Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Problem with Becoming a Better Person

    The Problem with Becoming a Better Person

    In her memoir Will and Attention, Meghan O’Gieblyn reminds us that exhortations to listen more, engage more fully with the world, and pay closer attention to what is happening around us are easier said than done. Part of the struggle comes from the tension between the voices inside our heads and the voices in the outside world. When the internal voices become loud enough, they drown out everything else, making genuine attention nearly impossible. Nor are these thoughts necessarily useful or interesting. O’Gieblyn describes her own as “circular, deterministic, and relentlessly self-excoriating.”

    That last word, with its suggestion of self-laceration, reminded me of something writer Ana Marie Cox once said on her now-defunct podcast. Just as she had been addicted to alcohol, she suffered from another addiction: self-hatred. Her therapist warned her not to pick up the liquor bottle of self-loathing and drink from it. Yet she would lift this metaphorical bottle to her lips as compulsively as an alcoholic sipping vodka. Once such a habit becomes deeply entrenched, paying attention to it becomes extraordinarily difficult because the behavior feels almost as involuntary as breathing.

    As O’Gieblyn struggles to follow Simone Weil’s advice to abandon the will and replace it with attention, she learns that she must engage with the world “without the distorting lens of the ego.” She must confront what William James called the “sick soul,” the soul divided against itself. We cannot simply will these divided selves into wholeness. In the tradition of the great religions, wholeness often requires surrender to a power greater than ourselves. But O’Gieblyn no longer finds the tenets of religion useful to her, nor even the more universal spiritual tenets of AA. “Letting go” too often returns her to the original problem: the egotistical self doing the letting go.

    Rather than seek surrender in the traditional religious sense, O’Gieblyn turns toward the kind of surrender Simone Weil associates with attention. Attention is not merely focus. It involves what Weil calls the “indirect method,” an idea she never explicitly defines. We can infer, however, that the indirect method requires us to approach a problem with calm and patience rather than demand immediate results. We engage with our problems from different angles, remain attentive to what they reveal, and hope to plant seeds that eventually bear fruit.

    But this approach presents a maddening problem. It requires maturity, and maturity may be the very state we are trying to attain. If we need maturity to approach life’s challenges with patient attention, we arrive at a bootstrapping paradox: We need the capacity we are trying to develop in order to develop that capacity.

    We all need maturity, poise, and wholeness, but the patience required to travel that path may be precisely what the immature person lacks. A patient person is therefore better equipped to practice Weil’s indirect method and bear fruit. An impatient person may become frustrated, abandon the endeavor, and regress into deeper forms of infantilization and addiction. Thus, he who has, more shall be given; he who has not, more shall be taken away. This is the psychological Matthew Effect: maturity creates conditions for greater maturity, while immaturity can create conditions for deeper immaturity. The rich get richer not merely in money but in psychological resources.

    As I reach retirement age, I find myself caught inside this very problem. I am trying to live as long as possible so I can collect as many monthly retirement checks as possible, turning myself into a commodity in the name of gaming the system on the metaphorical game show I call Beat the Actuary. Intellectually, I know this is spiritual madness, but I cannot simply will the impulse away. Nor do I appear to possess the patience necessary to attend to it in the calm and mature manner Simone Weil describes.

    Fortunately, I remain genuinely amused by the comic absurdity of my predicament. Without that amusement, I might tumble into despair. But despair eludes me for now. I am content to read Meghan O’Gieblyn’s meditations on will and attention and hope that, by the time I finish her book, I will have become a slightly better man.

  • You Can’t Retire from Yourself

    You Can’t Retire from Yourself

    When you retire, you wage battles with institutions, time, younger generations, health, and “old age,” but your biggest challenge is yourself. This is the old you that has always plagued you, now acclimating to the fact that, like it or not, your remaining years have been gamified by actuarial tables. The longer you live, the longer your family receives a revenue stream. This strange condition threatens to turn the old you into an even more intense version of yourself.

    In my case, the old me is a worrywart, an obsessive, a malcontent, and a neurotic. Now the final chapters of my life have been gamified, and I fear what this worrying, malcontented self might become. I cannot change him through an act of will. I have to pay attention to him.

