Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • How to Stop Your Appetite from Heckling You and Achieve Savorosity

    How to Stop Your Appetite from Heckling You and Achieve Savorosity

    Coined Term: Cravattenuation

    (craving + attenuation)

    Extended Definition:

    Cravattenuation is the psychological and physiological art of turning down the volume on your inner snack gremlin—the one who starts kicking the back of your consciousness the moment your stomach makes a polite gurgle. It’s the deliberate process of retraining your body to interpret minor hunger signals not as existential emergencies but as low-priority system notifications: “You might want to eat in a bit” instead of “RAID THE PANTRY OR DIE.” Just as meditation teaches you to sit with discomfort rather than react impulsively, Cravattenuation teaches you that a little hunger isn’t a crisis—it’s foreplay for a better meal.

    We’ve been conditioned by snack culture and anxiety-driven consumption to treat hunger as something to be feared and fixed immediately, like a smoke alarm or a toddler tantrum. But when you practice Cravattenuation, something remarkable happens: your threshold for hunger strengthens, and the urgency softens. You learn to sit with a mild stomach pang without spiraling into carb-lust. Over time, you develop what can only be described as Hunger Discernment: the ability to separate emotional nibble-itching from true physiological need.

    The Unexpected Perk:

    By making your body earn the meal—not through punishment, but patience—you begin to eat with a clarity and joy that’s been missing since the dawn of office vending machines. Food tastes better when you’re actually hungry for it. Not “kinda bored” hungry, not “scrolling through cheese reels” hungry, but real hungry. Cravattenuation helps you not only manage your weight with more ease and grace, it re-enchants the eating experience itself. You’ll start treating meals like mini homecomings rather than pit stops at a dopamine gas station.

    Name for the Healthy State: Savorosity

    (savor + satiety + curiosity)

    Savorosity is the elegant state you enter after mastering Cravattenuation—a zone where hunger feels less like a hostage crisis and more like an invitation. It’s when you greet mealtime with curiosity and pleasure, not guilt or compulsion. It’s when you chew slower, taste deeper, and know you’ve arrived not because you gave in to a craving, but because you earned your appetite.

    Cravattenuation gets you there. Savorosity keeps you there. And together, they free you from the tyranny of the pantry’s siren call.

  • DeDopaminification: Breaking Up with the Machine That Loves You Too Much

    DeDopaminification: Breaking Up with the Machine That Loves You Too Much

    DeDopaminification is the deliberate and uncomfortable process of recalibrating the brain’s reward circuitry after years—sometimes decades—of synthetic overstimulation. It’s what happens when you look your phone in the face and whisper, “It’s not me, it’s you.” In a culture addicted to frictionless pleasure and frictionless communication, DeDopaminification means reintroducing friction on purpose. It’s the detox of the soul, not with celery juice, but with withdrawal from digital dopamine driplines—apps, feeds, alerts, porn, outrage, and validation loops disguised as “engagement.”

    In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle diagnosed the psychic fragmentation wrought by constant digital interaction: we’ve become people who talk less but text more, who perform connection while starving for authenticity. In one of her most haunting observations, she notes how teens feel panicked without their phones—not because they’re afraid of missing messages, but because they fear missing themselves in the mirror of others’ attention. Turkle’s world is one where dopamine dependency isn’t just neurological—it’s existential. We’ve been trained to outsource our worth to the algorithmic gaze.

    Anne Lembke’s Dopamine Nation picks up this thread like a clinical slap to the face. Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist, makes it plain: the modern world is engineered to overstimulate us into oblivion. Pleasure is no longer earned—it’s swipeable. Whether it’s TikTok, sugar, or digital outrage, our brains are being rewired to expect fireworks where there used to be a slow-burning candle. Lembke writes that to reset our internal reward systems, we must embrace discomfort—yes, want less, enjoy silence, and learn how to sit with boredom like it’s a spiritual practice.

