Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • My Lifelong Marriage to Convenience

    My Lifelong Marriage to Convenience

    There is much to admire about centering our lives on convenience. We save time and resources, avoid wasted effort, and maximize efficiency in the name of what is too often called “optimization.” A life built around convenience often becomes a quest for “life hacks.” But if our behavior is less inventive, we don’t call it a hack at all—just a preference.

    For example, I refuse to go to the gym. It’s inconvenient, time-consuming, costly, and exposes me to airborne illnesses. I prefer to work out in the garage. That’s not a life hack—it’s just easier. The same goes for meals: having a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder and soy milk instead of lunch or dinner isn’t clever or innovative. It’s simply what I do when my family is out and I’m eating alone. Spending more than five minutes on a meal under those circumstances feels unnecessary. Calling a bowl of steel-cut oats or buckwheat groats a “life hack” would be grandiose.

    During the pandemic, three-fourths of my classes moved online through Canvas, a Learning Management System (LMS). Hard copies disappeared. Graded documents were uploaded to the platform, which was remarkably efficient. I didn’t have to drive to campus. The college saved on electricity. That was five years ago, and my classes remain online. I now drive less than 3,000 miles a year. Online classes have made me very efficient. Once you taste efficiency, it’s nearly impossible to go back to inefficiency.

    I admit I’m a less than admirable parent. I don’t like driving my teen daughters to their social functions—birthday parties, football games, dance practices, amusement parks. I find it all inconvenient. That’s my choice. If I were truly devoted to convenience, I wouldn’t have become a parent at all. And certainly not a cat owner. Kitty litter, flea control, vet visits, and travel arrangements are an affront to any serious commitment to convenience.

    As desirable as convenience is, some personalities—mine included—turn it into a pathology. We center our lives around it, and any violation of our convenience policies breeds resentment. Many of these resentments are unreasonable. I resent old age and death, primarily because they are inconvenient. Doctor appointments and funerals interfere with my routine.

    Convenience culture also makes us adore routine. I suspect routine is the groom to the bride of convenience.

    Even my worldview is infected by this impulse. I am an agnostic, which I despise, because it is inconvenient. Agnosticism demands reading and constant reflection. I’ve consumed books by agnostics, atheists, universalists, infernalists, and the post-mortem-salvation curious. While Elizabeth Anderson’s critique of scripture has many compelling points, her notion of morality as nothing more than evolution feels inadequate. Paul’s vision of humanity as fallen and divided is more persuasive and mirrors my own psychology. I wish I could settle happily into Anderson’s worldview. It would be so convenient.

    Speaking of religion, Jesus preached a gospel of inconvenience. His willingness to sacrifice his life in such a manner stands as the very opposite of convenience. For devotees of the gospel of ease, following Jesus is nearly unthinkable—a path that demands nothing less than a Damascus-level upheaval like Paul’s.

    When I think of convenience, I’m reminded of Chris Grossman, a wine salesman I worked with in the 1980s. He was brilliant and affable but had no close relationships. He admitted he didn’t care much for life. He had tried having a girlfriend once and said it was awful—not because of her, but because it was too inconvenient. By his late thirties, he was a bachelor. He ate the same foods every day for simplicity’s sake and once a year drove his Triumph to a car show in Carmel. I loved him for it, because I knew we were both soulmates in convenience culture.

    Some of us are more diseased by this devotion to convenience than others, and it often lowers our standards. I am appalled by factory farming and would like to be vegan. Perhaps if I lived alone, I could do it. But in a family of omnivores, that move would not go over well. I could prepare plant-based meals for myself, but I don’t—partly because of the inconvenience. Vegans I’ve spoken to say the hardest part isn’t the food but the social ostracism.

    I’m already the black sheep in my family—the anti-social shut-in whose quirks are laughed at on good days and resented on bad ones. If I imposed a vegan diet, I fear it would alienate me further, and I’d have to grovel my way back into some semblance of connection.

