tool for improving grammar and sentence structure and for learning how to write sandwich paragraphs and follow MLA format.
    4. If you’re teaching in a classroom, encourage students to appreciate the rare opportunity to gather with people from different walks of life and engage in civil discussions about the controversies of the day. Such exchanges sharpen their critical thinking and social skills while creating an environment that stands in opposition to the toxic polarization infecting so much of society today.
  • The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    Because I’ve been absorbing television commercials since the 1960s, I’ve internalized the belief that suffering is a bad thing. To suffer means there’s a glitch in the system, if you will. Television has always told me: “You’re doing it all wrong. You can buy your way into enough pleasure, comfort, and convenience to iron away those ugly wrinkles of human suffering.”

    To internalize the idea that consumerism can overcome human suffering is to undergo a kind of infantilization. Here’s a case in point: I spent over twenty years obsessing over watches, creating a cozy ecosystem to buffer myself from the anxiety and restlessness arising from an existential vacuum. But creating that buffer only allowed those problems to grow and fester. I was in a strange state. I was hyper-focused on watches, but I wasn’t engaged with the real world or with myself. I was both engaged and disengaged at the same time. My life was full of intense mental activity without meaningful psychological engagement.

    This contradiction points to something we might call Disengaged Hyperfixation: a condition in which intense concentration on a narrow interest creates the illusion of meaningful engagement while the individual becomes increasingly disconnected from relationships, responsibilities, and self-examination. I was deeply engaged in the minutiae of watches but disengaged from the emotional problems that required my attention.

    Disengaged Hyperfixation seems to be central to the business model of the Attention Economy. Create undemanding videos in which you repeat the same thing over and over about how amazing this or that watch is. Tell car enthusiasts how superior their favorite brand is to the competition. Talk about a high-protein diet for the millionth time to high-protein disciples. The brutal fact about the Attention Economy and Disengaged Hyperfixation is that you can get lost in these dopamine farms and piss your life away, only to discover too late that you were never meaningfully engaged with the precious, short time you have here on Earth. That realization brings a despair and anguish no YouTube influencer can cure.

  • I Can’t Remember If I’m Losing My Mind

    I Can’t Remember If I’m Losing My Mind

    If you’re in your sixties, you may be terrified by your cognitive decline because you don’t know the difference between normal aging, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia. You’re eager to make exercise and dietary choices that might slow the decline. You may even consider medication if that’s the best route. More than anything, you want to be informed rather than left in the dark.

    My concerns about memory loss began in my late fifties when I noticed that if I didn’t play one of my piano compositions every couple of weeks, I would forget parts of it. Around sixty-four, I noticed more forgetfulness. I would share a story with my wife and then repeat it several hours later until she interrupted me to explain that she’d already heard it. In my college classes, I might tell an anecdote in the third week and repeat it in the tenth, only to hear students laughing and pointing out my redundancy. Once I left the burner on low after making pasta sauce, and another time I left my work keys in the door at work. In both cases, I was multitasking. Doing several things at once has become more of a liability than ever.

    Like many people in my age bracket, I became fearful. I didn’t know what constituted normal cognitive aging and what might point to something more serious.

    I needed a guide, so I did some research and came upon Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory: What’s Normal, What’s Not, and What to Do About It, by neurologist Andrew Budson and neuropsychologist Maureen O’Connor. They begin with Step 1, an explanation of normal and abnormal memory loss. They write “that the difference between normal and abnormal memory isn’t necessarily the type of problems that occur but rather the frequency and severity of those problems.”

    They describe memories as episodes: having a meal, completing a workout, going to a movie, and so on. These episodes create coherent stories full of sensory details. No one has perfect memory or recall, so let go of that myth. There are many reasons we fail to remember things. If you’re not paying attention to your surroundings but are going through the motions on autopilot, or you’re distracted, you’re less likely to remember what happened.

    The authors observe that anxiety and depression can interfere with memory. So if you’re a self-absorbed depressive who spends too much time living inside his own head, you may not be particularly attentive to the external world.

    As I read Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory, I see an ongoing theme: You need to train yourself to pay attention. As the frontal lobes age, certain aspects of attention and executive function can become less efficient. The result may resemble some symptoms of ADHD. I was never diagnosed with ADHD, but I’m convinced I’ve had some of its traits all my life. If that’s the case, my aging frontal lobes have given me a new layer of ADHD-like symptoms over an already existing layer.

