Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Escape from Margaritaville

    Escape from Margaritaville

    I recently dreamed I was in a public park. The grass was cartoonishly green, a kind of chlorophyll utopia, and families sprawled across it as if they’d been carefully arranged for a Chamber of Commerce brochure. My suitcase sat at my side. I felt lost. Like a misplaced airport refugee, I looked up.

    Looming above the park was a billboard—a monstrosity of sun-bleached cheer—featuring a leathery couple in their seventies. They were bronzed like overcooked turkeys, grinning wide, basking in the eternal glow of some Florida condo where “Margaritaville” played on an endless loop.

    The “Margaritaville” billboard—two geriatric smiles frozen in sunlit rapture—reminded me that I’d been meaning to watch Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages, that gargantuan playground for the aged about forty-five miles from Orlando.

    Deep down, I knew I needed to watch this documentary. I was born in Florida, and as my retirement crept closer and closer, I felt an urge to return home. I love the smell of mangos and coconuts at night. Nostalgia is a potent drug. It could cause me to sell my home and buy a condo in Orlando.

    So I watched the documentary. It was the opposite of a travel infomercial. It was a horror movie. It started with synchronized water ballet to Neil Sedaka and margarita-fueled Parrothead parties. The Villages are marketed as heaven with a tiki umbrella on top, but for anyone with taste, patience, or shame, the place looks more like an early-onset hell: a tropical gulag where you pay people to micromanage your leisure until leisure itself becomes a program of infantilization.

    The film’s most disturbing subject is Dennis Dean—an eighty-one-year-old small-time grifter wanted for a DUI in California, living out of a blue van on the edge of The Villages and scheming his way into the bed of a rich widow. He prowls bingo halls and church socials with the persistence of a con man who has practiced charm until it has fossilized. When police finally close in, Dennis slips back into Nancy’s apartment. In a scene that sticks with you, he lies on her bed while she calls from the kitchen: “Lunch!” He finds his new girlfriend, whom he’s leeching off, annoying. He doesn’t move. He stares at the ceiling fan as if it were a slow, merciless clock, and you can see, plain as day, that comfort can become a prison for someone whose last liberty was earned through deceit. As I watched Dennis staring at the ceiling fan, it hit me: He’s in purgatory.

    The director never sneers at his subjects. Pain and longing are shown with a kind of blunt respect. But the portrait of The Villages itself isn’t charitable. It’s a retirement complex caught in mid-regression, a carnival mirror reflecting geriatrics clinging to perpetual adolescence until the spectacle curdles into something queasy and cringe-worthy. The managed fun—shuffleboard courts, themed parties, and scheduled joy—becomes a machine that demands you perform your own amusement. It’s not freedom. It’s occupation by leisure.

    And yes, I realized, sitting there with my pride intact and my Florida fantasies suddenly damp, that watching this must have been my wife’s brilliant little psy-ops operation. For a year, I’d been nagging her about moving the family to Florida—stilt houses, salt air, a hammock with my name on it. She was skeptical about moving to Florida. She mentioned hurricanes and unavailable flood insurance, for starters. Florida also had a reputation for government corruption, contractor fraud, and credit card theft. When her credit card was used fraudulently and she called her bank, the customer service agent asked, “You weren’t in Florida recently, were you?”

    In fact, she was.

    Florida was not paradise. It was a crime syndicate.

    She did not discourage me from watching Some Kind of Heaven. She didn’t have to. The documentary demolished my fantasy of returning to my home state within the first thirty seconds, with its water ballet and sedated margaritas. My obsession evaporated.

    But only for a minute.

    After a quick snack, I was back at my computer looking at luxury condos in Henderson, Nevada.

  • The Kryptonite of Stuff

    The Kryptonite of Stuff

    Americans are a strange people. We accumulate things we don’t need, discover we have no more space to contain them, and find that we cannot let them go. So we put them in storage units. Content that our things are in a safe place, we lock the door and rarely give them another thought. They remain tucked away, out of sight and out of mind, but they are still ours. Rather than give them away or sell them, we find that keeping things we may never see again somehow gives us peace of mind. David Owen explores this pathology in his essay “The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities.”

    The self-storage business in America is alive and well. Owen writes: “People who work in self-storage often say that their market is driven by ‘the four D’s’: death, displacement, divorce, and downsizing, all life events that entail sudden collisions between stuff accumulation and reality.”

