Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Death by Convenience: The AI Ads That Want to Rot Your Brain

    Death by Convenience: The AI Ads That Want to Rot Your Brain

    In his essay for The New Yorker, “What Do Commercials About A.I. Really Promise?”, Vinson Cunningham zeroes in on the unspoken premise of today’s AI hype: the dream of total disengagement. He poses the unsettling question: “If human workers don’t have to read, write, or even think, it’s unclear what’s left to do.” It’s a fair point. If ads are any indication, the only thing left for us is to stare blankly into our screens like mollusks waiting to be spoon-fed.

    These ads don’t sell a product; they sell a philosophy—one that flatters your laziness. Fix a leaky faucet? Too much trouble. Write a thank-you note? Are you kidding? Plan a meal, change a diaper, troubleshoot your noise-canceling headphones? Outrageous demands for a species that now views thinking as an optional activity. The machines will do it, and we’ll cheerfully slide into amoebic irrelevance.

    What’s most galling is the heroism layered into the pitch: You’re not shirking your responsibilities, you’re delegating. You’re optimizing your workflow. You’re buying back your precious time. You’re a genius. A disruptor. A life-hacking, boundary-pushing modern-day Prometheus who figured out how to get out of reading bedtime stories to your children.

    But Cunningham has a sharper take. The message behind the AI lovefest isn’t just about convenience—it’s about hollowing us out. As he puts it, “The preferred state, it seems, is a zoned-out semi-presence, the worker accounted for in body but absent in spirit.” That’s what the ads are pushing: a blissful vegetative state, where you’re physically upright but intellectually comatose.

    Why read to your kids when an AI avatar can do it in a soothing British accent? Why help them with their homework when a bot can explain algebra, write essays, correct their errors, and manage their grades—while you binge Breaking Bad for the third time? Why have a conversation with their teacher when your chatbot can send a perfectly passive-aggressive email on your behalf?

    This is not the frictionless future we were promised. It’s a slow lobotomy served on a platter of convenience. The ads imply that the life of the mind is outdated. And critical thinking? That’s for chumps with time to kill. Thinking takes bandwidth—something that would be better spent refining your custom coffee order via voice assistant.

    Cunningham sees the bitter punchline: In our rush to outsource everything, we’ve made ourselves obsolete. And the machines, coldly efficient and utterly indifferent, are more than happy to take it from here.

  • Buy Now, Cry Later: A Watch Addict’s Morning Routine

    Buy Now, Cry Later: A Watch Addict’s Morning Routine

    This morning, I sprang from bed at 5:50 like a man trying to outrun his own restlessness. Coffee in one hand, buckwheat groats in the other—my monkish morning ritual. By 6:20, I was deep into David Brooks’ New York Times lament over the death of the novel, parsing his elegy like a coroner looking for signs of life in a genre comatose under TikTok’s reign.

    I then pivoted to writing a YouTube essay on how to discover your watch identity without torching your bank account or your sanity. This required revisiting my own horological spiral, which could be summarized as: “I bought all the watches so you don’t have to.”

    Then, somewhere between the second paragraph and the first pangs of self-loathing, a thought struck me with the force of a stale TED Talk: I despise one-word-title books. You know the type—Grit, Blink, Regret, Drive, Trust—as if a single syllable can carry the weight of human experience. These are not books; they are glorified blog posts wearing a lab coat. They stretch one mediocre insight across 300 pages like butter scraped over too much toast. Malcolm Gladwell may not have invented this genre, but he certainly weaponized it.

    To be fair, a few have earned their keep: Testosterone, Breathe, and Dopamine Nation didn’t insult my intelligence. But the rest? They’re just placebo pills for the terminally curious.

    By 8:30, my family was still asleep, and I had hit the boredom wall with a dull thud. To numb the ennui, I began configuring a Toyota Camry online—my version of sniffing glue. I checked Southern California inventory as if I were a buyer, even though I won’t be pulling the trigger for at least a year. Classic FOMO, no doubt stirred by my best friend’s recent $70K Lexus purchase. His automotive flex triggered my inner consumer gremlin.

    Next came the Seiko browsing—Astrons, King Seikos, shiny little lies I tell myself in stainless steel form. I’m a man pushing into his 60s. I should be downsizing my neuroses, not accessorizing them.