    This is the theme of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s memoir Will and Attention. In the book’s opening pages, she quotes a sentence from Simone Weil that she keeps on an index card above her desk: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”

    O’Gieblyn has had ample opportunity to examine the failures of will in her long struggle with alcoholism. She writes that she nearly drank herself to death in her twenties, got sober for more than a decade, and then started drinking again, even while giving AA talks and dispensing a wisdom that could not save her. One of the things that confounds her about the relapse is that during her years of sobriety she was happy. Why give up happiness? To complicate matters further, when her relapse was exposed and she told her AA friends all the right things about needing to do the work and not taking life for granted, the pieties sounded false. Reflecting on that period, she writes, “I can see now that it was a problem of authority. I had lost the privilege of narrative distance. I no longer had an ‘old life’ and a ‘new life’; I had only this muddle of my own making.”

    As I reflect on O’Gieblyn’s words, much of her torment seems to come from living in a state of chaos. Having an old life and a new life creates a clean, well-ordered trajectory that appeals to us. But what if the lines become blurred? What if life becomes a mishmash of conflict and ambivalence as we vacillate between our worse and better impulses?

    O’Gieblyn could not will herself off alcohol. At the same time, she observes, she could not will herself to become a Catholic. Having rejected the fundamentalism of her family, she hungered for a return to religion, this time through Catholicism. But this failure dovetailed with her return to alcohol and represented, she writes, “a larger pattern of regression” that defied her intellectual understanding of the dangers of losing one’s spiritual anchoring. “I know a lot of things in theory,” she writes, “and none of it seems to be of much help in the trenches of everyday life.”

    She had written a book about losing her fundamentalist faith while seeking a path toward Catholicism by meeting with a priest and attending Mass. She comes to see both her return to alcoholism and her attraction to institutionalized religion as forms of self-sabotage. In both cases, she is seeking oblivion, a way of losing herself to forces greater than herself. Intellectually, she sees the danger, but emotionally she remains compelled. She must therefore confront compulsion versus will. Did she really choose to return to alcohol or to the certainty of religion? Did she even understand what the words will and choice meant?

    Then she encounters Weil’s argument that we fail to cure ourselves through will but may succeed through attention. The sentence hits her hard, arriving “as the signature of truth, the conviction that you are learning for the first time something you have always known.” But it takes her a long time to grasp what Weil means. At first, she understands only the failure of will because repeated failure has made that part painfully obvious.

    Her book becomes, in large part, a refutation of the will. If human agency exists, the will does not necessarily unlock it. Indeed, the more meaningful the endeavor, the more likely brute effort is to fail us. “The most important things in life completely elude the will,” O’Gieblyn writes. Effort alone cannot summon happiness, piety, faith, seduction, love, productivity, or genius. It is especially futile in the face of addiction. Nor can you simply will yourself into a life of faith, which makes me think of Paul’s admonition to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

    Part of the problem is that the will is an unreliable bedfellow. Is it even pure in its intentions? Do we really want the things the will supposedly guides us toward? O’Gieblyn thinks otherwise. She describes herself as a divided soul whose actions reveal that she does not necessarily want what she tells herself she wants. “My will is scattered, directed toward many contradictory things, and easily distracted.” The will is therefore an untrustworthy character, one Paul warned us about in his famous Epistle to the Romans.

    If the will fails us, what then of attention? What does it mean to apply Weil’s words to our lives? What would it mean to put the will in the back seat and let attention drive?

    First, we have to understand what the will is. Nietzsche believed “that the illusion of willpower rests on our tendency to identify with the part of our soul who commands, not the part who obeys.” But O’Gieblyn observes a contradiction that complicates the idea further. “On one hand,” she writes, “the will is desire (both will and volition come from root words meaning ‘wish’ or ‘desire’). On the other hand, the will is necessary only when you need to act against your desires, or overcome them.” The will therefore “both wants and wants not to want.” To cheat on your diet is not simply a lack of will but an excess of conflicting wills. “The person who breaks his diet wishes for things at once: to eat and to refrain.”

    Her argument is powerful, persuasive, and liberating, almost Pauline in its cogency. No wonder the will fails us. It is a contradictory beast. Its right hand doesn’t know what its left hand is doing. The will is therefore a bad companion. We should stop the car and toss it onto the curb.

