Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Man Who Would Be Watch

    The Man Who Would Be Watch

    For over ten years, I had a YouTube channel mostly dedicated to my tormented relationship with watches. If you wanted to watch a man losing his mind as he travailed inside the fever swamp of watch addiction, you had come to the right place. Perhaps the algorithms encouraged me to become even crazier for the sake of audience capture. Or perhaps I didn’t need the algorithms. I was doing an excellent job of becoming unhinged by my watch obsession all by myself. Just pause on that for a moment. I didn’t need the algorithms to go crazy. I had done it the natural way. Give me a round of applause.

    But like all good things, that particular kind of crazy came to an end. As I entered my sixties, my bandwidth for dealing with that kind of stress diminished, and new priorities took its place: staying healthy, planning for retirement, and recognizing that I had very little time left to worry about rotating watches on my wrist. As a result, my watch obsession lost much of its intensity. My relationship with watches is vastly different today from what it was even five years ago.

    How much I’ve changed became apparent yesterday when I was cleaning out my office at work. I found a notebook from several years ago in which I had written dozens of what were supposed to be my Master Lists of the Ultimate Watch Collection. In my attempt to arrive at a definitive Master List, I had revised it over and over. Some lists contained only five premium watches. Others had a dozen. Still others fell somewhere in between. I recognized the frenzied handwriting of a man trying to save himself from drowning in quicksand.

    When I opened the notebook and examined those lists, I was overcome with pain. I could see a man dealing with enormous anxiety, using his watch obsession as a diversion from confronting its real causes. Of course, the real causes of anxiety could never have been about watches or the Great Watch Questions: Is my Holy Grail a Tudor, an Omega, or a Grand Seiko? The true causes surely had more to do with love, connection, and mortality.

    But the man who made those lists was oblivious to that fact. He believed that arriving at the Ultimate Master Watch List would somehow bring him peace. He was clearly delusional.

    As I studied those lists, I saw a man struggling with unresolved personal torment. Reading them was painful because they gave me a window into someone I barely recognized. At the same time, I did recognize him, but only from a great distance.

    I was reminded of the terrible scene in The Man Who Would Be King when Peachy Carnehan, played by Michael Caine, holds the crowned head of Daniel Dravot, played by Sean Connery. The crowned head was the end result of a man’s misguided quest to become a god.

    My story was the same but slightly different. In the movie version of my past life, there was no crowned head. Instead, there was a severed forearm with an eight-inch wrist adorned with a luxury timepiece. I was the star of a movie titled The Man Who Would Be Watch.

    Because I’m no longer that man, my YouTube channel has changed. I talk more about the challenges of being in my sixties, retirement, and my misalignment with a world I barely recognize. By charting the course of my actual life, I am violating the principles of social media branding. I’ve deviated from my previous watch obsession, which means I’ve abandoned what business strategists call my content pillars and content buckets.

    A business strategist would shake his finger at me and say, “Do not abandon those content pillars and content buckets. Those are the tools that give audiences recognizable themes, comfort, and familiarity. Those are the tools that keep your audience coming back for more.”

    I would like to offer that business consultant a rebuttal.

    First, I’m all for content pillars and content buckets. I chronicled my watch addiction with honesty and due diligence, but the addiction was like a riverboat on a fast-moving river. It was bound to slow down and enter a tributary. In my case, the tributary was this small matter of age and mortality. I can’t pretend that the riverboat is still at the beginning of its journey. It’s nearing the end. No amount of business strategy, or tossing around terms like content pillars and content buckets, is going to stop that.

    My YouTube channel was always about chronicling my obsessions. If those obsessions were reconfigured by life events beyond my control, such as growing older, then the moral thing to do was to comment on those changes. In that regard, I’ve done nothing to abandon my channel’s mission or brand. I’ve stayed true to it.

    For many years, I was The Man Who Would Be Watch. But now I’m more like Peachy Carnehan. I’m the storyteller. I may be broken and half-crazed, but at least I’m still alive.

    What good is maintaining your content pillars and content buckets if you’re no longer around to deliver them?

