Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Rich Writer Walks Away

    The Rich Writer Walks Away

    As Carrère wrestles with the Christian faith in The Kingdom, he finds himself tortured by the usual suspects: happiness, success, and self-actualization. This is a man dripping in privilege. Money? Check. Education? Check. Artistic genius? Double check. He’s a published writer, for God’s sake. And yet, all this supposed “success” builds not a kingdom but a fortress—a fortress of pride so impenetrable it doesn’t just fail to make him happy, it traps him in his own personal hell. Enter Jesus, stage left, with a nice, tidy warning from the Gospel of Luke: to find salvation, the rich man must give up all his money to the poor and follow Jesus. And, surprise surprise, Carrère immediately identifies with the rich guy. How do we let go of our wealth and worldly success when it clings to us like a designer straightjacket?

    What if, Carrère wonders, our success is creative? Surely, that’s different. Surely, success that flows from some deep, tortured well inside ourselves is something noble—something to be admired, right? As he spirals into these questions, he flips through his notebooks and stumbles upon a gem from a second-century Apocryphal Gospel: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” He muses that this would fit nicely in the pages of “upmarket personal-development books.”

    Carrère, now neck-deep in his existential quandary, asks himself the obvious question: shouldn’t he pat himself on the back for bringing forth the depth within him? Shouldn’t he be congratulating himself for writing novels that not only get published but are devoured by readers and spark weighty conversations about the meaning of life? Or is he just walking the well-worn path of the cocky artist who loves to sniff his own brilliance? He’s genuinely worried that he’s morphing into the literary equivalent of a boastful fool. “Nevertheless, a stubborn little voice persistently interrupts these moments of pharisaical smugness,” he writes. “It says that all the riches I enjoy—the wisdom I pride myself on, the confident hope that I have of being on the right track—are what prevent real accomplishment. I never stop winning, although to really win I’d have to lose. I’m rich, gifted, praised, deserving, and conscious that I deserve: for all of that, woe to me!”

    Carrère tries to shut this voice down, telling himself he’s sabotaging his own happiness with pathological tendencies to glorify his suffering, wallow in guilt, and indulge in self-flagellation like some kind of masochistic monk. But let’s be honest—his rebuttals are about as effective as trying to stop a flood with a roll of paper towels. “Nevertheless, I think that the little voice of the Gospel is right,” he admits. “And like the rich young man, I walk away, sad and pensive, for I have great wealth.”

    And there it is—Carrère, the writer who has everything, still can’t shake the feeling that his wealth is not just a blessing but a curse. If he’s really honest with himself, all his accomplishments might just be getting in the way of something deeper, something real. But giving it all up? Well, that’s a whole other story.

    Carrère observes, with his usual flair for the uncomfortable truth, that no one challenges us quite like Jesus when it comes to interrogating our priorities. What do we really love? And like Carrère, I cringe at the answer. I am embarrassingly devoted to my creature comforts, pleasures, and soothing routines. I wrap myself in them like a cozy blanket of denial. While Jesus is over there asking me to sacrifice my trivial, cushy existence and actually engage with the world for his sake, I stand frozen, as if glued to my recliner, as inert and useless as a pillar of salt. 

  • What’s a Guy Like Paul to Do?

    What’s a Guy Like Paul to Do?

    Revisiting The Kingdom, I’m struck once again by how Carrère dives into Maccoby’s The Mythmaker and finds himself, as usual, both stimulated and somewhat convinced. Maccoby’s portrait of Paul is a scathing one: a man whose letters reveal a wannabe Pharisee who never quite had the intellectual chops to measure up to the great Gamaliel’s rigorous logic. Instead, Paul, the ultimate malcontent, resents his way to the top by any means necessary. He’s a Pharisee reject, a man in need of a new ladder to climb. Enter the Sadducees, Paul’s new benefactors. Maccoby gleefully paints him as a “mercenary” and a “hatchet man” for the Sadducees—a hired thug for the enemies of the Pharisees. 

    In Paul’s self-serving retelling of his story, he demonizes Judaism and aggrandizes himself, projecting all the worst qualities of the Sadducees (and himself) onto the Pharisees, making them the convenient scapegoat. Naturally, the New Testament follows suit, reworking history with reckless abandon, making the Pharisees the Big Bad while carefully crafting a narrative that the Romans—those kindly, civilized overlords—might find palatable. No one, apparently, worried about the minor detail of two millennia of anti-Semitism that would follow. The idea of Christian love and kindness? Well, that got lost somewhere between rewriting history and needing Rome’s approval.

    Paul’s stint as a Sadducee’s henchman ends at Damascus, where he’s allegedly compelled by his vision to stop tormenting the Jesus followers and instead join them. But of course, Paul being Paul, even his conversion manages to be another way to torment the original Jesus-followers by hijacking their Torah-based teachings and replacing them with his mystical mishmash of mystery cults. Suddenly, Paul’s version of Jesus requires no Torah and offers a much more user-friendly religion for the gentiles. And in this religious battle for supremacy, as Carrère grimly notes, “it’s Paul who wins out, because, as we’ll soon see, the Temple is destroyed, Israel as a nation is annihilated, and the church of Jerusalem dispersed.”