    The authors discuss strategies for improving attention, including the use of stimulants such as coffee. I drink my morning coffee religiously. My attention is at its best in the morning, when I do my best reading and writing.

    At the end of Chapter Two, titled “How Does Memory Change in Normal Aging?,” the authors explain that spending over an hour trying to find your car in a parking lot is not normal. This made me wonder whether I’ve been cognitively impaired all my life. Like my maternal grandmother, I have a horrible sense of direction. In 1980, during my sophomore year in college, it took me nearly half an hour to find my car. For the last decade or so, whenever I park in a giant garage, I photograph the identifying numbers so I can find my car later.

    My wife has known me for nearly thirty years. Throughout that time, she has observed that I live too much inside my head. We’ve all heard the cliché of the absent-minded professor. I’ve lived up to that cliché since I was in my thirties. I’ve shown up to class wearing slacks with tags and vertical strips of tape still affixed to them or wearing my shirt inside-out, only to be made aware of these sartorial violations by my attentive students. Old age may simply make the absent-mindedness more pronounced. In more serious cases, however, memory and navigation problems can point to Alzheimer’s disease. Warning signs include getting lost while driving and being unable to use familiar visual cues to find your way back, regularly forgetting appointments, repeatedly losing things, and asking the same questions or telling the same stories without remembering having done so. Such patterns can reflect the rapid forgetting associated with Alzheimer’s disease.


    I do repeat myself. For two consecutive weeks, I forgot that Thursday evening was when I was supposed to take one of my daughters to see her therapist. I also left a stovetop burner on, although that happened only once. So I’m not sure where I stand.

    I called my doctor to arrange a phone consultation and a cognitive assessment.

    One screening questionnaire discussed in the book is the AD8. Answering yes to two or more questions can indicate possible cognitive impairment that warrants further evaluation. It does not, by itself, establish Alzheimer’s disease or any other brain disorder.

    I answered yes to exactly two questions. Number 3 states: “Repeats the same things over and over (questions, stories, or statements).” I repeat myself, but usually only once. Does that count as a yes? Then there’s Number 7: “Trouble remembering appointments.” I forgot my daughter’s therapy appointment twice in a row and was so mortified that I doubt I’ll forget again. Does that count?

    Ambiguity is not helpful here, but the authors make a statement about dementia that is not ambiguous. They write that “Dementia indicates impairment of daily function due to problems with thinking and memory.”

    So the question is this: Is my daily functioning impaired? And that leads to a second question: How severe does the impairment have to be before it crosses the threshold into dementia?

    I suspect the next chapter of my life will involve exploring that second question more rigorously through cognitive testing, medical consultation, and lifestyle changes designed to protect my memory.

    I need to find out whether I have something called subjective cognitive decline, a condition in which people perceive a deterioration in their cognitive abilities even though standardized testing may show normal performance. I know I’m not the same person I used to be. I feel compromised, and I worry that this compromise may point to greater memory loss later in life.

    Or perhaps I have mild cognitive impairment, in which measurable cognitive difficulties don’t substantially interfere with independent daily functioning. Some people with this condition develop dementia, while others remain stable or even improve. The risk depends on the underlying cause, so I can’t assume that I face a fifty-fifty chance of developing dementia.

    Dementia is a general term for cognitive decline severe enough to interfere with independent functioning. It isn’t synonymous with Alzheimer’s disease, which is one possible cause. The authors define Alzheimer’s more specifically, writing that “Alzheimer’s is a brain disease characterized by amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.” The disease often affects memory-related structures, including the hippocampus, before progressing through other regions of the brain.

    Regular aerobic exercise, a healthy diet, and an active social life are among the habits associated with better cognitive health and a lower risk of dementia. Addicted to exercise and partial to a Mediterranean-style diet, I do reasonably well in the physical health department, although I could stand to lose thirty pounds.

    But the social component is more disturbing. Antisocial, introverted, and depressive, I’ve failed considerably in the social health category.

    My wife began worrying about my lack of a social life a few years ago. She was also the first to express concern about my memory loss. So I got off my butt, started doing some research, called my doctor for an appointment, and decided to become proactive about my cognitive health.

    I know a retired martial arts instructor who used to be an officemate at the college. I need to reach out to him and see whether he’ll join me for an hour-long walk at the beach every week. That kind of social routine could be a first step.

    I’m not hopeless. I didn’t dismiss my wife’s concerns. I took them seriously and responded appropriately. I just hope I haven’t done too little too late. If I do have a serious form of memory loss, my goal, as the authors advise, is to manage it so that it doesn’t take over my life.