    As a lifelong neurotic who already alienates people more than I’d like, I know that repairing frayed relationships is an excruciating, arduous task. And it’s so inconvenient.

  • Rage-Bait Justice: How TV and Conspiracy Manufacture Vigilantes (A College Essay Prompt)

    Rage-Bait Justice: How TV and Conspiracy Manufacture Vigilantes (A College Essay Prompt)

    David Osit’s 2025 documentary Predators argues that the television series To Catch a Predator (2004–2007) trafficked in a sensational form of “rage bait”: staged ambushes, blurred safety protocols, and police tactics sacrificed to the show’s appetite for ratings. The program framed itself as public service, but its producers often prioritized spectacle over procedure, converting criminal justice into prime-time theater. Osit links this practice to a broader media phenomenon—rage bait—that rewards outrage, erodes critical thinking, and normalizes vigilantism and voyeurism. The same dynamics, we could argue, animate conspiracy entrepreneurs such as Alex Jones (see The Truth vs. Alex Jones): both convert moral panic into entertainment and profit, with corrosive effects on civic life.

    In a 1,700-word argumentative essay, evaluate the claim that treating criminality and conspiracy as spectacle—whether through To Catch a Predator or Alex Jones’s media operations—cultivates our worst impulses rather than our better angels. Using specific examples from both Predators and The Truth vs. Alex Jones and other reliable sources, analyze the ethical and civic consequences of rage bait in an attention economy

    Three sample thesis statements (with mapping components)

    Thesis 1 — Ethical-civic critique (best for moral analysis)
     Thesis: By converting crime and conspiracy into spectacle, both To Catch a Predator and Alex Jones manufacture moral panic and reward voyeuristic retribution; rather than fostering accountability, they degrade due process, incentivize unsafe policing practices, and train audiences to prefer outrage over inquiry.
    Map: (1) define “rage bait” and show how each case uses spectacle; (2) document procedural and ethical harms (policing compromises, doxxing, false beliefs); (3) analyze effects on civic habits (decline of deliberation, rise of vigilantism); (4) propose remedies (media ethics standards, platform governance, public media literacy).

    Thesis 2 — Psychological-manipulation frame (best for evidence-driven argument)
     Thesis: Rage-bait media—exemplified by To Catch a Predator and Alex Jones—exploits cognitive biases (moral outrage, availability heuristic, social proof) to increase engagement, and that manipulation converts viewers into amateur prosecutors and conspiracy enforcers, producing measurable social harms like harassment, miscarriages of public trust, and political polarization.
    Map: (1) summarize psychological mechanisms; (2) show how production choices trigger those biases in the two cases; (3) cite empirical consequences (harassment, wrongful accusations, erosion of trust); (4) recommend policy and audience-level interventions.

    Thesis 3 — Comparative-intent frame (best for nuanced balance)
     Thesis: While To Catch a Predator and Alex Jones both monetize outrage, they differ in intentionality and practical outcomes—one trafficked in staged public shaming with ambiguous law-enforcement complicity; the other peddles wholesale distrust—yet both converge in the same social result: normalizing spectacle as a substitute for justice and public reasoning.
    Map: (1) compare production intent and methods; (2) detail convergent harms despite different aims; (3) argue why intent does not absolve societal damage; (4) close with corrective measures that address both content creation and platform incentives.

    Three likely counterarguments and tight rebuttals

    Counterargument 1 — “They serve the public good: exposing predators / exposing lies.”
     Claim: Defenders argue To Catch a Predator and figures like Jones uncover dangerous people and warn the public—both perform watchdog functions that mainstream institutions neglect.
    Rebuttal: Exposure can be legitimate, but methods matter. When producers stage confrontations or flout safety protocols, they risk false positives, entrapment claims, and endangering both suspects and vigilante viewers. Similarly, Jones’s “exposés” often rely on unverified claims that harm innocents and erode trust in verified institutions; exposing wrongdoing while abandoning standards of verification is not accountability but sensationalism. Evidence-based journalism follows verification and respects due process; rage-bait substitutes spectacle for those constraints.