    If I had to guess why we can’t let go of things, it’s because we can’t let go of the thing’s connection to some dream or aspiration we have. For example, I have a pair of barely worn blue jeans hanging in my closet. I haven’t worn them in more than eight years because I cannot get them around my waist. But the jeans represent my skinny, disciplined, well-mannered, handsome self. Someday, I tell myself, I’ll be able to wear them again. Meanwhile, they sit in my closet reeking of mothballs.

    I need to let go of my delusions. I need to look reality in the eye and let go of the clutter.

    This kind of streamlining adds depth to the notion of retirement. You’re not just retiring from the workforce. You’re relinquishing childish notions about yourself. As a result, you’re becoming a person who has entered a new dimension of clarity, stripped of delusions and bloated storage units.

    Retiring means you’re leaving the accumulation cycle and replacing it with decumulation. The less baggage you carry, the stronger you are as you face the challenges of your sixties and beyond.

    Accumulating things you don’t need in old age is kryptonite. All of that physical weight translates into heavy mental baggage. You feel lethargic at the mere thought of accumulated junk and the squandered dreams that junk represents.

    Putting your stuff in a storage unit merely pushes the problem a few miles away. You can still feel the weight. You are still exhausted by the kryptonite even as you dutifully pay the monthly storage bill to keep it safely out of sight.

    Retirement means more than collecting Social Security. It means letting go.

  • Bulking Up

    Bulking Up

    On the very day it became clear to me that I needed to put guardrails on AI editing—telling it to keep 90% of my original content to prevent my writing from morphing from my natural bodybuilder self into the PED-bloated version—I attended my daughters’ high school open house, where their English teacher told us she was teaching the students AI literacy. This entailed helping them use AI to “bulk up their resumes” because, in a competitive world where everyone was using AI, our children could not afford not to use generative AI. In fact, the teacher said, AI itself is now sorting through resumes and discarding the ones that aren’t sufficiently juiced up.

    It became clear to me that we are living inside a contradiction. On the one hand, writing needs to be “bulked up” and “on the juice” simply to compete with other AI-enhanced writing. On the other hand, in our post-reading society, where literacy rates are in steep decline, writing itself has never seemed more forlorn and withered. We are producing prose with bigger muscles at precisely the moment when our own writing muscles are beginning to atrophy.

    I was living through a cataclysmic moment in history. My personal retirement from teaching college writing had dovetailed with the world’s collective retirement from the kinds of literary pastimes that develop interiority and critical thinking. Reading books was becoming a rarity. Books had been displaced by sports gambling and short-form videos. To complicate matters, Rose Horowitch observes in “The End of Reading Is Here” that Americans have never read so much. The problem is that much of what they are reading is slop: “bulked up” AI writing, threads, captions, and text messages. Horowitch points to UCLA cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, who argues that “people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing.” The brain muscles required for this kind of thinking are atrophying, perhaps to the point of no return. As a result, we are moving toward a postliterate society.

    This is not a stagnant condition. It gets progressively worse. New generations may read less and less. They may become increasingly inclined to see teachers’ reading assignments as punitive. Bereft of strong reading and writing skills, they will need AI to “bulk up” their assigned writing more and more.

    Members of a postliterate society are vulnerable because they live increasingly at the surface level. They don’t dig underneath a text to find subtext, subtlety, and contradiction. They struggle to identify the logical fallacies that accompany manipulation. They can become more vulnerable to demagogues and more susceptible to being duped. A society that loses these habits of critical reading also risks weakening the habits of thought on which democratic life depends.

    A postliterate society also loses something of its humanity when its members can no longer recognize the richness of what, in good writing, we call authorial presence. To savor such presence in the writing of James Baldwin, H. L. Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, and Annie Dillard is part of being human.

    Not all is lost. Humans still find authorial presence in YouTube presentations, podcasts, and musical artists. No amount of AI “bulking up” can replicate the spectacular music and persona of SZA.

    But authorial presence in writing may be disappearing. “Bulking up” writing may eventually mean the death of writing.

    I may not simply be retiring from teaching writing. I may be retiring at the very moment I have become increasingly misaligned with a world that is uncoupling itself from literacy while diligently bulking up its resumes. 

  • Kierkegaard Goes Watch Shopping

    Kierkegaard Goes Watch Shopping

    I love well-crafted objects that combine form and function to the point that my excessive love for these things often pushes me to the brink of madness. I love the new G-Shock Frogman with its sapphire crystal and combi composite bracelet. It’s my perfect watch. I love my quiet Mac Mini connected to two 4K monitors for optimum productivity. I love premium 14-inch Chromebooks, soon to come out under the Googlebook banner, with 2.8K displays and overpowered Ultra 7 chips with 32GB of RAM. 