    Now that the will is gone, we need a replacement. That replacement is attention. But learning to pay attention to what matters is not a skill acquired overnight. We may first have to unlearn habits accumulated over decades before we can even begin. That unlearning may prove every bit as arduous as the learning that follows. Both will require focus, engagement, and the very faculty we are trying to cultivate: attention.

  • Beat the Actuary

    Beat the Actuary

    So, do you want your retirement revenue stream to be as large as possible but stop when you die, leaving your family without that monthly cash injection? Or do you want a significantly smaller amount with the advantage that your spouse and children will continue receiving monthly cash flow after you die?

    If you want the former, you click the Member-Only Option. If you want the latter, you click the Beneficiary Option. Your spouse’s age gets calculated into the equation. Actuarial tables are consulted. You are essentially making a wager on how long you think you will live—and how long you can maintain relatively good brain function while defying dementia—to determine which button you click.

    In my case, other factors came into play. Because of my wife’s relatively young age of fifty, her salary, and the fact that we have already paid off our mortgage, we decided I would click Member-Only.

    After looking coldly at the numbers, the risk factors, and the actuarial tables, I now find myself living in a new dimension. It is not an easy place to inhabit. Because I have never lived here before, I find it difficult to describe. I feel as if my spaceship has crashed on a forbidden planet. I have stepped out of the wreckage to survey the terrain, and everything looks strange and frightening.

    For starters, I’m trying to live as long as possible so my family can receive as much cash flow as possible. Of course, everyone wants to live a long life, but fighting time to maximize monetary rewards makes me feel as if I’m competing on a game show. It’s called Beat the Actuary. The longer I live, the better I game the system.

    Turning my desire for longevity and good health into a form of gamification strikes me as unhealthy, morbid, and deleterious to my spiritual health. Once I start trying to live as long as possible to maximize my family’s cash flow, I am no longer a human being. I am a commodity. The soul takes a back seat. Optimization takes the wheel.

    Optimizing is not living. It’s constantly calculating.

    Cheesecake followed by eggnog at a Christmas party? Tick two months off your life.

    The stress of missing an airline connection from Madrid to New York to Los Angeles? There goes another six months.

    Not taking statins with borderline LDL? Subtract another three years.

    Not embracing the vegan lifestyle? Shave off another five.

    Optimization makes me feel like a fragile egg that must be nestled inside layers of cotton, silk, and cashmere. I am no longer a human being. I am a mausoleum piece inhabiting a glass reliquary, protected from the harsh elements.

    Optimization is not life. It is death.

    So as I walk the terrain of this strange planet and confront these new fears, I am trying to maintain my dignity and live more like a human being and less like a TV game-show contestant.

    But my morbid imagination already gets the better of me. With my birthday coming up in a couple of weeks, I can imagine appearing on Beat the Actuary and being celebrated for surviving another year. The studio audience erupts in applause. Confetti rains down upon me as host Soupy Sales, wearing a banana-yellow blazer, congratulates me for making it through another year.

    At the center of the Beat the Actuary stage stands a twelve-foot-tall hourglass enclosed in a gleaming brass frame, its two enormous glass chambers filled with fine white sand. The sand continues its slow, merciless descent.

    Soupy Sales stares ominously at the giant hourglass. Then he turns toward the camera and fixes the television audience with mock solemnity.

    “Will Jeff McMahon be back next year? Only the hourglass knows for sure.”

  • The Nut Beneath the Sink

    The Nut Beneath the Sink

    Our kitchen sink features what is called a brushed stainless-steel U-spout faucet centered over a steel basin. It has a single handle that adjusts the water temperature: down for cold and up for hot. Three and a half years ago, the faucet base came loose, so you had to hold the faucet with one hand and operate the handle with the other to keep the entire assembly from rotating round and round. I bought a RIDGID telescoping basin wrench with a built-in LED light. As I recall, my wife, who is more of an engineer than I am, got under the sink and tightened the nut.

    A few days ago, the base loosened again. My wife, who is recovering from surgery, said I’d have to do it. I went into the garage, retrieved the telescoping basin wrench, and showed it to her.

    “Do you remember how you used this?” I asked.

    She looked at the device as if I had handed her the blueprints for a NASA space mission.

    “I don’t even remember if I used that,” she said. “I might have tightened it another way.”

    So I went on YouTube and watched demonstration videos. The device did not look user-friendly. One reviewer, a plumber, said it was kind of weird.

