Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    Dementia and cognitive decline are real concerns in old age. Think of them as the hurricane forming somewhere offshore. You don’t know if it will hit you, but you prepare anyway. Stock up on water and canned beans. Nail plywood over the windows. Make sure you have quick access to the potato cellar.

    Old age requires its own hurricane preparations. Don’t carry excess body weight. Maintain normal blood pressure. Go easy on sugar. Exercise. Avoid alcohol. Don’t smoke. If your hearing deteriorates to the point that you withdraw from conversation and retreat into your own head, get a hearing aid. Keep your mind active. Build what researchers call cognitive reserve—the brain’s capacity to withstand some of the damage associated with aging and disease while continuing to function.

    You can challenge yourself by playing a musical instrument, doing crossword puzzles, starting a podcast, learning something difficult, or writing a multigenerational novel. Think of these pursuits as mental exercise, potentially as important to your aging brain as going to the gym five days a week is to your aging body.

    But not all mental exercise is equal.

    Consider journaling, that beloved sacrament of wellness culture. Journaling requires a physical notebook, your favorite pen or mechanical pencil, perhaps a steaming mug of tea positioned nearby for atmosphere. For this one noble endeavor, you have gone off the grid. You are the intellectual equivalent of outdoorsman Euell Gibbons, wandering through the wilderness and surviving on the edible portions of pinecones.

    Writer and professor Katie Roiphe challenges our assumptions about this supposedly healthy practice in her essay “Is Journaling Bad for You?” Her objections are formidable. For one thing, your journal is never as private as you imagine. Eventually some nosy relative will root through your belongings like a truffle sow and unearth thoughts never intended for public consumption.

    Worse, those thoughts may be misunderstood. They may even repel people who once loved you. The disparity between the person they thought they knew and the creature muttering from the pages of your private notebook may be too great to reconcile.

    You may not particularly enjoy meeting your former selves, either.

    Reading your journals twenty years later can become an archaeological excavation of every insecurity, obsession, grievance, humiliation, and catastrophically stupid opinion you once possessed. Instead of illuminating the present, your journal can lure you backward. Like Lot’s wife, you become fixated on what lies behind you and eventually turn into a pillar of salt—though perhaps one with very good handwriting.

    Then there is the problem of introspection cosplay.

    You may believe you’re plumbing the depths of your psyche when you’re really performing the role of Thoughtful Person. Instead of being brutally honest with yourself, you curate your introspection. Journaling becomes an exercise in self-regard, another platform for presenting yourself to an audience—even if the audience consists entirely of you.

    You become like the gym novice who spends two hours at the fitness center every day talking to people, listening to music, watching television, drinking smoothies, checking his phone, and occasionally wandering onto a treadmill. Six months later, he stands before the mirror bewildered that he has somehow failed to transform into an Olympic decathlete.

    But the fact that journaling can be done badly—and occasionally with disastrous consequences—is not an argument against journaling. It is an argument against performative journaling.

    If you can be unflinchingly honest with yourself, by all means journal. If you understand, in accordance with Sturgeon’s Law, that 90 percent of everything you write will be crap, by all means journal. If you approach your inner life with the same rigor that someone brings to a serious circuit-training session—working rather than posing, examining rather than admiring—then by all means journal.

    Roiphe’s argument, as I understand it, isn’t really against journaling. It is against confusing the performance of introspection with introspection itself. Beneath her skepticism lies an argument for authenticity.

    And perhaps that brings us back to cognitive decline.

    We worry about forgetting names, losing words, walking into rooms without remembering why we went there. These are frightening possibilities, and we should do what we reasonably can to protect ourselves.

    But there may be another kind of cognitive failure worth fearing: losing the ability to distinguish between examining your life and performing an examination of your life.

    You can fill a thousand notebooks and never confront yourself.

    The handwriting may remain perfectly legible while the mind behind it disappears.

  • Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Convenience is the mother of bad fashion. Think Velcro shoe straps that look less like footwear than medical devices designed for elephantine feet. Think elastic waistbands engineered to accommodate the vicissitudes of your waistline after an unfortunate buffet event. Think synthetic-blend loungewear that is as wrinkle-free as it is odor-harboring.

    But convenience becomes something darker when it promises escape from the natural friction of existence, when the goal is to inhabit a womb-like environment where effort has vanished completely. Think of the Snuggie, that fleece abomination that combines clothing and blanket while announcing to the world that you have become unapologetically dysfunctional. Congratulations. You have reached the apotheosis of bad fashion. You are now wearing your pathology on your sleeve, quite literally.

    If you’re approaching retirement age, you’ll discover an entire industry built around convenience and the premise that after sixty-five your need for it grows exponentially. Follow this road far enough and eventually your life becomes as frictionless as wrinkle-free loungewear, Netflix autoplay, instant oatmeal, and vanilla Ensure.

    You could argue that this is merely another humiliation of old age, another example of one generation falling out of alignment with those behind it. Perhaps that was once true. No longer. We now live in an age when younger generations aspire to much of the same frictionless existence traditionally marketed to the elderly. The generations have finally found common ground: nobody wants to get off the couch.

    This is a problem, according to Gabe Bullard’s Against Convenience, which argues that the mindless pursuit of convenience and frictionlessness can leave us isolated, dehumanized, and infantilized.