    The problem is that I love these things too much, well beyond my needs. The philosopher Kierkegaard warned us about “the aesthetic life”: becoming intoxicated by the pursuit of pleasure, novelty, beauty, and experience. For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic life means allowing art, technology, beauty, entertainment, and pleasure to become the governing principles of existence. An aesthetic life doesn’t make us healthy or whole. A committed life does. Commitment to something higher than our appetites is the only antidote to the misery of wanting more than we could possibly own.

    And there is the Frogman GWF-D1000BC-1JF, staring me in the face, daring me not to want it.

  • I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    Here’s a tighter version that preserves your voice and keeps the Medicare card, the student conversation, and the angry blog reader as the narrative spine. I also kept the two metaphors but made them work together rather than compete.

    It was the middle of September when my Medicare card arrived in the mail. I held it for a moment and studied my name printed beneath the red, white, and blue bands. It felt like a rite of passage, another bureaucratic marker on the road to retirement. No ceremony. No gold watch. Just a government-issued card informing me that I had entered a new demographic.

    That same day, I held a Zoom office hour. One student showed up. I told her I was retiring, and somehow our conversation wandered from Mr. T as an icon of the 1980s to whether AI could replicate the music of SZA to Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which she was writing about for her essay. We talked about how the movie could be frightening and funny at the same time. Before leaving, she told me she felt fortunate to have taken my critical thinking class before I retired. I thanked her. After forty years of teaching, you learn not to brush aside a compliment from a student. You put it in your pocket.

    After the Zoom meeting, I started thinking about the tools that had changed my teaching. Google Docs was one of the great breakthroughs. A student’s paper no longer had to exist as a stack of stapled pages handed across a desk. The document floated somewhere in the cloud, a kind of fairy manuscript that student and teacher could enter simultaneously, revising sentences together from different locations.

    Then my wife introduced me to Google Slides. Once I realized how visually my students processed information, I practically lived on Slides. An assignment that seemed hopelessly dense on a two-page handout could become intelligible when broken into a sequence of clean visual ideas. I can scarcely imagine the final seven years of my teaching career without it.

    Then came generative AI.

    At first, AI seemed like another extraordinary professional tool. It accelerated research. It intensified brainstorming. It helped me develop assignment prompts, test arguments, generate counterarguments, and discover connections I might have overlooked.

    But AI was different from Docs and Slides because it didn’t merely change how I presented my writing. It could change the writing itself.

    For my first three years using generative AI, I became intoxicated by its powers of augmentation. Give it an ordinary paragraph and it could return something brighter, sharper, funnier, and more muscular. It added metaphors, jokes, comparisons, rhythms, and linguistic tricks I hadn’t conceived myself. The results were seductive precisely because they sounded better.

    There was only one problem. Increasingly, they didn’t sound like me.

    I think of those old photo cutout boards at cowboy-themed restaurants and tourist traps. You stand behind a painted cowboy and stick your head through a hole. The photograph contains your face, but everything below your neck belongs to somebody else: narrow waist, six-shooter, boots, chaps, heroic posture. Technically, you’re in the picture. But that isn’t your body.

    AI can do the same thing to prose. Your ideas and anecdotes remain visible through the hole, but the rhetorical body surrounding them belongs to the machine.

    My second metaphor is less flattering. AI became my literary performance-enhancing drug.

    Without AI, I was the natural bodybuilder. Maybe I looked pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but the muscles were mine. Then I discovered rhetorical steroids. Suddenly I could walk onto the stage swollen with metaphors, acid wit, vivid descriptions, elaborate comparisons, and perfectly engineered sentences. Every paragraph flexed.

    Worse, I learned how to order the injections.

    “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions.”

    That became one of my favorite prompts. I would feed AI a perfectly serviceable piece of writing and watch it return wearing a posing thong and covered in bronzer. My paragraph hadn’t been edited. It had been juiced.

    I loved it.

    Then a regular reader of my blog finally had enough.

    After reading one particularly steroidal post, he left an angry comment filled with expletives. His opening line was memorable:

    “Hey, Boomer, cut the shit.”

    He told me to tone it down. He was tired of the verbal pyrotechnics. Tired of the relentless jokes and metaphors. Tired, though he didn’t use my metaphor, of watching the Technicolor 4K bodybuilder flex under the stage lights.

    I apologized and told him I would tone it down. He later apologized for snapping at me. He’d had a bad morning, he explained, and admitted that he actually enjoyed reading my blog.

    “No worries,” I wrote back. “Thanks for the honest feedback.”

    And I meant it.