    Maccoby, never one to hold back, sees all of this as a colossal fraud—a case of the victors rewriting history to suit themselves. He argues that Christianity is “nothing more than history written by the victors, the result of a huge falsification aimed at having people believe that Paul and his new religion are the inheritors of Judaism and not its detractors.”

    Paul didn’t just invent a religion—he gave Jesus a full makeover, complete with a brand-new mission statement. Suddenly, this Jesus wasn’t keen on the Pharisees anymore, despite the fact they were practically swapping parables like trading cards. Paul’s freshly-minted Christ had no interest in leading a political uprising like the Pharisees might have hoped. Paul’s Jesus had moved on to loftier things—”a nebulous identification with God,” or, as Paul might say, a VIP pass to the divine without the hassle of earthly concerns. 

    In Paul’s revisionist masterstroke, he conveniently positions himself as the only guy who really gets Jesus, surpassing the original apostles because, let’s face it, who wouldn’t trust a man who only met Jesus in a blinding light show? Paul’s newfound authority becomes so overwhelming that he practically files the Old Testament under “Miscellaneous”—a dusty collection of angelic telegrams leading up to the Jesus Show. And for anyone who dared to question his creative liberties? Let’s just say, there was no room for constructive criticism when your Yelp review could end in a good old-fashioned burning at the stake.

    Fast-forward two thousand years, and enter Maccoby—the intrepid Talmudic scholar—swinging a wrecking ball at the Pauline edifice. In The Mythmaker, Maccoby takes it upon himself to do what no one else apparently could: drag humanity out of two millennia of theological fog and into the light. In a move that rivals Paul’s own grandiosity, Maccoby essentially declares, “Don’t worry, folks. I’ll handle this.” And with that, he positions himself as the savior of our two-thousand years of confusion.

    Carrère, ever the skeptic, makes it clear that while Maccoby’s arguments are compelling, he doesn’t buy them hook, line, and sinker. “Passing off two thousand years of Church history as complete revisionism strikes me as the height of revisionism.” He points out that Jesus may have clashed with the Pharisees not out of sheer opposition, but because they were wise—and, like all wise people, they probably questioned the company Jesus kept. Carrère also acknowledges that, while anti-Semitism runs rampant through Christian history, we don’t have to deny that the Jews clashed with Jesus in a way that resulted in his death. His personality likely clashed with both the Jews and the Romans, so there’s no need to twist the historical narrative into an anti-Jewish screed.

    Then, of course, there’s Paul. To portray him “as a goy informer to the secret police” is to reduce his complexity to a cartoonish level. Carrère insists we don’t deny the “Dostoyevskian” depth in Paul’s letters, with all their contradictions, spiritual torment, and raw humanity. Paul may have been maddening, but he wasn’t a mere caricature.

    And in rereading Carrère’s analysis, I’m jolted by a moment of almost tragic comedy: Luke, the starry-eyed biographer, grappling with the same unflattering caricatures of Paul that Maccoby gleefully tears into. Luke had heard these damning whispers circulating about his golden boy—rumors painting Paul as something far less glorious than the saintly hero Luke immortalized in his breathless chronicle. It clearly rattled him to the core, probably like finding out your idolized childhood superhero moonlights as a mall Santa. 

    Maybe, just maybe, there’s more to Paul than the hatchet-wielding mercenary we love to despise. He’s a complicated man, a genius even—capable of crafting words so achingly beautiful they could make angels weep, and other times spewing rants so unhinged you’d think he was a madman scribbling manifestos in his lonely, dimly-lit cave. Paul, the poetic prophet of human frailty one minute, and the rabid, impoverished soul screaming into the void the next. 

  • Beyond Reciprocal Claim-Making

    Beyond Reciprocal Claim-Making

    Once you see yourself as having a religious mind, there’s no crawling back out of that rabbit hole. A religious view isn’t the same as joining a cult where some bearded leader hoards Kool-Aid and controls your mind. No, the religious mind is about recognizing that life’s stakes are sky-high—you either spiritually flourish or rot. Your actions matter. You’re not just competing in some zero-sum, Darwinian cage match, battling your fellow humans for scraps of survival. No, you’re building something deeper: a soul. And, lucky you, you’re accountable for that construction.

    I’ve fantasized plenty of times about being free from this religious wiring. In my fantasy, I’m a “free thinker,” sipping espresso while smugly dismissing religion as man-made fluff—imperfect, tribalistic, derivative, and, let’s not forget, violent. Religion in this dream isn’t the root of morality; it’s an obstacle to reality. Enter Elizabeth Anderson, the philosophy professor who drops a truth bomb in her essay, “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” Anderson argues that morality doesn’t come from God but from people learning how to cooperate. Morality, she says, is baked into our DNA, so religion is at best redundant and, more often than not, a corrupting force.

    I’ve seen Anderson’s point play out with some of my most moral students, both professed atheists. One was a Hungarian transfer student who swore her father, also an atheist, had stronger morals than any theist she knew—and I believed her. She was one of the hardest-working, most decent students I’d ever taught. Then there was my Vietnamese student, the lone atheist among her five Christian siblings, who let it slip that when their mother was dying of cancer, she was the only one who flew back to Vietnam to care for her. Her devout Christian brothers and sisters? Nowhere to be found. Her hatred for religion as hypocrisy was as strong as her love for her mother.