  • The Coffee Purists Will Never Forgive Me

    The Coffee Purists Will Never Forgive Me

    Following the orthodox doctrine of coffee enthusiasts, I had been spending about a dollar an ounce for organic whole-bean coffee and grinding it in a burr grinder. The coffee was very good, but my wife and I wondered if using the grinder was worth the mess and hassle. The gadget collects grounds underneath, which invariably get everywhere. You find coffee grounds all over the counter. You take a wet washcloth to clean them up, and it becomes covered with giant dark brown streaks. You feel like an environmental worker cleaning up an oil spill. The work is constant. The grounds are insidious. They get everywhere.

    There is also the matter of limited counter space. The burr grinder is big and establishes its presence among the coffee, protein powder, creatine, and oatmeal containers. Something had to give.

    So my wife and I decided to break with the coffee purists and conduct an experiment. We put the burr grinder in the garage and decided to try less expensive pre-ground coffee. We started with Peet’s ground dark roast at 72 cents an ounce. It was just as good as the whole-bean coffee at about 75% of the cost. Maxwell House Smooth Bold, at the same price as Peet’s, was also very good. Tomorrow we’ll try Yuban Dark Roast Bold at 55 cents an ounce. I’ve had it before, and I’m confident it will meet our standards. The day after that, we’ll try the cheapest of the bunch, Folgers Black Silk, at 44 cents an ounce. I’ve had this before, too, and I’m confident it will be very good.

    The experiment has produced some surprises. For one, the budget coffee Maxwell House Smooth Bold costs the same as Peet’s. On principle, Maxwell House should lose its spot in the rotation unless I can find it cheaper. I’m drinking it now as I write this, and it is very good.

    I’m also surprised that I detect no difference between pre-ground and whole-bean coffee. I thought there was a significant difference a few years ago. What happened to me? I wonder how much confirmation bias makes people believe freshly ground whole-bean coffee tastes better than pre-ground. Or perhaps another form of confirmation bias is at work: I love the clean kitchen countertop and want to love the pre-ground budget coffee, so I will myself to like it. I doubt that’s the case. I love coffee, and if I found it weak, acidic, or off-tasting, I would reject it and happily bring back the burr grinder.

    My wife is happy with the new arrangement. So is one of my teenage daughters, who constantly fretted over the messy coffee grounds from the burr grinder.

    I’m 99% certain that, moving forward, our morning ritual will be grinder-free, and those whole-bean coffees costing over a dollar an ounce will be replaced with varieties costing half as much. The coffee purists will give us a censorious glare, but our kitchen countertop gleams bright and clean.

  • Consumerism Dies Before You Do

    Consumerism Dies Before You Do

    As you get older, the pangs of consumerism recede until you reach a state of materialistic ennui. Many of the things that once possessed your imagination lose their potency and luster. Stripped of their power, they appear like a heap of gray ash. Their very existence seems to mock the idea of consumerism itself. A false religion, you now call it. But it was a very real religion in your youth, when certain consumer goods had the power to transform you into the kind of person you aspired to be.

    But all of that is gone now. You notice that the objects you once valued are dead to you. You may drive past a car that in your youth overwhelmed you with frisson and longing, but now it has all the emotional power of reaching into the back of your pantry and finding a lonely, slightly moldy Idaho potato.

    Driving to my daughters’ high school yesterday afternoon to pick them up, I stopped at a red light beside a white BMW coupe with impossibly large wheels adorned with sport spokes. The wheels alone probably cost close to ten grand. I felt nothing. This complete lack of emotional connection to the BMW made me think of the 90s, when a BMW was a talisman of masculinity, power, and success. Now I regarded it the way I would a small fly on my windshield, a mild visual cue requiring no response.

    The BMW made me think of the box containing four mechanical diver watches that sits near my desk. For the last year, I’ve opened the box only out of obligation, occasionally winding one of the watches to make sure it still works. Wearing one of these beautiful divers does nothing for me anymore. I don’t feel elevated in any way. I feel nothing. I have died to these watches. I have considered selling them or giving them away, but I’m content to leave them in the box as a reminder of who I once was. I am not that person anymore.

    I could not will myself to love those mechanical divers any more than I could will myself to love an eighty-thousand-dollar BMW. The signs are strong enough that I can definitively say I have entered a new realm: the condition of consumerist lassitude. I suppose I could tell you how liberating all this is, how I feel free from the idols that once possessed me, but that would suggest I have been blessed with joy. Such is not the case. This boredom with luxurious things is accompanied more by weariness and malaise.