    Counterargument 2 — “Audience agency: viewers choose to watch—blame the audience for wanting spectacle.”
     Claim: Some say demand creates supply: if people didn’t tune in to outrage, producers wouldn’t supply it. Viewers are responsible for their choices.
    Rebuttal: Demand is shaped by supply. Media design and platform algorithms amplify outrage, reinforce confirmation bias, and make the extreme more visible. Moreover, many viewers do not have the media-literacy tools to parse staged setups or conspiratorial rhetoric. Responsibility therefore rests both with producers and with platforms that monetize attention; blaming passive viewers ignores the structural incentives that manufacture and magnify the spectacle.

    Counterargument 3 — “Different aims—public safety vs. entertainment—so comparison is unfair.”
     Claim: Critics argue the comparison collapses distinct categories: a sting operation aimed at child safety is not morally equivalent to a conspiracy show that pushes falsehoods.
    Rebuttal: Distinguishing aims matters, but consequences and methods matter more for public judgment. When public-safety rhetoric is deployed to justify theatrics—compromising police protocols for ratings—the boundary between service and spectacle disappears. Both enterprises monetize outrage, and both can cultivate a culture of punishment without procedure. Comparing them is not moral leveling so much as showing how different rationales can converge on the same harmful social model.

  • The Truth vs. Alex Jones Points to Larger Battles We Face

    The Truth vs. Alex Jones Points to Larger Battles We Face

    Yesterday I watched The Truth vs. Alex Jones and came away unsettled and discouraged. The film lays out, with testimony and footage, how a powerful falsehood about the Sandy Hook massacre metastasized into a lived reality for many—how ordinary people came to believe grieving parents were actors in some sinister plot. The human cost is plain: families harassed, reputations shredded, lives made worse by a rumor that would not die. The documentary also cites polling that suggests this belief is far from fringe, which is precisely what made me sit up and take notice.

    Alan Jacobs, in How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, gave me a frame for that discomfort. Jacobs argues that critical thinking is not merely a set of intellectual tools; it is a moral posture. It requires humility—the readiness to admit you might be wrong—intellectual rigor, and a willingness to engage, civilly, with rival views. In a public sphere where grievance entrepreneurs monetize confusion and cruelty, Jacobs’s point feels less like scholastic nicety and more like civic equipment. To believe in the conspiracy about Sandy Hook is less of an intellectual deficiency and more of a moral one. Willful ignorance is born of belligerence.

    There are historical moments when falsehoods gain unusual traction and the public square warps into a theater of lies. Watching the documentary, I thought about those moments not as distant epochs but as warnings: when social media rewards certainty over care, and when spectacle drowns out verification, civic habits fray. On the evening he announced his retirement, anchor Brian Williams put it bluntly when he spoke of “evil winds” in our national weather—less a prophecy than an observation that the job of keeping the truth in view has grown harder.

    That’s where I am: uneasy, but oddly steadied by the thought that civic muscles can be strengthened with small, repeated acts. Viktor Frankl reminded us that life’s circumstances often determine the work we must do; perhaps one task for this hour is to preserve the habits that let a shared reality exist in the first place.

  • How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    October 16, 1967, was a victory for the writers of cynicism. It was the day I learned the universe doesn’t give a damn. This was the day the veil was lifted. I was five, just shy of my sixth birthday, watching The Monkees, blissfully unaware that my entire worldview was about to be wrecked. The episode? “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling.” The plot? Micky Dolenz, the Monkee I admired most, gets metaphorically pancaked by Bulk, a human monument of muscle played by Mr. Universe Dave Draper. Bulk was no ordinary gym rat; he was a colossus in Speedos, the prototype Schwarzenegger. Worse, he stole Brenda, the beach goddess, right out from under Micky’s nose.