    Students like these could easily be poster children for Anderson’s argument that we don’t need theism to have morality. In fact, she’d argue, it might be better if we ditched religion altogether. Anderson kicks off her essay with a field trip to the Institute for Creation Research Museum in Santee, California, where creationists divide the world into two paths: “Creationism” and “Evolutionism.” Creationism, naturally, is the road to moral purity, while Evolutionism is the fast track to fornication, nihilism, addiction, humanism, Communism, and every other horror under the sun.

    Anderson doesn’t hold back: she writes that creationists’ beef with evolution isn’t scientific—it’s moral. Evolution leads to immorality, they argue, because it denies the existence of God. And, as theists have been shouting for centuries, without God, morality’s got nothing to stand on. As Dostoyevsky famously didn’t say, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” In other words, belief in God is the cork keeping the sinful champagne from exploding all over the place.

    But Anderson asks the obvious question: Can we know right from wrong without God? Do we really need the Ten Commandments to figure out that murdering your neighbor for his fancy new donkey might be a bad look? Of course not, she says. Every society—whether it’s religious, atheist, or somewhere in between—figures out basic moral rules: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness. These rules existed long before monotheism waltzed onto the scene, suggesting that moral knowledge comes not from divine revelation but from the messy experience of living together and figuring out how not to kill each other.

    Anderson’s takedown of theistic morality doesn’t stop there. She argues that the belief in God doesn’t just supply unnecessary rules; it’s often a crutch, relying on the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell to goad people into behaving decently. Her rebuttal is simple: people are motivated by love, honor, and respect, not divine bribery. In her view, these attributes can flourish just fine without a belief in God.

    Next, she dismantles the idea that we need God to give moral rules authority. If you need a deity to tell you murder, rape, and genocide are wrong, Anderson suggests, you’ve got bigger problems. We know these things are wrong without divine intervention—and, if your reasoning leads you to think everything is permitted, that’s a pretty solid clue you’ve gone off the rails.

    But here’s where Anderson flips the script. She argues that the moralistic “everything is permitted” problem applies more forcefully to theism than to atheism. If God’s laws are based on authority and not inherent goodness, then “in principle, anything is permitted.” Take Calvinism, for example. Predestination’s divine lottery, where God saves a few lucky souls and damns the rest to eternal hellfire, isn’t based on any moral reasoning—it’s just God’s will, and you better deal with it.

    Anderson’s critique of fundamentalist religion is merciless. She argues that if you take the evidence for theism seriously, you end up committed to the idea that even the most heinous acts are permitted. Since we know these acts aren’t morally permitted, she says, we should doubt the evidence for theism.

    By “theism,” Anderson isn’t just talking about some vague belief in a higher power. She’s talking about the God of Scripture—Old Testament, New Testament, and the Koran. And if you take the Bible as inerrant, Anderson argues, you’re forced to reckon with a God who’s often cruel and unjust, punishing people for the sins of others, hardening hearts, ordering genocides, and permitting slavery and rape.

    Of course, Christian apologists love to claim that the Old Testament God is the angry one, and the New Testament God is all love and forgiveness. Anderson’s having none of it. She points out that Jesus’ so-called “family values” include hating your relatives if they get in the way of your loyalty to him. And then there’s the doctrine of eternal damnation—a New Testament specialty—which, in Anderson’s view, is both cruel and incoherent.

    In the end, Anderson concludes that the God of the Bible is a moral disaster. But she’s sympathetic to thoughtful believers, the ones who struggle with the Bible’s moral atrocities. Their options, she says, are pretty grim. You can “bite the bullet” and accept the Bible’s horrors, bitter seeds and all, like a true believer. Or you can try a stopgap measure, arguing that God’s commands were appropriate in biblical times but don’t apply now—a strategy that doesn’t really hold water if you believe in a timeless God.

    Anderson’s conclusion is blunt: we’re better off abandoning theological claims as a foundation for morality. She draws on Hobbes to argue that worshiping God out of fear of his raw power isn’t love—it’s survival instinct, and that’s no basis for morality. Instead, Anderson suggests, morality is a system of reciprocal claim-making, where we hold each other accountable, no gods required.

    As compelling as Anderson’s essay is, I’m still not convinced. The world isn’t some rational, orderly place. There are shadows, mysteries, omens, and prophecies—strange phenomena that transcend the cold logic of reciprocal claim-making. Religion, in all its messiness, is the story of a fallen people trying to reconnect with their Maker. And as much truth as I see in Anderson’s rejection of theistic morality, I can’t shake the religious mind. I see myself as someone who’s fallen and in need of a path, a true path, to becoming the person I’m meant to be. Anderson’s talk of reciprocal claim-making? It doesn’t even come close to satisfying that deeper, spiritual hunger.

  • The Theology of Loose Ends

    The Theology of Loose Ends

    Ironically, the book that comes closest to expressing my own questions about Christianity—Emmanuel Carrère’s autobiographical novel The Kingdom—barely touches the one theological obsession that dominated my adolescence: hell.

    As a high school senior, I wasn’t driven toward Christianity by the promise of heaven nearly as much as I was terrified by the prospect of eternal damnation. My Christian classmates casually informed me that my Jewish relatives were burning in hell. It wasn’t merely the outrageousness of the claim that unsettled me. It was the manner in which they delivered it. Their verdict came with the breezy confidence of teenagers discussing last Friday night’s football game. They spoke of infinite punishment with astonishing emotional indifference. The certainty chilled me more than the doctrine itself.