    I thought I’d give it a try.

    I first cleared everything from under the kitchen sink: liquid dishwasher detergent, dishwashing soap, kitchen cleansers, water filters, a mini-sized fire extinguisher, sponges, brushes, mineral oil, and other supplies that had accumulated over time. I put everything into several canvas Trader Joe’s shopping bags and placed a towel on the bottom of the empty cabinet.

    Even emptied, the cabinet was difficult to maneuver in because of the garbage disposal and the under-sink water-filtration unit. Through trial and error, I learned that I could get farthest underneath by leaning on my left shoulder and angling my body in from the left. I held my phone camera inside the cavernous crevice and took a photograph of what I was aiming for.

    The photo, taken from inside the cabinet looking upward toward the underside of the sink and countertop, showed three prominent assemblies crowded into a tight space. On the left was a dark circular component with a black hose. Near the center were braided metal water-supply lines and additional plumbing. To the right was the important part: a shiny, horseshoe-shaped metal mounting bracket pressed against the underside of the countertop, with a copper-colored threaded shaft and fastener extending downward from the faucet. Another black hose hung through the area, making the mounting hardware even harder to see and reach. The photograph made clear why the repair was so awkward: the faucet fastener was tucked high against the countertop amid hoses and plumbing, with almost no room to maneuver a wrench.

    At about six feet and more than 230 pounds, I had limited mobility beneath the sink. Add my claustrophobia, which made me want to bolt out of the cabinet as quickly as possible, and I decided it was time to call my engineering friend Pedro.

    I’ve known Pedro for more than sixteen years. He is much shorter than I am and about a hundred pounds lighter. He was coming over anyway to take a couple of computers I no longer used. He planned to give them to his sister, also an engineer, who had some use for them.

    Unlike me, Pedro was able to make sense of the YouTube demonstration videos. He understood how to position the spring-loaded jaws around the mounting nut and flip the wrench head so the jaws would grip when turned in the tightening direction. As I held the faucet base steady from above, he tightened the nut from below.

    He then thanked me for giving him the opportunity to learn how to use a basin wrench. As the landlord of a couple of properties, he explained that he might someday need to perform the same repair for his tenants.

    But neither of us was convinced that this $70 wrench was the best way to go. RIDGID also makes a much cheaper tool, the $30 EZ Change plumbing wrench. Rather than using a spring-loaded jaw, it uses interchangeable sockets. You have to select the correct fitting, which may require some trial and error, but I’d rather deal with a socket than that jaw. Pedro felt the same way.

    After the faucet crisis was over, Pedro and I spent an hour talking about the rivalry between Honda and Toyota, the problems with turbo engines, speeding tickets, and his preference for Linux over other operating systems. Eventually, he had to head home. As I carried an old iMac to his car and he carried an old laptop, I told him I’d be sixty-five in a couple of weeks.

    “How old were you when I first met you?” he asked.

    “Forty-seven,” I said. “My wife was pregnant with the twins when you took my writing class.”

    Over those years, I watched Pedro go from state-champion boxer to firefighter to electrical engineer. He is now a landlord of several properties and the proud owner of a Lexus RC 350 F Sport in obsidian black. About a decade ago, my father-in-law recommended Pedro to a friend who hired him at his engineering firm. Because of his work ethic and ability to solve problems on the fly, Pedro quickly became the number-one employee. He is the go-to person for putting out fires and making sure projects meet their deadlines.

    So it didn’t surprise me that what was, for me, an anxiety-laden nightmare involving an inaccessible nut beneath the kitchen sink was, for Pedro, a useful learning experience—a practical skill he could add to his landlord repertoire.

    I am grateful to have Pedro as a friend. But I am also worried. What do I do three years from now when that nut comes loose again? Do I bring out the intimidating basin wrench with its spring-loaded jaw? Or should I buy the cheaper socket version?

    By then, Pedro will probably have invented a device that allows anxious homeowners like me to tighten the nut from above the sink.

  • A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    Like many of my fellow Boomers, I’ve gone down a commonly trodden and forlorn path in the realm of dwindling friendships. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I took friendship for granted. It came as naturally as going to the gym, shopping for clothes, going to clubs, and eating lunch at a cafe. These endeavors were often accompanied by friends. In the 80s and 90s, long conversations on landline phones were also part of the fabric of my social life. That I merited a two-hour phone conversation was no big deal. People found me engaging. My self-worth wasn’t something I questioned. It was simply a matter of fact that I was worthy of a two-hour conversation on random topics.