    Right on cue, a depression fog rolled in. The psychic hangover of retail fantasy. I remembered a dream I’d had the night before: I was adding tofu to someone’s salad to increase their protein. They devoured it like they hadn’t eaten in days. Later in the same dream, I was at a party, where a couple asked me to mentor their autistic daughter. I smiled politely, feeling like a fraud. Me? A mentor? I can barely manage my own dopamine addiction.

    That’s when the epiphany hit like a steel bracelet to the skull: the urge to buy a watch hits hardest when you’re bored, self-pitying, or both. In those moments, a $2,000 watch becomes emotional currency—a metal antidepressant disguised as self-expression. And like all impulsive purchases, it cures nothing but your momentary discomfort.

    I hovered over the “Buy Now” button. Then, mercy. I pulled back.

    At 9:00, one of my twin daughters wandered into the kitchen and asked what happened to the leftover buttermilk pancakes from yesterday. I told her the truth: she’d left the door open when she went to ask the neighbors about babysitting their granddaughter, and a massive fly invited itself in. I saw it licking the pancakes like a dog at a water bowl. Into the trash they went. She laughed. I suggested Cheerios with a scoop of strawberry protein powder. She agreed. In that small, domestic exchange—an absurd fly, a ruined pancake, a shared laugh—I found myself re-entering the land of the living.

    Gratitude, not consumption, had done the trick.

    So now, I prepare for my kettlebell workout, towel in hand, wondering which podcast will offer the most delicious repartee to sweat by. My soul has steadied, for now.

  • The Disappearing Novel and the Culture That Forgot How to Read

    The Disappearing Novel and the Culture That Forgot How to Read

    In his New York Times column “When Novels Mattered,” David Brooks laments the slow vanishing of the novelist as a public figure. Once, the release of a new novel—especially by the likes of Saul Bellow or Toni Morrison—was a cultural event. Now it barely causes a ripple.

    The novel no longer commands attention. The digital age has crushed the reader’s patience, fractured our attention span, and flooded our minds with the shallow stimuli of TikTok, endless texts, and algorithmic rabbit holes. Where once we waited for a new Roth novel with the same anticipation reserved today for a Marvel sequel, we now swipe past literature as if it were spam.

    For Brooks, this is not just a loss—it’s a tragedy. The decline of the novel signals something deeper: a society losing its capacity for moral complexity, nuance, and emotional depth. The great literary writers, he argues, once served as our secular prophets, our social conscience. They told the truth—harsh, beautiful, layered. They gave us characters who were flawed, human, and real—not two-dimensional avatars chasing dopamine hits on social media.

    One of Brooks’ most compelling insights is that this decline is not simply the result of technological distraction, but of cultural timidity. Great literature, he reminds us, requires audacity. The ability to speak outside the safe lanes. To challenge the dominant orthodoxy. And today, particularly among the liberal elite, that audacity is wilting. Brooks argues that young people, especially on college campuses, whisper their opinions in fear. The social cost of independent thinking has grown too high.

    Interestingly, Brooks—who has recently skewered the excesses of the political right—spares them from scrutiny here. His focus is firmly on the left, on the performative virtue and self-censorship that, while well-meaning, suffocates creative risk. In this climate, it’s easier to be righteous than original. Virtue signaling may win you applause online, but it doesn’t lead to great art.

    Yet the most persuasive moment in the essay arrives late, when Brooks describes the collective psychic damage of the last decade. “Our interior lives,” he writes, “are being battered by the shock waves of public events. There has been a comprehensive loss of faith.” That line lands hard. It names something many of us feel: that we are living in a Bosch-like hellscape of noise, cruelty, and absurdity—a fever dream of moral exhaustion.

    Brooks doesn’t say this, but I will: perhaps literature isn’t dead, just stunned. In shock. In digestion. Maybe we can’t write the great novels of this era because we haven’t fully metabolized the era itself. The story hasn’t ended, and we’re still trying to make sense of the firestorm.

    Is the novel dead? I doubt it. It’s sleeping off the chaos. There are still serious novelists out there—unhyped, uncelebrated—doing the slow, unsexy work. One who deserves more recognition is Sigrid Nunez, whose clear, intimate prose hits as hard as anything in Bellow’s canon.