    Yet even that wasn’t the most disturbing thing I encountered.

    The church we attended used The Living Bible, a popular paraphrase whose study notes included the astonishing suggestion that the Holocaust represented God’s punishment for the Jewish rejection of Christ. I remember reading those words in disbelief. To reduce one of history’s greatest atrocities to divine retribution felt not merely offensive but morally grotesque. If this was Christian theology, I wanted to wash my hands of it altogether. I longed for a world in which hell—and every conversation orbiting around it—would simply disappear.

    But what if it did?

    Suppose I abandoned infernalism entirely. Would I become one of those Christian Universalists—the thoughtful believers who reject eternal conscious torment and insist that love, rather than fear, should be the foundation of faith? I find myself instinctively drawn to them. They argue that the threat of hell cheapens our relationship with God, reducing love to coercion. Their vision of the afterlife resembles less a cosmic torture chamber than an infinitely patient schoolroom. No one is abandoned forever. Every soul is eventually healed, even if that healing requires painful correction.

    There is something deeply attractive about that picture.

    There is also something that makes me uneasy.

    If the worst imaginable outcome is temporary purification, what becomes of moral urgency? Human nature being what it is, wouldn’t many of us quietly conclude that we can indulge our appetites now and settle our spiritual debts later? Universalism can begin to resemble the theological equivalent of Universal Basic Income: everyone eventually receives the same eternal inheritance regardless of how recklessly they spent their earthly lives. Why struggle against the gravitational pull of selfishness if, in the end, the bill is always paid?

    Then again, infernalism carries its own unbearable cost. A universe in which billions suffer endlessly is hardly a satisfying resolution either.

    Neither vision leaves me entirely at peace.

    Paul, interestingly enough, occupies both sides of this debate. Depending on the interpreter, he becomes either the great defender of eternal punishment or the great herald of universal reconciliation. What virtually everyone agrees upon, however, is that Paul’s own life embodies Christianity’s defining redemption story. The persecutor becomes the apostle. The anxious, self-divided voice of Romans discovers liberation through surrender to Christ. His life unfolds with remarkable narrative coherence: chaos gives way to grace, alienation to reconciliation, death to resurrection.

    It is a magnificent story.

    But must every true story end that way?

    Dara Horn raises a question that has lingered with me ever since I read People Love Dead Jews. She recalls a reader complaining that her novel The World to Come, centered on the survivor of a pogrom, wasn’t “uplifting” enough. The complaint revealed something curious. Even sophisticated readers seem to hunger for stories that gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We crave endings that reassure us the universe is fundamentally coherent.

    Horn is suspicious of that craving.

    Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolutions owes much to Christianity itself. Christian history moves toward fulfillment. Its central drama is redemption. The scattered fragments of existence are ultimately gathered into a meaningful whole. Jewish storytelling, by contrast, often refuses such closure. The Hebrew Bible concludes not with final resolution but with an unfinished journey. Questions remain unanswered. Promises remain unfulfilled. The story continues beyond the final page.

    That difference fascinates me.

    Christianity often invites us to see history as one grand redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it teaches us how to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it learns to inhabit ambiguity with patience and humility. These stories do not pretend that chaos can always be conquered. They suggest that wisdom may consist in remaining faithful while chaos refuses to yield.

    Perhaps that is the more mature vision.

    Or perhaps I tell myself this because it allows me to avoid the far more demanding claims of Christianity. Perhaps my admiration for ambiguity is simply an elegant rationalization—a way of escaping the moral revolution that Carrère identifies at Christianity’s heart. If N. T. Wright and other defenders of Paul’s theology are correct, then Paul’s redemption story is not sentimental optimism but the astonishing claim that God has actually invaded history, overcome chaos, and begun dismantling what I have elsewhere called the Default Kingdom.

    I still do not know which story is true.

    I only know that I am no longer satisfied with easy answers, whether they arrive wrapped in eternal flames or universal embraces.

  • The Default Kingdom

    The Default Kingdom

    One of the central questions the self-described agnostic—or perhaps more accurately, currently agnostic, since Emmanuel Carrère never entirely closes the door on belief—explores in The Kingdom is this: What, if anything, makes Christianity fundamentally different from the world’s other religions and moral philosophies?

    Carrère readily acknowledges that the great religious traditions share a common ethical grammar. Nearly all contain some version of the Golden Rule. A contemporary of Jesus, the rabbi Hillel, famously taught, “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.” Do not lie. Do not boast. Do not humiliate. Do not bully. Compassion, honesty, and restraint are hardly unique to Christianity. They are the moral glue that binds much of humanity’s spiritual inheritance together.

    Where Christianity tears away from the others, Carrère argues, is in its astonishing redefinition of power.

    For Paul and Jesus, the path upward begins by descending. Better to be poor than rich, weak than strong, last than first, servant rather than master. Blessed are the meek, the persecuted, the hungry, and the broken, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. This was not merely unconventional wisdom. To the Greeks, whose highest ideals celebrated strength, excellence, beauty, and glory, it sounded like madness. Christianity did not merely revise the ancient world’s understanding of greatness; it turned it upside down.