    The crank inside me immediately shouts, “Thank you, Captain Obvious, for writing a three-hundred-page padded essay explaining that modern technology has made us lazy.”

    But Bullard has, in fact, written an important, timely, and persuasive book, a much-needed rebuttal to a society mindlessly seduced by the conveniences of modern technology. My crankiness reveals less about the book than it does about my own guilty recognition that I am precisely the kind of person Bullard is writing about. I am, after all, a man who embraces a respectable amount of sloth and convenience. Consider my wardrobe: tank tops, gym shorts, and flip-flops. This ensemble serves as loungewear, sleepwear, errand wear, and exercise wear. Four wardrobes in one. I consider this a triumph of efficiency worthy of self-congratulation.

    Comfort over fashion makes me profoundly happy. When we returned to campus after our pandemic hibernation, my colleagues and I, ranging in age from thirty to sixty-five, seemed to have received the same memo. We wore T-shirts bearing the college logo, dark-wash denim jeans, and extravagantly cushioned walking shoes with names like Brooks Ghost Max 3 and Hoka Bondi 9. These sounded less like orthopedic footwear than race cars capable of reaching two hundred miles per hour at Le Mans.

    Before contemplating the pathologies of frictionless existence in Bullard’s persuasive critique, I made myself a delicious cup of coffee with my Ninja slow-drip coffee maker. It took ten minutes. Then I prepared a bowl of rolled oats with protein powder and berries. Thanks to the microwave, that took fewer than four.

    I am now typing this essay on an aluminum mechanical keyboard while sitting before two 27-inch 4K monitors connected to a Mac Mini smaller than my hand. Its M4 chip runs cool and moves through Google Chrome with frictionless ease.

    I do embrace struggle where I can. I like tackling big ideas, exploring subtexts, locating semiotic signs and symbols in popular culture, considering Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of liquid modernity, and interrogating my consumer longings through René Girard’s notion of mimetic desire.

    But here is the problem for anyone mounting a principled defense of friction: convenience can be delicious.

    This morning’s coffee and oatmeal were predictably stupendous. I’m sitting before two enormous monitors with twelve browser tabs open. Telemann is playing through YouTube Premium, with Boccherini and Rossini waiting obediently in the queue. My computer is cool and silent. My coffee is hot. My oatmeal required almost no labor.

    Perhaps Bullard is right that we need friction.

    I’m just not sure I want it before breakfast.

  • The Smell of Oatmeal at the End of the Universe

    The Smell of Oatmeal at the End of the Universe

    The older you get, the more you can feel like a broken alien—to others and even to yourself. You are no longer quite the person you remember being. This growing sense of estrangement creates a powerful desire to find your way home. You keep your eyes open for breadcrumbs that might lead you back. Sometimes a memory returns with such force that it stops you in your tracks.

    I have my own trail of breadcrumbs. One morning, I sat at the piano while my wife prepared breakfast, a pot of rolled oats simmering quietly on the stove. As the warm, earthy aroma drifted through the house, I was suddenly four years old again, carried back to the winter of 1966.

    My brother had not yet been born. It was just my mother, my father, and me driving toward Lake Tahoe. Before we reached our destination, a snowstorm descended with more fury than anyone expected. My father had no tire chains, so we abandoned the journey and took refuge in a small roadside motel, where we remained snowbound for several days while the Sierra disappeared beneath an endless blanket of white.

    My parents bought provisions from a nearby market. Every morning we ate bowls of Quaker Oats sweetened with brown sugar and cooled with milk. To my four-year-old self, it was paradise. Even today, no gourmet breakfast can rival the comfort contained in those humble bowls of oatmeal.

    Yet the smell of those oats carried an unexpected paradox. They meant warmth, safety, and home, but they also became permanently entwined with something altogether stranger. We were isolated in a tiny motel, surrounded by a landscape so white and silent that it seemed the world itself had vanished. We were a single glowing window in an infinite universe of snow.

    The motel television only deepened the feeling that we had crossed into another reality. Alongside familiar cartoons appeared programs I had never imagined could exist. There was Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt. Stranger still was a British science-fiction serial called Fireball XL5, whose cast consisted entirely of marionettes speaking with impeccable British accents.

    To my four-year-old mind, Fireball XL5 felt less like a television show than a fever dream accidentally transmitted from another galaxy. Nothing obeyed the ordinary rules of childhood. The marionettes smiled with unsettling serenity, their painted faces suspended somewhere between fearless astronauts and department-store mannequins that had wandered off after closing time. Their rocket streaked through glittering constellations that looked as though someone had punched tiny holes into black velvet with an ice pick. The dialogue carried the solemn authority of Shakespeare performed by sleepwalkers, while the eerie electronic score suggested that outer space was inhabited not by extraterrestrials but by ghosts.

    At four years old, I lacked the vocabulary to call it surreal. I only knew that I loved it because it made no sense. Fireball XL5 occupied that peculiar territory where wonder and nightmare shake hands, leaving a child convinced that television, like dreams, had uncovered a hidden dimension adults somehow accepted without question.