    The talent remains. The novels are still being written. What’s missing is the cultural infrastructure that once elevated them to necessity. We don’t need more influencers—we need readers with stamina. We need a culture willing to wrestle with meaning again.

  • Demoted Dad: A Suburban Fall from Instructional Grace

    Demoted Dad: A Suburban Fall from Instructional Grace

    This morning, mid-swing in a blissful kettlebell session in my garage—a sacred temple of sweat, steel, and solitude—I glanced out to see a domestic drama playing out on the asphalt stage of my street.

    There he was: a dad in safari shorts and a floppy bucket hat, walking ten feet behind his five-year-old son, who was waging war with a two-wheeled bike. The boy had the wild energy of someone determined to conquer balance through sheer will. He fell. Got up. Fell again. But on the third tumble, he’d had enough. He plopped down in the middle of the road like a pint-sized union striker, arms crossed, lips pursed, radiating silent defiance. He wasn’t hurt. He was done.

    The dad—poor man—begged him to rise. Pleaded. Offered bribes, probably. But the child had entered the iron-willed resistance phase that all seasoned parents recognize: the Sit-In of Doom.

    I considered emerging from my kettlebell cave to offer peace offerings. Coffee for the dad. Lemonade for the boy. Something to cut the tension. But reason—and David French’s podcast on the masculinity crisis—pulled me back into my dungeon. I resumed my Turkish Get-Ups as the father stood in the street, trying to lead someone who refused to be led.

    Thirty minutes passed.

    When I looked again, the scene had shifted.

    Now the father was on his own bike, trailing behind his son and wife. The boy, steadier now, was pedaling confidently while the mother jogged beside him, holding the handlebars like a Secret Service agent shielding the President. The boy beamed, triumphant. The mother wore a face that said, without saying a word, “This is how it’s done.”

    And the father?

    He wore the same sullen expression his son had half an hour earlier. He looked demoted. Not from fatherhood, but from a very specific rank: Lead Bike Instructor.

    He was now an observing sidekick. A support staffer. An unpaid intern in his own household. Whether he’ll regain his instructor’s license remains to be seen, but one suspects the road back will involve bureaucratic hoops, penance, and perhaps a formal review board chaired by his wife.

    Such is the quiet theater of suburbia—played out between fallen bikes, bruised egos, and the eternal struggle for parental credibility.

  • Don’t Let Brotoxification Ruin Your Watch Hobby

    Don’t Let Brotoxification Ruin Your Watch Hobby

    I’ve been both a watch enthusiast and a watch addict for over two decades—long enough to know the difference between a genuine passion and a performance art piece in a wrist-sized frame.

    Some of my collecting history is noble. Some of it’s embarrassing. I’ve chased watches for the right reasons: fascination with engineering, aesthetics, a deeply personal sense of style. But I’ve also chased them for the wrong reasons: hero cosplay, status projection, and the sad, sweaty hope that someone—anyone—might think I was cool for wearing a submersible chunk of steel on my wrist.

    Let’s call it what it is: I’ve bought watches to feel like a man. That instinct isn’t always authentic—it’s often a costume. And in the world of collecting, nothing poisons the well faster than performative masculinity dressed up as personal style.

    So I started trying to pare things down. Simplify. Get to the core of what I actually like, and keep a small, personal collection that reflects who I am—not who I want Instagram to think I am.

    Easier said than done.

    Because in today’s world, “authenticity” has become just another algorithmic trend, another pantomime we perform for likes and approval. The word phony doesn’t even do justice to the industrial-strength fakery we’re marinating in. It’s beyond phony. It’s Olympic-level insincerity with corporate backing and PowerPoint slides.

    We now live in a cultural ecosystem where people are so fake, their attempts at being authentic create new layers of fakery. It’s not just that they’re inauthentic—they’re meta-inauthentic. They study authenticity like it’s a language exam, and the harder they try to sound fluent, the more their accent bleeds through.

    Take, for example, the great frauds of my TV-watching youth.

    Eddie Haskell—Leave It to Beaver’s oily teenage suck-up—mastered the art of smiling at your mother while plotting your destruction behind the garage. He didn’t just imitate politeness; he weaponized it.

