Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    You insist on living near the ocean, but not because you have any romantic desire to surf, bodyboard, or frolic in the waves like a sunscreen commercial. The beach serves a higher purpose. It calms you simply by existing. You need to smell the salt air, hear the muffled percussion of the surf, and watch the horizon dissolve into infinity. What you do not need is to step into the Pacific’s suspicious broth of runoff, seaweed, sunscreen residue, and whatever else civilization has politely donated to the tides. Nor do you wish to experience the tactile indignity of sand infiltrating every crevice of your body, clothing, luggage, and soul. During vacations in Oahu or Miami, you dutifully reserve a room overlooking the beach, then spend the day luxuriating beside the resort pool, periodically glancing toward the ocean with profound gratitude that you are not actually in it.

    Deserts present a similar paradox. From a safe distance they possess a cinematic grandeur, a landscape sculpted by eternity itself. Up close they reveal themselves to be an elaborate rehearsal for the apocalypse. Every cactus appears armed, every rock radiates hostility, and every gust of wind feels like the opening chapter of Mad Max. Your lips chap. Your skin shrivels. Your eyeballs seem to lose moisture by the minute. After forty-eight hours you become convinced you are quietly mummifying while still alive.

    Snow fares no better. Others speak reverently of winter wonderlands. You see an aggressively inhospitable climate masquerading as a Christmas card. Snow closes roads, freezes lungs, transforms ordinary errands into survival expeditions, and renders every hillside one unfortunate sneeze away from an avalanche. Even aesthetically it disappoints. An endless field of white is less majestic than monotonous, as though nature had forgotten to finish painting the landscape. Icicles, meanwhile, look less like decorations than nature’s collection of sharpened stakes awaiting an unfortunate passerby. One of your life’s quiet triumphs has been constructing a life that requires almost no interaction with snow whatsoever.

    Instead, you are captivated by what you call Unicorn Cities—those mythical communities that seem to have discovered the cheat code to geography. They enjoy unusually pleasant weather, attract unusually decent people, and somehow escape the afflictions suffered by neighboring regions. Port Angeles occupies a privileged place in this private mythology. Nestled within Washington’s Banana Belt, it promises milder temperatures than logic suggests it deserves. You are endlessly fascinated by it. You consume photographs, weather reports, and travel videos with almost devotional enthusiasm. Yet you have no real desire to go. Visiting would replace imagination with reality, and reality almost never survives comparison with imagination.

    So congratulate yourself for remaining loyal to your quiet corner of Southern California, where you leave town only reluctantly, tan in your own backyard for fifteen minutes a few afternoons each week, and venture to Hawaii or Miami once or twice a year merely to sit beside an immaculate swimming pool while gazing at the ocean from a respectful distance.

    You are, after all, a Threshold Tourist.

    A Threshold Tourist prefers to remain at the edge of an experience rather than surrender to it, extracting its beauty, symbolism, and emotional nourishment while politely declining its inconveniences. The destination is not meant to be conquered or consumed. It is meant to be contemplated. Paradise, in your estimation, is best appreciated from the balcony.

  • The Young and the Larval

    The Young and the Larval

    A year ago, I attended a family birthday party in Studio City. Hundreds of cheerful, talkative guests wandered around a lavish backyard pool shaded by thick stands of trees. The setting felt less like Los Angeles than a country estate in Provence. Beneath a canopy, guests feasted on fragrant Middle Eastern food while a white-haired band by the deep end of the pool played one boomer anthem after another. It was a celebration of long lives, old friendships, and accumulated memories.

    Most of the guests were in their seventies.

    While eating lunch, I spoke with my cousin’s husband, a retired ophthalmologist and former hospital administrator. A man who had once occupied positions of enormous responsibility, he told me the greatest surprise of old age wasn’t aching joints or declining stamina.

    It was invisibility.

    “People look right through you,” he said.

    His remark landed with the force of an unwelcome prophecy. Your accomplishments, reputation, expertise, and decades of experience quietly evaporate. Whatever authority once entered the room ahead of you no longer accompanies you through the door. You undergo what I call Aura Expiration: the quiet disappearance of the prestige, authority, and social recognition accumulated over a lifetime once age strips away the culture’s fascination with achievement and status.

    Yesterday’s distinguished physician becomes today’s anonymous old man standing patiently in line at Trader Joe’s.