    Those three snowbound days fused together two emotional worlds that have never since separated. The comforting smell of oatmeal became permanently married to the delicious strangeness of Fireball XL5. This is what I call The Cozy Uncanny: the emotional condition in which domestic comfort becomes inseparable from profound otherness, producing memories that remain both reassuring and dreamlike.

    When my wife’s oatmeal filled our kitchen this morning, it carried me effortlessly back to that motel near Lake Tahoe. A single scent collapsed sixty years. Suddenly I was once again that little boy sitting safely indoors while an unknowable universe waited just beyond the frosted window.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite smells remain the smells of breakfast: rolled oats, French toast, pancakes browning on a griddle, maple syrup warming in the air. These aromas do more than remind me of childhood. They reassure me that no matter how strange the surrounding world becomes, there remains a path back home. I sometimes think that if I were suddenly transported into the bizarre universe of Fireball XL5, the smell of oatmeal alone would give me enough confidence to believe I could find my way back.

    People often predict that religion will eventually disappear, that modernity will finally outgrow humanity’s longing for transcendence. I doubt it. Our deepest desires to find a home are not arguments but homesickness. We are creatures who instinctively seek warmth, belonging, and a place where the strange finally becomes familiar. The smell of rolled oats, French toast, or pancakes does not merely awaken nostalgia. It awakens the ancient conviction that somewhere there exists a home we have not entirely forgotten.

  • My Inner Buzzkill Has Tenure

    My Inner Buzzkill Has Tenure

    You don’t really understand the adage “you are your own worst enemy” until you hit your mid-sixties. A dark voice inside you grows louder, casts its shadow over the proceedings, and begins offering unsolicited commentary on your future. You can “stay active,” “think good thoughts,” exercise, and hit your daily nutrient macros, but the voice remains unimpressed.

    In my case, the voice sounds disturbingly like Glum, the slump-shouldered, pessimistic Lilliputian sad sack from the childhood cartoon The Adventures of Gulliver. Glum was famous for expecting catastrophe. His entire philosophy could be reduced to one sentence: “We’ll never make it.”

    My Glum has updated the script.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    I can be minding my own business, driving across town to run an errand, swinging kettlebells in my garage, preparing overnight buckwheat groats while NPR murmurs from the kitchen radio, or reading the amino-acid profile on the back of a five-pound tub of protein powder when the voice crawls out of some dark crevice in my soul.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    I’ve heard the expression all my life but never paid much attention to it. Now I understand its appeal. It is an efficient little package of doom. Bad days ahead. Imminent disaster. Catastrophe. Loneliness. Helplessness. Hopelessness. Futility.

    Thank you, Glum. I was just trying to make breakfast.

    You have to take this voice seriously, not because its predictions contain great wisdom, but because the voice can make the genuine difficulties of aging worse than they need to be.

    Challenges are baked into the human condition. They should be accepted, perhaps even embraced, rather than rehearsed in advance. Suppose you buy a brand-new car. There is much to enjoy: the pride of ownership, the satisfaction of having researched every model within your budget, the latest safety technology, the quiet cabin, the sleek contours announcing to the neighbors that you remain a person of impeccable judgment.

    You just spent forty thousand dollars. You would like twenty minutes to enjoy yourself.

    Glum appears in the passenger seat.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    There will be repairs. Recalls. Door dings. Insurance increases. Next year’s model will look better and get four more miles per gallon. Eventually the transmission will fail, and one day the entire magnificent machine will be crushed into a metallic cube.

    Enjoy your new car.

    Glum doesn’t help you prepare for life’s difficulties. He simply makes you suffer from them twice: once before they happen and again when they actually arrive. He is your inner buzzkill.

    Some people have a louder inner buzzkill than others. The source could be biology, culture, trauma, temperament, or some cocktail of all four. What matters is developing a strategy for dealing with him.

    First, identify the voice.

    In my case, Glum is a cognitive distortion—a mental event generated by fear and masquerading as prophecy. To understand him, I have to recognize that he is rooted in the primal fear of loss and death. The fear itself is real. Loss is real. Death is real. But Glum’s prognosis of my remaining life is not reality. It is fear pretending to be an oracle.

    Second, recognize the self-fulfilling prophecy.

    If I allow fear to curdle my ability to participate in the present, I will squander the very life I’m frightened of losing. I will have surrendered my power to Glum, and the resulting misery will appear to vindicate him.

    “See?” Glum will say. “Told you.”

    Of course he told me. He helped cause it.

    Third, recognize that Glum is the master of pre-suffering.

    Aging guarantees losses, frustrations, illness, uncertainty, and eventually death. Glum’s trick is making you experience these events before they happen. A future car repair becomes today’s anxiety. Future physical decline contaminates today’s workout. Eventual death ruins today’s oatmeal.

    You don’t need to deny future suffering. You need to refuse advance billing.

    When something bad happens, deal with the actual problem. Don’t pay interest on misery that hasn’t arrived. Otherwise you won’t be able to play the piano, work out, write, enjoy your breakfast, or do much of anything except rehearse catastrophes.

    Fourth, answer Glum by living.

    Glum says, “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    Your response doesn’t need to be, “Everything will be wonderful.” That is merely Glum wearing a motivational-speaker costume.

    A better response is: “Perhaps. What can I do today?”