    To illustrate this moral inversion, Carrère turns to Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical novel Quo Vadis. A sophisticated Roman officer, accustomed to luxury, power, and the refined pleasures of imperial life, is captured by Christians whom he has persecuted. Certain that revenge awaits him, he braces himself for torture or execution. Instead, his captors quietly set him free.

    The gesture is so alien to his imagination that he cannot process it. Surely this is some elaborate mockery, he tells himself, a cruel joke whose punchline has yet to arrive. Mercy, in his world, is incomprehensible because mercy possesses no strategic value. It gains no territory, wins no battles, and intimidates no enemies.

    Yet that very mercy becomes an ambush. Slowly, the Christians’ refusal to answer violence with violence dissolves the officer’s moral certainties. Their forgiveness reveals a form of strength that eclipses the imperial virtues he had spent his life admiring. He comes to see that domination is not the highest expression of power after all. Love is. So profoundly is he transformed that he embraces the Christian faith, becomes one of its fearless defenders, and ultimately accepts martyrdom, facing the lions with the same courage he once believed could exist only on the battlefield.

    For Carrère, this inversion of values constitutes Christianity’s greatest “force of persuasion.” It challenges what we might call the Default Kingdom: humanity’s instinctive moral operating system, in which strength, wealth, beauty, status, and dominance appear to be self-evident proofs of success and virtue. As Carrère observes, most people naturally “prefer to be strong rather than weak, rich rather than poor, big rather than small, dominant rather than dominated.” Such preferences seem so obvious that they rarely require justification.

    Christianity refuses to grant them that obviousness.

    In Carrère’s reading, neither Greek philosophy nor Jewish tradition overturns the Default Kingdom in quite this radical way. Christianity alone proclaims that the first shall be last, that the poor are blessed, that enemies should be loved, and that the victorious are often the defeated. Its revolution is persuasive not because its teachings are clever, but because its earliest followers embody them. The Christians of the Acts of the Apostles do not merely preach this impossible ethic—they live it. Their willingness to forgive, to suffer, and even to die rather than imitate the world’s pursuit of domination sends a shock wave through the Roman Empire. With every act of inexplicable mercy, the Default Kingdom loses a little more of its authority, and history itself begins to bend toward a radically different vision of what it means to be powerful.

  • When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    If I were the sort of watch enthusiast content with half a dozen Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shocks—a collection stretching from the hulking, superheroic Frogman to the modest, bespectacled GW-5000U—I would admire that collection for reasons having little to do with the watches themselves. Certainly, it would cover every practical need I could imagine. More important, however, it would signify that I had become an entirely different species of collector.

    My former self collected from a place of addiction, neediness, and what I have elsewhere called Gollumification. Every few months I required another gleaming mechanical diver, preferably one costing a few thousand dollars, to jolt me awake from the deadening fog of boredom. The ritual reminded me of suburban mothers in the late 1960s making their regular pilgrimage to the beauty salon to “get their hair done.” As a child, I watched them return transformed—not merely coiffed, but spiritually refurbished, buoyed by the conviction that a new hairstyle had somehow renewed the self beneath it.

    Waiting for FedEx to deliver an expensive Seiko diver is the masculine version of the same liturgy.

    Both rituals whisper the same seductive lie: This time you’ll feel complete.

    The object itself scarcely matters. Hair today. Watches tomorrow. Kitchen remodels, sports cars, cosmetic procedures, luxury vacations, religious conversions, career promotions, perfectly optimized bodies—the props change, but the script remains stubbornly familiar. We keep staging ceremonies of self-renewal, hoping the next acquisition will accomplish what none of its predecessors could.

    The collector I wish I were inhabits a different emotional universe. He still loves watches, perhaps loves them even more, but he no longer requires them to rescue him from himself. He can appreciate a beautifully engineered timepiece without recruiting it into a desperate campaign against boredom. His contentment is not the result of finally finding the perfect watch; it is the reason he no longer needs to keep looking for one.

    His most remarkable quality is not restraint but peace.

    He no longer hungers to be “energized” because boredom has ceased to function as an existential emergency. He no longer imagines that the next purchase will repair some invisible crack running through his identity. He is already whole before the courier rings the doorbell.

    Of course, I recognize this as a fantasy.

    I call it The Fantasy of the Whole Man: the dream that one final purchase, one decisive achievement, one dramatic conversion, or one perfectly timed life adjustment will usher us into permanent inner completion, rendering future craving obsolete. It imagines a version of ourselves so psychologically integrated that desire finally relinquishes its grip.

    No watch can perform that miracle.

    Yet the fantasy reveals something profoundly true about watch enthusiasts—and, indeed, about human beings generally. Beneath our fascination with polished titanium, Zaratsu finishing, Swiss escapements, or atomic timekeeping lies a quieter longing. We are not merely searching for the next beautiful object. We are searching for a version of ourselves that no longer requires beautiful objects to feel sufficient.

    That is the collection we never quite manage to complete.

  • The Great Social Media Deconversion

    The Great Social Media Deconversion

    In 2008 I was doing power yoga in my office while listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy, on KFI 640. In the middle of discussing routers, spyware, and the eternal misery of Windows Vista, he casually remarked, “This Facebook thing is a big deal.”

    I had no idea what he meant.

    I wasn’t the sort of person who chased the latest technological revolution. I listened to Leo for a different reason. I loved hearing retirees call in with computers so old they belonged in an archaeological dig. They would ask whether they should keep a desktop that required thirty minutes to boot, wheezed like an emphysema patient opening Microsoft Word, and treated email as an Olympic event, or whether it was finally time to buy “one of these new computers.”