    Then there was Dr. Smith from Lost in Space—the preening, verbose con man who brought zero medical skills to the spaceship but still managed to insult the robot with Shakespearean flair:
    “You clumsy, colossal clod!”
    “You insidious ignoramus!”
    “You bubble-headed booby!”

    Ironically, Dr. Smith’s insults turned me on to language itself. I owe the man my English degree. Which just proves: sometimes even a fraud can inspire something real.

    Fast-forward to today’s most delicious case of catastrophic phoniness: the political operatives who realized they had alienated the male vote. After years of condescension, virtue signaling, and high-minded lectures, they finally realized men were tuning them out—if not outright recoiling.

    So what did they do?

    They flew to Half Moon Bay, checked into a luxury resort, and held a think tank retreat to rebrand masculinity. Picture it: Ivy League consultants in cashmere sweaters eating lobster rolls and sipping Pinot Noir while spitballing ways to reconnect with the “working man.” They treated young men like they were a rare species of jungle ape. Field notes were probably taken.

    This level of cluelessness isn’t just tone-deaf—it’s operatic. If the writers of Succession pitched this as a storyline, HBO would tell them to tone it down for realism.

    We need a name for this kind of oblivious, polished, self-defeating fakery. I call it Brotoxification: the act of rebranding yourself to appeal to men—but doing it with such manicured insincerity that you repel the very people you’re trying to win back.

    I work with young men every day—college football players, ex-military students, guys grinding through school because life didn’t hand them a shortcut. They don’t want coddling. They want three things: structure, discipline, and real-life skills. The last thing they need is a smug consultant in designer sneakers telling them how to “be seen.”

    And this circles back to watches.

    A few ground rules for keeping your watch hobby clean:

    1. Don’t overthink it.
    If a watch keeps whispering to you at 2 a.m., it probably belongs on your wrist. Trust your gut. You don’t need a panel of experts or a YouTube breakdown.

    2. Never buy a watch because you think it’ll earn you applause.
    If you’re trying to impress the crowd, the crowd will sniff out your desperation and laugh behind your back. Buying a “manly watch” to look tough is like buying cologne to smell rich. It doesn’t fool anyone.

    3. You don’t need to be rich.
    A $200 G-Shock Rangeman, worn with conviction, beats a $10,000 showpiece worn like a rented tux. Living within your means isn’t just practical—it’s masculine. It’s called integrity.

    In the end, authenticity can’t be strategized. It’s not something you workshop in a resort ballroom between keynote speakers and complimentary wine pairings. It’s not a brand refresh. And it sure as hell isn’t something you can outsource to consultants.

    Whether we’re talking about politics, masculinity, or watch collecting, the minute you start performing sincerity is the minute you’ve already lost it.

    So do yourself a favor: Keep your hobby honest. Reject the Brotox. And wear your damn watch because you love it—not because you’re hoping someone else will.

  • The Fever Swamp of Watch Collecting

    The Fever Swamp of Watch Collecting

    Once upon a time—last week, to be precise—I made a YouTube video arguing that a man should not chase variety in his watch collection but instead find his signature style and whittle his hoard down to a tasteful few. Like a monk with only one robe. Or a chef with one good knife. Or a middle-aged guy who knows that buying yet another GMT won’t fix his marriage.

    Now, did I believe what I was saying? Not entirely. I was, to be honest, talking myself off the ledge. It was a kind of public self-hypnosis: say it enough times on camera, and maybe I’ll stop buying watches I never wear. But I’ll admit—the thought experiment was stimulating, like sniffing ammonia salts just to feel something. Most commenters agreed, saying peace of mind only arrived after purging the herd. But not all. Some insisted that a large, diverse collection brings them genuine joy. Fair. Not everyone needs to live like a horological monk.

    Still, I enjoyed making the video. It felt like intellectual calisthenics for the soul, even if it didn’t convert me.

    One viewer, the formidable “Captain Nolan,” asked a deceptively simple question that demands more than a quick reply:

    “How can you discover your identity without trying watches in every category—divers, pilots, field watches, dress, digital, mechanical, quartz, and so on?”

    By “identity,” he means your taste. What fits your lifestyle, your aesthetic, your internal brand. A fair question. And at first, I answered like a smug adolescent. I said, “You know what you like the same way I knew Raquel Welch was the apex of female beauty when I was nine. One glance. No need to watch Love American Style reruns or thumb through Vogue. Case closed.”