    Aura Expiration ushers you into something even stranger. You enter what I think of as Social Hades: the peculiar stage of life in which a person remains physically present while gradually disappearing from society’s field of vision. You are neither fully among the living nor entirely absent. You become ghostlike—a witness rather than a participant—despite possessing more knowledge and experience than many of those who unconsciously dismiss you.

    Your very existence reminds younger people of the one truth they spend enormous energy avoiding: they, too, are running out of time.

    Naturally, there are ways to resist. You can dye your hair, chase fashion, cultivate the illusion of perpetual youth, or loudly insist that you are “still relevant.” But there is something tragic about watching a person wage war against chronology. The struggle itself often accelerates the indignity. Better to heed the biblical warning against kicking against the goads. Some losses are not defeats but transitions.

    Reading Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, I was struck by his observation that the Greeks imagined the afterlife as Hades, “an underworld where men’s shadows lead a sort of half-life: slow, comatose, larva-like, hardly aware.”

    I cannot help wondering whether this image grew partly from ordinary observation. Perhaps Hades resembled the fate awaiting the elderly in every civilization: still alive, yet treated as shadows; still capable of thought, yet gently ushered to the margins where they could cease interrupting youth’s fantasy of immortality.

    I have little interest in fighting that social reality. At best, younger people will treat me with courteous indifference. At worst, they will regard me as an inconvenient reminder that every fashionable face eventually wrinkles and every energetic stride slows.

    There is, however, one form of aging against which I intend to fight with all the stubbornness I possess.

    I refuse to let my mind become larval.

    I intend to keep reading difficult books, pursuing arguments, changing my mind when evidence demands it, writing essays, asking inconvenient questions, and remaining incurably curious. I would like to live forever, if only because I desperately want to know what happens next.

    Besides, history has a wicked sense of irony.

    Many young people imagine themselves to be in the thick of life merely because they inhabit the latest trends, wear the correct clothes, speak the approved vocabulary, and faithfully repeat the fashionable opinions of their tribe. Yet conformity has a way of anesthetizing curiosity. The mind quietly hardens while the body remains young.

    That is the true danger.

    Such people suffer from what I call The Larval Mind: a state of intellectual dormancy in which curiosity, skepticism, and independent judgment have withered away, leaving a person easily manipulated by fashion, ideology, algorithms, or tribal consensus. Their bodies pulse with youthful energy while their minds drift through life half-asleep.

    An eighty-year-old wrestling with Paul, Carrère, Darwin, artificial intelligence, and the future of civilization may be far younger than a twenty-five-year-old who has surrendered his thinking to TikTok, political orthodoxy, influencer culture, or whatever intellectual narcotic happens to dominate the moment.

    Perhaps youth has less to do with birthdays than with curiosity.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is not youth at all.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is refusing to become larval.

  • The Book That Failed to Cure Me of Paul

    The Book That Failed to Cure Me of Paul

    For more than twenty years, I have lived under the spell of Hyam Maccoby’s portrait of the apostle Paul in The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity. No book has done more to persuade me that Christianity might be the brilliant invention of a single, insecure, wildly ambitious genius. In Maccoby’s telling, Paul transformed a small Jewish sect into a universal religion by fusing Judaism, paganism, and strands of Hellenistic thought into something Jesus himself would scarcely have recognized. In the process, Paul elevated his own authority, turned Christianity against Judaism through supersessionism, and helped lay the theological foundation for the antisemitism that would spread through Western history like a centuries-long contagion.

    It is an intoxicating argument.

    Maccoby writes with the confidence of a prosecutor who has already secured the conviction before the trial begins. His prose is lucid, forceful, and relentlessly persuasive. He marshals his evidence with such authority that resistance feels almost irrational. Reading The Mythmaker is less like weighing competing historical interpretations than being swept into a courtroom drama where every witness seems to strengthen the case against the defendant.

    I was hardly alone in falling under its influence. On Amazon, the featured review is by the late novelist Anne Rice. After spending what she called “twelve earnest years” trying to become a Christian, her faith collapsed beneath what she regarded as Paul’s supersessionist theology and well-worn theological clichés. Maccoby, she writes, finally explained the confusion that had haunted her. Although she did not endorse every argument, she declared that the concluding chapter alone justified the price of the book.

    In many ways, I envy Rice.