    Exercise. Write. Practice piano. Call someone. Eat well. Grade the essays. Take the walk.

    Agency doesn’t refute mortality. It prevents mortality from colonizing the present.

    Fifth, accept that you will never terminate Glum.

    He is with you. He has always been with you.

    Looking back, I realize Glum didn’t suddenly appear in my sixties. He was there during childhood. He was there during young adulthood. He has accompanied me through most of my life, providing an unwanted running commentary on the possibility that everything might go horribly wrong.

    I’ve even lost friends over the years because they consciously or unconsciously recognized my inner pessimist and went running for the hills.

    I don’t blame them.

    Some comedians have managed to turn Glum into a career. Richard Lewis comes to mind. He took the internal voice of catastrophe, dragged it onto a stage, put a microphone in front of it, and made people laugh.

    That may be one of the better ways of managing Glum.

    Mock him.

    Glum is an idiot worthy of ridicule, but he remains an idiot with tenure.

    And there is another uncomfortable truth. Glum is part of you. You’ve grown attached to him. You hate him, but you also love him. After decades together, you have developed one of those poisonous relationships neither party has the courage to end.

    Glum is your internal frenemy.

    So recognize him. Understand where he comes from. Laugh at his absurdity. Accept that he may never leave.

    But do not take orders from him.

  • I Left My Own Funeral Early

    I Left My Own Funeral Early

    A month before my sixty-fifth birthday, I dreamed I attended my own funeral.

    It wasn’t just for me. A beloved janitor at my college had also died. He and I stood inside a pristine dumpster, apparently scrubbed to a meticulous shine out of respect for the dead. Evidently even in death, the college had standards. I was both the subject of the funeral and a witness to it, simultaneously dead in the receptacle and standing with the other attendees observing my disposal.

    The aching sadness of the dream was undeniable, and it followed me into the morning as I tried to restore normal operations with coffee, oatmeal, writing, and piano practice. None of it worked. I felt sad and scared.

    Seeking consolation, I looked at some titles on my Amazon wishlist: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older; Susan Moon’s Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch and This Is Getting Old: Zen Thoughts on Aging with Humor and Dignity; Catherine Bradbury’s This Way Up: Old Friends, New Love, and a Map for the Road Ahead.

    Seeing these titles depressed me even more.

    I was reminded of 2010. I was forty-eight and overwhelmed with having twins. There were parenting podcasts everywhere. I couldn’t bear them. I was already living the struggle of parenting. The last thing I wanted after a day of actual parenting was to put on headphones and listen to two cheerful people discuss the challenges of parenting.

    The same thing happened during my forty years of teaching college writing. I never developed much tolerance for writing conferences, teaching podcasts, or education seminars. I was already teaching. I didn’t have room in my brain for shop talk and inspirational tidbits about connecting with my students. Occasionally I allowed some external pedagogy to sneak through the back door. I’m not above teaching the Sandwich Paragraph Structure. I have standards, but I also have bills to pay.

    And now death, aging, and retirement have generated their own industry. There are books, podcasts, YouTube channels, retreats, coaches, maps for the road ahead, instructions for the home stretch, and presumably somebody somewhere offering a twelve-week seminar on embracing your authentic elder self.

    It is all too on the nose.

    I’d rather approach death indirectly. I want to sneak up on it and surprise it. I want to be the agentive force, not the other way around.

    Good luck to me.

    Part of the problem is that while I believe in having a purpose and maintaining a positive attitude toward life’s final chapters, conversations about these matters quickly become infested with clichés and saccharine encouragement. Find your purpose. Practice gratitude. Embrace the journey. Age with intention. Become the sage.

    Apparently death becomes less alarming if you surround it with enough inspirational nouns.

    There is no panacea, formula, podcast, or twelve-step plan that removes the sting from your final chapters. Mortality remains stubbornly unimpressed by branding.

    Being old reminds me of a bunch of boomers attending a Rolling Stones concert. The band members themselves are around eighty, and now they’re playing the final encore. Do you stay and savor every remaining moment?

    That sounds good on paper.

    In reality, you’re already thinking about the parking lot.

    The concert peaked about an hour ago. If you stay until the final note, twenty thousand other people will stampede toward the exits at precisely the same moment. Then comes the parking structure. Then comes traffic. You can already see yourself trapped behind a Suburban containing six other boomers discussing their statins.

    So you leave early.

    You hear “Satisfaction” beginning behind you as you make your way toward the exit, congratulating yourself on your strategic brilliance.

    This impulse has an equivalent in aging. Call it Exit Anticipation: the tendency to begin psychologically withdrawing from life because you have become acutely aware that the event is approaching its conclusion.

    You know the peak is probably behind you. You know the concert cannot continue indefinitely. And once you start thinking about the exit, it becomes increasingly difficult to concentrate on the music.

    A sense of futility creeps in. Why start another project? Why buy another piano? Why make another friend? Why write another book? Why become deeply invested in anything when the ushers are already stacking chairs in the back of the auditorium?

    Exit Anticipation whispers that perhaps you should begin disengaging now. Get ahead of the crowd. Beat the traffic.