    But that answer is glib. And idiotic. Taste in watches—unlike adolescent lust—is not a hormonal thunderclap. It’s a process.

    So here’s the grown-up answer: yes, you do need to try different styles, just like trying on jackets at Nordstrom. Some are flattering, some make you look like a Bulgarian hitman. It’s tactile. Visceral. And wildly expensive. To really figure out your taste, you may end up spending $5,000 to $10,000 just to land in the right neighborhood. You might call this the Fitting Room Narrative—the idea that trying on a wide range of watches will help you find the “real you.”

    It sounds rational. Comforting, even. But I don’t believe in it.

    The problem is the human brain. It’s not a spreadsheet. It’s a haunted house full of desires, delusions, and marketing fumes. So let me propose a more honest alternative: The Fever Swamp Narrative.

    Here’s how it works:

    You fall headfirst into the hobby. You start buying watches the way a toddler grabs Halloween candy. You buy microbrand divers, G-Shocks, Speedmasters, and maybe a Rolex or two if your credit limit allows it. You tell yourself each one serves a “purpose.” You start spending a grand a month, easy. Over ten years, you’ve spent more than most people do on therapy. And God knows you need therapy.

    Eventually, the collection metastasizes. Dozens of watches, each one representing a temporary high. You stop wearing half of them. You obsess over straps, bezels, lume. Your identity fuses with your hobby. You’re no longer a man who wears watches; you’re a man being worn by them.

    Then comes the collapse: financial strain, marital tension, the vacant stare of a man wondering why he owns three identical Seikos. Maybe you go through a breakup or foreclosure. Maybe your friends stage an intervention. Maybe your dog leaves you. Think about that. Your watch obsession got so bad your dog abandoned you. 

    You finally tap out. Sell the collection. Keep three. Or two. Or one. You tell yourself you’re “cured.”

    Except… maybe you’re not. Maybe, like Bell’s palsy or a bad ex, the obsession lies dormant. All it takes is one random trigger—a stressful day, a YouTube thumbnail, a flash sale—and you relapse. Buy a Sinn. Then a Squale. Then you’re back in the swamp.

    Why do we cling to the Fitting Room Narrative when it’s so obviously false? Because it has a tidy structure. A clean arc. Beginning, middle, resolution. We’re narrative junkies. We want our Luke Skywalkers to finish Jedi school and never regress. 

    Same with watch collectors. We want the Watch Ninja to overcome his demons and live a Zen life with a single Grand Seiko. If he relapses, we unsubscribe. He becomes a punchline. Another Liver King of horology.

    Still don’t believe me? Consider Pete Rose. In the ‘70s, he was “Charlie Hustle,” the human embodiment of work ethic. But zoom out, and the myth crumbles. Pete wasn’t disciplined—he was compulsive. He gambled, lied, betrayed friends. The man was a walking cautionary tale wrapped in a Cincinnati Reds jersey.

    Or take Sedona. Supposedly a spiritual vortex. In reality, a commercialized fever dream of overpriced crystals, green juice, and pseudo-mystical hokum. You arrive expecting transcendence and leave with a maxed-out credit card and lower back pain from a “chakra realignment.”

    We love myths because they sell. But real life is more complicated. Messier. Less flattering.

    So I could tell you a satisfying tale about finding my “true self” through curating a humble collection of retro divers and minimalist field watches. I could wrap it all up with a bow. But I won’t. Because that would be fiction.

    And honestly, haven’t we had enough of that?

  • Trader Joe’s and the End of the World (One Tofu Block at a Time)

    Trader Joe’s and the End of the World (One Tofu Block at a Time)

    With my wife and twin daughters making the long drive home from San Francisco, I realized someone had to restock the household pantry. That someone was me. So by 8 a.m., I was wandering the fluorescent aisles of Trader Joe’s, still half-asleep, in search of tempeh, oat milk, and maybe a reason to keep going.

    Twenty seconds in, I spotted Eliot—a jazz musician in his early forties who’s worked there forever and knows every spice rack and frozen entrée by memory. I hadn’t seen him in a while. He asked if I’d retired from teaching at the local college yet.