    Spending time with friends diminished in my late thirties and forties. I would go to a restaurant once every other month or so with colleagues. As I grew apart from some of them and others retired, I did not notice that their disappearance was not accompanied by replacements. My friendship count went down. Meanwhile, I acclimated to life in the cave, my expression for retreating into a suburban enclave and learning to entertain and distract yourself as you disconnect from the beehive of life.

    As engagement farms sprouted up around 2010 and offered frictionless, half-baked social interaction, my habits of isolation worsened because superficial parasocial interactions substituted for in-depth, messy, real ones. These digital engagements proved unsatisfactory. Engagement on these platforms was not authentic friendship. It was a brief burst of dopamine. When the dopamine died, you were left hungry for real social interaction. These engagement farms, in other words, were the equivalent of junk food. You could overconsume the processed stuff while remaining emotionally malnourished.

    Fifteen years of this social deprivation, combined with the chaos and false euphoria of attention-capture platforms, lulled Boomers like me into a state of social isolation that became our new normal.

    There could be a gender factor here. My wife maintains real friendships, and she notices my deprivation in that department. She wants me to put time and energy into my “social health,” as she calls it. I agree that engaging in real friendships would be good for my social health and, in turn, put less pressure on her. The problem is that I don’t have a magic wand. I can’t say abracadabra and have a friend materialize like a genie from a bottle.

    Social entropy is a real and insidious thing that can’t be reversed overnight. I worry that you reach an age and become so entrenched in routines and habits that you cross the Isolation Rubicon, making a return to a normal and healthy social world extremely difficult.

    In this new landscape, where landline phones and two-hour conversations have become extinct and we spend much of our time in parasocial engagements, I can appreciate some of these mediated communications. By and large, people are friendly on my YouTube channel and Instagram page. I don’t diminish these interactions. I simply see them for what they are. They are limited because they exist in the digital sphere. They cannot substitute for real interaction.

    I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with two Trader Joe’s clerks, both in their late twenties. One was scanning my food items. The other was bagging them. I told them that 99% of the time I shop at Trader Joe’s at eight a.m., and I want to be out of the store by 8:45 because I notice that each passing hour brings more people, stress, and anxiety. I told them that one time I had to come in at three p.m. for emergency provisions when my wife’s friends from out of town showed up. I walked into a crowded Trader Joe’s and didn’t even recognize the place. Nor did I recognize the customers.

    “These aren’t my people,” I said.

    My dismay at feeling like an alien during my afternoon shopping spree made the clerk, a short woman whose arms were generously covered with tattoos, stop scanning my groceries. She let out a loud belly laugh. I could see the self-abandoned joy in her face. Making her laugh in that moment was more gratifying than a decade of social-media engagements. You cannot substitute real engagement with parasocial interplay.

    But real engagement is increasingly rare. If I shop at Target, there is no clerk. I scan the items myself while a robot admonishes me if I don’t place them in the designated bagging area.

    A lot of my social deprivation is of my own making. I am lazy, sullen, egotistical, and introverted. While I can be entertaining, I am usually tolerated in low doses. Regardless of what I think about myself, the world does not owe me a bevy of friends waiting on my doorstep to join them in some madcap adventure or other.

    I feel dumb that back in 2010 I was enticed by the so-called social-media corporations. Relying on engagement farms for a morsel of social interaction while curating some energetic persona full of moxie and frisson was pure chicanery. The fact that I substituted this curated nonsense for real life was my fault. I played myself. I let the engagement-farm companies play me as well.

    I don’t have an easy solution to my social health, but I can see the landscape clearly. I am sobered enough after decades of curating a dazzling persona to end that folly. Wherever life takes me from this point on, I’m going there without the fakery.

  • Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    When I was in my late thirties, I was visiting my wife’s family for a summer barbecue in Long Beach. Her brother and some of his friends were there. We were standing on the front lawn talking about some of my habits and routines: eating dinner no later than five; going to bed no later than ten; eating sufficient fiber; abstaining from alcohol but deriving great pleasure from sipping chilled prune juice, analyzing its complex flavors with the panache of a sommelier; driving to movie theaters an hour early to make sure I get a parking space and a good seat; avoiding long drives because I find them mentally taxing; and buying a car only after scouring the reliability data in Consumer Reports.

