Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Watch Abundance Anhedonia

    Watch Abundance Anhedonia

    Sometimes I wonder how technology might assassinate my love for timepieces. Picture this: a $200 spool of 3-D printer feedstock spits out your $10,000 grail watch. Eight years later, when the mechanical movement needs servicing, you don’t take it to a watchmaker—you print another.

    If watch-printing is as easy as making pancakes, I’d have thousands. Would I be happy? No. I’d be the spoiled rich kid sulking in his palatial bedroom because Mom and Dad bought him every toy but a bazooka.

    “Son, I bought you everything.”
    “But I want a bazooka.”
    “They’re illegal.”
    “I don’t care!”

    When everything is instant, the “holy grail” becomes an inside joke. The magic dies in the flood of abundance. Just ask the diamond industry. Lab-grown stones are flawless, cheap, and undetectable to the human eye—obliterating the romance of bankrupting yourself for an engagement ring. Watches could be next. As thousands of luxury timepieces materialize out of your 3-D printer, you will be overcome by Watch Abundance Anhedonia: a psychological dead zone caused by frictionless acquisition. When effort, waiting, and sacrifice are removed from ownership, pleasure flatlines. The watch collector becomes the sulking child of excess, bored by plenitude and secretly longing for denial.

    And that’s just one front. On another, tech billionaires are funding biohackers to keep us ticking for 900 years. If I’m going to live to 85, time feels urgent. If I’m going to live to 900, time is a leisurely brunch. Chronological time starts to matter less than biological time—the wear and tear written in my cells.

    In that world, your Rolex Submariner won’t tell you what matters. Your doctor-prescribed smartwatch will, tracking cardiovascular vitality, antioxidant levels, and the sorry truth of your lifestyle choices. Refuse to wear it, and your insurance premiums explode tenfold or you’re cut off entirely. Privacy? Gone. Your vitals are known to your insurer, employer, spouse, dating app matches, and the guy at your gym checking your actuarial risk.

    When the mechanical watch dies, so does your privacy. And somewhere, Dale Gribble from King of the Hill is finding the conspiracy angle.

    Give it five years. Our “watch collector meet-up” will look more like group therapy for mechanical-watch dinosaurs funding their therapists instead of their ADs. But fear not—obsession never dies, it just changes costume. Post-watch, your new drug will be optimization.

    You’ll strap on your OnePlus Watch 3, buy a $2,600 CAROL resistance bike, and simulate being chased by a saber-toothed tiger because “hormesis”—that holy word—demands mild ordeals to make you live forever. Resistance intervals, intermittent fasting, cold plunges. Goodbye winding bezels; hello gamified cell stress.

    Our poster boy? Bryan Johnson—the billionaire fasting himself pale, zapping his groin nightly to maintain the virility of a high school quarterback. Critics say he looks like a vampire who’s just failed a blood test. I say he’s the future. Picture him at 200, marrying a 20-year-old and siring a brood. Male Potency and Reproductive Success: the distilled recipe for happiness.

    Except I’m kidding. The truth: peer-reviewed science says we might beat the big killers before 90—heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s—but the biological ceiling is still ~100. Eventually your organs quit. All the optimization in the world won’t rewrite that.

    As a watch obsessive, I know the tyranny of time. The biohackers are fixated on biological time as if it’s the only kind that matters. But the Greeks knew a third: kairos—the moment saturated with meaning, purpose, connection. All the Bryan Johnsons in the world can’t 3-D print that.

    Live 200 years without kairos and you’re not a winner; you’re a remake of Citizen Kane with a garage full of exotic cars and no friends.

    A long time ago, a friend told me about the night cocaine hollowed him out so completely that he didn’t care his best friend was kissing his girlfriend. Then a voice in his head said, “Dude, you should care.” He went to rehab the next day. That’s soul work.

    And that’s what’s missing from the longevity cult: soul work. Without it, all the tech, watches, and optimized mitochondria in the world are just a shiny grift.

  • Why You Can’t Pursue the Watch Hobby in Solitude

    Why You Can’t Pursue the Watch Hobby in Solitude

    I should have known at thirteen that seventeen would be brutal. At thirteen, Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” was already circulating through the house like a prophecy. I liked the song well enough, but my mother loved it. It was her time machine back to high school—loneliness, rejection, the ache of not measuring up. More than once I watched her eyes fill as the song drifted out of our Panasonic portable radio. That was her loneliness anthem. I needed my own. Mine was “Watching and Waiting” by the Moody Blues—a song for someone alone in the dark who senses there is something greater beyond himself and aches to make contact with it. Less teenage rejection, more metaphysical hunger.

