Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  •  I Never Want to See the Caffeinated Squirrel Again

     I Never Want to See the Caffeinated Squirrel Again

    What does an essay about the death of performative AI-enhanced writing have to do with a book about retirement, aging, and death? It has everything to do with it because the death of performative AI-enhanced writing means I get to live. By live, I mean my voice, my authenticity, and my creativity.

    My experiments with AI writing tools over the last four years took me down a dark road in which, for a long stretch, I used AI the way a bodybuilder uses steroids. AI boosted my prose, made it more muscular, and gave it a more dramatic flex. I’d write my original content and give AI this prompt: “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions.” With this one prompt, my content was no longer 100% mine. It was closer to 80%. The extra 20% belonged to my co-author. And that 20% made my sentences, similes, metaphors, and witticisms exist in a kind of AI-infused alchemy. AI wasn’t just providing spice and accent to my ingredients. It was adding additional ingredients to the recipe.

    My prose was eye-catching at first. It made me feel like the bodybuilder who no longer competed onstage with respectable 18-inch biceps. Now when I strutted across the stage, my biceps had a peak on top of a peak on top of yet another peak and bulged to over 22 inches.

    This kind of writerly muscle-flex became addicting at first, but over time, I had to abandon it. Not only did the additional muscle call my authorial authenticity into question, but it became a form of overwriting, even purple prose. It became mind-numbing. Worse, it became exposed as imitative when I saw the same muscular prose in other people’s online essays, my students’ essays, and even Amazon reviews.

    AI was recycling the same arsenal of stock linguistic tricks for all buyers. Someone wasn’t frenzied anymore. They had the energy of a “caffeinated squirrel.” AI would present the caffeinated-squirrel image over and over without shame. When recalling a long stretch of time that harkened back to the past, AI was fond of writing, “Not since the Nixon Administration had I forgotten my breakfast.” It would use this Nixonian reference even if you were referring to 1981, when the hackneyed reference to the Reagan Administration would at least be accurate.

    Whenever I wanted to write about a misguided quest or the purchase of a disappointing consumer product, AI’s stock joke was that my instant coffee or microwave oatmeal made me regret my life choices. For reasons I don’t understand, AI also gravitated toward certain verbs and nouns. It overused anchor or anchoring, as in fixing something firmly to something else. Everything was getting anchored. AI also overused architecture as a substitute for structure. Everything had an architecture. A philosophical treatise had an underlying architecture. So did Baskin-Robbins.

    Throwing around words you never used before in these new contexts—anchor, architecture—made you feel smarter until it didn’t. It stopped making you feel smarter when you saw your students using the same bag of tricks.

    Another danger of using AI as a co-author is the slippery slope. Infusing your writing with growth hormones can lull you into laziness so that, little by little, you outsource your thought and effort to the machine.

    Eventually, you reach the point where AI has kicked your butt. You look at your AI writing assistant and say, “All right, you won. I’m a ghost of my former self.” You reach the point where you have to reclaim your authorship and your humanity.

    If you’re going to use AI at all, you need to set boundaries. Get rid of the prompt “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions,” which can add a good 20% of synthetic muscle to your original content. Replace it with this one: “Rewrite the following by preserving its original content while editing to improve clarity, concision, and polish for meaning and sentence structure. The edit should preserve 95% of the original content.”

    This is the Authentic Content Prompt.

    It should be applied as a universal rule in a world of ideas where authenticity and integrity need some kind of imprimatur amid the digital morass of AI slop. Just as the Good Housekeeping Seal became a trusted symbol that a product had been tested and met the Good Housekeeping Institute’s standards, perhaps we need a Good Writing Integrity-Keeping Seal of approval. Readers could go online and see this recognizable seal on a webpage, assuring them that what they are reading contains original content without the synthetic muscle.

    Whether or not such a seal of approval ever materializes, my AI experiments have led me to my own personal Authentic Content Prompt.

    My ACP, as I call it, keeps AI as an editor and prevents it from becoming a co-author. As the latter, it becomes dangerous and should be known as the Toxic Purple Prose Machine. Use it at your own risk. 

  • AI Writing Has Entered Its Angel Flights Era

    AI Writing Has Entered Its Angel Flights Era

    Performative AI-enhanced composition is to writing what Angel Flights disco party pants were to fashion in the 1970s: Both are embarrassing expressions of gauche, unbridled ostentation doomed to a short shelf life. Both deserve funerals to announce their extinction.

    That AI-enhanced composition, which took off in 2023, has expired in 2026 became apparent to me after reading an Amazon review of Orgain peanut butter protein powder. The review slapped me in the face like a warning that I must never use AI as a co-writer because if you ask AI to perform for you, it will deliver the same bag of tricks an uncouth used-car salesman uses to deceive the gullible car buyer.

    This cheap bag of tricks is evident throughout the protein powder review. The reviewer begins: “I’ve tried so many protein powders that my blender probably has trust issues.” The attempt at comedy by telling Amazon readers that your blender has trust issues announces that you wanted to be a comedian in another life but got stuck writing an AI-boosted Amazon review instead.

    Then the reviewer complains about the horrible protein powders she endured before discovering Orgain: “Chalky ones, gritty ones, ones that taste like someone whispered ‘peanut butter’ into a bag of dirt.” That a substandard protein powder whispers “peanut butter” into a bag of dirt is a case of someone trying too hard to be funny. Writing with AI can do that to you. It can give you a facade of acerbic wit and verbal moxie that becomes part of your schtick. Eventually, not using AI in this manner makes you feel naked.