    At one point, one of my brother-in-law’s friends, Shane, a tall, Viking-like figure with light blue eyes and shaggy blond hair, casually looked at me and said, “Dude, you’d make a great eighty-five-year-old.”

    I can understand Shane’s comment. I am not a risk-taker. I like predictability and routine. I like reliable outcomes. I am drawn to things that give me assurance and safety.

    Take cars, for example. I am drawn to Honda. I have been buying Hondas for the last four decades. I like the interiors. They are familiar. I know how to use the controls. The ride is smooth. There is no drama. The styling is not too busy. It tends toward vanilla. I even like the word Honda. It sounds angelic, whispery, and soothing. Repeating the word over and over is a form of ASMR.

    My connection to Honda runs so deep that my wife and I both own Honda Accords. Hers is a 2014 with a 2.4-liter naturally aspirated engine, and mine is a 2018 with a 2.0 turbo. When our twins get their driver’s licenses, we plan on buying another Accord, a hybrid that gets around 50 mpg. Or perhaps a Camry Hybrid. Whichever brand is the most reliable when I’m ready to buy. Because I am willing to share my Accord with my daughters, I can hold off on buying my next car. I think I might wait until the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. By then, Accords and Camrys will probably get over 60 miles per gallon.

    Regardless of what I do, I will be anxious because a big purchase entails risk. I am risk-averse. To minimize risk, I seek monotony, routine, and familiarity. I subscribe to the adage that it’s better to be with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

    This does not mean I’m provincial. I’d be just as happy having a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast as I would a bowl of Korean bibimbap. I find both dishes comforting. Both are familiar to me. Both are reliably delicious.

    So I’m a bit riled that in the summer of 2000 Shane said I’d make a great eighty-five-year-old. Actually, I would not. I can lift more weight than most men half my age. I love international food, the spicier the better. I watch daring, often subversive television, movies, and documentaries. I am, in other words, youthful and adventurous when it comes to exercise, eating, and entertainment.

    On the other hand, I am admittedly overly cautious and ridiculously obsessive when it comes to maintaining my routine and making big consumer purchases. But I think my contradictions should be appreciated. Labeling me prematurely old is inaccurate and demonstrates weak analytical skills.

    I love Shane. I wish him the best, and I am eager to locate him, if for no other reason than to discuss his appraisal of me as an exemplar of an eighty-five-year-old on my wife’s family’s lawn that summer day in 2000.

    I might even politely challenge him to an arm wrestle.

  • The Great Honda Uncoupling

    The Great Honda Uncoupling

    A car crisis has entered my life and sent me down a rabbit hole of angst and distress. Honda has a major engine problem affecting many of its models. The problem involves the cylinder-head gasket losing its seal. This can result in coolant loss, overheating, engine misfires, and coolant entering the combustion chambers. The affected engines include Honda’s 1.5-liter turbos, 2.0-liter turbos, naturally aspirated 2.0-liters, and naturally aspirated hybrid models. Eight models are affected from 2017 through 2026. Honda has extended the warranty on these models to ten years or 150,000 miles.

    My 2018 Accord with the 2.0 turbo is not on the list. While I’m relieved, I’m not exactly brimming with confidence either. It is more than eight years old with only 29,200 miles on the odometer as I write this twenty days before my sixty-fifth birthday, October 28. I no longer look at my Accord with confidence. I look at it with mistrust.

    And this leads to a painful fact: I am afraid that Honda and I may be uncoupling.

    I take this breach of trust personally. Having a car divorce after forty years is heartbreaking. Honda was always my cozy companion. Honda was my trusty sherpa, taking me to work, medical appointments, Trader Joe’s, and Target. The Honda service center is within walking distance of my home. I know the staff. I joke with them. I tell them how much I love Honda. They smile back at me tenderly. Like me, they own Hondas. They are part of my extended family.

    But the breach of trust resulting from faulty engines has forced me to look elsewhere. Honda’s only competition for me is Toyota because, like Honda, it has a reputation for reliability. However, while the Honda service center is only one and a half miles away, the Toyota service center is an intimidating four miles away. Yet a little research offers some consolation: Toyota offers a pickup and drop-off service, which Honda does not. More importantly, Toyota has a clean bill of health on its engines, which Honda does not.