    His irritation had exposed something I had been reluctant to admit. I had become so accustomed to AI-enhanced prose that ordinary writing began to look inadequate to me. I had trained my eyes on rhetorical 4K until my natural prose looked like a 250-nit IPS screen. I kept turning up the resolution, contrast, saturation, and brightness until eventually somebody in the audience yelled for me to turn the damn thing down.

    So I changed my AI prompt.

    “Edit the following for syntax, grammar, and clarity, but keep 95 percent of my original language.”

    I call it the 95 Percent Rule. AI remains a powerful professional tool, but the rule establishes a boundary: the machine can clean the window; it doesn’t get to replace the view.

    I eventually shared the rule with my students under “Academic Integrity and Best Practices.” It seemed fitting. After years of warning students about outsourcing their thinking to generative AI, I had discovered that I needed guardrails of my own.

    That realization arrived at an appropriate moment. My Medicare card was sitting on my desk. Retirement was approaching. Forty years of teaching had taken me from paper essays to documents floating in the cloud, from classroom handouts to Google Slides, and finally to machines capable of rewriting a person’s sentences in seconds.

    The tools had changed my teaching. Some had even changed the way my brain worked.

    Now, as I prepared to leave the classroom, I had one more thing to retire.

    The cowboy body could go back behind the plywood.

    The PED-bloated bodybuilder could leave the stage.

    I wanted my own sentences back.

  • What If Perseverance Is the Disease?

    What If Perseverance Is the Disease?

    In the 1970s, I wanted to become a Major League Baseball player. There was one problem: I sucked.

    I couldn’t hit a curveball. I couldn’t catch up to a high fastball. At third base, I could field a grounder and then launch the throw twenty feet over the first baseman’s head, turning a routine out into an emergency evacuation of the opposing dugout. By thirteen, the scouting reports were conclusive. I quit.

    Next came bodybuilding. I actually showed some promise. In 1981, I took runner-up in Mr. Teenage San Francisco. But that was about as far as the genetics were going to carry me. I could build a respectable mid-level physique, but I wasn’t going to become Sergio Oliva or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those men appeared to have been assembled in a laboratory using replacement parts from livestock. I quit bodybuilding that same year.

    Then I wanted to become a pianist and composer. Unfortunately, reading music and writing compositions on staff paper struck my brain with roughly the same clarity as vector and stochastic calculus. Another dream quietly left the building.

    Next came the Smooth Bachelor.

    This was my plan to become a smooth, smarmy bachelor who knew exactly what to say to women. My life would be full of hot tubs, champagne, water beds, and lava lamps. Unfortunately, I possessed approximately the same romantic smoothness as Richard Lewis after five cups of espresso. The Smooth Bachelor era was brief and catastrophic.

    Then came the big one.

    I would become a novelist.

    This ambition survived longer because I could actually write. I had a quirky, neurotic personality. I could make people laugh in conversation. Surely these qualities meant that somewhere inside me lived a novelist waiting to emerge.

    They didn’t.

    My novels were usually constructed around premises sturdy enough to support a Saturday Night Live sketch. I would then stretch the premise across two hundred pages and wonder why the resulting manuscript felt less like a novel than a short story being held against its will.

    They were reliably unreadable.

    Yet this was the dream I had the greatest difficulty quitting because becoming a novelist wasn’t merely another ambition. I had turned it into redemption.

    The published novel would retroactively make sense of everything. All the neurosis, misanthropy, social awkwardness, failed ambitions, compulsions, humiliations, and self-sabotage would be transformed into literary material. I wouldn’t merely have suffered from my peculiarities. I would have monetized them.

    Even better, people would admire me.

    This was the part I was reluctant to admit.

    Publication had become my Holy Grail of affirmation and vindication. Somewhere in my imagination, people were rising to their feet:

    “Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff McMahon has done it! The failed baseball player, failed bodybuilder, failed pianist, failed composer, and failed Hot Tub Stud has finally fulfilled his destiny. He is a novelist!”

    Applause.

    Someone brings me a chilled beverage.

    Someone else produces a generous slice of carrot cake.

    “Make sure this man feels loved. Make sure he feels special. He has suffered enough.”

    Once I understood that fantasy, perseverance became a much more complicated virtue.

    We are constantly told that perseverance reveals character. Keep going. Never surrender. Follow your dream. Winners never quit.

    But what if perseverance isn’t always strength?

    What if sometimes it is fear wearing a motivational T-shirt?