    My state of languor reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague at the college over a decade ago. We were talking about happiness, and I remember exactly what I told him: “Happiness is not an abundance of things. It’s the absence of bullshit.” This remark strikes me as more true today than it did ten years ago. Nearly sixty-five, I am grateful that I have no dire health problems requiring me to visit clinics and endure the rigors and tedium of invasive tests. I have reached a new realm in which, every day I wake up relatively healthy and discover that I have lived to see another day, gratitude asserts itself so strongly that there is little room in my brain for materialistic idolatry.

    I woke up this morning, made coffee, sat at my computer, did some writing, and glowed with the anticipation that in a couple of hours I would enter my garage, turn on a podcast, and experience the bliss of an hour of kettlebells. No BMW or mechanical watch can do that for me. Those things no longer have the incandescence they once had. The infatuation is gone. I can’t say they have died. It’s the other way around. I have died. I am dead to those things. The more I cling to health and life as I enter life’s final chapters, the more I die to the status symbols that once captivated my imagination.

    This is not wisdom or virtue. It’s closer to bandwidth. I simply don’t have enough room in my brain to muster the emotional pageantry and hype over things that don’t contribute to my health and well-being. That I have died to fussy, high-maintenance luxury watches and sexy sports cars, and in their place desire more reliable things, makes me boring and practical. And that is a good thing. It brings me back to the words I shared with my colleague. Life is not about being surrounded by opulence. It’s about being unfettered by unnecessary complications. With so little time left, I find myself purging those complications with methodical ruthlessness. I am in a new landscape now, with new duties and obligations. Dying to luxury items was one of those obligations, and I didn’t die to these things by an act of will. It seems nature did it for me.

  • Pumping Iron Against the Dying Light

    Pumping Iron Against the Dying Light

    The desire to work out in the garage with weights, mostly kettlebells for the last two decades, has not abated as I close in on my sixty-fifth birthday. There is no voice inside me saying, “Someday you will hang up your leather workout gloves.” I embrace the workout grind with undying enthusiasm. I remember reading a bodybuilding magazine in the 70s and coming across a quote from a champion bodybuilder: “I’m going to keep training as long as God allows me to breathe.” I’m on the same page. Working out is not an option. It’s as essential as breathing.

    I have to assume that since my first workout in 1974, I’ve been getting a dopamine fix from these training sessions, resulting in stress relief. I have to assume working out is my way of managing anxiety and depression. I have to assume my workouts are addictive in their own right. If I miss a workout, I feel so ungrounded that I become unbearable to myself and others. This makes vacations a challenge. What’s supposed to be a time of stress relief becomes a stress bomb.

    Working out for an hour a day is not just about carving out an hour for exercise. It’s about creating an entire routine built around that hour. The feedings, the naps, the piano, the writing, the creative work, and the chores all revolve around the 10 a.m. workout.

    So the Happy Place, as people might call it, is not just the garage, where the alchemy of resistance and sweat takes place while a radio tuned to news talk hums in the background. It’s the entire daily routine.

    Essential to this routine, after the workout shower and feeding, is the nap. I am so spent after a workout that I demand sixty minutes flat on my back with noise-canceling headphones and one of my favorite podcasts before waking up and having my yogurt bowl. Without that nap, I would not be able to go on for the rest of the day. Something is taken away from me during that morning workout. Something is given back to me after that afternoon nap.

    I am more than a hopeless workout guy. I am a hopeless nostalgic workout guy. My heart is not just in the gym. It’s in an era. I’m talking about the 70s, the only bodybuilding age I connect with. In my mind, I am training and eating protein bars with Arnold, Draper, Zane, Mentzer, Oliva, Nubret, and others. I am tanning with the greats on Venice Beach and talking about preacher curls, donkey raises, and hack squats until the orange sun sets in the salmon sky. I am connected with others, the dream of eternal youth, and the Life Force.

    Man does not live on bread alone. He lives on myth. I find solace in entering a 70s portal where I am a well-preserved Adonis consuming protein bowls and nutritional shakes. I am reminded of one of John Cheever’s most famous short stories, “The Swimmer.” Aged and washed-up, the main character, Neddy Merrill, decides to swim a chain of swimming pools, which he imagines as the Lucinda River, to travel from a distant house to his home. He imagines himself as a pilgrim embarked on a quest to achieve mythic glory. But all his self-mythologizing distracts him from the brutal fact that his selfish and alcoholic ways have severed his ties with family and friends. He returns to a home that is boarded up and empty.