    Maccoby gave her precisely what she had been searching for: an intellectually satisfying deconversion. His argument untied the theological knot that had troubled her and allowed her to walk away with a sense of clarity and peace.

    My own journey has been perversely different.

    The deeper I investigated Maccoby’s claims—and, just as importantly, the criticisms of his excesses—the less certain I became. Instead of confirming my doubts about Paul, the evidence steadily eroded my confidence in Maccoby’s portrait. The elegant certainty I once admired began to look increasingly overstated. The villain proved more elusive than the indictment suggested.

    Today I find myself in an unexpected place. My admiration for The Mythmaker has diminished, while my fascination with Paul has grown. Not because I have ceased asking difficult questions, but because Paul has become a far more complex, intelligent, passionate, and psychologically compelling figure than Maccoby allowed him to be.

    Much of that transformation can be traced to Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, my favorite novel. Carrère approaches Paul from almost the opposite direction. He does not write as an apologist, nor does he write as a prosecutor eager to secure a conviction. An agnostic by his own description, Carrère remains captivated by Paul, Luke, and the improbable chain of events that produced Christianity. He grants them neither sainthood nor villainy. Instead, he treats them as astonishingly gifted human beings whose words continue to exercise an almost gravitational pull on the Western imagination.

    That difference has mattered enormously to me. Maccoby offered the comforting simplicity of a conviction already reached. Carrère offered something rarer and ultimately more valuable: the unsettling experience of remaining in the presence of a man who refuses to become either hero or monster.

  • The Atheist Who Loved Church

    The Atheist Who Loved Church

    In 1979, I asked Christ to save me from hell and got baptized in a church. The minister dunking me held me under the water a little too long, triggering a claustrophobic panic. For a split second, I fought the urge to wrestle him underwater and put him in a headlock.

    The truth is, I never felt comfortable in church. The music grated on me, the displays of piety felt forced, and I was already battling social anxiety that made the whole scene intolerable. My Christian friends from high school were there, but they didn’t seem to understand me. Their conversations were peppered with Christian clichés, the kind that make your skin crawl. I felt crushed by a constant thought: all my Jewish relatives, long gone, were suffering in hell. The “good news” wasn’t working with me. I was depressed, and the sheer cheerfulness of everyone around me only magnified the dissonance I felt.

    At the time, my mother was dating Bill, a man in his fifties with a grim past. Abandoned by his parents, both alcoholics and addicts, he was found half-dead and drunk in a gutter at the age of eleven. He got sober as an adult and spent his life helping others do the same. His blue eyes, sad and weathered, hinted at that broken boy inside him. I couldn’t look in his eyes without seeing that eleven-year-old boy drunk and alone in the gutter. 

    One Sunday morning, as I was begrudgingly getting ready for church, Bill surprised me. He said he loved going to church, even though he didn’t believe in God. He wasn’t moved by the theology—he was an atheist, after all—but the hymns, he said, brought him joy and a sense of community he couldn’t find anywhere else. This stunned me then, and it still does now. How could someone, an atheist no less, attend church just to soak in the music and camaraderie? But Bill embraced that contradiction without a second thought.

    A few years later, my mother, in tears, told me Bill had died of lung cancer, the kind of death you might expect from someone who had smoked like a chimney. The news hit me hard, but what lingers most is the memory of those sad blue eyes, the ones that saw through me and seemed to carry the weight of that abandoned child in the gutter. Even now, the thought of him, lost and broken at eleven, leaves me feeling a heaviness that’s hard to shake and brings tears to my eyes.

    In her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, religious studies author Elaine Pagels writes about the pagans during the early Christian era who threw their unwanted babies in the trash. The Christians loved those abandoned babies and did all they could to save them. Their belief in God made such abandonment repugnant. Part of me thinks, I don’t know if I’m a Christian or not, but God bless those Christians for saving those babies. 

    I want to believe there is a part of me that wishes to love God for the same reason I was heartbroken when I learned of how Bill was abandoned as a small child and treated like unwanted rubbish. I want to believe that God would embrace such a child and bring him into His fold.

  • Beyond Reciprocal Claim-Making

    Beyond Reciprocal Claim-Making

    Once you see yourself as having a religious mind, there’s no crawling back out of that rabbit hole. A religious view isn’t the same as joining a cult where some bearded leader hoards Kool-Aid and controls your mind. No, the religious mind is about recognizing that life’s stakes are sky-high—you either spiritually flourish or rot. Your actions matter. You’re not just competing in some zero-sum, Darwinian cage match, battling your fellow humans for scraps of survival. No, you’re building something deeper: a soul. And, lucky you, you’re accountable for that construction.