    DeDopaminification is not some puritanical rejection of pleasure. It’s the fight to reclaim pleasure that isn’t bankrupting us. It’s deleting TikTok not because you’re better than it, but because it’s better than you—so good it’s lethal. It’s deciding that your attention span deserves a tombstone with dignity, not a death-by-scroll. It’s not heroic or Instagrammable. In fact, it’s boring, slow, sometimes lonely—but it’s also real. And that’s what makes it revolutionary.

  • Reclaiming Your Sanity May Depend on DeBrandification

    Reclaiming Your Sanity May Depend on DeBrandification

    DeBrandification is the conscious, defiant act of peeling away the curated layers of your public persona like old vinyl siding from a house that never needed a makeover in the first place. It’s the moment you look at your bio—“educator, content strategist, latte enthusiast, recovering perfectionist”—and think, Who the hell is this algorithm-optimized mannequin and what has she done with my soul? DeBrandification is not rebranding; it is anti-branding. It’s the willful act of becoming unmarketable, unpredictable, and gloriously unverified. You stop asking, Will this post get engagement? and start wondering, What would I write if no one were watching and no sponsors were lurking?

    It begins subtly: you delete a profile picture, unpublish a blog, or (gasp) let your TikTok account die peacefully of neglect. Soon, you’re off the grid like a suburban Thoreau with Wi-Fi guilt, refusing to hashtag your lunch or quote-tag your trauma. You don’t disappear—you just stop performing. The metrics vanish, and in their place, something odd happens: your thoughts get weirder, your sentences wobblier, your voice less pleasing but more alive. DeBrandification is not career suicide. It’s self-resurrection. And if you do it right, you won’t just lose followers—you’ll lose the craving for them.

    The final scene of Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” is a textbook act of DeBrandification—messy, raw, and utterly liberating. After spending the entire episode contorting herself into a chirpy, pastel-colored caricature to boost her social rating, Lacie finally bottoms out—literally and metaphorically—in a jail cell. Stripped of her devices, her followers, and the suffocating need to be likable, she engages in a gloriously profane scream-fest with her fellow inmate, both of them hurling insults with reckless joy. It’s the first time we see her alive—flushed, furious, and unfiltered. In that moment, Lacie isn’t falling apart; she’s shedding the synthetic skin of her brand. No more forced smiles, no more filtered breakfasts, no more networking by emotional hostage. What remains is a person—not an avatar, not a score—a human being who, for the first time, doesn’t give a five-star damn.

  • The Resurrection and Other Interruptions to My Nap

    The Resurrection and Other Interruptions to My Nap

    This Saturday afternoon, somewhere between my post-kettlebell stupor and the first REM cycle, I drifted into the odd liminal space where podcasts mingle with dreams. In my AirPods: Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast, where the ever-Catholic provocateur was in conversation with Francis Collins, the brilliant scientist and evangelical convert who led the Human Genome Project and somehow still believes Jesus flew to Heaven in a flesh-and-spirit upgrade that sounds suspiciously like the beta version of a Marvel character.

    These two men—earnest, erudite, and disturbingly unbothered by the metaphysical gymnastics required—agreed that Jesus was no zombie. No, the risen Christ, they insisted, was something far more sophisticated: a being of glorified materiality, capable of munching on grilled fish one moment and defying the laws of gravity the next. As I lay there, blinking ceiling-ward in the warm afterglow of lactic acid and religious speculation, it hit me: I’m a doubter. Not an edgy nihilist, just your garden-variety agnostic with a decades-long lease agreement in my head, where Jesus and Paul have been living rent-free since I hit puberty.

    The part I can’t swallow—resurrection aside—is substitutionary atonement. The notion that a God supposedly defined by love could only be appeased by orchestrating a cosmic bloodletting reads less like theology and more like something out of a Bronze Age mafia drama. And yet, Sullivan and Collins weren’t foaming zealots—they were thoughtful, gracious, luminously intelligent men. Which led me, mid-nap, to remember Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, a fever dream of a novel in which the narrator interrogates Luke, the Gospel’s narrator, with a mix of admiration, suspicion, and barely-contained despair. It’s the story of someone trying to understand the story being told by someone who wasn’t sure they believed it either.