    Looking at this cautionary tale, I must remind myself that workouts are no panacea. My dependence on them and the routines that surround them can make me more self-absorbed than is healthy for me and my family. But in many ways, it’s too late to go back. When I started working out at thirteen and a few years later saw Arnold and other legends in the movie Pumping Iron, I crossed some invisible Rubicon from which there would be no return.

  • The Cringe That Defines You

    The Cringe That Defines You

    Cringe television refers to those comedies that bypass sentimentality altogether and go straight for the jugular by creating socially awkward situations–the equivalent of a social car crash–that are almost unbearable to watch. You squirm, gasp, cover your eyes, tell yourself you can’t believe what’s happening, and insist that you need to watch something less distressing. Yet you remain glued to the television, watching in spite of yourself. The Larry Sanders Show, the British and American versions of The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and You’re the Worst mercilessly floor the pedal, taking you to the golden nougat of cringe, that horrific center where fallen social graces, eviscerated decorum, spectacular embarrassment, and irrevocable humiliation achieve a ripeness and potency you never dreamed possible.

    We watch cringe television for complex reasons. There is the perverse enjoyment of it, which almost defies psychological analysis, except to acknowledge that we harbor a streak of cruelty that enjoys watching others lose their dignity. But there is also the survivor inside us who wants to learn from these humiliating spectacles so that we won’t follow in these hapless people’s footsteps and suffer their ostracism and disgrace.

    One lesson we learn from cringe television is that the more swollen our egos become, the more stupid and socially unaware we are likely to be. The more aggressively we assert our egotism in social situations, the more we alienate others, often without the slightest awareness that we’re being perceived as pompous, overbearing, bullying, obnoxious, and just plain boring.

    Offering an abundance of cringe is the reality show Below Deck in all its variations. My wife and I were recently watching the Down Under version when chef Ben Robinson decided he deserved to sleep in the more spacious guest quarters for one night to catch up on his sleep. The chief stew explicitly told him not to do so because the bed had been made with clean linens for guests arriving the next day. But Ben, having an inglorious hissy fit, marched into the luxurious guest quarters, messed up the bed, and refused to leave, even after his co-worker, second officer João Franco, urged him to get out.

    Ben Robinson is a talented, intelligent, well-read, articulate chef, but thanks to cringe television, those are not the qualities I will remember. I will remember a broken forty-five-year-old man selfishly violating every rule of decorum so he could indulge himself in the forbidden guest quarters. That episode taught me a painful lesson: A single moment of cringe can be so potent that it obliterates your finer qualities and reduces you to your lowest common denominator in the eyes of others. Whatever Ben does with the rest of his life, I will always see him throwing an infantile tantrum in the guest quarters, clinging to the sheets while João begs him to leave for the chief stew’s sake.

    Regardless of how generous I want to be toward Ben, I cannot erase the image of him behaving like a five-year-old. This is an example of the Reverse-Halo Effect, also known as the Horn Effect, in which one conspicuous negative action contaminates our overall judgment of a person, regardless of that person’s other admirable qualities.

    We all fear becoming victims of the Reverse-Halo Effect. Perhaps that’s one reason we watch cringe television: We hope to immunize ourselves against a similar fate.

    Because my own ego has gotten the better of me on more occasions than I care to count, I’m sure I’ve suffered from the Reverse-Halo Effect myself. I’m therefore in no position to judge Ben Robinson. Like him, I’ve dished up more cringe than is healthy for a lifetime.

    One potential source of cringe I’ve been imagining lately involves telling my co-workers that I’m retiring within a year and then changing my mind. The cat is already out of the bag. Everyone in my department knows I’m retiring. On several occasions, I’ve told colleagues that I’m hanging it up, only to have them interrupt me with, “I know. The word is out.” They’ve been treating me with the warmth and kindness people instinctively extend to someone approaching retirement. It’s a sentimental occasion, after all—the twilight of a career, a time for reflection and appreciation of the good years.

    But after twenty years of watching cringe television, I found myself entertaining a perverse thought: What if I changed my mind? What if, after announcing my retirement to everyone, perhaps even enjoying a retirement party, I decided I wasn’t ready to make the leap? I needed the money. I needed the work routine. I needed human interaction. I needed to be needed. God, how awkward it would be to show up at the fall department meeting the following year when everyone thought I was gone. I could imagine being about as welcome as a bride who wakes up on her wedding day with a boil in the center of her forehead.