    Not wanting to write in her natural state, the reviewer continues with the AI boost: “This stuff is ridiculously good. It tastes like actual peanut butter instead of a chemistry experiment, blends smoothly into smoothies, and somehow even makes my morning coffee feel like it came from a trendy café charging $9 a cup.” Comparing bad protein powder to a chemistry experiment gone awry is another example of AI enhancement. Telling the reader that Orgain powder elevates your home-brewed coffee to overpriced artisan coffee is an example of AI hyperbole going off the rails.

    The review becomes less an appraisal of protein powder and more of a muscle-flex. In this regard, AI becomes a can of Muscle-Flex that you add to inferior writing the way you add Hamburger Helper to expired, off-color hamburger.

    The AI-augmented praise continues: “No clumps. No weird aftertaste. No regretting my life choices halfway through the shaker bottle.” As someone who has experimented with AI for the last four years, I can attest that throwing in “regretting my life choices” is a familiar, overused tool of AI wit.

    The AI-loving reviewer continues the hyperbole with her praise of Orgain: “And the best part? The price doesn’t require a second mortgage.” Comparing a high-priced protein powder to a second mortgage is another clichéd use of AI hyperbole. I see it all the time, not only in my own AI experiments but in my students’ writing as well.

    Just as Angel Flights bell-bottoms could never flare horizontally enough, AI hyperbole can never be extreme enough. Over time, the extremes become mind-numbing. The earnest attempt to impress and razzle-dazzle becomes a sign of desperation rather than skill, talent, or good taste.

    That the funeral for performative AI-enhanced composition has arrived in 2026 should cause us all to celebrate. It is an occasion to reclaim our authenticity and use AI the way it should be used: not as a co-author but as an editor. Our writing should belong to us and us alone. AI can correct grammar, help us achieve clarity and concision, and repair awkward sentence structure, but beyond that, we are venturing into the disco in our Angel Flights.

    And we all know how that ended.

  • The Nap of No Return

    The Nap of No Return

    As a lifelong sloth and connoisseur of comfort, routine, and having “everything just so,” I have to be wary of infantilization, the habit of soothing myself by disengaging from the world until I enter long stretches of mindless inertia.

    I am not particularly vulnerable to this dangerous habit in the morning. I write, play the piano, and work out with kettlebells in the garage. But after lunch and my fitful post-workout nap, I am drawn to the couch and my true crime shows. That is where I can become lizard-eyed and begin checking out from life.

    Part of my afternoon retreat is owed to my lifelong inability to sleep well. I haven’t gotten eight straight hours of sleep in more than forty years. I wake from disturbing dreams that are all different and all the same. I’m often traveling in a caravan of people. We are walking or driving along the coast, embarked upon some vague quest. The leader, generally speaking, is not happy with me. I am too grumpy. I am moving too slowly or too quickly. I am going down the wrong path.

    Invariably, I get lost and have to find my way back to the group. I am in a state of great distress. The harder I try to rectify the situation, the worse it becomes. Eventually I wake up and try to process another haunting narrative featuring me as the stray sheep. I go to the bathroom, return to the bed or the couch, where I probably migrated around midnight, put in my earbuds, and hope a podcast will lull me back to sleep.

    My nights of tumultuous, broken, tormented sleep point to the fact that I am a restless, anxious person. Letting go and giving myself over to the moment is difficult, not just when sleeping but in other endeavors.

    Reading can be a challenge, especially when I find myself getting irritated because a book seems padded with fluff. It should have been an essay or a short story, but instead it has been inflated into a 300-page monstrosity of repetition and tedium.

    Sitting through a two-hour movie can prove almost impossible. If the movie features a detective wearing a turtleneck sweater in a balmy climate, I experience vicarious heat exhaustion and have to turn off the television or flee the theater before I suffer a nervous breakdown. When characters eat at a dinner table during a TV show or movie, I lose interest in the plot and start wondering what they’re eating. Soon I am getting an apple from the refrigerator.

    I can relax in certain circumstances. I can sit down at the piano for twenty minutes. Piano is a reliable source of anxiety release, especially when I play for an imaginary audience in which I am the hero. There is something wonderfully relaxing about playing a sonata before imaginary admirers who are being lulled into the same state of relaxation by my piano playing that I am.

    Another reliable source of relaxation is the afternoon consumption of television droning in the background while I descend into a blissful half-sleep condition I call the Womb State.

    An African animal documentary narrated by my trusty guide David Attenborough can put me into the Womb State. A true crime series in which detectives are waiting to learn whether ballistic evidence matches the casings used by their suspect can lull me into the Womb State.

    My deepest, most blissful descent into the Womb State in recent memory occurred when I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, opened Netflix on my phone, and listened to The Big Picture podcast. Listening to the gregarious Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins speculate for two hours about which movies might produce the year’s Best Actor was a euphoric state of relaxation more potent than Xanax or Valium.

    As I am only a few weeks from turning sixty-five and know that my sleep will probably become lighter and lighter, I realize I may depend increasingly on these Womb State pastimes. Opening a streaming app on my phone, putting on my noise-cancelling headphones, and listening to animal documentaries, crime shows, and movie-review podcasts may add fifteen years to my life.

    The problem, of course, is overdoing it.

    When I like something, I tend to overdo it, and the relentless pursuit of the Womb State can result in infantilization.