    Facebook barely registered on my radar.

    Then, in the summer of 2009, my wife was pregnant with our twin daughters. It occurred to me that Facebook might be a convenient way to share photos and updates with family and friends. So I created an account.

    Within weeks my friend list exploded like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

    I was enchanted.

    Perhaps this was the medium I had been waiting for all my life.

    Unfortunately, Facebook did not merely connect me to other people. It connected me to the most embarrassing parts of myself. My ego, which until then had lived quietly in the basement, burst upstairs carrying champagne.

    People would discover me.

    I would become famous.

    How many friends could I accumulate?

    How many likes?

    How many followers?

    Would humanity finally recognize my genius now that history had invented the proper delivery system?

    The intoxication was exquisite.

    That was seventeen years ago.

    Looking back, my relationship with Facebook has all the emotional contours of a failed marriage. There was the honeymoon, the infatuation, the passionate commitment, the slow accumulation of grievances, the disappointment, the resentment, and now something even colder than resentment.

    Contempt.

    Or perhaps futility.

    The old expression comes to mind: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

    Another comes from the Book of Acts, where the risen Christ asks Saul, “Why are you kicking against the goads?” Stop exhausting yourself fighting reality.

    That is how social media feels now.

    Not tragic.

    Pointless.

    Because the marriage was built on lies.

    The lies sounded persuasive enough.

    Metrics measure significance.

    Engagement proves value.

    Visibility creates influence.

    Influence creates meaning.

    If enough strangers notice you, your life has somehow become larger.

    It took me years to realize that every one of those propositions was counterfeit.

    The pursuit of attention slowly teaches us to manipulate others.

    Eventually it teaches us to manipulate ourselves.

    The more desperately we chase attention, the more anxious we become.

    The anxiety metastasizes into resentment.

    Soon we are no longer expressing ourselves.

    We are auditioning for an algorithm.

    Attention capture is not meaning.

    Attention capture is not love.

    Attention capture is not flourishing.

    One can dominate the internet and still become another version of Gollum, clutching a glowing ring instead of a precious one.

    A few days ago I watched a fitness YouTuber whose work I normally admire upload one of those interchangeable “What I Eat in a Day” videos. He microwaved leftovers. He poured cereal into a bowl. He assembled a few perfectly ordinary meals to reassure viewers that he was just like them.

    The video felt less like communication than contractual obligation.

    He looked exhausted.

    Not physically.

    Spiritually.

    As though the algorithm had shown up at his front door demanding another sacrifice.

    I watched perhaps thirty seconds before closing the window.

    I did it for his dignity.

    And for mine.

    Now I don’t know what to do with Facebook, Instagram, or my fifteen-year-old YouTube channel.

    They feel less like hobbies than reminders of a marriage that should have ended years ago.

    I still write on my blog.

    Almost nobody reads it.

    Wonderful.

    Obscurity has become strangely liberating.

    I write what genuinely interests me instead of what might seduce an algorithm into distributing me like digital fertilizer across the internet. I no longer feel compelled to manufacture outrage, optimize thumbnails, or package my thoughts into bite-sized dopamine pellets.

    The work belongs to me again.

    People often wonder what comes after divorce.

    The honest answer is that nobody knows.

    You spend a long time discovering who you are after years spent becoming someone else.

    I suspect millions of us are undergoing that same process with social media.

    We experienced the honeymoon.

    We believed the promises.

    We invested our identities.

    We discovered the betrayal.

    Now we are wandering through the emotional wreckage trying to remember who we were before engagement statistics became a measure of our worth.

    We are all, in one way or another, losing our religion.

    R.E.M. accidentally wrote the soundtrack for the algorithmic age.

    I have become convinced that social media has diminished us personally, culturally, politically, and spiritually. It rewarded vanity, monetized outrage, industrialized narcissism, and trained us to confuse visibility with virtue.

    But I have also become convinced that this era is ending.

    People are tiring of the performance.

    The masks have grown heavy.

    The applause no longer sounds convincing.

    Something new is approaching.

    Whether it will be better or merely different, I cannot say.

    I only know that the old marriage is over.

    And, for the first time in years, that feels less like a loss than a beginning.

  • The Dishwasher and the Soul

    The Dishwasher and the Soul

    People love to narrate themselves into virtue. They announce that they are resilient, compassionate, emotionally intelligent, enlightened. Fine. But character is not established by autobiography. It is established by collateral damage. The verdict is rendered not by the stories we tell about ourselves but by the people who must live with us.

    By that standard, I don’t receive flattering marks.

    I alienate people. Friendships wither. Members of my own family find me exhausting. I do not know how to repair whatever defect keeps reproducing these outcomes. Self-loathing only deepens the rut. It is like trying to escape quicksand by thrashing harder.

    For years my wife has insisted that I have Asperger’s, though I have never received a formal diagnosis. In 2013, I saw a psychiatrist who concluded that I had escaped my mother’s severe depression and bipolar disorder only to inherit a milder companion: dysthymia, a chronic, low-grade depression that rarely knocks you flat but seldom lets you stand fully upright. I eventually stopped seeing him after realizing that I seemed to be providing more entertainment than receiving treatment. I would leave his office lighter in wallet but not in spirit. The experience merely reinforced my suspicion that therapy, at least in my case, was proving more theatrical than therapeutic.