    Micky, desperate to win her back, did what any of us would: he signed up for Weaklings Anonymous. Their solution? Hoisting weights the size of small cars and downing fermented goat milk curd—an elixir I can only assume tasted like liquid despair. He even sold his drum set, jeopardizing the band’s future, all to build enough brawn to challenge Bulk.

    And for what? Brenda, fickle as fate, had a sudden epiphany—muscles were passé. She ditched Bulk for a scrawny intellectual buried in Remembrance of Things Past. Apparently, Proust’s multivolume exploration of memory and ennui was hotter than biceps.

    There, in front of my Zenith TV, I watched Micky’s heart crumple, and with it, mine. The moral of the story was clear and soul-crushing: hard work guarantees nothing. You could sacrifice, sweat, and sip goat curd until you resembled a Greco-Roman statue, only to find the universe had other plans—plans that favored nerds with library cards.

    The Monkees changed everything. The show taught me the brutal truth of irony: things don’t go the way as planned. I didn’t have the word for irony as a five-year-old, but I could feel it sending an existential chill through my bones. 

    As the decades passed, I finally processed that childhood memory into a piano song I wrote, titled “The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz”:

  • We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    In the hellfire of the summer of 1971—sun like a coin press and every pine needle a tiny oven—I was nine and certain the world owed me a miracle. My family and four others had staked a two-week claim on a rugged patch of Mount Shasta: we fished, water-skied, swatted hornets, and lazed beneath the buzzing halo of a massive battery radio that vomited The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night into the pines. It should have been Eden. It should have been bliss. Instead it felt like the production meeting for a childhood trauma.

    One dawn I lay cocooned in my tent, not merely asleep but translating into the rarest dream of my short life. In that vivid pantomime I’d been plucked off our campsite and dropped into San Francisco, standing before a gleaming red cable car with the Brady Bunch beaming at me like a panel of missionary saints. Mike and Carol had already signed the papers. I was family now—promised the split-level, the avocado-green kitchen, my very own bunk. My brain supplied questions with the urgency of a petition: Would I get a room? Would Greg tolerate me? When would they shoot my induction episode?

    Then Mark and Tosh—the twin saviors of sobriety—tore the dream away like a curtain ripped mid-scene. “C’mon, man, fishing,” they croaked, their voices the sound of gravestones being lowered. Fishing? Fishing?! I had been adopted by television perfection and now I was expected to sniff out worms like a commoner. I sulked with the theatricality of a miniature tyrant, trudging the rest of the day with the scowl of a man exiled from paradise, my secret grief lodged like a splinter under the skin of my soul. There was no way to explain. “Sorry, I can’t bait a hook—my new stepfamily needs me on stage.” Right. I bit my lip and chewed on humiliation.

    My father barked like a sergeant and cut the melodrama down with a single order: “Get with the program. We’re living in the wild.” The wild, he meant, with its yellowjackets circling our biscuits and a lake full of indifferent fish. I wanted the Brady kitchen, not a fishing pole and a chorus of stings. The pointy little deaths of mosquito bites and the cheap tin of powdered pancake mix were the actualities. The dream stayed lodged; reality kept showing us its rough, unvarnished palm.

    That sulking boy at Mount Shasta believed his fantasy was a portal out of chaos—a personal miracle nobody else would imagine. The joke is that it wasn’t original. Millions of American children were fed the same sedatives: thirty-minute morality plays in which family harmony was manufactured to lipstick level. While we bathed in their canned warmth, the actors backstage were burning through lives: addiction, affairs, fights that would make our own messy households look like spas. The dissonance between stage-gleam and soap-opera sludge is almost religious in its cruelty.