    As someone whose anxious personality denies him a good night’s sleep, I crave the Womb State as a counterbalance. I crave the soothing sounds of a podcast or documentary while giant cushioned headphone cones surround my ears and I lie on a Beautyrest with diamond-infused memory foam and microcontouring pocketed nano-coils while a Tempur-Pedic pillow cradles my neck. In the proper dose, this afternoon ritual gives me the rest I need.

    Taken to extremes, however, the ritual becomes part of the dark arts.

    The nap with headphones is no longer about rejuvenation. It is about extinction.

    Think of the 1973 movie Soylent Green, a dystopian nightmare in which citizens can choose voluntary euthanasia. They listen to soothing music while immersed in wraparound projections of beautiful landscapes. The government controls these citizens in part through the power of infantilization. There is a fine line between wanting to let go and becoming a helpless, malleable citizen whose self-agency has disappeared forever.

    I therefore need to remain wary of the temptations of infantilization. Napping may provide necessary rest for a man who can’t get a good night’s sleep, or it could be the precursor to the Nap of No Return.

    Just as David Attenborough adds extra gravitas and poignancy to his voice while describing an old alpha lion leaving its pride to die in isolated dignity, I can imagine the fabled naturalist shifting his commentary to me:

    “And here lies a man for whom the nap crept up on him and would not let go. Here in the suburbs, the greatest threat is not a natural predator. It is infantilization.”

  • Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    My fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez told our class in the early 1980s that we had to write our short stories over and over until they reached a pristine state in which we no longer had to apologize for anything in them. The stories had to stand on their own, beyond reproach.

    I thought of Gonzalez’s words when I came across a section of The Good Life Method in which the authors present a writing exercise: You have to write an apologia, or apology, for your own life. Apology in this context doesn’t mean saying you’re sorry. It means “speaking in one’s defense.” Your philosophical core, and the actions that grow from it, should be things you can defend on philosophical grounds.

    The authors provide several examples. I’ll mention three. Socrates defended his pursuit of the good life, a quest that embarrassed and antagonized the elite class. Augustine defended his religious conversion. Nietzsche defended his rejection of Christian morality and his vision of the Übermensch, or superman, a figure capable of overcoming inherited values and creating new ones rather than obediently accepting the old moral structure.

    Your personal apologia contains three building blocks. The first is a story that raises the question of what constitutes the good life and suggests a possible answer. The second is an argument for your goal, or higher purpose. The third is the method—the means by which you intend to achieve your goal of living the good life.

    The authors make it clear that having the correct conception of the good life isn’t enough. You have to act in accordance with your ideal. To make their case, they cite Aristotle, who warned about the chasm between belief and action. He compares people who philosophize without changing their lives to patients who listen attentively to their doctors and then ignore every instruction. The patients won’t become healthy, and neither will the philosophers. In religious terms, faith without works is dead.

    As I consider the personal apologia and its three building blocks, it occurs to me that this exercise is essentially a Life Syllabus complete with Enduring Understandings. You identify the good life, establish the philosophical basis for it, and create a plan of action for living it.

    That is your syllabus.

    It seems reasonable to me that a young person should have such a Life Syllabus. Having one is surely more profitable than not having one. Living every day as if you’re making everything up as you go along strikes me as both depressing and futile.

    I’m reminded of a friend who waited tables in Denver in the early 1980s. Eventually the job depressed him because, as he explained it, every day he was starting from scratch. The job gave him nothing to build upon. Every shift he constructed a tower of blocks, and by the next shift the tower had collapsed. He had to start all over again.

    A syllabus, with its building blocks, promises the opposite. It gives you a journey in which one action builds upon the previous one. You are making something of yourself. You are flourishing. You are moving closer to the good life and, presumably, becoming a good person along the way.

    For a young person, such a journey seems profitable. If you are in your mid-sixties, as I am, it isn’t too late. In fact, the matter has become considerably more urgent.

    So with this in mind, I return to the apologia and its first building block: a personal story that gave me some glimpse of an answer to the question of how to live a good life.

    The first story that comes to mind happened in 1981. I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder attending college in Northern California. Preparing for the late-summer Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School, I ate a high-protein, low-carb diet and tanned every day. In the weeks leading up to the contest, my clothes began hanging from my 180-pound, perfectly tanned physique like a bad costume. This necessitated an entirely new wardrobe, which brought me to a fitting room in a Pleasanton shopping mall.

    While I tried on pants behind gauzy curtains, two attractive young women standing outside began arguing over which one should ask me out. Their voices grew louder and louder, which I interpreted as compelling evidence that I was a highly valued commodity.

    This was my golden opportunity. My moment to shine.

    And what did I do?

    I froze.

    I threw up an aloof facade so potent that it was like scattering banana peels under their feet and sending them sliding away from my presence. I appeared stuck-up, full of myself, and out of reach when, in reality, I was a frightened imbecile hiding behind a fortress of muscle.

    In spite of my perfect tan and ripped physique, I was useless because I possessed the social skills of a wilted houseplant. All that bodybuilding had caused me to neglect more important matters: soul-building, social-skill building, mind-building. I was essentially a cipher. My chiseled body had done nothing to put me on the path toward the good life.

    Disillusioned with bodybuilding, I hit the books in college and tried to develop my mind with the same intensity I had applied to my body. I read Nabokov, Bellow, Kafka, and Dostoevsky. I learned to play piano works by Chopin, Schubert, and Brahms.

    And I became an annoying pseudo-intellectual snob.