    A person can keep pursuing a goal because the goal remains worthwhile and attainable. But he can also keep pursuing it because quitting threatens some deeper fantasy about who he needs to become. He isn’t persevering because the work is flourishing. He’s persevering because he has assigned the achievement an impossible psychological task: Make me worthy. Vindicate my life. Make people admire me. Make me feel loved.

    Under those conditions, perseverance stops looking noble.

    It starts looking pathological.

    That is why Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting feels less like another book on my reading list than an intervention. For someone of my temperament, quitting isn’t necessarily evidence that I lack character. Sometimes quitting may require more character than continuing.

    I’ve spent enough of my life chasing various Holy Grails of vindication.

    At this point, I’d like to know which quests are worth finishing—and which ones deserve to be abandoned in the woods.

  • The Salvation Hustle

    The Salvation Hustle

    You reach a point in life when everything feels desperate. Losing weight will save you from dying in your bed at night from sleep apnea. Writing a publishable book or viral essay will save you from being both irrelevant and useless. Making a viral video will do the same. Embarking on a successful podcast will keep you mentally alive and “part of the conversation.” Starting your own restaurant featuring your grandmother’s brisket with gravy made from a secret family recipe will put you on the map and change what it means to enjoy good brisket. Become a yoga instructor and open your own studio to help people reinvent themselves in ways no one could have imagined. You’re special, dammit, and you’re going to prove it. You just need to work harder. So you must do this. You must do that. Make more sacrifices. Get on the true path. Never take your eyes off the prize.

    But a voice breaks through your insanity and tells you that you’re on a fool’s errand. You’re trying to save your life. Deep down, you know you are losing it.

    That same voice says: Let go. Surrender to the things you can’t control. Don’t live out other people’s fantasies of success. Don’t think fame and popularity will make you whole. Don’t confuse fame and popularity with love. It’s not love. It’s desperation.

    So you retire your delusions. You realize that all the time and energy invested in your various mirages were killing you. You were making a bad investment. Take stock. Assess the damage. You become certain that it’s time to abandon your many chimeras and start from scratch. Use your time and energy on projects rooted in sanity, projects that might actually bear fruit.

    The problem is, you don’t have a clue what these new projects will be. You’ve lived in a fever dream for years, perhaps decades. Where do you begin?

    Such is the existential challenge presented in Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting: The Surprise Benefits of Opting Out. She observes that too many of us spend enormous amounts of desperate energy auditioning for the role of superstar—the venerated, successful person who sets records and raises the bar in whatever field we pursue, believing that this prized status will make us whole and happy. We create unrealistic expectations and often head down the wrong path. Then we become so exhausted from pursuing our dreams that we no longer have enough distance to assess whether those dreams are even viable.

    Crouse uses the metaphor of a duck to describe this desperate period of her life: “gliding along on the surface while my legs churned furiously below.” That brief description perfectly captures the life of quiet desperation described by Henry David Thoreau. Always auditioning for some desirable role, we glide along on the surface while below our legs churn furiously in pursuit of some fruitless endeavor.

    Crouse argues that we should take stock of all that furious churning and, when necessary, put an end to it. It’s called quitting. Contrary to society’s condemnation of “the quitter” as someone who lacks perseverance, the real character flaw may be the refusal to quit: cowardice. You need the courage to interrogate the results of your endeavors and ask whether those results merit perseverance. In some cases, quitting can be a good thing. Crouse offers an “alternative definition” of quitter from the Middle French: “to set free.”

    All her life, Crouse confesses, she has been a high achiever, fiercely competitive, always pushing herself to the limit and loath to interrupt her path to glory. When an injury threatened her athletic training, she’d forego the doctor and take an Advil instead. Late-night runs were aided by GPS. When her grandmother died, she didn’t tell her team for fear that it would compromise their performance.

    Looking back at the ways she pushed and punished herself, Crouse questions the wisdom of these often ruthless efforts. Her self-interrogation became serious after she had two children and realized she didn’t want to pass on her “darker types of perseverance” to them. Self-abuse is one thing. Teaching your children the habits of self-abuse crosses the line.

    When the forces of ambition are no longer part of your flourishing but have become a dark pact with fear and desperation, it may be time to abandon ship. It may be time to move on.

  • What If Nobody Shows Up?

    What If Nobody Shows Up?

    I know where my greatest reach is. A blog post might get a dozen readers. A ten-minute video essay about philosophy, retirement, materialism, addiction, or my twenty-five-year enthusiasm for timepieces can get a few thousand views. If I want to engage with a larger audience, the evidence is fairly clear: I should take more of my writing and turn it into video essays.