    In my risk-averse mind, I’m uncoupling from Honda and moving toward Toyota. For me, this is far more than a rational consumer decision. The change has emotional weight. It’s like getting divorced and remarried. It’s like selling your house and moving across the country. It’s like making a career change. Imagine working as an engineer for twenty years and then opening a yoga studio. I am entering foreign territory.

    But Honda has left me little choice. For years, its engineers had a massive engine problem growing right under their noses. This degree of negligence and incompetence feels like the automotive equivalent of marital infidelity. A massive breach of trust has occurred.

    And this points to yet another problem: If and when Honda fixes its defective engines, regaining my trust could take at least a decade. I would need long-term data to be convinced that Honda reliability is up to spec again. I don’t want to be the car buyer who provides the data. I want to be the car buyer who studies the data after the fact and then makes his decision.

    Buying a car is like choosing a bride. I don’t want some thirty-six-month dalliance with a car lease. I want to commit for the long term. Till death do us part.

    The holy sacrament between Honda and me has dissolved. Unless Honda does something as dramatic as moving a few mountains and parting the Pacific Ocean to win back my trust, I am afraid the uncoupling is upon us.

    I am looking over the horizon.

    I see a beaming light.

    It reads Toyota Camry.

    Preferably in Dark Cosmos.

  • When All Else Fails, Put on the Frogman

    When All Else Fails, Put on the Frogman

    This morning I got to my office early, graded essays, finalized my lesson plan, and then did some Amazon shopping. I bought home necessities, omega 3 fish oil, and a pair of Brooks Adrenaline GTS 25 walking shoes. I feel chagrined after making such a purchase because I cannot resist the impulse for self-congratulation. “Look at you, you did your shopping, and you’re treating your feet to the comfort and support they deserve. Give yourself a pat on the back, old chum.”

    I feel so stupid for having this impulse. I really need to do something truly significant today. I need to be a hero of some sort, but all I can do is put on my G-Shock Frogman and act the part. 

  • The Tyranny of the Full Refrigerator

    The Tyranny of the Full Refrigerator

    I suffer from a condition common to families living in a state of suburban abundance. When I walk into my kitchen and see food overflowing from the refrigerator and pantry, I become anxious and overwhelmed. All those food items are like YouTube channels competing for my attention. All those food items demand action. They contribute to “food noise.” When I open the refrigerator or pantry doors and see barely enough space for all the boxes, cans, leftover containers, cartons, and bottles, I feel this force come over me. It says, “Sir, you have a job. Eat!”

    This is not what I want. I don’t want my kitchen to be the room of temptation and chaos. I want to live in a place called Dignity.

    What I need is to live in a state of food minimalism: three meals a day, no snacking, no food noise, no food bursting at the seams. Just as I want to keep my mind clear by not intoxicating it with online engagement platforms, I want to keep my body clear of food noise and excess calories. I want to be a liberated, svelte, muscular version of myself—the Free Man. I don’t want to be the anxious, mentally hijacked, food-obsessed, blubbery version of myself—the Self-Indulgent Man.

    This is my battle, and it is a personal one. My family does not want to cooperate with me in my quest. For them, there is no such thing as too much food. There is only not enough food. They always want more. This is the continuous tension between my family and me. I must navigate it thoughtfully, with kindness, patience, and love.

    Can I do so? As I struggle with this notion, I am reminded that man does not live by bread alone. Moreover, too much bread will fatten and eventually kill me.

  • Writing After the Death of Reading

    Writing After the Death of Reading

    When the deep reading of long and complex writing is no longer the fabric of our culture, there will be a vacuum. It will be filled, of course. What fills the vacuum is not pretty. It is chaos, unbridled passions, dopamine, outrage, and a nightmarish phantasmagoria from which there may be no return.

    I keep coming back to Childish Gambino and his music video “This Is America,” in which cars are aflame, people are dancing amid the violence, chaos, and rubble, and the young generation is perched above the hellscape, distracted by their smartphones. The singer refers to the phones as “tools.” These tools can capture the chaos but cannot make sense of it. They can also serve another function: hijacking the brain. As the fires rage and the chaos intensifies, the mind is soothed by a new dance or cat video. Or one becomes engaged with a conspiracy and feels special for having the mindfulness to give credence to something the dumb masses have dismissed. Meanwhile, the hellscape gets worse as ordered reality recedes into the distance.