    The good news is that I have no doubts about retiring. I will not show up like an unwanted boil next fall. I will be retired. But years of watching cringe television have instilled in me the crazed desire to imagine scenarios that would put me in socially awkward situations. This is surely a terrible use of my time. I would be better off concentrating on avoiding the very real moments of cringe that my egotism produces naturally, without distracting myself with imaginary disasters.

    Ben Robinson, I’m disappointed in you for selfishly messing up those bed sheets, but I can’t judge you. I’ve metaphorically shit the bed too many times in my life to count.

  • The Great Book I Don’t Want to Finish

    The Great Book I Don’t Want to Finish

    I bought the Audiobook American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. I’m several hours into it. This is such a well written book. It is fully realized. It is relevant to our age. It is full of depth and reflects arduous work by a talented author Kai Bird. He has written about an infamous grifter who provided a blueprint for other aspiring grifters in our post-truth, post-shame era. American Scoundrel is surely a book that helps us understand our current condition.

    But I’m having trouble getting through the book. I dread listening to it. Descending into the psyche of Roy Cohn is extremely toxic, abrasive and unbearable. The descent is unrelenting. There are no comic respites. The life of Roy Cohn is so predictably malevolent. He is such a bad actor. Combining this history with the news events of the day is overwhelming me.

    I have nine hours to go and honestly, I’m not sure I want to complete the journey, but I feel I have to. Finishing a book, in written or audio form, because of a sense of obligation is not a place I want to be in. But such are the decisions we make as readers and as part of an audience of performed books.

    I may delude myself and “take a pause” from the book and start listening to the Audiobook Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness by Lars Anderson. I haven’t watched sports in over a decade, but I usually enjoy sports biographies. They provide a pleasant diversion from the brutality of the real world.

    My aversion to Roy Cohn does not mean I’m not averse to reading about dark subjects. In fact, I am gulping with great pleasure the Kindle version of Evan Gershkovich’s memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land, which is about this journalist’s survival in a Russian prison. So there is hope for me. Reading about a Wall Street Journal writer learning how to co-exist with hardened Russian criminals is riveting. Descending into the diabolical mind of Roy Cohn is simply intolerable.

    So I’ve convinced myself to pause American Scoundrel. The problem isn’t that Kai Bird failed. In some sense, he succeeded all too well.

  • The Case for Boring Technology

    The Case for Boring Technology

    As I got older, I began to see consumer products as portals to a world I can describe only as cozy. By cozy, I mean products that give me functionality, tactile pleasure, familiarity, reliability, and control. I increasingly prefer them to products that may be more spectacular and alluring but are prone to falter or persist in feeling alien.

    In the living room, I have a $1,500 4K LG television. Despite its spectacular picture and rich sound, I despise using it. The interface is schizophrenic. One second I’m scrolling through tiles; the next, the television inexplicably switches to an annoying “magic pointer.” It’s not magic. It’s crappy. No one asked for it. It shows up like a smelly uncle at your doorstep. It adds nothing but confusion. The interface also jumps rows without prompting and sometimes kicks me out of the home screen altogether. The LG is decidedly not cozy. It’s so aggravating that I’m buying a Roku device simply to override the interface.

    Speaking of Roku, I own a budget $200 Roku TV in the bedroom. Its picture can’t compete with the LG’s, but using it is effortless. It is direct, simple, and reliable. It does what I ask it to do and then leaves me alone. That is cozy.

    For radios, I use the Tecsun PL-660 in the kitchen because I can play it while it’s plugged into the wall without electrical interference. When my hands are wet from washing dishes, I don’t want to disconnect and reconnect a power cord every time I turn on the radio. For a while, I used the richer-sounding Tecsun PL-880 and PL-990. Their speakers were superior, but using them wasn’t cozy. I was constantly worried about getting the USB plug wet and shorting the radio. Worry is the enemy of cozy. So I returned to the thinner-sounding PL-660. On balance, its dependable performance makes it the cozy choice.

    For shopping, I prefer Trader Joe’s. It is small. Walking from one end to the other isn’t an expedition; it feels like walking from my kitchen to my bedroom. I know the employees. When I’m finished shopping, I walk to the checkout aisle and interact with an actual human being. That is cozy.