    One thing is clear. Memory loss can lead to anxiety and depression, and anxiety and depression can produce cognitive symptoms that resemble dementia. So I may be dealing with a recursive loop, one condition feeding the other in a vicious cycle of what has sometimes been called “pseudodementia.”

    One thing I know that fights depression and learned helplessness is knowledge.

    I must continue the deep dive.

  • The United States of Memory Foam

    The United States of Memory Foam

    Last night I dreamed I was working out with kettlebells in my garage. Overcome by a sudden restlessness, I decided to venture away from home by doing a long Farmer’s Walk, an exercise in which you hold a heavy kettlebell in each hand and walk a significant distance as if carrying two suitcases. I decided to take a walk across the entire country.

    As I journeyed through America, I discovered that everyone was an aspiring influencer. The product everyone was advertising on social media was mattresses, the kind that arrive at your doorstep compressed into a box and then inflate before your eyes. Everywhere I went, people were pretending to sleep, wearing fake, blissful smiles while recording video selfies. Living rooms, bedrooms, and other areas of the house had been transformed into home studios. People were so absorbed in their influencer activities that they no longer spoke to one another. Conversation had died. People lived alongside one another but were psychologically worlds apart.

    I decided to walk a considerable distance to Influencer City, where a woman who presided over all the influencers lived at a luxurious resort. She was known as the Influencer Queen. When I arrived, she was having tea and biscuits with her associates beside a swimming pool.

    They regarded me with some curiosity, a man in his sixties carrying two kettlebells. I could see the Queen’s concern, so I assured her that the kettlebells weren’t weighing me down. Something else was crushing me, I explained. I was discouraged by the fragmentation of society. Everyone had devoted themselves to the futile mission of selling dubious mattresses.

    Surrounded by her entourage, the Influencer Queen listened intently, as though my words had affected her deeply. But just as I was reaching the heart of my criticism, someone whispered in her ear that the swimming pool needed renovations, and she immediately lost interest. She turned to her entourage and began discussing the renovations as though I were no longer standing there.

    Realizing that she had no interest in my concerns, I walked away. Forlorn, I tried to make my way home, but I had no idea where I was. I spotted a neighborhood in the distant sunset and decided to try my luck in that direction. The kettlebells remained surprisingly light, but my heart was heavy. In the distance, I heard an aspiring influencer discussing coil count and gel-infused memory foam.

    I sighed in despair. Americans knew everything about memory foam but had forgotten how to talk to one another.

  • Can Movies Save My Soul?

    Can Movies Save My Soul?

    I write as an agnostic, so this is not a sermon. It is a meditation on Philippians that leads to what I see as three major orientations toward life.

    I’ll begin with Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. I’m fascinated by Philippians because it defines the Christian message in a way that goes against human instinct. Throughout history and across cultures, the human default setting has been to prefer power, convenience, comfort, and pleasure over a life committed to a higher cause. But in Philippians, God comes to Earth, denies himself glory and power, and instead lowers himself to love and serve others. His life becomes a model for us, one that demands imitation.

    If we study his life, we learn that life is not a plaything, a toy designed to provide pleasure and excitement. Contrary to much of modern psychology, with its emphasis on self-agency, autonomy, and self-individuation, life does not belong entirely to us. It contains a purpose greater than our instincts for pleasure, power, and self-actualization. Philippians teaches us that our purpose is to lower ourselves in order to love and serve others. Christianity at its best is a distillation of that message in all its potency.

    Talk is cheap, of course. Many have marveled and wept at the beautiful, albeit challenging, message in Philippians and preached about it, but few have actually lived it. The literature suggests that Saint Francis of Assisi lived such a life. A life of self-renunciation in imitation of Christ, embracing poverty over riches, is rare indeed.

    When I first contemplated this humble life, I framed existence as a choice between two orientations: self-renunciation in service to God or self-gratification in service to our baser instincts. But as I’ve watched and enjoyed Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan discussing movies and culture on the Netflix presentation of the podcast The Big Picture, I’ve come to recognize a third orientation, one that may help explain my agnosticism.

    These three podcasters, who strike me as secular, seem to genuinely love what they do. No doubt about it, they work hard, slogging through hundreds of mediocre movies a year and occasionally encountering a few good ones. They are extremely smart, talented, and passionate about their work. They don’t strike me as greedy people who worship at the altar of money or lead grotesquely hedonistic lives that would make Gollum blush with shame.