    Intellectual pride, it turned out, didn’t put me on the path toward the good life either. My existence vacillated between the despair of believing I was a misfit while listening to The Smiths and the arrogance of believing I was superior to “the masses” while affecting the pomposity of Vladimir Nabokov. I had traded one costume for another. Instead of hiding behind muscles, I was hiding behind books, classical music, and intellectual affectation.

    I was a poseur, someone who didn’t know how to be real with himself or anyone else.

    So what was the good life?

    A life of authenticity, for starters. A life of humility in which I rejected both the hidden pride of despair and the more flamboyant pride of snobbery.

    But I can’t pretend the road toward authenticity was a straight line. There were starts and stops, loops and detours, concentric circles and occasional ascents. I did become more authentic over time, but not because I possessed a clear philosophy or followed a carefully constructed syllabus. Life challenges and conflicts with actual human beings forced me to surrender some of the facade and BS and learn to respect other people.

    Being respectful required being authentic.

    This was a long, gradual process. It didn’t happen because I read this philosopher or that one. No single book cracked open the heavens and handed me the operating manual.

    In the end, no philosopher was my teacher.

    Life was the teacher.

    And this brings me to a problem I have with The Good Life Method. I understand its impulse very clearly. Like these sharp, talented, well-intentioned Notre Dame professors, I love writing a course syllabus, which can easily double as a Life Syllabus. I love the idea of a plan, an outline, a sequence of building blocks, and a path toward the good life.

    But perhaps it is too pat. Too tidy. Too much like a pretty package with a ribbon tied neatly on top.

    Life may be too messy for the course outline. It may be too messy for resolution and absolute answers. As someone who struggles with my Jewish and Catholic background and remains agnostic about several enormous religious questions, I’m reminded of something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville’s inability to achieve religious clarity: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

    I know that territory.

    I remain sympathetic to the goals of The Good Life Method. I want the Life Syllabus. I want the Enduring Understandings. I want the building blocks, the method, the telos, and the reassuring sense that one assignment leads logically to the next.

    I’m just not convinced that life has read the syllabus.

    And I have serious doubts that this method, or any method, provides a surefire path to the promised land.

  • Give Me Chaos and I Will Make You a Syllabus

    Give Me Chaos and I Will Make You a Syllabus

    If you are a good college instructor, you provide a haven for your students. By haven, I mean that you give them structure and order in a world of chaos and nonsense. There is a world outside the classroom, and it is a tempest of confusion, trickery, deception, wild-goose chases, chimeras, and misguided Holy Grails. Inside a young person’s mind, the world can resemble a jumble of blurry lines, flashing lights, and static on a 1960s television with a faulty UHF antenna. As an instructor, you have to pull your students out of that blinding, cacophonous television set.

    Your first job is to understand that they are rather comfortable living there. Just as a fish doesn’t know it’s wet after spending its entire life in water, students don’t necessarily know they live in confusion because confusion is their default environment. You have to make them see the disorder of their living space, persuade them that it is not normal, and convince them to look for an exit.

    This part of your class does not feel like a haven because it is disruptive. You must, as Kafka writes of good literature, be the axe that breaks their frozen ocean. You must create tumult. Students should occasionally feel as if the ground has been removed from beneath their feet. They should feel disoriented, even vertiginous.

    But this is where the haven enters. It is your course syllabus.

    The syllabus contains your purpose—not merely the official student learning outcomes but what educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe call Enduring Understandings. These are the large ideas students should carry with them long after the class is over. If you’re teaching a unit on the life of Frederick Douglass, for example, you don’t merely teach the courage of an adolescent who defied laws forbidding him to read and write. You teach that the interiority produced by advanced literacy allows a person to understand and crave freedom in ways that would otherwise be unavailable.

    But your syllabus contains more than course purpose, student learning outcomes, and Enduring Understandings. It contains the manual for implementing those goals. You give students a purpose, a structure, a timeline, and a method.

    That is the haven.

    There is something very American about the course syllabus. By American, I mean that our culture is embedded in the optimistic belief that we can fix things. The world is broken because, in part, people are broken, but give us the right how-to manual and we will get to work. Because we grow up with this belief, we tend to take free will and self-agency for granted. We can improve particular forms of intelligence, critical thinking, communication skills, marital intimacy, leadership, and financial stewardship. We can learn to write screenplays, become comedians, actors, yoga instructors, computer programmers, and whatever else the instructional manual promises.

    We recognize few bounds. We can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We can transcend economic and social class and ascend to the highest altitudes of American finance and status, where presumably everyone has a personal chef and a diversified portfolio.

    College instructors participate in this national faith. Depending on what course we teach, we provide a syllabus that is more than a schedule of due dates. It is more than a manual. It is an affirmation of self-agency and the hope of self-reinvention. It provides a haven of order and structure in a world of chaos.

    So being an instructor is a big deal. In fact, the word instructor doesn’t capture the gravitas of our calling. Perhaps another term is required. Perhaps we should be called priestocrats. Our very existence and role in society constitute an argument for self-improvement, self-agency, and order in a chaotic world.

    As someone who has taught college and written syllabi for forty years, do I really believe all this?

    I honestly don’t know.

    But I do know this: Writing a syllabus is enormously comforting because it makes me feel ordered and structured in a world of chaos. A syllabus gives me the sensation of control. I love writing them so much that I can imagine retiring from teaching less than a year from now and continuing to write syllabi “just for fun.” I will scour essays from various authors, discover some thematic through-line connecting them, and create an imaginary sixteen-week course complete with reading and writing assignments. There will be an Enduring Understanding, of course. There will be a telos, a higher purpose. There will probably be due dates even though no students exist.