    Should we expect actors’ private lives to line up with the squeaky-clean product they sell? Of course not. It would be as reasonable to expect Superman to sort his recycling. Hollywood is a factory of facades: glossy façades varnished over dysfunction. The Brady Bunch was the perfect exhibit—an engineered Eden whose actors were stuck inside their own human messes. Yet we kept praying to that televised altar because fantasy is sweet and often cheaper than facing the real family across your table.

    Decades later, the fantasy will still sneak up on me. Sometimes I dream my face is a square in that opening montage—cheeks plump, grin kerchiefed to perfection—living, forever, inside a clapboard postcard where problems resolve in thirty minutes. In the dream I am blissfully ignorant of the backstage carnage. I wake up with that small, ridiculous ache—a taste for a world that never existed, an appetite for a comfort that, like cheap candy, rots faster than it satisfies.

  • False Neutrality: Reading Armand Nicholi’s Debate

    False Neutrality: Reading Armand Nicholi’s Debate

    I’m about a third of the way through the Audible of Armand Nicholi’s The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate, in which Nicholi argues that the single largest life decision — whether to accept or reject belief in God — carries the heaviest consequences. He paints Lewis as modest, serene, and living in a state of grace (the fruits of the spirit, if you like), while he casts Freud as intoxicated with his own genius, dismissing God as a childish projection.

    I have several objections. First, Nicholi leans on a rhetorical pose I find disingenuous: “I’m not trying to persuade anyone — just look at the facts.” He presents himself as a neutral referee while quietly aligning with Lewis. The result is a parade of straw-man treatments that caricature Freud and flatten the debate into tidy contrasts the evidence doesn’t support.

    Second, Nicholi’s central frame is an either/or fallacy: you either believe in God or you don’t. That binary elides the vast internal variety within religious traditions. One person’s God can be another person’s devil — and not across religions but within the same text. Christianity alone supplies wildly different conceptions: the Calvinist God versus a Universalist God; a God who offers post-mortem purgatorial salvation versus one who does not. Even accounts of the Crucifixion diverge: some Christians see it as substitutionary atonement, others categorically reject that reading. As Jerry Walls notes, the God who plans substitutionary atonement is not the God who doesn’t.

    Nicholi also ignores how different beliefs about God imply different beliefs about human nature. Are we, as Paul suggests in Romans, depraved and helpless? Or, as Hyam Maccoby argues from a Jewish perspective, did God create us with the capacity to meet Him halfway? The kind of God you endorse carries with it a theory of human wiring — and Nicholi refuses to engage that complexity.

    Those omissions aren’t accidental; they’re convenient. Reducing belief to a binary choice lets Nicholi render one side salutary and the other contemptible without wrestling with the theological and anthropological thickets that make the question genuinely hard.

    The tone of the book compounds the problem. A Harvard psychiatrist writing in a creamy, intellectual register, posing as an impartial guide through this existential choice, slides easily into what feels like a polished little tract. The surface civility—measured analysis, calm diction—camouflages rhetorical sleights of hand that, to my mind, undermine the work’s seriousness.

    I want to be fair. I’m trying. But once you notice the frauds and fallacies — the imposture of neutrality, the forced binary, the flattened portrayals — they don’t unsee themselves. So I’m forcing my way through the remaining two-thirds of the book, partly out of duty and partly to see whether Nicholi can salvage his argument when he has to meet the harder questions he’s been avoiding.

  • Tooter Turtle Goes to Gold’s Gym

    Tooter Turtle Goes to Gold’s Gym

    When you’re old, you burn daylight running stupid counterfactuals. Forty years of teaching college writing and now I mutter to myself, “You were never meant to be a professor. You were meant to be a personal trainer.” This fantasy is less revelation than acid reflux—I can’t keep it down no matter how hard I try.

    But let’s be honest about the personal trainer gig. Path A: you scrape together rent money coaching half-motivated clients through limp triceps pushdowns while they whine about kale. Path B: you cater to narcissistic celebrities who want you to count their lunges in a whisper, until their self-absorption has hollowed you out like a dry coconut.