    Somewhere between guilt, caffeine, and the ache in my glutes, I sat up and thought: Maybe I should write a novel. Not about Jesus—he already has a publisher—but about me wrestling with Carrère, while Carrère wrestles with Luke, while Sullivan and Collins serenely eat fish with the risen Lord. It’s wildly ambitious, probably self-indulgent, and smells faintly of midlife crisis. But what’s faith—or doubt—if not the ultimate literary prompt?

  • A Letter from Søren Kierkegaard to Mr. Francis Sinatra, Upon Hearing “It Was a Very Good Year”

    A Letter from Søren Kierkegaard to Mr. Francis Sinatra, Upon Hearing “It Was a Very Good Year”


    Copenhagen, beneath the long shadow of time

    Dear Mr. Sinatra,

    I have listened to your song “It Was a Very Good Year,” and I confess—I wept. Not the kind of weeping that pleases the sentimentalists or flatters the romantics, but the deeper, quieter kind—the kind that arises when one hears a man sing of life not as a celebration, but as an autopsy performed with a silk glove.

    You sing of years as “vintage wine”—fine, aged, savored. And yet behind every lyric is a sigh. This is not nostalgia; it is resignation. The song begins with youth and ends in winter, as all songs must. But what strikes me most is not the inevitability of decline—it is the illusion that meaning can be harvested from pleasure, that the parade of lovers and seasons might add up to something more than passing time.

    You, sir, are not crooning. You are confessing. You thought you were merely singing of girls in small towns and blue-blooded women on leafy lanes, but what you have revealed is the terrifying symmetry of life: its seductions, its grandeur, and finally, its slow vanishing into the dusk. The “very good years” are not triumphs—they are tombstones in a vineyard.

    You have sung the melody of Either/Or: the aesthetic man, reflecting at last, asking whether the wine was ever enough. I urge you—do not be deceived by your own elegance. Beneath your tuxedo, a soul is asking what all this revelry was for. That question is not to be avoided. It is your truest note.

    Yours in dread and velvet,
    Søren Kierkegaard
    (The man your song already anticipated—though you didn’t know it at the time)

  • A Letter from S. Kierkegaard to Gilbert O’Sullivan, Upon Hearing “Alone Again (Naturally)”

    A Letter from S. Kierkegaard to Gilbert O’Sullivan, Upon Hearing “Alone Again (Naturally)”


    Copenhagen, the hour of melancholy

    Dear Mr. O’Sullivan,

    Permit me, in the solitude of this northern study, to offer you my condolences and my thanks.

    I have just listened to your song “Alone Again (Naturally),” and I must confess—I wept. Not the theatrical weeping of sentimental theatergoers or lovers of tear-stained novels, but the quiet, resigned weeping of the man who recognizes in another’s lament the echo of his own despair. You have sung, sir, what I have tried to write: the terrifying banality of abandonment, the nausea of meaninglessness, the shrill laughter of life’s cruel ironies dressed in soft melodies.

    What impresses me most is not your grief, but your refusal to disguise it. You do not rage at God with grand Nietzschean thunder. You simply say, “I expected better.” And there—there—is the true terror: not in the presence of pain, but in the unbearable silence of the heavens when one has cried out for mercy and received weather. You have given voice to the man I once called the Knight of Infinite Resignation—he who walks among others, smiling out of decorum, while his soul is collapsing inward like a dying star.

    Continue, if you can, to sing these dread lullabies. The crowd will mistake them for easy listening. But those of us who have stood at the edge of the abyss will recognize the truth behind your gentle chords. We are not soothed. We are seen.