    I’ve fantasized plenty of times about being free from this religious wiring. In my fantasy, I’m a “free thinker,” sipping espresso while smugly dismissing religion as man-made fluff—imperfect, tribalistic, derivative, and, let’s not forget, violent. Religion in this dream isn’t the root of morality; it’s an obstacle to reality. Enter Elizabeth Anderson, the philosophy professor who drops a truth bomb in her essay, “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” Anderson argues that morality doesn’t come from God but from people learning how to cooperate. Morality, she says, is baked into our DNA, so religion is at best redundant and, more often than not, a corrupting force.

    I’ve seen Anderson’s point play out with some of my most moral students, both professed atheists. One was a Hungarian transfer student who swore her father, also an atheist, had stronger morals than any theist she knew—and I believed her. She was one of the hardest-working, most decent students I’d ever taught. Then there was my Vietnamese student, the lone atheist among her five Christian siblings, who let it slip that when their mother was dying of cancer, she was the only one who flew back to Vietnam to care for her. Her devout Christian brothers and sisters? Nowhere to be found. Her hatred for religion as hypocrisy was as strong as her love for her mother.

    Students like these could easily be poster children for Anderson’s argument that we don’t need theism to have morality. In fact, she’d argue, it might be better if we ditched religion altogether. Anderson kicks off her essay with a field trip to the Institute for Creation Research Museum in Santee, California, where creationists divide the world into two paths: “Creationism” and “Evolutionism.” Creationism, naturally, is the road to moral purity, while Evolutionism is the fast track to fornication, nihilism, addiction, humanism, Communism, and every other horror under the sun.

    Anderson doesn’t hold back: she writes that creationists’ beef with evolution isn’t scientific—it’s moral. Evolution leads to immorality, they argue, because it denies the existence of God. And, as theists have been shouting for centuries, without God, morality’s got nothing to stand on. As Dostoyevsky famously didn’t say, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” In other words, belief in God is the cork keeping the sinful champagne from exploding all over the place.

    But Anderson asks the obvious question: Can we know right from wrong without God? Do we really need the Ten Commandments to figure out that murdering your neighbor for his fancy new donkey might be a bad look? Of course not, she says. Every society—whether it’s religious, atheist, or somewhere in between—figures out basic moral rules: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness. These rules existed long before monotheism waltzed onto the scene, suggesting that moral knowledge comes not from divine revelation but from the messy experience of living together and figuring out how not to kill each other.

    Anderson’s takedown of theistic morality doesn’t stop there. She argues that the belief in God doesn’t just supply unnecessary rules; it’s often a crutch, relying on the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell to goad people into behaving decently. Her rebuttal is simple: people are motivated by love, honor, and respect, not divine bribery. In her view, these attributes can flourish just fine without a belief in God.

    Next, she dismantles the idea that we need God to give moral rules authority. If you need a deity to tell you murder, rape, and genocide are wrong, Anderson suggests, you’ve got bigger problems. We know these things are wrong without divine intervention—and, if your reasoning leads you to think everything is permitted, that’s a pretty solid clue you’ve gone off the rails.

    But here’s where Anderson flips the script. She argues that the moralistic “everything is permitted” problem applies more forcefully to theism than to atheism. If God’s laws are based on authority and not inherent goodness, then “in principle, anything is permitted.” Take Calvinism, for example. Predestination’s divine lottery, where God saves a few lucky souls and damns the rest to eternal hellfire, isn’t based on any moral reasoning—it’s just God’s will, and you better deal with it.

    Anderson’s critique of fundamentalist religion is merciless. She argues that if you take the evidence for theism seriously, you end up committed to the idea that even the most heinous acts are permitted. Since we know these acts aren’t morally permitted, she says, we should doubt the evidence for theism.

    By “theism,” Anderson isn’t just talking about some vague belief in a higher power. She’s talking about the God of Scripture—Old Testament, New Testament, and the Koran. And if you take the Bible as inerrant, Anderson argues, you’re forced to reckon with a God who’s often cruel and unjust, punishing people for the sins of others, hardening hearts, ordering genocides, and permitting slavery and rape.