    “Two more years,” I said, adding, “but who knows what’s happening to writing classes in the Age of ChatGPT. Everyone talks like they know. They don’t.”

    He asked how I’m handling it in the classroom.

    “I’m not sure I am,” I told him. “I can teach. I can perform. I can entertain. But grading online essays? That’s an existential crisis wrapped in a PDF. I’m dancing in quicksand.”

    Eliot nodded grimly. “This generation doesn’t read.”

    “My daughters don’t,” I said. “Their friends don’t. They’re sweet kids, empathetic and funny, but they don’t seem built for a world that requires deadlines, grit, or employment.”

    Eliot, without hesitation: “We’re screwed.”

    “And there’s no going back,” I said. “CNN gets out-watched by Joe Rogan. Most people get their facts from guys yelling into ring lights while drinking protein shakes.”

    We stared into the epistemic abyss together, nodded, and parted ways before we started crying in the chip aisle.

    Twenty minutes later, I made it to the checkout line, where I was greeted by Megan—the tall, soft-spoken vegan cashier who’s known me for years. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and noticed the mountain of super-firm tofu in my cart.

    We exchanged tofu recipes, talked about the protein digestibility scale, and mourned the impossibility of plant-based love in a society fueled by backyard barbecue. Her breakup, as it turns out, was partly due to meat incompatibility. “He grilled like it was a belief system,” she said.

    We also touched—briefly—on factory farming, which always makes me want to cry or scream or stop eating altogether. But just like I couldn’t solve the collapse of literacy and truth with Eliot, I couldn’t solve the meat-industrial complex with Megan.

    All I could do was pay for my groceries and accept the fact that I’m a limited man in a crumbling culture, armed with tofu, oat milk, and a Costco-sized tub of almond butter.

    I loaded the trunk with the small consolation that I had, at the very least, fed my family.

  • Posting Ennui and the Rise of Podcast Land

    Posting Ennui and the Rise of Podcast Land

    It’s a small miracle that Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker piece, “Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui?”, wasn’t published five years ago. The argument feels overdue—like an obituary written long after the corpse started to stink. Chayka observes what most of us have already felt in our scrolling bones: the golden era of amateur posting—your breakfast photo, your blurry concert shot, your moody-filtered selfie—has gone the way of the lava lamp and the Livestrong bracelet. What was once dubbed “valorized amateurism” now reads like cringe-inducing narcissism.

    In its place, we have the glossy perfection of influencers and the manic edge of doom content. It’s either an unboxing of a $5,000 Japanese toaster or a clip forecasting economic collapse by Tuesday. There is no middle.

    Some of this is generational. Millennials have aged out of thirst traps and into soft lighting and privacy. Gen Z, including my daughters, treat public self-aggrandizement with the kind of disgust once reserved for timeshare pitches and chain emails. To them, most online posting isn’t just unnecessary—it’s embarrassing.

    Chayka diagnoses the affliction as posting ennui—the existential fatigue of shouting into a void dominated by micro-celebrity algorithms and brand-filtered banality. We used to post in order to share something real; now we post to survive the algorithm’s cold indifference. And the algorithm doesn’t even show our friends anymore. So what’s the point? The casual post is now a ghost of its former self—undone not by controversy, but by irrelevance.

    Then there’s AI, which hangs over this whole landscape like a digital grim reaper. Now, even authenticity feels manufactured. Who made that caption? Who edited that face? Is that even a real voice? The uncanny valley has extended to your Instagram feed.

    Chayka predicts we may be headed toward what he calls Posting Zero—a post-social media state of blissful digital silence, where the compulsion to perform evaporates, and nobody’s life is reduced to a grid of curated lies.

    And honestly? I’m here for it.

    Let the pixelated word salads and beige hotel mirror selfies die a quiet death. Let the algorithm cannibalize itself. But here’s where I’ll add a wrinkle Chayka overlooks: even as posting dies, Podcast Land thrives.

    The podcast isn’t dead. It’s ascendant. While selfies wilt, microphones multiply. I know people—and I count myself among them—who have fully relocated to Podcast Land. Sam Harris talks to me for two hours a day. I fall asleep to history podcasts. I nap with AirPods in. I swing kettlebells to longform interviews about Stoicism and dopamine. I am deep in Podcast Land. I’ve got residency status.