    I will never stop writing syllabi because I have the Syllabus Gene.

    The gene revealed itself early. When I was thirteen, I became an Olympic weightlifter and, shortly afterward, a bodybuilder. I spent hours in my father’s office, where he had a beautiful blue IBM Selectric typewriter. I would type workouts, read them over, revise them, throw away the paper, and begin again. Each new version seemed to bring me closer to the haven of the Perfect Workout, the program that would optimize my fitness and provide the order I craved.

    The world was chaotic. The average man looked like a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of him, and by God, I was going to create a manual that would spare me that indignity.

    Looking back, the connection seems obvious. The thirteen-year-old typing workout schedules on an IBM Selectric and the college instructor constructing sixteen-week composition courses are essentially the same person. Give me chaos and I will make categories. Give me confusion and I will create a sequence. Give me sixteen weeks and I will assign due dates.

    Perhaps that is what I have been doing for forty years. I thought I was creating a haven for my students. Maybe I was creating one for myself as well.

    So I am retiring from teaching college writing.

    But I will always write a syllabus.

    My sanity depends on it.

  • The Good Life Is Making Me Anxious

    The Good Life Is Making Me Anxious

    Of course, retirement is not about retiring. It’s about learning to live differently after you’ve been loosed from your professional obligations. The same goes for aging. It’s not about preparing to die. It’s about preparing to live appropriately in the face of death.

    So after hearing Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan discuss these issues on a podcast with David Brooks, I picked up The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. Written by Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, the book’s ten chapters begin with action verbs: desire, live, take, work, love, wonder, take, struggle, contemplate, and prepare. I saw this as a promising start because my current action verbs are worry, fret, stew, and agonize. This book could represent an improvement in my approach.

    The Introduction immediately caught me. The authors observe that we are goal-oriented creatures. We see ourselves on a ladder, constantly climbing in the realms of health, fitness, social status, and material success. We devote enormous amounts of time and energy to achieving these goals, and the labor itself reassures us that we are headed somewhere worthwhile.

    As I read, I envisioned all of us standing over the parts of our lives as if they were machine pieces moving along a conveyor belt. We are assembly-line workers connecting some of the pieces, but we don’t know what the finished product is supposed to look like. We have our station on the line. We work earnestly. We tighten our bolts. But we’ve lost sight of the machine.

    The authors argue that there is an answer to this myopia. It’s called philosophy. Aristotle understood its purpose. Interrogating your life and the lives around you should help you develop a philosophy aimed at making you a good person. Good people have something in common: they lead “a good life.” Defining the good life, and then embodying it, becomes the purpose of philosophy.

    What strikes me about this lesson is that it applies to people of all ages and employment conditions. We have found the rare universal shoe that fits everyone’s feet.

    Aspiring to the good life puts everything else into context. If I want ten thousand people to watch one of my YouTube videos in three days and become grouchy with my family because only three thousand people have bothered to admire me, I’ve lost my way. I’ve lost what the authors call telos, the aim that gives life meaning and direction. We have a target. Our actions are arrows. The arrows should hit the target.

    Road rage, social-media disappointment, food hoarding, slothful TV bingeing, and compulsive internet shopping are arrows lying uselessly in the grass. Giving ourselves over to unruly passions becomes a recipe for misery. Happiness, by contrast, means hitting the target by living the good life. Aristotle called this goal eudaimonia.

    Because I am Ashkenazi Jewish on my mother’s side and Roman Catholic on my father’s, I am familiar with versions of this framework. In Judaism, we aspire to a good life while wrestling with the evil inclination. God has given us enough reason and strength to move toward him. We meet God halfway, and God reciprocates.

    Christianity tells a more severe story. We don’t merely fail to pursue the good life. We run from it. We love darkness and self-indulgence. We enjoy our little kingdoms of complacent narcissism, where the rest of humanity can suffer somewhere safely beyond the property line. But God is the Hound of Heaven. He hunts us down and drags us toward the fold while we scream and kick our legs. As Paul and John explain it, we are sinners in need of a divine rescue mission before we can turn around and walk the true path.

    So reading The Good Life Method makes me anxious.

    I agree with the general framework. Our lives should not be rooted in materialism, social status, and self-indulgence. We should seek to become good people. My anxiety begins with that old warning: the devil is in the details.

    Can we reach the good life and find atonement and redemption through Aristotle’s philosophy? Through the similar structure of Judaism? Through Christianity? There are similarities, certainly, but there are also enormous differences. Take eschatology, a frightening word for “last things.” What exactly are the last things? Does death bring annihilation, the complete extinction of consciousness? Do we enter some larval underworld imagined by ancient Greek religion? Do we haunt Hades, Sheol, or Gehenna, neither happy nor tortured, but half-conscious, like someone slowly waking from a codeine dream?

    Or is there a Judgment Day, a Lake of Fire, and a heavenly mansion where, as Aquinas notoriously suggested, part of the pleasure enjoyed by the blessed comes from witnessing the punishment of the damned? They mocked you on earth for your pious ways. Now look who’s laughing.

    The devil is in the details.

    So I am anxious.

    But I read on.