    By seventeen, starting college, I was profoundly lonely. According to Erik Erikson, this is the stage defined by intimacy versus isolation, and I was losing badly. I felt it in my bones as a socially maladroit bodybuilder shuffling through classes by day and working nights as a bouncer at a teen disco called Maverick’s in San Ramon. Picture it: me at the door, arms crossed, watching a parade of thrill-seekers gyrate, flirt, and dissolve into noise. The job didn’t cure my loneliness; it distilled it. I was close enough to touch the crowd and miles away from belonging to it.

    One morning after a late shift, I dreamed I was living in the Stone Age. I was alone in a cave, wrapped in animal skins, stepping out into a gray, indifferent sky. I raised my arms toward the clouds, reaching for something—anything—that might answer me. In the background, “Watching and Waiting” played like a prayer I hadn’t yet learned how to pray. The dream was sad and beautiful, which felt like progress. As Kierkegaard noted, despair’s worst form is not knowing you’re in it. At least I knew. And as the Psalmist understood long before therapy existed, grace tends to follow sorrow once the sorrow has been fully felt.

    People hate being alone. They’ll sit through ads on YouTube rather than listen ad-free on Spotify because YouTube lets them comment, scroll, argue, agree—experience the song with others. Solitude may be cleaner, but communion is warmer. Which brings me to watches. What is the watch hobby in isolation? Nothing. A watch on a deserted island is just a lump of steel keeping time for no one. The hobby exists only because a community animates it—supports it, debates it, sometimes overfeeds it. A watch on your wrist is a semiotic flare. It says something. Others read it. You read them back. That exchange is the point.

    This is what I mean by Horological Communion: the quiet fellowship formed when watches are not hoarded as private trophies but offered as shared symbols. Meaning emerges only when the object is seen, recognized, and answered—at meetups, in forums, in comment sections, across a knowing glance from one wrist to another. Without that communion, the watch is mute. It ticks, faithfully, but it says nothing at all.

  • The Watch Miserabilist

    The Watch Miserabilist

    The Watch Miserabilist is a man determined—by temperament, guilt, vanity, and a punishing inner prosecutor—to turn a pleasurable hobby into a moral catastrophe. He stares at his collection as if it were evidence in a trial against him and sighs, “These watches mock me. I am unworthy. I have nowhere to wear them.” He glances down at his Omega Planet Ocean while seated in a windowless man cave and concludes, with theatrical despair, that the watch has exposed him as a fraud. Luxury, in his hands, becomes an accusation.

    He shuffles around his lair like a contemporary Gollum: threadbare robe, bloodshot eyes, four-day beard, posture of defeat. He looks vaguely unhoused. The contrast is brutal—this exhausted homunculus lugging around a six-thousand-dollar slab of Swiss engineering on his wrist. The watch gleams with purpose; the man does not. You can practically hear the object wondering how it ended up here. Whatever redemption the Miserabilist hoped the purchase would bring has failed spectacularly. The watch did not save him. It only sharpened the irony.

    Despite owning a dozen coveted Swiss watches, his YouTube channel limps along with fewer than fifty subscribers. His voice is saturated with despair—thick, damp, unventilated. Viewers last about five seconds before clicking away, not because the watch isn’t beautiful, but because the misery is suffocating. The sadness radiates through the screen. You can almost smell the robe. No lume shot can redeem a tone that sounds like it’s been steeped overnight in self-loathing.

    The uncomfortable truth is that every watch obsessive carries a trace of the Watch Miserabilist within. It’s the voice of guilt and nihilism that wants to poison enjoyment, to insist that pleasure is illegitimate, that beauty must be justified, that desire is suspect. This voice must be acknowledged—but never indulged. You laugh at it. You recognize it. You keep it at arm’s length. Because once coddled, it metastasizes. The Watch Miserabilist is not wisdom. It is a disease, and left unchecked, it will devour every ounce of joy in its path.

  • The Greatest Flex Is Self-Denial

    The Greatest Flex Is Self-Denial

    In case anyone has missed it, Bruce Springsteen is seventy-five years old and still looks like he could outrun most men half his age while singing at full volume. He has the same chiseled body that powered “Born to Run” during my junior year—the song that injected an entire generation with adolescent adrenaline and the belief that escape was always one chorus away. The mystery is not that Springsteen is still performing. The mystery is how he’s performing while appearing carved out of disciplined granite.