    What isn’t cozy is walking into a giant chain supermarket or, worse, Costco, where the building is the size of a football stadium and almost as loud. Often there is no human to check you out. Instead, a scanner admonishes you for failing to place your groceries in the designated area. Sometimes six-foot beeping robots cruise the aisles scanning shelves and managing inventory. This isn’t cozy. It is literally alienating.

    I would never buy a refrigerator with a built-in ice maker because those things are notorious sources of breakdowns and headaches. There is nothing cozy about wondering which complicated mechanism inside your refrigerator will fail next. Give me the basic Whirlpool top-freezer refrigerator recommended by an appliance mechanic. In many cases, the more basic the machine, the cozier it becomes.

    I could continue through the entire house and garage: cars, watches, computers, fans, vacuum cleaners, toaster ovens, microwaves, tabletop ice makers, electric toothbrushes, double-edged razors. Again and again, I choose reliability over flash. Predictable functionality creates a cozy feeling that expensive, nerve-wracking gadgets often destroy with their hiccups, fussy fits, unnecessary features, and breakdowns.

    As I consider this obsession with coziness, however, I have to remind myself that life’s default setting is the opposite of cozy. Life is uncertainty and conflict. The cozy environments I construct with consumer products are, at best, small consolations against a world that can overwhelm me with its unpredictability. Coziness is the exception, not the rule.

    Sociologist Anthony Giddens would give my quest another name: ontological security, a fundamental sense of continuity, order, and trust in one’s world. Familiar routines and dependable objects help sustain that feeling. My cozy products create miniature islands of ontological security within a life whose default condition remains uncertainty and conflict.

    Let me be clear, however. I am not a Cozy Purist. I know this because perhaps the coziest appliance ever made is one I no longer use: the vintage swan-neck coffee percolator. You can still find them on eBay. The old models with American-made heating elements seem capable of surviving several human generations. Perhaps the most beloved is the GE Immersible, though Farberware, Universal, and Sunbeam made wonderful ones as well. Few appliances are cozier. A percolator makes a soft, rhythmic burbling as heated water rises through the stem and splashes against the glass dome. The sound is mechanical but gentle, as reassuring as rain tapping against a window.

    I enjoyed the percolator’s cozy ritual for several years until I committed the fatal mistake of conducting a taste test. I compared percolated coffee with slow-drip coffee. The slow-drip coffee was far better: richer, more complex, less bitter. It wasn’t close.

    So now I use a modern slow-drip coffee maker. It may last six years. It may last six months. In that respect, it isn’t cozy at all. But the coffee tastes better. I may be a creature who craves cozy comforts, but I have my limits.

  • You Can’t Take the 403(b) With You

    You Can’t Take the 403(b) With You

    Jean Chatzky is concerned about retired money hoarders, people who have amassed a considerable sum and are terrified of watching it dwindle. They have spent decades baking a magnificent chocolate cake. Why eat it when it looks so beautiful sitting untouched in the windowsill?

    But this is folly. The money was saved for a reason: to enjoy life, fulfill bucket lists, and eventually circulate back into the economy. Citing the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study in her essay “Americans Aren’t Spending Their Retirement Savings,” Chatzky identifies a “retirement consumption gap”: many retirees spend considerably less than they could while remaining financially secure for the rest of their lives. She puts the gap at about 8 percent for middle-income retirees and as high as 53 percent for the wealthy. The result is an enormous reservoir of money sitting in retirement accounts rather than being used by the people who spent their lives accumulating it.

    This reluctance to spend isn’t merely bad for the economy. It can be bad for the spirit. Chatzky argues that retirees may be better off spending more of their assets in exchange for a higher quality of life. The goal, after all, was never to die with the largest possible account balance. The money was supposed to finance the life.

    Her argument is persuasive, but it doesn’t fully address one deep psychological reason for hoarding money: a large portfolio can sustain the fantasy that we aren’t going to die. The money becomes a chimera of immortality. It whispers, “Look how big I am. As long as I remain intact, I will protect you. But let my numbers dwindle, and perhaps your remaining years will dwindle with them.”