    So yes, let the Instagram Stories dry up. Let the TikTok dances lose their rhythm. But don’t mistake this silence for disengagement. We’re still listening. We’re still absorbing. We’re just done performing.

    Welcome to Posting Zero. Now please keep your voice down—I’m trying to hear what Sam Harris is saying about the AI Takeover.

  • The Stories We Tell About Finding Happiness Are Probably False

    The Stories We Tell About Finding Happiness Are Probably False

    The other night, I released a video arguing that variety in a watch collection is overrated. Instead of chasing endless categories—divers, pilots, field watches, dress pieces, and the like—we should focus on our personal style and keep our collections small, tight, and true. That was the premise.

    But if I’m honest, I’m not sure I fully believe it. The video was part thought experiment, part self-intervention—an attempt to persuade myself to stop buying watches I don’t have the time (or wrist real estate) to wear. The argument had internal logic. It also had a faint scent of self-justifying desperation.

    And that’s okay. I enjoyed making it. Wrestling with the ideas sharpened my thoughts, and the feedback I received from many of you helped me realize something essential: passion without dialogue is narcissism. Ideas need to be tested by others—challenged, probed, broken open. That’s how belief is forged. Not in solitude, but in the noisy, messy public square.

    It was gratifying to hear from so many who, like me, have felt tormented by a sprawling watch collection—agonizing over wrist time, managing rotations like a circus act, and wondering if maybe the hobby was no longer bringing joy but anxiety in disguise.

    Then came a comment from one of you—Captain Nolan—who posed a question that cut through all my watch-reducing rhetoric:

    “How can you discover what your identity is without trying out watches in the various categories (divers, pilots, field, dress, digital, quartz, mechanical, etc., etc.)?”

    It’s a fair question. One I initially wanted to swat away with a tight two-sentence reply and move on. But I couldn’t. The question lingered—because it isn’t really about watches. It’s about identity. And once you start poking at identity, you’re no longer in YouTube comment territory. You’ve stepped into the philosophical deep end—an arena better suited for Aristotle than for a guy with a camera and a strap obsession.

    The second reason I hesitated is more personal: I only make videos when there’s a spark of fun, curiosity, or joy. The idea of producing a moody think-piece on self-discovery sounded like a slog. Dull. Pretentious. The video equivalent of being cornered by someone at a party who wants to discuss their enneagram type.

    Still, Captain Nolan’s question lodged itself in my mind. How do we figure out what we actually like in watches? And how—after two decades of collecting—did I land where I am now?

    The answer is both simple and brutal:

    There’s the true answer, and there’s the false answer.

    And most people—including YouTubers, influencers, and algorithm-chasing content creators—prefer the false one.

    The False Answer

    The false answer is a story. A myth. A satisfying narrative that wraps things up in a bow. We’ve been telling these stories for millennia. They bring moral clarity, personal triumph, and a happy ending. They sell. They go viral. They’re designed for applause.

    In the watch hobby, this tidy fable is called The Purification Myth.

    It goes something like this:

    You start off as a giddy newbie, blown away by the sheer number of watches out there. You binge. You buy everything from entry-level divers to Swiss Grails. You accumulate far too many watches to wear, and you convince yourself that this is happiness.

    But then comes the crash—maybe financial, maybe emotional, maybe romantic. The fever breaks. You wake up, ashamed of your bloated collection and the dopamine-fueled mania that built it. You sell off everything except a small, tasteful core collection. Peace is restored. Cue soft jazz. Fade to black.

    It’s a good story. It even has some truth in it. But like most recovery narratives, it’s cleaner than reality.

    Because in real life, the fever doesn’t always break for good. You relapse. You sell everything and then buy it all back. You swear off watches on bracelets, only to fall for a titanium chrono six months later. You go minimalist—and then buy a G-Shock with solar charging, atomic syncing, and more features than a fighter jet. Your tastes mutate.

    This is the part the Purification Myth leaves out: people are irrational, compulsive, and deeply inconsistent. And the stories they tell—about clarity, simplicity, “knowing what they want”—are often PR campaigns for whatever identity they’ve temporarily settled into.

    Let me give you some real-life examples.