    After I retire, I’ll have more time to do this. I could become, for lack of a less embarrassing term, a YouTuber essayist. But it strikes me as dreadfully presumptuous to assume I could pull that off. I see five major impediments: desperate content mining, narcissism drift, mukbang-hangout syndrome, performance anxiety, and algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    The first problem is the demand for consistent content. Suppose I decide to make two fifteen-minute videos a week. Where does all that material come from? Inevitably, I start mining my own life. My anxious personality has provided me with plenty of comic misadventures, but I doubt it can reliably produce two worthwhile episodes every week.

    I see talented YouTubers run into this problem all the time. They need material, so they start digging toward the bottom of the barrel. A minor controversy becomes a major event. A molehill gets the full mountain treatment. Out comes the obligatory reaction video. Or we get some cutesy, self-referential meditation on the human condition that exists mainly because Thursday arrived and Thursday requires content.

    I know myself well enough to recognize the danger. The moment I catch myself digging through the dregs for “just something to say,” I’ll become too annoyed with myself to say it.

    The second problem is narcissism drift. You’re on camera. You’re talking about yourself. You’re watching yourself talk about yourself. You become the star of a program devoted largely to the continuing adventures of you.

    At some point, you have to look at yourself and ask, “What’s the big deal here? You’re just some schmuck complaining that somebody parked with a bumper sticking into your driveway.”

    Not every irritation is an essay. Not every confession deserves an audience. Not every personal experience contains some hidden philosophical treasure waiting to be excavated.

    My rule has to be simple: the personal story must lead to something universal. If it never escapes my own navel, it doesn’t deserve to be uploaded. Following that rule probably means I won’t make two videos a week. Maybe I’ll make one a week. Maybe one every two weeks. That seems preferable to manufacturing material simply because the channel needs feeding.

    The third problem is what I call mukbang-hangout syndrome. At some point, the creator stops producing meaningful content and starts hanging out with the audience. The channel becomes a parasocial living room. People eat, chat, open packages, answer questions, and keep one another company. The content is the hanging out.

    I can’t see myself doing this, partly because I don’t have the ego for it. Why would people want to hang out with me?

    My cousin Pete in Studio City recently said, “Jeff, you’re going to be sixty-five next month. Let’s have a big party.”

    I told him, “Pete, let me explain something about me. I don’t have the kind of ego that makes big birthday parties possible. The thought of dozens of people driving from afar bearing gifts to celebrate my birthday makes me feel chagrined and socially awkward. Let’s keep it small.”

    If I can barely tolerate the idea of holding court at my own birthday party, I’m certainly not going to hold court on YouTube while eating noodles.

    The fourth problem is performance anxiety. Few things are more demoralizing than uploading a video and watching it fail in real time. You get a spattering of views. Then YouTube helpfully sends you a notice: “This video is not performing as well as your previous videos.”

    I mentally translate this as: “Fix it, loser.”

    You start imagining the YouTube police arriving at your house to ask why you uploaded something so unpopular that you’ve become a liability to the platform.

    A poorly performing video feels like the grand opening of a restaurant where nobody shows up. The linen tablecloths are pressed. The napkins are folded. The menus are ready. The doors open.

    Nothing.

    Eventually, you want to turn off the lights, pack a suitcase, and check into an undisclosed hotel.

    And this leads to the fifth and most serious problem: algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    Once you become anxious about performance, you start trying to please the algorithm. You notice what gets rewarded and begin changing your work accordingly. Out comes the Shock-Face Thumbnail, with your eyes bulging as though you just put your hand on a hot stove. Then comes the Catastrophe Title: “I Made a HUGE Mistake!” Then the False Binary: Seiko or Citizen?

    The more these tactics work, the greater the temptation to repeat them.

    Eventually, you risk becoming less like yourself and more like the algorithm. You’re no longer asking what you genuinely want to say. You’re thinking about audience capture, retention, thumbnails, titles, hooks, and whatever else might earn another burst of YouTube confetti.

    At that point, the algorithm isn’t merely distributing your work. It is changing your brain.

    Looking at these five impediments makes a respectable case for not doing any of this.

    But there are two important counterarguments.

    First, I’ve spent the last ten years on my channel developing ideas about addiction, consumerism, timepieces, aging, and the stages of life. It would be foolish to throw away everything I’ve built simply because I’m frightened by the traps of becoming a YouTuber. I already have a body of material. Retirement will give me more time to develop it.

    Second, video gives me something that writing alone cannot. I’m physically present. I work from an outline or partial script, but I also improvise. My voice, body language, facial expressions, hesitations, peculiar phrases, and occasional mistakes become part of the essay.