    Yours in melancholic solidarity,
    Søren Kierkegaard
    (Author of Either/Or, The Concept of Dread, and other unpopular bangers)

  • If Paul Feuded with His Rival Apostles on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen

    If Paul Feuded with His Rival Apostles on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen

    Title: The Real Apostles of Jerusalem: Pentecost and Pettiness on Bravo

    [INT. Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen – The studio is lit like a Roman bathhouse crossed with a New York tiki bar. Andy Cohen sits gleaming between a grimacing Paul the Apostle, in an impeccably tailored robe with Roman stitching, and Peter, who looks like he’d rather be crucified upside-down again than share a couch with Paul. To the left, Bartholomew checks his cuticles while James the Lesser sips merlot like it’s judgment day.]

    ANDY COHEN
    Welcome back to Watch What Happens Live! We are blessed tonight—literally. It’s an apostolic showdown, honey. On my left, we have Peter, James, John, and the boys from Galilee. And to my right, the man who insists he’s also a real apostle—Paul of Tarsus!

    PAUL (tight smile)
    I’m not just a real apostle, Andy. I’m the apostle to the Gentiles. I practically invented the church. And yet I’m never invited to the literary salons in Antioch, never quoted at theology brunches. I wrote thirteen letters—some of which people still read. Unlike certain fishermen whose only contribution was foot-in-mouth disease.

    PETER (fuming)
    Oh give me a break, Saul—I mean Paul. You show up years after the resurrection, claim you saw a “light,” and suddenly you’re the CEO of Jesus, Inc.? The rest of us actually knew the man. We walked with Him. We ate with Him. We heard Him snore. You had a seizure on a donkey and decided you’re the oracle of salvation.

    JAMES THE LESSER (leaning in)
    Let’s be real. If Paul had a PR team any better, he’d be trending on Messianic TikTok. The man has a scroll drop every month. “To the Galatians,” “To the Ephesians,” “To My Haters.” Please.

    ANDY COHEN
    Wow, okay! So Peter, what’s your biggest gripe with Paul?

    PETER
    He’s always subtweeting us in his epistles! “Even if an angel preaches a different gospel, let him be accursed.” Oh gee, I wonder who he meant. Then he throws in a “those who seemed to be something meant nothing to me.” That’s me, Andy! He means me! I was the rock! Now I’m a footnote?

    JOHN (muttering)
    I wrote a whole gospel and he still called me “pillar adjacent.”

    PAUL (exploding)
    You accuse me of ambition, but I suffered for this calling. I was shipwrecked! Imprisoned! Bitten by snakes! You lot had fish and loaves—I had near-death experiences and unpaid missionary tours! If I boast, I boast in the Lord. And maybe also a little in my rhetorical genius.

    BARTHOLOMEW (finally speaking)
    He called himself the least of the apostles and then made himself the brand.

    PAUL
    The Spirit speaks through me!

    PETER
    The Spirit told you to call me a hypocrite in front of the Galatians?

    PAUL
    If the sandal fits.

    ANDY COHEN (grinning like a man feeding Christians to lions)
    Oof! Okay, we are flaming tonight—like the bush, not the brunch. Final thoughts? Can we bury the hatchet like it’s buried at Golgotha?

    PETER (snatching his wine glass)
    Sure. I’ll bury it right here.

    Peter hurls the wine in Paul’s face. The studio erupts. Paul stands, soaked and fuming, quoting 2 Corinthians about his sufferings while John rolls his eyes and checks his scroll for quotes about loving one another.

    ANDY COHEN (gleeful)
    Okay, that’s the gospel according to Bravo! Next week: Mary Magdalene claps back at Judas in The Real Disciples: Women Tell All! Goodnight, everybody!

    [Cue the theme song: “Turn the Other Cheek (Remix)” by DJ Pontius Pilate.]

  • If Kierkegaard Wrote a TV Review of The Pitt

    If Kierkegaard Wrote a TV Review of The Pitt

    Title: The Sickness Unto Careerism: A Review of The Pitt
    By S. Kierkegaard (translated from the dread)

    In The Pitt, we behold not a hospital, but a crucible of despair masquerading as productivity. Here, men and women do not treat illness—they perform competence. Each character is driven not by love of medicine or patient, but by the terrible fear of being unremarkable. The show is not about healing bodies; it is about sustaining the fiction of self.