    So I became my own maintenance department.

    Routine is my antidepressant. I cling to it with the desperation of a fish clinging to water. Remove it, and anxiety rushes in to occupy the vacuum. Home becomes less a residence than a fortified monastery whose sacred relics are my kettlebells, exercise bike, piano, protein powder, creatine, and carefully arranged supplements. Every object reassures me that the machinery of the day can continue without surprise.

    Leaving this sanctuary, even for something as benign as a vacation, often feels less like recreation than exile.

    While other people return from holidays refreshed, carrying photographs and amusing anecdotes, I return as though I have survived a natural disaster. Friends ask, “How was your vacation?” I usually shrug because I honestly cannot answer. It dissolves into a hazy montage of disrupted routines, low-grade dread, and the relief of finally coming home. Rather than becoming more engaged with life, I retreat inward. I regress. I become emotionally unavailable. Sometimes I stay home to spare my family the burden of dragging me through another reluctant excursion. They enjoy themselves more, but they miss me all the same.

    That realization hurts.

    I often feel as though I am the heaviest burden my family carries. I bought us a home in a beautiful coastal suburb. The mortgage is gone. We enjoy financial security and enough discretionary income to live comfortably. Yet I cannot escape Christ’s unsettling question, slightly rewritten for my own circumstances: What does it profit a family to live in a lovely house if the husband and father carries conspicuous gaps in his emotional life?

    If there were a genuine cure, I would pursue it tomorrow.

    A retreat deep in the woods. An ayahuasca ceremony promising psychic rebirth. A religious conversion dramatic enough to rearrange the furniture of my soul. If someone could convincingly promise to transform me from an anxious, melancholy recluse into a man whose presence naturally enlarged the lives of others, I would sign the consent form before they finished explaining the side effects.

    Instead, the dishwasher beeps.

    In half an hour I’ll empty it, wipe down the counters, and make salmon, rice, and salad for my family. It is not redemption, but it is dinner.

    Perhaps this is where real life usually unfolds—not in miraculous transformations but in ordinary competence. I can contribute. I can keep the kitchen running. I can exercise. I can stay away from alcohol. I can show up for the responsibilities that lie directly before me, even if I stumble over the emotional ones that lie beyond them.

    There is an old wisdom about staying in your lane. It is not a cure, but it prevents unnecessary collisions.

    Good physical health is not salvation, but it helps. Financial stability is not happiness, but it removes many unnecessary sorrows. A clean kitchen does not heal the mind, but it gives tomorrow one less disorder to inherit.

    So, for now, gratitude remains my most reliable therapy—not because it erases my defects, but because it keeps them from becoming the only facts I recognize. It reminds me that a life can be imperfect without being worthless, that a man can remain unfinished without being beyond repair, and that sometimes the most meaningful victories are measured not in dramatic breakthroughs but in quietly making dinner when your mind insists you’ve accomplished nothing at all.

  • The Ghost at the End of My Block

    The Ghost at the End of My Block

    An unkempt, unemployed man in his sixties—I’ll call him D—lives on my street. He is painfully thin, wears a beard that seems less grown than surrendered to, and carries the thousand-yard stare of someone who has spent too many years trapped inside his own mind. He is the neighborhood’s resident ghost, the subject of whispered conversations held over hedges and driveways whenever his name comes up.

    I rarely see him anymore.

    With each passing year he seems to retreat another step from the world. According to my neighbors, he now walks his dog only after dark, as if daylight itself has become an adversary.

    The last time we spoke was more than a decade ago. He told me his mother had emigrated from Ukraine. She was still alive then but has since passed away. He admitted he struggled with clinical depression. Once upon a time he earned his living in real estate. He loved photography. He struck me as intelligent, thoughtful, even pleasant. Nothing about him suggested the caricature of the neighborhood eccentric.

    Depression, however, is not content merely to inhabit a person. Given enough years, it colonizes the landscape around him.

    D’s house looks less like a residence than a psychological self-portrait.

    Weeds have risen high enough to conceal much of the property, swallowing the front yard as if nature were quietly reclaiming it. Enormous rocks lie scattered across the lot—not arranged with the intention of landscaping but dumped haphazardly, as though an avalanche had paused just long enough to empty its pockets. A rusted car sits permanently marooned in the driveway, stripped of its engine, one of those eternal restoration projects that never progresses beyond the fantasy stage.

    Then there is the roof.

    Or rather, the absence of one.

    Instead of shingles, enormous black tarps have been stretched across the house like bandages wrapped around a wound too deep to heal. The place resembles less a home than a disaster site awaiting inspectors who never arrive.

    The neighbors tell me D has owned five yellow Labrador retrievers over the past twenty-five years.

    Each one has had exactly the same name.

    Reggie.

    Perhaps it is sentiment. Perhaps ritual. Or perhaps depression dislikes novelty and prefers the comforting illusion that nothing essential has changed.

    Reggie, unfortunately, is also a source of neighborhood diplomacy. D has a habit of letting him roam unleashed, which periodically inspires shouted exchanges with nearby homeowners who are less enchanted by canine freedom than D appears to be.