    In this farce, I’m no different than Tooter Turtle, that cartoon sad sack from my childhood. Every week he begged Mr. Wizard to reinvent him as a lumberjack, a detective, a gladiator, a football star. And every week he proved that no matter how much you change the costume, you can’t change the pratfall. His new career always ended in humiliation, panic, and the desperate cry: “Help me, Mr. Wizard!”

    That’s us: eternal college freshmen, forever switching majors, convinced that the next “out there” will be our deliverance. But when the magic portal opens, we loathe ourselves for asking.

    Me, a personal trainer? Please. Within a week I’d be rolling my eyes at clients’ flabby excuses, pawning my kettlebells to cover insurance premiums I don’t have, and slinging creatine tubs from the trunk of my Honda. I wouldn’t be a coach—I’d be a sidewalk prophet of six-pack abs, half-broke, half-starved, and wholly ridiculous.

    Punchline: In short, I’d be Tooter Turtle in gym shorts—begging Mr. Wizard to zap me back to the classroom, where at least the only thing I’m destroying is a freshman’s thesis statement.

  • Religion Is No Kevlar Vest Against the Fear of Death

    Religion Is No Kevlar Vest Against the Fear of Death

    My mother’s people were Ashkenazi Jews from Poland; my father’s, Roman Catholics from Scotland and Ireland. Yet both treated religion like a dusty attic trunk filled with moth-eaten lace. When a TV preacher with the face of a sour prune croaked on about sin, my parents would smirk, as if watching a vaudeville relic wheeze out his final act.

    I wasn’t so quick to sneer. At Castro Valley High, a white-haired Mrs. Hanson, seventy if a day, handed us the Book of Job, and I was caught like a fish. God, suffering, celestial wagers—it was grotesque, terrifying, delicious. I’d drive my Ford Maverick to the gym, sunrays slicing through storm clouds, and briefly imagine a divine presence scanning my biceps. I didn’t know biblical doctrine from dog food, but I felt sure there was an afterlife waiting—an enchanting lounge where the velvet ropes always parted. For a short stretch of adolescence, I even stopped fearing death.

    Then came my Christian classmates, thrusting paperback apocalypse manuals into my hands. Rapture. Beasts. Eternal torment. Overnight my buoyant heaven curdled into a horror show where my Jewish relatives burned forever. Some Christians reassured me that such cruelty wasn’t “real Christianity.” But the deeper I read, the more Paul’s letters stood like theological battering rams against Jews who wouldn’t bend the knee. Supersessionism, they called it—a polite term for spiritual eviction.

    The Church Fathers weren’t gentler. Augustine’s take on eternal damnation? Justice, pure and simple. Billions in flames, and he shrugs: they had their chance. Forgive me if I don’t find that a winning sales pitch.

    Which is why I keep returning to Dale Allison’s Night Comes. Barely 200 pages, but packed with the force of a midnight storm. A Christian, Allison treats hell not as a theological curiosity but as a moral obscenity that collapses under its own weight. He doesn’t stitch loopholes into doctrine—he pokes holes until the absurdity gushes out.

    His stories haunt me. His teenage daughter found annihilation worse than hell; she feared nothingness more than flames. His son, in an email of raw honesty, mourned the idea that “the museum of his mind will be closed.” Not death, but the erasure of memory—the bulldozing of everything tender and beloved—that was the real terror.

    As a teen I believed our cherished moments had permanent residence in some cosmic vault. Allison doesn’t smash that hope, but he makes it more fragile, more complicated. He notes—accurately, grimly—that saints and mystics, when Death shows up in the doorway, often beg and claw like the rest of us. Religious devotion, it seems, is no Kevlar vest.

    And so, in old age, I sit with a religious ambivalence as stubborn as arthritis: no doctrine, no creed, no “blessed assurance” makes the thought of extinction less ghastly. Maybe the fear of death is not a flaw to be cured but a mirror—one that forces us to stop pretending we’re eternal and finally face the finite with our eyes wide open.