    This matters more to me as Artificial Intelligence spreads.

    I call it the Human-Fingerprint Premium: the more synthetic expression surrounds us, the more valuable unmistakably human expression becomes. AI can generate oceans of polished language. What it cannot duplicate is the exact experience of a particular human being sitting before a camera, thinking through an idea and occasionally surprising himself with what comes out of his mouth.

    That may become increasingly valuable.

    So I’m going to make an earnest attempt at video essays after retirement. I don’t know how often I’ll make them, and I don’t want the demands of YouTube to determine the schedule. The essay has to justify the video, not the other way around.

    Still, there is one reality I can’t escape. Running a YouTube channel is a lot like running a restaurant.

    You can believe in what you’re serving.

    But the place stays open only as long as people show up.

  • Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    We should stop using the term social media.

    The phrase is almost comically dishonest. “Social media” sounds benign and convivial, suggesting a chatty little kaffeeklatsch where neighbors exchange vacation photographs, discuss their grandchildren, and recommend a good plumber. Pour some coffee. Pull up a chair. Let’s socialize.

    That is not what we built.

    The dominant platforms employ some of the most sophisticated behavioral engineering ever devised to keep human eyes fixed on screens. Algorithms learn which emotional buttons produce another swipe, another click, another minute of captivity. Outrage works. So does envy. Loneliness works beautifully. Add FOMO, sexual display, humiliation, tribal grievance, political hatred, and the irresistible pleasure of watching somebody you despise get publicly disemboweled, and you have a remarkably efficient machine for converting human weakness into advertising revenue.

    There is nothing particularly social about it. Much of the behavior is aggressively antisocial.

    Spend enough time inside these systems and something stranger begins to happen. People start becoming grotesque duplicates of themselves. Their opinions harden. Their language becomes more predictable. Their enemies become more monstrous. Their own tribe becomes more virtuous. Their emotional repertoire contracts until nearly every stimulus produces one of four responses: outrage, envy, contempt, or applause.

    To understand the transformation, forget Silicon Valley and think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

    Attention Captivity Platforms perform a kind of digital body snatching. You enter as yourself intending to check one message. Forty-five minutes later, you emerge as an algorithmically engineered duplicate—scrolling, liking, raging, purchasing, and repeating opinions mysteriously identical to those of ten million other pod people.

    In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, aliens replace your personality while you sleep. TikTok and Instagram have improved the technology.

    You remain awake and volunteer for the procedure.

    This is why I prefer the term Attention Captivity Platform. It describes the transaction with considerably greater accuracy. Your attention is the commodity. Captivity is the business strategy. The platform is the machinery that makes the transaction possible.

    I considered other names.

    The Rage Dungeon has possibilities. It captures the experience of descending voluntarily into a subterranean chamber where strangers scream at one another until everyone develops hypertension.

    Algorithmic Asylum isn’t bad either. Everyone appears agitated, nobody seems particularly well, and the people operating the institution have discovered a profitable reason not to discharge the patients.

    The Hostility Feed gets directly to the product being served.

    And I have a particular affection for the Grievance Casino. You sit before the machine pulling the lever again and again, except instead of cherries and sevens, it dispenses stories confirming that your enemies are even more depraved than you suspected. Occasionally you hit the jackpot: somebody you already hate says something stupid.

    All of these names illuminate some aspect of the machinery.

    But social media illuminates nothing.

    Calling these systems social media is like calling a colonoscopy a spa treatment. The procedure may have its uses, but let’s not pretend we’re getting a hot-stone massage.

    Language matters because euphemisms conceal mechanisms. The phrase social media encourages us to think we’re participating in an electronic town square. Attention Captivity Platform forces us to ask the more uncomfortable question:

    If I’m the one being captured, who exactly is being served?

  • The Waiting List for Napkin Folders

    The Waiting List for Napkin Folders

    One of the most valuable ideas in Steve Lopez’s retirement memoir Independence Day is that a meditation on retirement eventually becomes a meditation on something much larger: What does it mean to remain fully alive?

    Lopez keeps circling back to an answer that complicates the conventional retirement fantasy. Being fully alive is intimately connected to being useful to someone other than yourself. We don’t flourish merely because we possess freedom, comfort, entertainment, or an empty calendar. We need some evidence that our presence in the world matters.

    Call this the Useful-Self Principle: Human beings have a deep psychological need to exercise their abilities in ways that benefit others. Our inherent worth does not depend upon our productivity, but our sense of vitality often depends upon knowing that something is better because we showed up.