    Becoming untethered from reality, losing civic order, becoming addicted to screen-fueled dopamine, and living in ever-growing chaos is not the hellscape of the future. It is now. James Marriott sees this hellscape as the direct result of our loss of reading. In his book The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, his central argument is that literacy is essential to maintaining civilization. As he writes in his introduction: “I believe much of the disorder and unreason of the twenty-first century is a direct consequence of the fading of the written word and colonisation of our culture by addictive screens. As reading declines, the result, evident all around us, is the intellectual hollowing out of our society. Without reading, the world is going to become less rational and more disordered.” His book argues that we have not yet “fully grasped the consequences of this transformation” from reading books to gazing at content on screens.

    The way we absorb information as a result of technology presents a moral dilemma in the way I communicate with others. Do I stop writing and make “content” that is accessible to people acclimated to a world in which reading has been replaced by digital content? To be more specific, do I abandon the project of my blog and replace it with video essays meant for publication on YouTube? If I do so, am I part of the problem, kowtowing to a digital world of frictionless rewards, or am I simply being reasonable by communicating with people in the way they are most likely to receive ideas?

    I do have a blog. I enjoy keeping it active and posting almost every day, but if I write an essay on the blog and don’t post the link to my YouTube channel, only about five people will read it. If I post the link, I might get thirty visitors. On the other hand, if I take the same content, sit in front of a video camera for twelve minutes, and post the video essay on YouTube, I can get a few thousand views over the course of a few days. There is no contest. The evidence has made it clear. People don’t want to read my content. They would rather watch me sit with my ebony Yamaha piano behind me and talk about a subject for ten to fifteen minutes.

    So I have to make a choice. I can post something on my blog and be the tree that falls in the forest and makes no noise, or I can deliver a video presentation in which I try to make my personal challenges relevant to others and have a voice that actually gets heard.

    To clarify the situation even further, I have a hundred subscribers to my blog. I have over eleven thousand subscribers to my YouTube channel. I can see the communication landscape clearly. You go to work where the job is. There isn’t much opportunity to spread my ideas in the blog market. There are more opportunities on YouTube.

    I don’t take YouTube for granted either. I tell my viewers that, as a middling presence on YouTube, I view my channel like a restaurant. It stays open as long as the customers show up. It took a long time to get a substantial audience. For a decade, I talked about my watch obsession, did “State of the Watch Collection” videos, and interrogated my watch-related madness. Fellow watch enthusiasts could relate. We took solace in knowing we weren’t alone. We understood each other.

    But eventually, this path presented some challenges. I could only talk about my watch addiction for so long before I began repeating myself. As other YouTubers created more and more polished and highly edited watch videos, I found myself feeling redundant and technologically backward in that world. I had to make a lane change.

    My subject matter broadened to include my personal life challenges, such as living in my sixties and preparing financially and emotionally for retirement. Sometimes I’d throw in some watch talk, most noticeably my pivot from expensive mechanical diver watches to more affordable G-Shocks. The older I got, the less I wanted to deal with owning and servicing mechanical watches and the more I was comforted by the atomic accuracy and solar power of my G-Shocks.

    To my surprise, a sit-down video essay can perform better than a video featuring a watch close-up. I think I know why. YouTube viewers have become sophisticated enough to know that I don’t have anything special to offer in delivering watch eye candy. My strength is the video essay. I will lean into it and keep it going. I retire the channel when the customers stop showing up.

    Of course, I lament our post-reading world, the one James Marriott has described with such sharp insight and clarity. Of course, I am disappointed that I am not a published writer with a significant following. But I’m reminded of when I play Yahtzee. My daughter and I use a common expression when we’re aiming for a high score, such as getting a large straight, and end up having to settle for a small straight. Instead of complaining about the lot given to us, we say, “I’ll take what I can get.”

    If there is an audience out there that hungers for authentic ideas in a ten-minute video, then I will use that hunger as a toehold, stick my foot into it, and try to leverage myself up the mountain. I’ll keep ascending that world of ideas until I can no longer find footing and the unforgiving landscape demands that I stop climbing.