    This condition has a name: Symbolic Immortality. Accumulated wealth becomes something that psychologically transcends mortality, and the retiree begins treating the endurance of the portfolio as evidence for the endurance of the self. More broadly, symbolic immortality appears whenever we invest an object, achievement, institution, or legacy with the hope that some representation of us will survive our biological death. Ernest Becker’s work and later Terror Management Theory explore this human impulse. We live through our children, our art and writing, our careers, buildings bearing our names, and, of course, our money. We dignify these things with grand words such as “legacy,” but lurking underneath the grandeur is something more primitive: we are terrified of disappearing.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with leaving something behind. Children, books, charitable gifts, institutions, and inheritances can extend our influence beyond our lifetimes. The trouble begins when the symbol stops serving life and life begins serving the symbol. The portfolio that was supposed to provide freedom becomes something its owner must protect. The chocolate cake was baked to be eaten, but eating it now feels like destroying it.

    That is why we should take Chatzky’s warning seriously. A large retirement balance can represent prudence and security, but hoarding money merely because spending it makes mortality feel more real is something else entirely. At that point, preserving the money has become more important than living the life the money was accumulated to support.

    Eat the cake.

  • Spite Is My New Retirement Plan

    Spite Is My New Retirement Plan

    I called my financial rep, Shawn, to ask about my investments and make sure my wife was listed as the beneficiary. Inevitably, the conversation drifted toward my anxieties about imminent retirement. I told him I had discovered a new and somewhat dubious incentive to stay alive: I wanted to collect my monthly CalSTRS checks for as long as humanly possible. I had even turned the arrangement into an imaginary game show called Beat the Actuary.

    Shawn laughed. “No doubt about it. CalSTRS wants you to die. The sooner, the better.”

    “I knew it!” I shouted with gleeful vindication.

    Then Shawn said something I found enormously flattering. “You know, you’re the first person who’s ever conceived of retirement this way.”

    “Because I’m a college professor,” I said. “I’m paid to overthink.”

    “I like it,” he said. “It makes me look at retirement in a whole new light.”

    “Damn right,” I said, my chest swollen with pride. “I’m going to live just to spite CalSTRS, and by God, I’m going to win.”

    Let us be clear, then. Society pays homage to the sanctity of human life, but look unflinchingly at the actuarial machinery inside bureaucracies such as CalSTRS and Kaiser Permanente and you encounter a colder reality: financially, the books often balance better when people die sooner rather than later. So if you want to retire and beat the system, practice Adversarial Gamification. Turn the bureaucracy into a competition by inventing an opponent, establishing the stakes, and keeping score. Retirement becomes Beat the Actuary, and longevity becomes the scoreboard. Every birthday is another round won. Every pension check is another small defeat for the actuarial tables.

    So stick to your Mediterranean diet. Keep doing your cardio. Build your muscle. Maintain your sterling bloodwork. If discipline, good sense, and the desire for excellent health aren’t enough to keep you on the righteous path, try spite.

    Sometimes you need an enemy.

  • Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    When you retire, you may imagine the trajectory of your final chapters in Hollywood terms because Hollywood has spent your entire life telling you what life is supposed to look like, regardless of how little its stories resemble reality. You may picture yourself as one of the endearing geriatrics in Cocoon, blissfully swimming with friends in a pool that functions less as a swimming pool than as the Fountain of Youth. Hollywood has been selling you fantasies all your life. Eventually, those fantasies seep inside you and become your own.

    It is therefore imperative to understand the kinds of stories Hollywood tells. Hollywood essentially gives us two: the Centripetal Story and the Centrifugal Story. When I explain these narratives to my students, I draw two diagrams on the board.

    The centripetal diagram consists of circles moving inward, becoming progressively smaller. One arrow points toward the center. I call this Circle A. The centrifugal diagram consists of circles moving outward, becoming progressively larger. One arrow points away from the center. I call this Circle B.

    Without explaining what the circles mean, I ask my students to raise their hands if they want their lives to resemble Circle A or Circle B. The overwhelming majority choose Circle B.

    Hollywood has taught them well.

    The Centrifugal Story dominates Hollywood because it offers what audiences want: transformation, expansion, heroism, and redemption. With notable exceptions, Hollywood has little appetite for the Centripetal Story.

    To explain the difference, I begin with a movie Hollywood rarely makes anymore: Citizen Kane. It is not a traditional Hollywood movie because the protagonist is rotten at the beginning and proceeds to rot more thoroughly. My college fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez called this process centripetal development. The character does not fundamentally change; he becomes an increasingly concentrated version of what he already is. Charles Foster Kane begins as an egotistical, controlling man hungry for love and recognition. Wealth and power magnify these qualities until they consume his relationships and leave him isolated. Kane does not become someone else. He becomes more completely Kane.