    The Myth of Pete Rose

    I grew up on the myth of Charlie Hustle–Pete Rose, the man who played baseball like his hair was on fire. The story was simple: if you hustle like Pete, greatness will follow. The world will respect you. You’ll win.

    Turns out Pete Rose hustled only on the field. Off the field when it came to examining his moral flaws, he was a lazy, selfish, self-mythologizing gambler who bet recklessly and burned bridges like he lit cigars with them.

    The moral? The story was inspiring. It just wasn’t true.

    The Sedona Illusion

    My family recently went to Sedona, Arizona—a place that sells its own myth: come sip matcha, get a mud massage, and experience spiritual rebirth in the vortexes.

    What you get is overpriced kitsch, fake mysticism, and conspicuous consumerism wearing a tie-dyed robe. Crystals, smoothies, celebrities in Lamborghinis. It’s Disneyland for people who think they’re too enlightened for Disneyland.

    So yes, I could tell you a satisfying story about how I finally landed on a curated set of Seiko divers, all on straps, and how I found inner peace. But I won’t. Because that’s not the whole truth.

    The real story is messier, and ongoing. It contradicts itself. It evolves. Sometimes it forgets what it believes and remembers something else entirely.

    If you want to find your identity—watch or otherwise—know this: you won’t find it in a story. And you certainly won’t find it in someone else’s.

    You find it in the space between obsessions. In the quiet after the hype fades. In the awkwardness of realizing the thing you thought would make you whole… just doesn’t.

    That’s where identity lives. Not in clarity, but in contradiction.

  • The Farmer’s Carry and Other Acts of Suburban Defiance

    The Farmer’s Carry and Other Acts of Suburban Defiance

    Last night I had dinner at The Kebab Shop with an old friend—a former boxing champion turned engineer, the kind of guy who looks like he could build a bridge in the morning and break your nose that afternoon, all while discussing Tolstoy.

    He recently broke up with his girlfriend and confessed something strange and honest:

    “I feel like I’m chasing the sad,” he said. “Just so I’ll feel better about myself.”

    I told him not to worry—he’s sad, alright. Sometimes pain is too large to register. Like being so exhausted you can’t fall asleep, or so depleted you can’t even feel tired.
    He nodded, then casually dropped the bomb: he just bought a Lexus. I assumed an SUV—some respectable adult-mobile with storage. Nope. He turned his phone toward me and grinned. It was an obsidian black Lexus RC350 coupe, a low-slung, 311-horsepower statement of rebellion against mediocrity and middle age. Price tag? A cool $70,000.

    Why? Because he gets bored. Easily. He’s cursed with a mind that needs friction. His current job is too easy, and when things get too easy, life feels mechanical. He’s planning to move on—to another job, another city, more challenge, more money, more meaning.
    He told me staying home to watch TV feels like soul rot. So instead, he journals (in a real book, with prompts—who knew that was a thing?), plays soccer on weekends, and takes private dance lessons. Yes, dance. This man has better time management than most monasteries.

    I told him I admire him. I mean it. He’s not surrendering to entropy; he’s interrogating it with pen, ball, and motion. He’s writing his way out of the void. I might need to follow his lead when I retire in two years. No matter our age, we either rage our fists at mortality or we start sinking into the upholstery.

    I then told my friend that I nearly bought a $2,000 recliner last week. A magnificent beast of engineered comfort. But the moment I imagined myself melting into it, day after day, I envisioned not rest—but early burial. A leather sarcophagus with cupholders. I backed away like it was a cursed object.

    I was inspired by my friend’s hunger for adventure, so the next morning I punished myself with a new exercise: the Farmer’s Carry–two kettlebells, one in each hand, pacing in circles across my front lawn like a rogue warlord in gym shorts. Neighbors peeked through their blinds to watch this 63-year-old Larry Csonka doppelgänger lumbering across the grass like I was either training for something… or losing a very public battle with aging.

    The exercise nearly broke me. I’ll keep it in rotation, but with moderation. I train to feel alive, not to hemorrhage my last remaining Life Force into the turf of suburban California.

    And now, I wait for my friend to pull up and take me for a ride in his Lexus. He’s earned it. The man’s been driving the same Corolla for thirteen years. Now it’s his turn to live a little. And me? I’ll tag along, a passenger for a while, enjoying the ride through this strange, accelerating cycle of life.