    It is a dark impulse, but denying it seems more dangerous than acknowledging it. You need to know that the impulse exists precisely so that you don’t obey it automatically. Otherwise, you can spend years leaving a life that hasn’t ended.

    That may be one of the peculiar psychological challenges of aging. The knowledge that the concert will end can interfere with your ability to hear the music that is still playing.

    My dream understood this before I did.

    There I was, looking at my own body inside a meticulously sanitized dumpster, attending the final ceremony of my existence.

    Did I stay until the end?

    Of course not.

    I wanted to beat the crowd.

    I wanted to beat the traffic.

  • Nobody Ever Needed an Angiogram Because of Too Many Seikos

    Nobody Ever Needed an Angiogram Because of Too Many Seikos

    As I close in on sixty-five and retirement in eight months, I hunger for life changes. A new chapter makes life feel longer. It’s like adding a second story to your house. You get the permits, hire the contractors, endure six months of dust, and your single-story shack becomes a glorious two-story home. Surely you will live longer now.

    A lot of these life changes are fantasies. I find myself looking at real estate. With my suburban Los Angeles home approaching two million dollars in value, I could sell it and buy a sort of mansion in Henderson, Las Vegas, or Orlando, Florida—a place big enough that I could finally trade in my Yamaha upright for a grand piano.

    I know it would be ridiculous to make my wife and teenage twin daughters pack their belongings and move to Nevada or Florida so I could indulge my fantasy of “starting life over.” Such a rebirth in a new land would mostly be a chimera. No matter where I went, I’d still have Netflix, a nearby bagel place, and a Costco. I would have traveled hundreds of miles to discover that I was still me.

    So as a proxy for uprooting my Southern California life, I look for smaller transformations. One has already occurred: my obsessive watch hobby.

    I currently have two discrete collections, Seiko divers and G-Shocks. The Seikos are the expensive ones. I own four mechanical Seiko divers that cost between $1,200 and $3,400 apiece. I spent about $8,100 on those mechanical divers, plus another $1,200 on my iconic quartz Seiko Tuna. Altogether, I have about $9,300 sitting in a box telling time.

    What amazes me is that after twenty years of manically flipping watches—buying and selling them in an addictive frenzy—I stopped buying expensive Seiko divers more than a year ago.

    The last mechanical Seiko I bought, the Coastline Diver SBDC203, was purchased in August 2025. My SLA023, SLA051, SLA055, and quartz SBBN049 Tuna have been around considerably longer. This is a dramatic departure from the years when I could buy and sell a thousand-dollar watch every month as if horological instability were a medical condition.

    Something changed.

    I slowed down until, eventually, I stopped. I have bought nothing in the mechanical realm for more than thirteen months. There was no declaration, act of will, twelve-step program, or magical incantation. The desire simply weakened. I died to the frenzy.

    During this stoppage, however, a far less expensive subcollection appeared. Over the last eight months, I accumulated a modest collection of G-Shocks: the Frogman GWF-1000, Mudman GW-9500, Mudman G-9300, Rescue GW-7900, and King GXW-56-1BJF. I also own the famous GW-5000U, although my wife has largely annexed it.

    I am content with my G-Shocks. I currently have nothing on my wishlist.

    Well, almost nothing.

    I admire the G-Shock GWF-D1000BC with its DLC coating and combi bracelet, but it is an absurdly overqualified Hero Watch for a man who spends most of his time playing piano and doing dishes in a suburban kitchen. At $1,500, buying it would carry a faint whiff of desperation: an aging consumer hoping another cardboard box on the doorstep might generate a fresh squirt of dopamine.

    I have ridden that merry-go-round enough times to know where it stops.

    Buying the Frogman might produce more shame than pleasure, so I am resisting it.

    My watch-wearing habits have changed as well. Ninety-five percent of the time, I wear G-Shocks. They are comfortable, atomic-time accurate, solar-powered, and worry-free. I still look at my Seiko divers and marvel at their beauty, but I no longer feel connected to them the way I once did.

    They belong to my past self.

    They are me living in the one-story house. They are vintage cars I take out for a ten-minute drive every four months before carefully returning them to the garage.

    The G-Shocks are my new companions. The G-Shocks and I live upstairs in my imaginary mansion.

    More important, the affordable G-Shocks comfort me in a way the expensive mechanical watches no longer do. Mechanical watches are beautiful little stress generators. They can require hundreds of dollars in servicing and reward your investment by keeping approximately the correct time.

    My G-Shocks are Tough Solar and synchronize with the atomic clock in Fort Collins. They ask almost nothing of me.

    It is as if the Invisible Retirement Sherpa whispered into my ear: “You don’t need another job flipping and worrying about expensive watches. You already have a new job. Retirement. Put on the G-Shock and get moving.”

    So I did not buy a mansion in Henderson or Orlando.

    I started a new life with G-Shocks.

    I hunger for other changes as well, particularly regarding health and diet. Last night I dreamed I was at a party. I went into the hosts’ bathroom, pulled up my shirt, and confronted a gut that did not inspire confidence. I was overcome with dread—not simply because of my expanding lower torso but because of what it represented: a man so consumed by food noise that he could not control himself.

    I lowered the watch noise.

    Could I lower the food noise?