    The answer, it turns out, is brutal in its simplicity. Springsteen eats one meal a day. That’s it. No grazing. No late-night negotiations with the pantry. His self-control has apparently spread, too. Chris Martin of Coldplay—another famous man who could afford to eat like a Roman emperor—has sworn off dinner entirely. I find all of this deeply unsettling, not because it’s unhealthy or extreme, but because it’s practiced by people who could easily afford indulgence as a full-time lifestyle.

    That’s the real flex. Not yachts. Not villas. Not decadent excess. The most impressive display of power available to the wealthy is self-denial. These men don’t lack access. They lack excuses. Their discipline quietly points an accusatory finger at the rest of us, and unfortunately, that finger lands squarely on my plate.

    If I’m being honest—and honesty is the whole problem here—I’m indulgent when it comes to food. Portions creep. Snacks multiply. I carry about twenty pounds that no amount of kettlebells or Schwinn Airdyne heroics can fully offset. Springsteen himself has said that fitness is ninety percent diet, and I resent him for being right. You can’t out-train a refrigerator you keep reopening out of habit.

    So tonight, instead of reaching for another snack, I may watch the latest Bruce Springsteen documentary for moral reinforcement. The man who once soundtracked youthful restlessness may now be offering something rarer: a model of restraint with dignity intact. Cheers to Bruce Springsteen—patron saint of senior citizens who refuse to let dinner win.

  • The Watch Relapse Spectacle

    The Watch Relapse Spectacle

    Watch addicts eventually reach a terminal stage of torment: the moment when the hobby that once delivered pleasure produces only agitation. The rotation feels oppressive. The collection feels accusatory. At this point, the addict does what desperate cultures have always done—he invents a ritual.

    Surveying the landscape for deliverance, one inevitably recalls the 2014 viral fever dream known as the Ice Bucket Challenge. The watch world demands its own purgative spectacle. Enter the One-Watch Challenge.

    The ritual is simple and public. A ten-minute YouTube video is required. The setting must be tasteful—backyard at golden hour or living room with flattering light. Friends gather. Straws are drawn. Every watch in the collection is claimed except the one the addict secretly hopes will remain. The winners strap on their spoils, grinning like looters at the fall of a city. The subject is then lifted into the air, victorious yet emptied, holding aloft his single remaining watch.

    He is reborn. He is no longer a collector. He is a Oner—a new creature who has renounced rotation days for the austere monogamy of one watch, worn for the rest of his natural life. He speaks of clarity. He speaks of peace. He uploads the video and waits for absolution.

    Naturally, the movement does not end there.

    A counter-genre soon emerges: the Relapser. These videos document former Oners discovered months later, sprawled on their carpets amid a shameful abundance of watches. Boxes are open. Straps are tangled. The men appear undone—glassy-eyed, infantile, muttering references to limited editions and “just one more.” The videos are initially consumed as comedy, shared with a wink and a laugh.

    Over time, the laughter fades.

    The genre acquires a formal name: the Watch Relapse Spectacle—the inevitable counter-ritual in which renunciation collapses into excess. What began as entertainment hardens into parable. For the first time, the wider public glimpses the pathology beneath the polish. The madness is no longer charming. It is instructive.

  • Why Giving a Watch Away Hurts Less Than Selling It

    Why Giving a Watch Away Hurts Less Than Selling It

    The true watch obsessive learns, sooner or later, that giving a watch away hurts far less than selling one—especially when the sale takes place on eBay, under fluorescent lighting, at the mercy of low-ball bidders with no evident shame. Money changes hands, but dignity does not.

    When a watch is given to a friend, there is grief, yes, but it is clean grief. The obsessive knows where the watch has gone. It has not disappeared into the void. It has been adopted. The new owner will wind it, strap it on, and—most importantly—understand it. The watch now lives in a reliable home. The separation has narrative continuity.

    Selling a watch to a stranger is something else entirely. The watch vanishes into anonymity, shipped off like a misfit toy condemned to an unloving Christmas morning. One imagines it being worn carelessly, scratched against countertops, left overnight in damp gym lockers, its history erased by someone who never asked to hear it. Worse still is the insult of the low bid, as if the watch’s years of loyal service have been publicly appraised and found wanting.

    This is why giving a watch away produces a strange, paradoxical pleasure. It feels like an act of stewardship rather than loss. Selling, by contrast, curdles the stomach. It tastes like bile. The obsessive may need the money, but the transaction leaves a moral residue that no PayPal balance can cleanse.

    This condition is known as Custodial Consolation: the relief that comes not from letting go, but from knowing exactly where the thing has gone. The obsessive is comforted by certainty. The watch is not lost—it is merely relocated, where it will be understood, protected, and occasionally admired, which is all it ever really wanted.