    I know the book ahead of me is not some saccharine self-help manual stuffed with fortune-cookie platitudes. Nor is it a New Age sales pitch assuring me that I can be spiritual and selfish at the same time because having my cake and eating it is apparently my God-given entitlement. Like any worthwhile book, The Good Life Method intends to challenge me. It will throw down a gauntlet. It will force me to examine my values and priorities.

    Because Sullivan and Blaschko teach at Notre Dame and are practicing Roman Catholics, however, I don’t yet know whether their goal is to convert me in the specifically religious sense or in the more universal philosophical sense. Nor do I know whether universal moral improvement is sufficient once eschatology enters the room.

    If I practiced a particular religious faith, I’m not sure I would be satisfied if people adopted my moral philosophy and stopped there. That would be like repainting an old car. You cleaned and stripped the surface. You repaired the body. You spread the Bondo, sanded it smooth, applied the primer, and congratulated yourself on the progress.

    But you stopped.

    No sealer. No base coat. No clear coat. No curing.

    You understood Aristotle. You understood the arrows and the target. You may even have become a nicer person. But you failed to conform those principles to the required orthodoxy. You are an unfinished automobile sitting under fluorescent shop lights with enormous patches of Bondo across the doors.

    You are an eyesore.

    I am overcome with these thoughts, and I haven’t even finished the Introduction.

    Apparently one thing that did not retire when I did was my compulsion to worry, fret, obsess, and make myself increasingly miserable while reading books designed to teach me how to be happy.

  • My Accidental COVID Shot

    My Accidental COVID Shot

    It was a sunny morning on the first of October when I sat taking notes in a Kaiser doctor’s office in Carson while my wife and her surgeon reviewed the post-op do’s and don’ts. Nothing over ten pounds for six weeks. No blood-thinning ibuprofen during that time. She could sleep on her side but not her stomach. She could lift her arms over her head. In a week, she would want vitamin E oil for the affected areas. In about a month, silicone scar cream.

    Eventually the conversation drifted from post-op recovery to their shared interest in child-rearing. My wife is a middle-school health and language arts teacher; the doctor has a one-year-old and a three-year-old and is currently serving a life sentence in the maximum-security wing of parenting.

    I grew antsy.

    A week earlier, I had missed my opportunity to get a drive-through flu shot, and at nearly sixty-five I don’t like missing my shots. Vaccinations have become another maintenance item, like rotating the tires or changing the furnace filter. Ignore the schedule long enough and something expensive starts coughing.

    I excused myself, received the blessing of my wife and her doctor, and took the elevator down to Floor One, where I found the vaccine station. I filled out a form, assured everyone that vaccines did not cause me to transform into Mr. Hyde, and sat beside a friendly nurse in her early thirties.

    “You’re okay with Pfizer?” she asked.

    “What are my other choices?”

    “None.”

    “Then don’t offer me Diet Pepsi when there’s only Diet Coke.”

    She laughed.

    The shot burned like hell. It burned even more after the needle came out, but I maintained my dignity, thanked the nurse, and returned to Floor Three, where my wife was waiting in the post-op area.

    I told her about the burning.

    “Did you get a flu shot?” she asked.

    I nodded. Of course I had. I had gone to the flu-shot station she had pointed out earlier.

    “Sounds like you got a COVID shot.”

    “She did say it was Pfizer.”

    “That’s COVID, dude.”

    There are moments when a single sentence rearranges reality.

    We returned to the vaccine station, and sure enough, sitting there in plain sight were two stacks of forms: one for flu and one for COVID.

    I was a car that needed unleaded and had somehow filled itself with diesel.

    Since I was already there—and apparently collecting vaccines like G-Shocks—I decided I might as well get the flu shot too, this time in the opposite arm.

    I rolled up my sleeve.

    “Flex or relax?”

    “Relax,” the nurse said, “or you’ll be sorry.”

    This seemed like excellent advice for vaccines, aging, and perhaps life in general.

    I relaxed.

    I thanked her for both shots and returned to my wife, who reminded me that the last COVID vaccine had turned me into a basket case for about twenty-four hours. This was unfortunate timing. She was recovering from surgery and needed me functioning at something approaching full capacity, not wandering around the house shivering beneath a blanket and announcing that death was imminent.

    I promised that when we got home, I would take three ibuprofen and a nap and prepare myself for whatever punishment my immune system had scheduled for the next twenty-four hours.

    Perhaps I should be grateful. Through a combination of diligence, confusion, and poor signage comprehension, I had knocked out two vaccines in one visit. My shingles vaccinations had been completed six months earlier. Now COVID and flu were checked off the list.

    At nearly sixty-five, you begin to appreciate these small victories. Retirement is approaching, bringing with it enough disruptions, anxieties, medical appointments, identity crises, and mysterious bodily developments without influenza, shingles, or COVID joining the welcoming committee.

    So perhaps I’m ready.

    We shall see.

    Meanwhile, I’m eager to tear off these damn Band-Aids.

  • I Lived in the Before Times

    I Lived in the Before Times

    The Boomer shaking his fist at the television while denouncing the stupidity of the world—or standing on his lawn, arms akimbo, broadcasting his bitter displeasure with the neighborhood’s rapid decline—is an archetype of a particular kind of pathetic old-timer. He cannot accept his growing misalignment with the world. His rage is fundamentally rooted in fear: he is living in a world he no longer understands and increasingly lacks the ability to navigate. Unable to adapt, he acts out. He is a man sinking in quicksand with no rope within reach.

    Understood this way, retirement and old age are partly about misalignment and the primal terror of becoming isolated by it.