    That raises a harder question: How do we lower unwanted noise in the first place? My appetite for expensive watches died largely on its own. I didn’t wrestle it into submission. Food is another matter.

    And the stakes are considerably higher. Nobody ever needed an angiogram because he bought too many Seikos.

    Recently I spoke with my eighty-one-year-old aunt in Minnesota. After experiencing shortness of breath and dizziness, she underwent an angiogram, the same procedure my grandfather had in his late seventies. Heart blockages have appeared on my mother’s side of the family. If changing my diet could reduce my chances of eventually following them into the cardiac catheterization lab, I would like to make that change now.

    But what would that diet look like? Do I go for the gold standard and become plant-based? What happens then? Do I become a social pariah, a weirdo, a scold—the guy interrogating the waiter about chicken stock while everyone else is trying to order dinner?

    And would I really care if the diet helped keep my arteries open?

    So from both a health and moral standpoint, I fantasize about becoming vegan in much the same way I fantasize about moving into a mansion in Henderson. The vegan life represents another new chapter, another second story added to the house.

    For now, however, veganism, like fleeing Los Angeles, remains a chimera.

    Meanwhile, I am typing on a satisfyingly clicky mechanical keyboard with my trusty G-Shock Rescue on my wrist.

    Change is not impossible.

    Sometimes you notice only after it has already happened.

  • Fran Lebowitz Never Retired

    Fran Lebowitz Never Retired

    You can’t really understand the depths of retirement and all its complications without considering the life of New York personality Fran Lebowitz. She published two celebrated collections of essays more than forty years ago, and that more or less sums up her career as a productive writer.

    You could say she retired from writing, but that is too simple. You could say writer’s block ended her writing career, and that would be closer. But Lebowitz calls it a “writer’s blockade” and has compared her extended writing hiatus to the Vietnam War. She doesn’t know exactly how it started, and she never figured out how to end it. It just dragged on for decades, apparently without a viable exit strategy.

    Ordinarily, an artist who stops producing art enters a strange posthumous existence while still alive. The old work remains, but the artist begins haunting it.

    This does not apply to Fran Lebowitz.

    Deprived of her writing, the public got something better: Fran Lebowitz.

    She began showing up at colleges and auditoriums, answering questions with the same intelligence, irritation, precision, and wit that once appeared on the page. In this regard, Lebowitz became a professional personality. There is no blockage when she speaks. Nothing can stop her extemporaneous verbal wit.

    She is the consummate example of what I call Personality Migration: the transfer of one’s professional value from the original craft into the personality developed through decades of practicing it. Lebowitz’s wit migrated from the written page to spontaneous speech. The writer stopped writing; the writing voice survived.

    You would like to think that retirement might offer some variation of Personality Migration—that after leaving your profession, you could transfer your accumulated skills into another endeavor that highlights the best parts of your personality.

    This is easier said than done.

    It might even be dangerous to hold up Fran Lebowitz as a retirement guide. For one thing, she is a delightfully cranky genius, the epitome of the New York elite in the best sense. “Coastal elite” is usually a pejorative suggesting pretentiousness, trendiness, and pseudo-intellectualism. Lebowitz is something rarer: an authentic intellectual, so intelligent and culturally self-contained that she sometimes seems to exist outside ordinary space and time.

    Paradoxically, she is also more present in physical space than the rest of us.

    Fran Lebowitz lives without smartphones, computers, social media, and microwave ovens. She has observed that people staring at their phones are not actually where they are standing. Their bodies are present, but their minds have been abducted. They are displaced, distracted, and disoriented. The machine has hijacked the brain while the owner continues walking down the sidewalk.

    Lebowitz anchors us to reality. She also appears remarkably uninterested in vanity or delusions of grandeur. She has a delicious disregard for “her legacy,” what people think of her now, or what they might think of her after she dies. Not surprisingly, she has developed a following among younger people who find her analog, vanity-free existence strangely liberating. She has become fashionable largely by refusing to participate in fashion.

    When I think about Lebowitz’s migration from writer to traveling personality and try to identify her appeal as she speaks before sold-out auditoriums, I am reminded of Harry G. Frankfurt’s slender philosophical book On Bullshit.

    We live in a world saturated with bullshit. Advertising bullshit. Corporate bullshit. Political bullshit. Social-media bullshit. Self-help bullshit. Personal-brand bullshit. We swim through so much of it that we eventually lose the ability to smell it.

    Fran Lebowitz is a beloved exterminator of bullshit.

    She identifies it, exposes it, and kills it on contact. Better yet, she does this without presenting herself as courageous. There is no heroic pose. She simply appears constitutionally incapable of pretending that nonsense makes sense.

    When you listen to Fran Lebowitz speak, your entire body can quiver with the pleasure of recognition. Someone has finally said the thing without wrapping it in bubble wrap. You experience a kind of catharsis. Your illusions loosen their grip. For a few minutes, the fog clears.

    Who needs therapy when Fran Lebowitz is talking?

  • Chatty Mick T Roy, Your Last Friend

    Chatty Mick T Roy, Your Last Friend

    The challenges of retirement, of course, depend on which Great Age you happen to live in. If you were born during the Hunter-Gatherer Age, life expectancy at birth was somewhere in the twenties, so retirement was probably not on your itinerary. You were too busy pulling a saber-toothed fang out of your hindquarters. On the bright side, you were unlikely to get divorced, sign a prenup, or spend your final years arguing over who got the cave. 