    They are cosmopolitan and educated. They believe in smart conversations, the pleasures of nuanced analysis, the wonder of good art, and the power of storytelling. They understand the vitality cinema brings to culture. A successful movie becomes a sort of muse. It informs society. It reflects society. It changes society. It shares a language with society. Fans of Wayne’s World or A Few Good Men frequently quote famous lines, evidence of the permanent stamp these movies have left on them.

    A great movie like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey or Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything creates a text for endless discussion. Such movies transcend entertainment by disrupting culture, changing the way we see things, and illuminating aspects of the human condition we may never have considered.

    To see art, and movies specifically, as a place of transcendence suggests that art, not religion, may be the muscle humanity needs to flex to stay vibrant. This is not a dogmatic transcendence tied to one doctrine or another. Watching The Godfather won’t help you on Judgment Day. But it will make you interrogate the messy relationship between business and family loyalty in new ways.

    Great movies won’t give you a religious doctrine, but they can help you distinguish between sacred and profane time, as in Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping. Movies don’t shut down conversations with absolute dogmas. They open new conversations that keep the mind alive. That’s what I see in the work of the talented Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan.

    I worry that a life of religious certainty, with its monk-like retreat into poverty and blissful prayer, may cut us off from art in all its contradictory, life-beating spectacle. I worry that religious doctrine can become stagnant and two-dimensional in a way that art remains dynamic and multidimensional.

    At the same time, when I contemplate the love described in Philippians, my heart longs for such a life. I wonder if such a life could save me and the lost, self-deceiving souls in Weapons, Eddington, and Bugonia.

  • One Flew Over the Cozy Nest

    One Flew Over the Cozy Nest

    I was approaching sixty-five when the idea of something being cozy or not became the operating principle through which I viewed the world. The mildly entertaining, sentimental TV show Best Medicine was cozy because the small coastal fishing village of Port Wenn, Maine, was built on community connection and trust, qualities increasingly scarce in a country becoming paranoid, isolated, and unhinged by weaponized misinformation and cultural and political polarization.

    The LG TV interface I had to use was bonkers, with flashing lights and a runaway cursor that produced chaos rather than efficient navigation. Replacing this frustrating operating system with a Roku device would make the TV cozy. Having a lightning-fast Chromebook with premium hardware and guaranteed security updates was cozy, but its buggy replacement, the supposedly more premium Googlebook with half-baked software, was not cozy.

    Having nostalgic Folgers coffee in the morning was cozy. Shaving with my vintage Gillette razors, which evoked childhood memories of admiring my father during his morning shaves, was cozy. Using a bar of soap for all my shampoo and body wash needs instead of relying on liquid soap in plastic bottles was cozy. Wearing a solar Multiband-6 G-Shock Frogman, with its reliability and atomic accuracy, was cozy. Wearing a tank top emblazoned with Maui or Kona and gray nylon gym shorts, which served as my uniform for sleeping, working out, and running errands, was cozy. Watching true crime and animal documentaries, which sometimes lulled me into a blissful state of half-sleep, was cozy. Learning that the 2.0-liter turbo engine in my 2018 Honda Accord might be susceptible to a blown head gasket, contradicting Honda’s reputation for long-term reliability, was definitely not cozy.

    I had gone overboard with cozy. It had become an operating principle governing all my thoughts. This cozy craze exposed my obsessive personality, which was always searching for an absolute system that explained everything. I knew it was crazy, sometimes laughable, and often annoying, but I couldn’t stop it. Against my will, I had become a terminal patient in a movie titled One Flew Over the Cozy Nest.

    I had to do something. I had to cure myself of my cozy obsession before it was too late. I had to interrogate the flaws of the cozy quest. I began with the foremost principle for combating my pathological desire to cocoon myself in a warm, cozy state. I called it the Universal Law of Diminishing Comfort: The pursuit of comfort can become a source of discomfort. What begins as a sensible effort to eliminate unnecessary aggravation gradually becomes an obsession with eliminating uncertainty itself. In other words, the cure becomes worse than the disease.

    The astute Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified my folly long ago when he warned about the dangers of trying to secure ourselves against life’s uncertainties. We attempt to manage our lives to create an illusion of security while hollowing ourselves out from within. As the cozy lifestyle becomes more cultivated, the soul atrophies.

    Life is chaotic to the point of being terrifying. I turn on my LG TV, try to scroll to Netflix, and inexplicably the cursor exits the Home screen. Suddenly, I’m lost inside a hostile green screen that reads webOS. I need my Roku Ultra 4K so I can find my way back home.