    It is tempting to dismiss the Boomer accordingly. He is simply curdling in old age and knows there is nothing he can do about it. Like the Wicked Witch screaming, “I’m melting!” he is slowly disappearing from the world.

    But we oversimplify the Boomer’s demise at our own peril. Two seemingly contradictory things can be true. On one hand, the Boomer really is misaligned with the world and may lack some of the adaptive skills necessary to flourish in it. On the other hand, some of his roots in the past point toward a superior way of being.

    I’m talking about reading.

    I’m talking about reading a paragraph containing complex ideas and understanding it.

    Not just a paragraph, either. A long essay. Even a book.

    The Boomer has lived in the Before and After Times. In the Before Times, his brain was trained for sustained reading. He processed the world through text, made sense of his place in it, and constructed a worldview by reading enormous amounts of material. Through reading, he learned to identify patterns, cycles, sophistry, trickery, deception, charlatanism, and occasionally authenticity.

    He was literate.

    The After Times are considerably less hospitable to literacy. We now spend large portions of our lives inside engagement farms, euphemistically called “social media platforms,” where fragmented attention is not a design flaw but the business model. The platforms compete to keep us clicking, swiping, gawking, raging, desiring, and returning. Sustained thought must compete against an industrial apparatus designed to interrupt it.

    The Boomer terrified by his misalignment therefore confronts an uncomfortable paradox. He legitimately fears his own growing ineptitude while also witnessing a different kind of ineptitude spreading around him: people losing their tolerance for sustained attention.

    Living in a post-reading society and knowing the difference because you lived in the Before Times is a peculiar privilege of age. I have students who were in sixth grade when the pandemic denied them anything resembling normal schooling for nearly two years. They spent much of their adolescence with TikTok, Instagram Reels, Snapchat, YouTube, and Roblox. Reading rarely occupied the center of this world. When assigned, it could feel less like intellectual discovery than community service for toilet-papering somebody’s house.

    Short video clips engineered to deliver immediate stimulation became the staple product of the engagement farms young people carried everywhere in their slender glass bricks. Childish Gambino captured something about this condition in “This Is America.” Violence and social breakdown erupt throughout the video while dancing, spectacle, and entertainment continually hijack our attention. The catastrophe is happening right in front of us, but something more stimulating keeps wandering into the foreground.

    If someone as young and culturally fluent as Childish Gambino can suggest that we are losing ourselves inside spectacle and distraction, the old Boomer ranting on his lawn suddenly deserves another hearing.

    There really was a Before Times when sustained literacy occupied a larger place in ordinary intellectual life, and its erosion has consequences. This is the subject of James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. As part of his research, Marriott contacted senior academics who told him that it was becoming increasingly difficult to assign a novel and expect students to read it within a week.

    I can attest to the larger problem. Assign long books and many students won’t read them. Some will drop the class. Eventually word spreads that you assign books, and students may avoid your section unless circumstances force them into it. You can assign one short book and give students the entire semester to read it. Even that is no longer a surefire proposition.

    I saw the accelerated decline of books in my own classrooms around 2012, almost exactly when smartphones reached critical mass and became mandatory accessories. Around that time, the lavish visits from textbook representatives began disappearing. No more kiosks and catered food. No more giant boxes of composition readers, essay collections, and grammar books arriving at our offices for inspection. The hundred-dollar composition textbook began its long march toward extinction. Even the used-book buyers vanished—the cheerful scavengers who once wandered into our offices and handed us cash for unwanted textbooks gathering dust on our shelves.

    College is a business. The business model had changed.

    Students were finding cheaper alternatives to outrageously priced textbooks, which was often a welcome development. But something larger was changing at the same time. We were increasingly creating classroom content for students living inside an information environment that competed directly against sustained reading.

    To my credit, I have adapted. I now break reading and writing assignments into shorter visual components using Google Slides. I make the concepts visible. I map arguments. I isolate terms. I provide examples.

    But sometimes I wonder whether adaptation has quietly become accommodation.

    I find myself hand-feeding information more than I did in the past. Instead of asking students to wrestle with a difficult text until they extract its argument, I increasingly extract the argument, put it on a slide, define the terms, provide the mapping components, and lead them through the analysis. The very skills I want reading to develop are sometimes the skills students need before they can tolerate the reading.

    There is the trap.

    So yes, I am misaligned.

    I am the aging man standing on the lawn wondering what happened to the neighborhood. I lived in the Before Times, and part of me will always remain there.

    But misalignment does not necessarily mean error.

    Sometimes the old man yelling from the lawn really is yelling at a fire.

  • I Drove Home Without Trying on the Milk

    I Drove Home Without Trying on the Milk

    Last night I dreamed that a group of YouTubers who specialize in watches met at a museum where actors performed live reenactments of world history as a kind of Cirque du Soleil extravaganza. Empires rose and fell while acrobats dangled from the ceiling. Afterward, we gathered in the museum café to discuss the performance.

    No one admitted it, but we were all dead to watches.

    We weren’t ashamed of this, nor were we particularly proud. We simply didn’t know how to talk about it. These were people who had spent years discussing bezels, lume, movements, finishing, wrist presence, heritage, and the spiritual significance of shaving two millimeters off a case diameter. Now none of us cared. A watch was a watch. It told the time. Apparently, this had been its function all along.

    We had moved on.