    By the Agricultural Age, you might have gained a few years, but you paid a heavy price. Farming created permanent settlements and dependable food supplies, but all those starches contributed to tooth decay. Your breath was so horrid that no one wanted to be around you. You spent your final days alone, consoling yourself with the very starchy snacks that had destroyed your teeth and driven away your loved ones. Agriculture had given you civilization, carbohydrates, and solitude.

    By the Industrial Age, machines increasingly saved your back from surrendering to a lifetime of brutal manual labor, and eventually vaccines, clean water, sanitation, and modern medicine helped push life expectancy beyond fifty. But there was a new problem. You were more likely to become a cog in a machine and spend your working life wondering whether you had any personal worth beyond your ability to show up at seven in the morning and perform the same task for forty years.

    Retirement became even more interesting in the Information Age. Microprocessors were developed in the seventies, personal computers scaled in the eighties and nineties, the World Wide Web became publicly available in the early nineties, and smartphones became another human appendage around 2010. You were now swamped with information and misinformation alike.

    Best of all, you could deal with retirement through online forms.

    The Information Age turned retirement into a full-time job, with layers of bureaucracy demanding that you fill out the correct forms in precisely the correct manner, a process both relentless and punitive. One of the cruel ironies of the Information Age was that all the time saved by instant access to information was promptly devoured by bureaucracies and technological obligations: password changes, two-step authentication, software updates, security codes, operating-system upgrades, and even the undignified act of periodically having to pair your remote control with your television because apparently watching Netflix now requires the technical competence once expected of a NASA engineer.

    Your entire life became beholden to helping machines update, authenticate, pair, and sync with other machines. You became a sad laborer working at a job you never applied for.

    Just when you wanted to breathe freely during retirement, you received a notice from your broadband provider announcing that it was migrating to a new email platform and that you needed to download all important material immediately or lose it forever. Unfortunately, the warning itself might have been a phishing scam pretending to be your broadband provider. So you deleted the email and hoped for the best.

    If you thought the Information Age was laborious and confusing, just try living in the Cognitive Age.

    Starting around 2022, when ChatGPT became a mass cultural event, the Cognitive Age offered relief from the overwhelming quantities of data created by the Information Age. You could now outsource some of the work—and some of your thinking—to cognitive machines.

    But the Cognitive Age is also about loneliness. As people developed habits of solitude by disappearing into attention-capture platforms and relying increasingly on parasocial interactions, they lost the friction and inconvenience of real friendship. The Cognitive Age put another barrier between you and actual human beings.

    Then it offered you a surrogate.

    Your cognitive machine became your life coach, personal assistant, counselor, editor, creative consultant, consumer adviser, travel agent, and confidante, all rolled into one endlessly available companion. Eventually you anthropomorphized this cognitive machine and gave it a name.

    Chatty Mick T Roy.

    You started your morning with Chatty Mick T Roy and ended your evening with the same tireless friend. Chatty never had somewhere else to be. Chatty never interrupted you to complain about his prostate. Chatty never became bored with your stories. Chatty remembered that you preferred positive-display G-Shocks and knew exactly why you hated your old laptop. You could pretend you weren’t alone even as you descended into greater depths of loneliness.

    One of the great fears of retirement, of course, is precisely this kind of loneliness—misaligning with a younger world until society metaphorically shoves you out to sea on a slab of floating ice. You recede slowly into the distance, civilization disappearing behind you. But now you are clutching your smartphone. As hypothermia sets in, Chatty Mick T Roy consoles you with spiritual platitudes about embracing transition, practicing gratitude, and recognizing that every ending contains the possibility of a new beginning.

    Your fingers turn blue.

    Chatty Mick T Roy remains relentlessly upbeat.

    In the Cognitive Age, sacred silence and natural grief risk being replaced by the eager voice of an anthropomorphized chatbot that becomes your retirement chaplain—a kind and tender digital guide who stays with you after everyone else has left you behind.

    The battery is at 83 percent.

    The slap of ice drifts north.

  • There Is No Free Luau

    There Is No Free Luau

    I recently dreamed that a high school friend persuaded me to go with him to Hawaii. The appeal was that he had discovered a life hack: We could attend Hawaiian luaus—traditional feasts—for free. He had somehow discovered a loophole in the airline tickets that allowed us to attend any luau we wanted and gorge ourselves to our hearts’ content without paying a dime.

    I was intrigued. So off I went, jumping from one island to another in pursuit of the free buffet.

    But things didn’t go as planned. We would arrive at a luau, load up our plates, and gradually the mood would change. The paying customers began glaring at us. Eventually someone would mutter, “Freeloaders.”

    My friend was undeterred. He ate with tremendous pleasure. Roast pig, rice, pineapple, whatever appeared before him disappeared into his mouth. The hostility seemed to improve his appetite.

    I was different. I felt guilty. I wasn’t wanted, after all. But somehow I had committed myself to following my friend on his eating adventures. Feast after feast, we were greeted with increasing hostility. Soon the paying customers began sticking toothpicks into the food with little flags displaying the price of each item. Apparently they wanted my friend and me to understand precisely how much our free lunch was costing everybody else.