    What torments the staff of The Pitt is not death, but possibility—the gnawing anxiety that their lives could be otherwise, that beneath the pager beeps and sterile monologues lies the choking truth: they have chosen incorrectly. They grasp at promotions, publications, and approval from institutions as if these might quiet the inward scream of inauthenticity. They cannot be alone, for solitude would demand an encounter with the Self, and such an encounter would destroy them.

    Thus The Pitt is not drama; it is diagnosis. Each scene is a new symptom of the despair that arises when one pursues admiration instead of inwardness, prestige instead of passion. These doctors do not fear God. They fear irrelevance. And in this, they are modern to the marrow.

  • If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”—that haunting anthem of denial, repression, and the unbearable weight of vulnerability—he would recognize a soul attempting to cloak longing in irony, and failing beautifully. Pascal might scribble in his notebook, pen dipped in both skepticism and sorrow:

    1.
     Man denies love not because he is free from it, but because he is enslaved by it. The louder he insists he feels nothing, the more we hear the tremor of devotion in his voice. “I’m not in love” is merely a liturgy of protest against the heart’s verdict.

    2.
     He removes her picture—not to forget her, but to stop trembling at the sight of it. In doing so, he seeks mastery over his affections by performing indifference. But emotion, like God, does not vanish because man has ceased to name it.

    3.
     He insists: “It’s just a silly phase.” But only those who are drowning need to rename the water. The one who plays casual most often suffers the deepest cut, for pride clutches at dignity even as the soul dissolves in yearning.

    4.
     We would rather say, “I don’t care,” than risk the shame of caring too much. Man arms himself with detachment the way cowards wear armor—not to protect the heart, but to avoid ever using it.

    5.
     Every word he utters is a mask stitched by fear. He cannot love openly, for he believes vulnerability is weakness. And yet, in avoiding weakness, he becomes truly pathetic—a captive of what he dares not name.

    6.
     To say “don’t think you’ve won” is to reveal that one has already lost. The war is over. The heart surrendered in the second verse. Only the mind marches on, planting flags on a battlefield already buried in flowers.

    7.
     There is no cruelty greater than pretending not to feel. It is a lie told to oneself in the presence of truth. Love, when denied, becomes not less real—but more dangerous, like a flame hidden under dry cloth. It will burn eventually.

  • If Blaise Pascal Had Listened to “Deacon Blues”

    If Blaise Pascal Had Listened to “Deacon Blues”

    If Blaise Pascal had listened to “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan—a song about the seductive dignity of failure, self-invention, and the strange glory of obscurity—he might have jotted down a set of Pensées to dissect the Deacon Blues persona.

    1.
     Man prefers to be a broken genius than an obedient saint. The dream of ruin, if it is romantic enough, intoxicates him more than the dull clarity of success. He calls this rebellion, but it is merely another form of vanity—failure dressed in excessive self-regard.

    2.
     He who calls himself “Deacon Blues” chooses a name of ironic grandeur. He does not wish to be great, but to appear profound in his brokenness. This too is a form of ambition—narcissism inverted and dipped in bourbon.

    3.
     The world offers two false promises: the applause of others and the nobility of being misunderstood. Deacon Blues seeks the latter, not because it is better, but because it hurts less to fail on one’s own terms than to succeed on another’s.

    4.
     To live in the margins and call it freedom—this is man’s trick. He flees from the burden of excellence and cloaks his retreat in poetry. But exile, chosen for aesthetic reasons, is still a form of cowardice.

    5.
     He dreams of learning to work the saxophone, not to make music, but to be seen as one who has suffered for his art. In this, he is like those who wish to be martyrs, not for truth, but for drama.

    6.
     “Drink Scotch whisky all night long and die behind the wheel.” Thus he crowns his life not with virtue, but with stylized destruction. He does not want to be saved—only to be mourned beautifully.

    7.
     Deacon Blues wants a name, not a self. He believes identity is a lyric he can write into being. But names do not change the soul, only the soundtrack to its delusions.