  • The Clown in the Rain

    The Clown in the Rain

    It was the late ’60s, and my father and I were swept along with the crowd exiting a circus in San Jose. Rain poured hard and steady, the kind that flattens hair and soaks shoes in minutes. In the chaos of umbrellas and slick pavement, I spotted him—Hocus Pocus, the Bay Area’s clown celebrity, wandering alone through the parking lot.

    His makeup was smudged by the weather, his wig drooping, his posture sagging as though the downpour had stripped him of performance energy. He looked less like a jester than a man burdened by his own melancholy, trudging through puddles without hurry. Then his eyes flicked toward me. For a brief moment, he shook off the fog around him, managed a weary smile, and pulled from his pocket an autographed photograph. He handed it to me silently, a token from a man who seemed at once broken and kind.

    What I remember most is his expression—resigned to sadness, yet somehow still present enough to gift a child a sliver of joy. The photo, worn at the corners, became a reminder that even in rain-soaked despair, generosity can find its way through.

  • Old Age and Father Time’s Frenemies

    Old Age and Father Time’s Frenemies

    I often think back to the summer of 2019 when my wife and twin daughters were vacationing in Maui. There, on the beach, I spotted a short, compact man in his mid-seventies parading around in dark-blue Speedos with a woman at least fifty years his junior — a striking Mediterranean beauty in her twenties. The guy was trim, well-manscaped, scampering confidently on the sand like a millionaire who spends half his life in boardrooms and the other half trying to outrun the Grim Reaper. He dove into the waves with the vigor of someone convinced that as long as he keeps moving, Father Time can’t catch him.

    You could smell the wealth on him. He was probably a CEO with a portfolio big enough to buy the illusion of eternal youth. He worked hard and played harder, to borrow Hugh Hefner’s mantra. Now, I’m not here to pass moral judgment on a man who chooses a partner young enough to be his granddaughter — that’s his business. What fascinates me is the fantasy: money, discipline, and a little manscaping used as talismans against aging, as if youth were a rare potion you could sip to stay forever young.

    The whole tableau, though, felt wrong. He and his youthful companion were mismatched puzzle pieces jammed together by brute will. It was as if two jagged halves of a broken mirror had been glued into place; every forced smile and awkward embrace chipped another sliver off, until all that remained was a pile of glittering shards — the perfect image for the futility of trying to cheat time.

    This rich, fit man is Father Time’s frenemy — the one who insists they’re on friendly terms while secretly plotting a hostile takeover. He may have sold himself a “perfect picture,” but the public sees the mismatch as plainly as a traffic cone in a tuxedo. The spectacle exposes his poverty: an inability to relinquish something that no longer belongs to him, a clinging to youth that reveals fear rather than confidence. That fear, in turn, sabotages his aspiration to curate an enviable life; the attempt to perform eternal youth only underlines the loss he refuses to admit.

    I’m reminded, uncomfortably, of Joe Ferraro from Netflix’s Mafia: Most Wanted. Born in Ecuador in 1962 and raised in Toronto, Ferraro turned to bodybuilding, gambling, and organized crime as a teenager, hungry for money, women, clothes, and respect. He got it all — a Rolex Daytona, gold necklaces, designer sunglasses large enough to require their own zip code — until seven months in prison and eventual deportation stripped him of his infrastructure. In his sixties, he’s a sculpted caricature: tank top, ostentatious sport coat draped like a cape, and penetrating melancholy eyes that reveal he knows the score. He says he wants his life back, but knows he’s too old for the young man’s game and can’t look away from it.

    Both the rich man in Maui and Ferraro in exile put me in mind of Lot’s wife. They cannot relinquish the lifestyle that defines them; youth is their identity, and the thought of being disconnected from it registers as a kind of death. Unable to let go, they calcify into pillars of salt — frozen monuments to a self that no longer exists.