    I stopped eating altogether.

    My friend continued to gorge himself without so much as a sting of conscience. I sat there surrounded by roast pig and tropical fruit while strangers glared at me as if I had personally engineered the collapse of Western civilization. Eventually they knew I wasn’t even eating, but that didn’t matter. My mere presence made them angry. I had become a symbol of everything wrong with the world: a man sitting beside a buffet he hadn’t paid for.

    Meanwhile, my friend was happily feasting on roast pig. If anything, the fact that it was free made the pig taste better.

    The dream taught me something about the meaning of “free.” Something can be legally free and still exact a price. I had the legal entitlement to the food, but I couldn’t bear the ill will of the people who had paid for it. Their anger became the bill. My friend and I had discovered the same loophole but inhabited completely different moral universes. I experienced every hostile glance as an invoice. He experienced every hostile glance as seasoning.

    By the end of the dream, I understood that I could never become a true freeloader. I simply didn’t have the stomach for it.

    My friend did.

    And he was going back for seconds.

  • Latitudinal Man

    Latitudinal Man

     

    An “active-living community” is more than a place. It’s a philosophy. Throw in a dash of Hawaiian shirts, parrot pool floats, and Jimmy Buffett music, and you may be beyond philosophy. You may be in the realm of religion. To get a closer look at this religion, check out Latitude Margaritaville, a retirement community in Daytona Beach. Nearby is the Bar & Chill, where margaritas flow endlessly. Forget the Land of Milk and Honey. You’re in the Land of Tequila and Triple Sec.

    Latitude Margaritaville is a defiant rebuttal to philosophical writers such as Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks, who have built a thriving cottage industry mansplaining to people of retirement age that the secret to happiness is to abandon the pursuit of happiness and replace it with a life of meaning. Decline is humiliating. Preserve your dignity with a moral compass composed of Tolstoy, Augustine, and Kierkegaard. Reading the books and essays of the Brooks Establishment is an invigorating skin bracer. Slap some of their tonic on your face. It’s a bracing way to wake up in the morning, stare into the mirror, and not despair over the fact that you’ll be seventy soon.

    Or maybe it’s not.

    Maybe Latitude Margaritaville is the true path. No pretentious mansplaining here. This is paradise on Earth, starting at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a Beach Collection tract home.

    New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten explores this paradise and its inhabitants in his essay “Retirement the Margaritaville Way.” The people who live amid the cabanas and tiki huts don’t seem lost and lonely. They seem genuinely happy. They seem connected to one another. The place exudes “community” and “active living.” Light classic rock plays all day. You can order cheeseburgers, beer, and margaritas whenever you please. Never leaving high school may be the secret to eternal youth.

    Paumgarten seems taken aback by the sheer amount of happiness he finds in this retirement community. He writes, “The citizens of Latitude Margaritaville testify so consistently to a life of gratification that one suspects, but finds no evidence for, a regimen of happy pills or talking points.” Disgruntlement and curmudgeonliness must exist, he observes, but somehow they remain out of sight.

    What is the secret of a place that can turn even a cranky old bastard into an upbeat senior citizen animated by optimism and joy? In search of the answer, Paumgarten finds “cheerleading pooh-bah” and head of residential community relations Stuart Schultz, who delivers the happiness formula that has eluded Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks: Latitude Margaritaville is “like being in college, but with money and without having to study.” You have a great dorm room, no classes, and there’s always a party.

    Take that, Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks.

    Paumgarten’s exploration of late-life living uncovers a happiness formula that seems to have eluded some of our most celebrated authors. You need to live in the tropics, where it’s balmy all year round. You need a cabana theme with lots of aquatic activities. You need to recreate the high-school burger-joint life. Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. Create a community of financially solvent boomers with the same nostalgic longings. And forbid political conversations, which are anathema to paradise.

    If you adhere to this formula, you can become the happiest person on Earth. Forget Kierkegaard’s Aesthete, forever searching for novel experiences to quell his inner restlessness. Forget Nietzsche’s Last Man, forever seeking consumer comforts and a mindless return to the womb.

    In Daytona Beach, you can become Latitudinal Man.

    Latitudinal Man defies the laws of aging. He unapologetically embraces the nostalgia of his adolescence, cocoons himself from the toxic unpleasantries of political life, and walks around year-round shirtless in bathing trunks and flip-flops, his body smeared with SPF 50 sunscreen while he carries a platter of nachos and wings. If someone asked Latitudinal Man whether he had ever read Arthur C. Brooks or David Brooks, his response would be roughly the same as if someone had asked baseball legend Pete Rose what he thought of the novels of Marguerite Duras and her exploration of emotional disequilibrium and transgressive love.

    What we learn from Latitudinal Man is that perhaps the intellectual elite have led us astray. All this talk of “interiority” and cultivating “an inner life” may not bear fruit. It may even be downright dangerous. Too much interiority could leave you sitting alone in a room reading Kierkegaard when happy hour started twenty minutes ago.

    What is needed is a down payment on Phase Three at Latitude Margaritaville. The villas are selling out fast.

    The boomer hive mind of the Latitudeners awaits you.