    Of course, Christian apologists love to claim that the Old Testament God is the angry one, and the New Testament God is all love and forgiveness. Anderson’s having none of it. She points out that Jesus’ so-called “family values” include hating your relatives if they get in the way of your loyalty to him. And then there’s the doctrine of eternal damnation—a New Testament specialty—which, in Anderson’s view, is both cruel and incoherent.

    In the end, Anderson concludes that the God of the Bible is a moral disaster. But she’s sympathetic to thoughtful believers, the ones who struggle with the Bible’s moral atrocities. Their options, she says, are pretty grim. You can “bite the bullet” and accept the Bible’s horrors, bitter seeds and all, like a true believer. Or you can try a stopgap measure, arguing that God’s commands were appropriate in biblical times but don’t apply now—a strategy that doesn’t really hold water if you believe in a timeless God.

    Anderson’s conclusion is blunt: we’re better off abandoning theological claims as a foundation for morality. She draws on Hobbes to argue that worshiping God out of fear of his raw power isn’t love—it’s survival instinct, and that’s no basis for morality. Instead, Anderson suggests, morality is a system of reciprocal claim-making, where we hold each other accountable, no gods required.

    As compelling as Anderson’s essay is, I’m still not convinced. The world isn’t some rational, orderly place. There are shadows, mysteries, omens, and prophecies—strange phenomena that transcend the cold logic of reciprocal claim-making. Religion, in all its messiness, is the story of a fallen people trying to reconnect with their Maker. And as much truth as I see in Anderson’s rejection of theistic morality, I can’t shake the religious mind. I see myself as someone who’s fallen and in need of a path, a true path, to becoming the person I’m meant to be. Anderson’s talk of reciprocal claim-making? It doesn’t even come close to satisfying that deeper, spiritual hunger.

  • The Theology of Loose Ends

    The Theology of Loose Ends

    Ironically, the book that comes closest to expressing my own questions about Christianity—Emmanuel Carrère’s autobiographical novel The Kingdom—barely touches the one theological obsession that dominated my adolescence: hell.

    As a high school senior, I wasn’t driven toward Christianity by the promise of heaven nearly as much as I was terrified by the prospect of eternal damnation. My Christian classmates casually informed me that my Jewish relatives were burning in hell. It wasn’t merely the outrageousness of the claim that unsettled me. It was the manner in which they delivered it. Their verdict came with the breezy confidence of teenagers discussing last Friday night’s football game. They spoke of infinite punishment with astonishing emotional indifference. The certainty chilled me more than the doctrine itself.

    Yet even that wasn’t the most disturbing thing I encountered.

    The church we attended used The Living Bible, a popular paraphrase whose study notes included the astonishing suggestion that the Holocaust represented God’s punishment for the Jewish rejection of Christ. I remember reading those words in disbelief. To reduce one of history’s greatest atrocities to divine retribution felt not merely offensive but morally grotesque. If this was Christian theology, I wanted to wash my hands of it altogether. I longed for a world in which hell—and every conversation orbiting around it—would simply disappear.

    But what if it did?

    Suppose I abandoned infernalism entirely. Would I become one of those Christian Universalists—the thoughtful believers who reject eternal conscious torment and insist that love, rather than fear, should be the foundation of faith? I find myself instinctively drawn to them. They argue that the threat of hell cheapens our relationship with God, reducing love to coercion. Their vision of the afterlife resembles less a cosmic torture chamber than an infinitely patient schoolroom. No one is abandoned forever. Every soul is eventually healed, even if that healing requires painful correction.

    There is something deeply attractive about that picture.

    There is also something that makes me uneasy.

    If the worst imaginable outcome is temporary purification, what becomes of moral urgency? Human nature being what it is, wouldn’t many of us quietly conclude that we can indulge our appetites now and settle our spiritual debts later? Universalism can begin to resemble the theological equivalent of Universal Basic Income: everyone eventually receives the same eternal inheritance regardless of how recklessly they spent their earthly lives. Why struggle against the gravitational pull of selfishness if, in the end, the bill is always paid?

    Then again, infernalism carries its own unbearable cost. A universe in which billions suffer endlessly is hardly a satisfying resolution either.

    Neither vision leaves me entirely at peace.