    Oddly, nobody seemed sad or relieved. We were more like patients in convalescence, sitting around after surviving the same peculiar disease. The watch obsession had taken something out of us. Years of acquisition, research, comparison, anticipation, unboxing, disappointment, resale, and reacquisition had finally exhausted the machinery of desire. We had spent years looking for the watch that would end the search, only to discover that the search ended when we stopped caring about watches.

    After commiserating about the museum performance, we went our separate ways.

    Then my wife called. She needed a half gallon of milk.

    I stopped at a store, but buying milk turned out to be more complicated than I remembered. Apparently, you now had to try on the carton the way you would try on shoes.

    “Do you have this in a thirteen double-wide?” I asked the clerk.

    She checked. “Only thirteen regular.”

    I took off my shoe and inserted my sock-covered foot into the milk carton. Milk swished around my ankle.

    “Too tight,” I said.

    She told me she would look in the back for a wider model.

    Only then did the obvious problem occur to me. Hadn’t I just ruined the milk? How could they possibly put this carton back on the shelf after I had stuck my foot into it?

    The clerk, a blonde college student who looked about twenty, seemed puzzled by my concern.

    “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It happens all the time.”

    I told her to forget about the double-wide. I would buy the milk anyway.

    I drove home with my half gallon, hoping no one would notice that I hadn’t tried it on.

  • How to Age Without Ruining Everyone Else’s Day

    How to Age Without Ruining Everyone Else’s Day

    I was sixty-four when I attended my cousin Pete’s seventy-fifth birthday party at his home in Studio City. The place teemed with cousins and their friends, ninety percent of them over seventy, including the members of the Beatles-and-Stones cover band.

    When twilight arrived—salmon sky, ninety degrees—dozens of people in their seventies stripped down and leapt into the swimming pool like aging dolphins. They splashed, laughed, floated on their backs, and generally behaved as though the actuarial tables had been suspended for the evening. I remained beneath the canopy in long pants, swatting mosquitoes and sulking.

    I sat with a plate of hummus, feta, figs, and baba ghanoush and talked with Jim, my cousin Diane’s husband, a seventy-eight-year-old retired ophthalmologist.

    I told him about some of the challenges I was encountering as I entered my mid-sixties: early bedtimes, bladder-draining night patrols, and my growing terror of driving after dark.

    Jim leaned toward me, lowered his voice, and delivered a sentence that should probably be etched on my tombstone.

    “The hardest part of aging is becoming invisible. You still take up space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture.”

    I immediately thought of Dostoevsky—or rather a sentiment I associate with his darkly comic vision of human nature. After a certain age, merely continuing to exist begins to seem vaguely impolite. Forty is acceptable. Fifty is pushing your luck. Seventy-five? Now you’re abusing the hospitality. Mind your manners and die already.

    “Exactly my point,” Jim said.

    I was joking, but the joke contains an unpleasant truth. Call it The Mortality Courtesy: the tacit social expectation that aging people should manage their decline in ways that minimize discomfort and inconvenience to everyone else.

    Stay healthy. Stay attractive. Stay mobile. Stay independent. Don’t complain. Don’t smell strange. Don’t require assistance getting out of the car. Don’t hold up the line while searching for your credit card. Keep your hearing aids charged. Maintain bladder control. And above all, don’t become one of those frightening old people whose visible deterioration reminds everyone else where this carnival ride is heading.

    If you absolutely must age and die, please have the decency not to make it awkward.

    Tolstoy understood The Mortality Courtesy perfectly. In the wonderfully cruel opening of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, employees at a prominent law court learn that Ivan Ilyich has died. Almost immediately, they begin wondering what promotions and personnel changes his death might make available to them.

    Ivan is dead. Someone may be getting a better office.

    They are also secretly relieved by the most fundamental fact of the situation: death happened to Ivan and not to them. One person’s catastrophe becomes another person’s reassurance.

    Then comes the funeral, which presents its own set of irritations. Death requires scheduling adjustments. There must be displays of grief, solemn expressions, uncomfortable clothing, flowers, condolences, and perhaps an afternoon sacrificed to standing around a coffin when everyone has other things to do.

    The dead can be terribly inconsiderate.

    But Ivan’s greatest breach of etiquette is more serious. His death reminds everyone that they are fools for living as though they will live forever.

    That is the real violation of The Mortality Courtesy.

    We spend much of our lives climbing ladders of pleasure, status, acquisition, accomplishment, and recognition, always imagining that happiness waits on the next rung. Better house. Better job. Better body. Better vacation. Better restaurant reservation. Better retirement portfolio. Keep climbing and eventually you will arrive at the radiant platform where everything finally makes sense.

    Then some inconsiderate bastard dies.

    Suddenly the entire enterprise looks suspicious.

    This may explain why visible aging can make younger people uncomfortable. The old person isn’t merely old. He is carrying information. His stooped posture, hearing aids, liver spots, pill organizer, orthopedic shoes, and careful descent down a staircase are little dispatches from the future.

    Nobody asked for these updates.

    Wouldn’t it be more polite to remain eternally youthful and salubrious? Stay lean. Keep your teeth. Maintain excellent posture. Swim laps at seventy-five. Wear tasteful linen. Post photographs from Tuscany. Inspire everyone with your vitality.

    This is the kind of aging society can tolerate because it doesn’t look sufficiently like aging.

    Perhaps that is what fascinated me about Pete’s birthday party. The septuagenarians launching themselves into the pool were performing the acceptable version of old age. They were vigorous, social, musical, suntanned, drinking wine, singing Beatles songs, and behaving as though seventy-five were merely fifty with a better retirement account.