  • The Exit Watch That Blew the Exit

    The Exit Watch That Blew the Exit

    There comes a moment in every watch influencer’s career when he announces, with ceremonial gravity, that he has found his Exit Watch. This watch, he assures his audience, is different. It stands apart from the rest of the collection not merely in design, but in destiny. It promises completion. Closure. A sense that the long pilgrimage through steel and lume has reached its ordained end.

    The watch is so magnificent that it demands narrative consequences. The influencer hints at “big changes.” New content. A reimagined channel. Perhaps fewer uploads, perhaps deeper reflections. The implication is clear: the Exit Watch has not merely ended a collecting phase—it has matured the man.

    Then the watch arrives.

    It is flawless. Better than expected. The case sings. The dial radiates authority. The bracelet feels engineered by monks. The unboxing video trembles with reverence. For approximately forty-eight hours, the influencer experiences peace.

    Then something goes wrong.

    The watch does not quiet desire. It amplifies it. Instead of satiation, there is hunger—acute, feral, unprecedented. The Exit Watch behaves less like a sedative and more like a stimulant. New watches begin to haunt his thoughts. He starts browsing late at night. He rationalizes. He reopens tabs he swore were closed forever. The collection multiplies wildly, untethered from logic or restraint.

    Within months, the spiral is complete. The influencer is on the brink of losing his sanity, his marriage, and his house—saved only by a merciful uncle who wires sixty thousand dollars to send him to a rehab facility in the Utah desert. There, stripped of his collection, he learns to play the flute, hunt his own food, and live without Wi-Fi. He emerges thinner, quieter, and reconciled to a solitary G-Shock Frogman, worn not for pleasure but for survival.

    This is Exit Watch Reversal: the affliction in which a watch intended to conclude a collecting arc instead detonates it. The subject does not experience closure, but acceleration—as though the watch has unlocked a previously dormant appetite and handed it the keys.

  • Applause Collapse and the Perils of a “New Direction”

    Applause Collapse and the Perils of a “New Direction”

    There comes a moment in every watch influencer’s career when he believes—sincerely, even nobly—that his audience is ready to applaud his growth. He has done the hard work. He has pared down. He has purified. Five watches remain, all on straps, each presented as evidence of restraint and moral clarity. The comments are approving. The tone is reverent. He is, at last, becoming free.

    Naturally, this serenity bores him.

    So he shakes things up. Three new watches enter the fold. The collection now stands at eight—four on straps, four on bracelets—symmetry restored, balance achieved. He announces a “new direction.” He films a YouTube video about his “evolving philosophy.” He speaks earnestly of equilibrium, versatility, and personal growth. The framing is careful. The lighting is soft. The music is tasteful. He waits for the applause.

    It does not come.

    Instead, the comment section turns cold. The audience, once indulgent, becomes prosecutorial. I thought you were healing. This feels like relapse. You were doing so well at five. The verdict is unanimous and devastating: the addiction has returned. What’s worse is not the criticism itself, but its accuracy. The influencer feels it immediately, like a clean punch to the ribs. The comments articulate the doubt he was trying not to hear.

    Shame sets in. He replays the video and cringes at his own rhetoric. “Quest for balance” now sounds like a euphemism. The watches feel heavier on the wrist. Within weeks, he detonates the entire enterprise. Seven watches are given away. One remains, kept on a strap, stripped of pleasure and worn more as a reminder than an object of joy. He deletes his YouTube channel. He nukes Instagram. He earns a kettlebell certification. He eats clean. He helps clients. He speaks of social media with quiet contempt, like someone describing a former addiction he has sworn never to touch again.

    This is Applause Collapse: the moment an influencer unveils a carefully staged transformation, expecting affirmation, only to encounter moral disappointment so severe that disappearance feels like the only honest response. It is not the loss of praise that breaks him. It is the realization that the crowd was not watching his journey—they were auditing his compliance.

  • Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and the Wounded Male Ego

    Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and the Wounded Male Ego

    I resisted watching Frankenstein. I assumed it would be a lavish, overcooked gothic reheating of Frankenstein—all velvet drapes, thunderclaps, and prestige posturing. I was wrong. It is polished and operatic, yes, but beneath the lacquer there’s an unexpectedly tender heart beating, unevenly, like something newly stitched together and afraid it might be noticed.

    Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein as a man permanently damaged by a tyrannical, grandiose father. This Victor doesn’t merely want to conquer death; he wants to correct his own humiliation. Science becomes his altar, godhood his compensation. In trying to escape the cruelty that shaped him, he replicates it with terrifying fidelity. The film is unsparing on this point: the wounded male ego, when armed with intellect and ambition, is a demolition device.

    The monster—created from hanged bodies and unholy obsession—is played by Jacob Elordi with startling delicacy. Six-foot-five and impossibly graceful, Elordi gives us not a brute but a melancholic waif, a creature whose sadness feels tuned to a minor key. There’s something unmistakably early-’80s indie about him—an echo of Julian Cope or the funereal romance of Echo & the Bunnymen and The Cure. He looks like he could step up to a microphone and confess his alienation in verse. Elordi doesn’t lean into that fantasy, but he doesn’t need to. His restraint is what breaks you.

    That this film avoids camp, self-indulgence, and parody is no small feat. At over two and a half hours, with a plot that is essentially elemental, the pacing remains assured. Del Toro trusts atmosphere, performance, and thematic coherence. The conviction is clear: a man tries to elevate himself into a god and leaves a trail of devastation, while the being he creates is condemned to a far crueler fate—immortality without belonging.

    When the credits rolled, I could almost hear Ian McCulloch singing “The Disease.” The association felt right. Elordi’s monster carries that same expression: beautiful, doomed, and painfully aware that he will outlive his wounds without ever outgrowing them.

  • Writing the Book That No One Can Ignore

    Writing the Book That No One Can Ignore

    You don’t sit down to write a book the world wants to read by accident. At least, it feels like an act of will. You force yourself into the chair. You produce sentences. You assemble a manuscript that lodges itself in people’s heads, agitates their assumptions, rearranges their furniture. The book exerts power—but not the vulgar kind. You’re not trying to dominate anyone. You’re simply telling the truth so cleanly, so directly, that looking away becomes impossible. Your ideas don’t shout. They persist. They refuse to be ignored.

    This kind of book is not a lecture, a scolding, or a manifesto. It doesn’t traffic in nihilism, misanthropy, or fashionable despair. It doesn’t prescribe easy solutions or luxuriate in outrage. Instead, it diagnoses. And a real diagnosis cuts both ways: it is unsparing about the human predicament while still pointing—quietly but unmistakably—toward an exit. Not optimism. Orientation.

    The book earns its authority by puncturing the clichés we treat as wisdom. It exposes the mass hallucinations surrounding happiness, success, fulfillment—all the shiny quests we pursue with religious devotion and predictable disappointment. But it does this without contempt. The tone isn’t superior; it’s exact. The pleasure of reading comes from recognition, not humiliation. You feel seen, not scolded.

    The sentences do the heavy lifting. They are short, fearless, and unembarrassed by clarity. There is no ornamental fog, no academic hedging, no decorative complexity masquerading as depth. Flowery prose and pretentious diction are weeds on a neglected lawn: they obscure what matters. This language is honed, not arid. It glints. Each sentence lands cleanly and moves on.

    If a curmudgeonly edge appears, it’s a seasoning, not the main course. A book powered by pure crankiness curdles into nihilism—and nihilism is dull. It flattens stakes, erases texture, and mistakes exhaustion for insight. This book avoids that trap. It remains alive to nuance, contradiction, and consequence.

    Because the book is so bracingly clear, other writers feel it immediately. Not admiration first—envy. The good kind. The Beatles hearing Pet Sounds and realizing the bar has been raised. The book doesn’t just succeed; it rearranges the landscape.

    What ultimately distinguishes it isn’t the subject matter but the voice. To understand that voice, Emmanuel Carrère’s Kingdom is instructive. Carrère contrasts the florid ambition of Luke—his PR-friendly, overworked prose—with the sayings of Jesus, which arrive stripped, terse, and destabilizing. Jesus’ words feel both utterly familiar and entirely unprecedented. Carrère calls this a linguistic hapax legomenon: a way of speaking so singular that it leaves no doubt a real person once spoke this way.

    That is the essence of a world-changing book. Its language has no template. It cannot be reverse-engineered or taught. It doesn’t sound like anything else. It lands in the reader’s mind with a depth that imitation can’t reach. At that point, the writer looks less like a craftsman and more like an oracle—someone through whom something passes.

    Which brings us back to will. Maybe writing such a book isn’t an act of will at all. Maybe the writer is chosen—by temperament, by obsession, by affliction—to speak this way. Either way, the true desire isn’t fame or money or validation. It’s to produce language with the force of a hapax legomenon: words that could only be said once, and yet echo forever.

    That, finally, is its own reward.