    Recently, the family next door began an ambitious renovation. They moved out for a year while contractors demolished and rebuilt much of their home at a cost north of half a million dollars.

    During one conversation, one of the neighbors revealed something I had never considered.

    The tarps.

    They aren’t merely ugly.

    They are loud.

    Every windy night they snap, crack, and whip against the roof structure with relentless fury, sounding less like construction material than a chorus of agitated ghosts auditioning for Poltergeist. Sleep becomes impossible.

    So the neighbors arrived at a remarkably practical conclusion.

    Since they were already spending roughly $600,000 rebuilding their own home, they decided to buy D a new roof.

    The cost?

    About $20,000.

    It is an act of generosity, certainly.

    It is also an investment in uninterrupted sleep.

    When you’ve already committed well over half a million dollars to creating your dream home, another twenty thousand begins to look less like charity than an effective noise-canceling device.

    Every neighborhood, it seems, has its own D.

    There is always one house that refuses to cooperate with the local mythology of upward mobility. Every freshly painted facade, every manicured lawn, every luxury SUV in the driveway quietly tells a story of competence, prosperity, and orderly lives. Then there is the one property that interrupts the narrative like an uncomfortable footnote. It reminds everyone that not every life can be renovated with quartz countertops, drought-tolerant landscaping, and a designer front door.

    Some houses broadcast success.

    Others testify to defeat.

    D’s house has become an architectural memoir of prolonged suffering, a place where depression has seeped from the mind into the soil, the weeds, the rusting car, and finally the roof itself.

    Replacing the tarps with shingles will not rewrite that story.

    A new roof cannot cure clinical depression. It cannot restore lost ambition, resurrect old dreams, or persuade a haunted man that tomorrow will be kinder than yesterday.

    But it can silence the ghosts.

  • The Authenticity Paradox

    The Authenticity Paradox

    Damascus is the mother of all superhero origin stories. Before Peter Parker is bitten by a spider or Bruce Wayne enters the Batcave, there is Saul of Tarsus riding toward Damascus with murder in his heart. He is not searching for truth. He believes he already possesses it. He is intent on hunting down followers of “The Way” and dragging them to their deaths. His path is one of certainty, violence, and righteous darkness.

    Then, against every instinct and every intention, his story is hijacked.

    A blinding light crashes into his world. The risen Christ—the very Savior whose followers Saul has dedicated himself to destroying—confronts him directly. “Why do you keep goading the ox?” the voice asks. Then comes the devastating revelation: “I am your Lord.”

    The encounter leaves Saul shattered. Blind. Disoriented. Helpless. For three days he sits in darkness while a far greater darkness collapses inside him. His old identity has suffered an internal earthquake. The architecture of his soul has cracked beyond repair.

    Then a stranger arrives.

    The man claims to have been sent by the Lord. More unsettling still, he addresses him not as the man Saul understands himself to be but as the man history will remember: Paul.

    The new identity feels like an insult.

    Saul wants nothing to do with this strange future. He wants his old certainties, his old mission, his old enemies. Like nearly every great hero, he is reluctant. He does not answer a call to adventure with enthusiasm but with resistance. He loves the familiar darkness more than the terrifying demands of the light.

    But the light proves stronger than his will.

    He can no longer goad the ox. He can no longer wage war against the truth that has invaded him. At last he surrenders, becoming Paul the evangelist, whose letters would shape Western civilization more profoundly than those of any emperor, philosopher, or statesman.

    Paul’s conversion reminds me of one of the strangest moments in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” After exhausting himself trying to remove Bartleby from his office, the narrator presses money into Bartleby’s hand in hopes that he will finally leave. Bartleby lets the money fall to the floor. Then the narrator confesses:

    “But it dropped to the floor, and then strange to say, I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of.”

    It is one of literature’s finest descriptions of divided desire.

    Like Paul, Melville’s narrator longs for change while simultaneously resisting it. He wants liberation, but only on terms that preserve the person he already is. He discovers that the obstacle standing in his way is not Bartleby but himself.

    Perhaps this is the hidden struggle behind every genuine transformation.

    Each of us carries within us a pillar of salt—a hardened identity built from habit, fear, pride, resentment, and old certainties. We mistake this calcified self for our true self because it has been with us for so long. Yet the longer we cling to it, the heavier it becomes. Eventually it drags us beneath the surface, where it is no longer an anchor but a tomb.

    Most of us never let go.

    The pillar of salt sinks us.

    But for the rare few who are not merely called but chosen, another possibility emerges. Their lives reveal what novelist Emmanuel Carrère sees at the heart of Paul’s Damascus encounter. Reflecting on Paul’s conversion, Carrère writes:

    “Paul was no longer himself; he was finally himself.”

    It is one of the deepest paradoxes of the spiritual life.

    We usually imagine authenticity as self-expression, the freedom to become more completely the person we already believe ourselves to be. Damascus turns that comforting assumption upside down. It suggests that our deepest self may be buried beneath the very identity we defend most fiercely. Before we can become who we truly are, we must relinquish the person we cannot imagine living without.

    Paul’s conversion thus reveals what might be called the Authenticity Paradox: the condition in which becoming one’s truest self first requires ceasing to be the person one believes oneself to be. Authenticity is not achieved by polishing the old self until it shines. It is achieved by surrendering the old self altogether, trusting that what feels like annihilation is, in fact, the beginning of a more truthful life.