    American moviegoers generally don’t want to watch a character rot. They want transformation and redemption. They want the Centrifugal Story. Casablanca provides the classic example. Rick Blaine begins emotionally closed, cynical, and committed to self-protection: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Unlike Kane, whose defects become increasingly concentrated, Rick moves outward from the imprisoned self toward other people, moral responsibility, and sacrifice. His love for Ilsa initially tempts him to retreat further into private desire, but in the end he relinquishes her so she can leave with Victor Laszlo and contribute to something larger than any of them. Rick becomes less enclosed by the ego.

    Rick has undergone the classic Hollywood character arc. His old life is finished, and he enters a new world as a new man. Hollywood did not invent this narrative. It inherited it from the conversion story, most famously Augustine’s Confessions. Meghan O’Gieblyn calls this narrative structure the Autobiography: thoughtful reflection on a former life followed by a new life vastly superior to the old one. The structure is seductively tidy. You were lost. Then you were found. The movement is linear. There is no returning because you are dead to the person you once were. Revelation has compelled you to let go of your wastrel existence.

    The problem, O’Gieblyn observes, is that “You cannot understand the meaning of your life while you are still living it.” The conversion narrative solves this problem by allowing you to die without actually dying. Once dead to the old life, you can stand outside it, interrogate it, and contrast that decrepit existence with the person you have become. As O’Gieblyn writes, “Augustine is the father of the genre because he is the one who discovered the crucial loophole: die, then go on living.” Renounce the old life, be born again, and you acquire a second life from which to narrate the first.

    The conversion narrative is also the Hollywood narrative, and if you’re retiring, as I am, you want your final chapters to resemble that unmistakable Hollywood circle: centrifugal, with the arrow pointing outward.

    But after struggling with addiction, recovery, and relapse, O’Gieblyn finds this narrative as hollow as it is seductive. She fought like hell to beat her addictions and make her life “a perfect dovetail of conversion and deconversion narratives.” She wanted a trajectory as tidy as Augustine’s. Life refused to cooperate. She fears that instead of moving confidently outward, she may be traveling in circles. “My life has lost its arc,” she writes, “and I fear that it’s become less a narrative than one of those demented children’s songs that goes around in circles.”

    Yet O’Gieblyn is no nihilist. She still burns for understanding. She still feels compelled to write autobiography as a way of making sense of her failures and triumphs. She still hopes to find some form of wholeness within her contradictions.

    Perhaps those contradictions should not discourage her. Perhaps Augustine’s narrative is simply too neatly ordered to be true. Perhaps children crave cozy narratives while adults learn to tolerate the real stuff, even when the real stuff refuses to provide a feel-good ending.

    Dara Horn explores this problem in her provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Jewish literature couldn’t care less about my centripetal and centrifugal circles. Life is too unruly for either trajectory. It is a mishmash of paths. Horn considers our hunger for satisfying endings after a reader complained 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 want stories to gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We want endings that reassure us that the universe is fundamentally coherent, that every life can finally be rendered as Circle A or Circle B.

    Horn is suspicious of this craving.

    Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolution owes much to Christianity. 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, is often more willing to refuse closure. The Hebrew Bible ends 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 enormous redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it asks us to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it teaches us 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. I wonder whether remaining faithful amid the madness resembles the kind of attention Simone Weil asks us to cultivate as we approach our problems with calm, patience, and perhaps even faith.

    Perhaps that is the more mature vision. Perhaps the Augustinian character arc can infantilize us when we mistake it for a description of how life actually works. Hero stories easily become propaganda because they give us the emotional resolution we crave, whether or not reality warrants it.

    Hollywood has little incentive to tell us otherwise. It traffics in grand mythologies designed to activate our deepest cravings. Consider the 1985 movie Cocoon. It offers a saccharine myth of centrifugal time in which old age becomes an opportunity for expansion rather than contraction. Its elderly characters escape physical decline, rediscover vitality, romance, friendship, and adventure, and ultimately transcend mortality itself by leaving Earth with aliens. Instead of time narrowing their lives toward death, time opens outward toward limitless possibility. Hollywood takes aging, one of life’s great experiences of diminishment, and transforms it into liberation.

    The Centrifugal Story is alive and well.

    The trouble is that it may be more myth than life.