    Lopez considers this idea through the extraordinary example of Hedda Bolgar, a psychologist who continued working until she was 102. She told him, “What I grew up with was, if there’s an unmet need in this world, you try to meet it, and if there’s a problem, you try to solve it.”

    There is an entire philosophy of life packed into those two sentences.

    Bolgar didn’t regard the world as a giant resort constructed for her personal gratification. She looked outward. Where is the need? Where is the problem? What can I do about it?

    Seen this way, retirement is a fairly narrow administrative concept. You retire from a job. You leave the classroom, hospital, office, factory, courtroom, newsroom, or whatever institution employed you for thirty or forty years. You surrender the title, paycheck, meetings, deadlines, performance evaluations, and passwords you can never remember.

    But you don’t retire from the human condition.

    The deeper obligation remains: escape the gravitational pull of narcissistic indifference, discover what you’re capable of doing, and connect those abilities to something the world needs.

    Bolgar died at 103. Her longevity is remarkable, but the number isn’t the most interesting thing about her life. More important was the fact that she remained engaged with other people almost until the end. Her usefulness gave her an identity that survived the conventional expiration date of a career. She had somewhere to direct herself.

    I think about my grandfather.

    He had been politically active throughout his life. He marched with longshoremen in San Pedro in defense of union rights and participated in similar forms of activism. He had spent decades believing that citizenship required more than sitting in a chair and complaining about the government.

    Then, at eighty, he fell.

    His body never completely recovered. Eventually he entered a senior-care home in Palos Verdes. I visited him at least once a week until he died at eighty-five.

    What tormented him wasn’t merely physical decline.

    He hated feeling useless.

    He looked around at the other residents and recognized the same despair in them. Their meals arrived. Their medications arrived. Their laundry was done. People cleaned their rooms, changed their sheets, pushed their wheelchairs, organized their activities, and watched over them.

    Everything was being done for them.

    That sounds like care, and of course it was. But there was another side to dependency that became increasingly visible to my grandfather: almost nothing was being asked of them.

    Then he discovered a job.

    The cafeteria needed residents to fold napkins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

    Napkins.

    Of all the grand human enterprises—building bridges, teaching children, performing surgery, defending workers, composing symphonies—we are talking about folding pieces of cloth before somebody eats meatloaf.

    And there was a waiting list.

    That waiting list has stayed with me because it reveals the Useful-Self Principle in its most concentrated form. Those residents weren’t desperate for napkins. They were desperate to be needed.

    Give me something to do.

    Let somebody depend upon me.

    Let there be one small corner of this institution that functions differently because I am here.

    When opportunities for usefulness become scarce, even folding a napkin can acquire dignity.

    I remember another moment in that cafeteria. A woman in a wheelchair who appeared to have dementia saw me and suddenly began shouting. She wanted me to rescue her. Take me out of here. Get me away from this godforsaken place.

    I looked at her and tried to reassure her. I told her everything would be okay.

    She knew I was lying.

    She was trapped, and some part of her understood it. What frightened her wasn’t simply the building. Her world had contracted. Other people determined where she lived, when she ate, where she went, and what happened next. She had become dependent upon strangers for the ordinary machinery of existence.

    I don’t know what remained intact inside her mind, and I don’t want to romanticize dementia or pretend that usefulness could have rescued her from neurological decline. But the memory has always represented something larger to me: the terror of becoming entirely acted upon rather than retaining the ability to act upon the world.

    That distinction becomes increasingly important as we age.

    The Useful-Self Principle should never be confused with the cruel proposition that human beings earn their worth through productivity. A bedridden person has no less value than a surgeon. A person with dementia does not become less human because she can no longer contribute as she once did.

    Human worth is unconditional.

    But the experience of usefulness is something different. It is one of the ways we feel our connection to other people. We teach. We repair. We cook. We listen. We volunteer. We write. We mentor. We drive someone to an appointment. We watch a grandchild. We call a lonely friend. We fold the napkins.

    This is why usefulness should not be treated as the broccoli of life—the dreary obligation we endure before finally earning the cheesecake of retirement.

    Usefulness is not the broccoli.

    It is part of the feast.

    The great opportunity of retirement isn’t merely that nobody tells you what to do anymore. It is that you can finally ask a better question:

    What needs doing that I am still capable of doing?

    Hedda Bolgar kept answering that question until she was 102.

    My grandfather understood its importance when he watched elderly people compete for the privilege of folding napkins.

    Perhaps that is one of retirement’s most important lessons. We spend decades dreaming about the day when nobody will need anything from us.

    Then the day arrives.

    And we discover how desperately we want to be needed.