    Paul, interestingly enough, occupies both sides of this debate. Depending on the interpreter, he becomes either the great defender of eternal punishment or the great herald of universal reconciliation. What virtually everyone agrees upon, however, is that Paul’s own life embodies Christianity’s defining redemption story. The persecutor becomes the apostle. The anxious, self-divided voice of Romans discovers liberation through surrender to Christ. His life unfolds with remarkable narrative coherence: chaos gives way to grace, alienation to reconciliation, death to resurrection.

    It is a magnificent story.

    But must every true story end that way?

    Dara Horn raises a question that has lingered with me ever since I read People Love Dead Jews. She recalls a reader complaining that her novel The World to Come, centered on the survivor of a pogrom, wasn’t “uplifting” enough. The complaint revealed something curious. Even sophisticated readers seem to hunger for stories that gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We crave endings that reassure us the universe is fundamentally coherent.

    Horn is suspicious of that craving.

    Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolutions owes much to Christianity itself. Christian history moves toward fulfillment. Its central drama is redemption. The scattered fragments of existence are ultimately gathered into a meaningful whole. Jewish storytelling, by contrast, often refuses such closure. The Hebrew Bible concludes not with final resolution but with an unfinished journey. Questions remain unanswered. Promises remain unfulfilled. The story continues beyond the final page.

    That difference fascinates me.

    Christianity often invites us to see history as one grand redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it teaches us how to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it learns to inhabit ambiguity with patience and humility. These stories do not pretend that chaos can always be conquered. They suggest that wisdom may consist in remaining faithful while chaos refuses to yield.

    Perhaps that is the more mature vision.

    Or perhaps I tell myself this because it allows me to avoid the far more demanding claims of Christianity. Perhaps my admiration for ambiguity is simply an elegant rationalization—a way of escaping the moral revolution that Carrère identifies at Christianity’s heart. If N. T. Wright and other defenders of Paul’s theology are correct, then Paul’s redemption story is not sentimental optimism but the astonishing claim that God has actually invaded history, overcome chaos, and begun dismantling what I have elsewhere called the Default Kingdom.

    I still do not know which story is true.

    I only know that I am no longer satisfied with easy answers, whether they arrive wrapped in eternal flames or universal embraces.

  • When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    If I were the sort of watch enthusiast content with half a dozen Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shocks—a collection stretching from the hulking, superheroic Frogman to the modest, bespectacled GW-5000U—I would admire that collection for reasons having little to do with the watches themselves. Certainly, it would cover every practical need I could imagine. More important, however, it would signify that I had become an entirely different species of collector.

    My former self collected from a place of addiction, neediness, and what I have elsewhere called Gollumification. Every few months I required another gleaming mechanical diver, preferably one costing a few thousand dollars, to jolt me awake from the deadening fog of boredom. The ritual reminded me of suburban mothers in the late 1960s making their regular pilgrimage to the beauty salon to “get their hair done.” As a child, I watched them return transformed—not merely coiffed, but spiritually refurbished, buoyed by the conviction that a new hairstyle had somehow renewed the self beneath it.

    Waiting for FedEx to deliver an expensive Seiko diver is the masculine version of the same liturgy.

    Both rituals whisper the same seductive lie: This time you’ll feel complete.

    The object itself scarcely matters. Hair today. Watches tomorrow. Kitchen remodels, sports cars, cosmetic procedures, luxury vacations, religious conversions, career promotions, perfectly optimized bodies—the props change, but the script remains stubbornly familiar. We keep staging ceremonies of self-renewal, hoping the next acquisition will accomplish what none of its predecessors could.

    The collector I wish I were inhabits a different emotional universe. He still loves watches, perhaps loves them even more, but he no longer requires them to rescue him from himself. He can appreciate a beautifully engineered timepiece without recruiting it into a desperate campaign against boredom. His contentment is not the result of finally finding the perfect watch; it is the reason he no longer needs to keep looking for one.

    His most remarkable quality is not restraint but peace.

    He no longer hungers to be “energized” because boredom has ceased to function as an existential emergency. He no longer imagines that the next purchase will repair some invisible crack running through his identity. He is already whole before the courier rings the doorbell.

    Of course, I recognize this as a fantasy.

    I call it The Fantasy of the Whole Man: the dream that one final purchase, one decisive achievement, one dramatic conversion, or one perfectly timed life adjustment will usher us into permanent inner completion, rendering future craving obsolete. It imagines a version of ourselves so psychologically integrated that desire finally relinquishes its grip.

    No watch can perform that miracle.

    Yet the fantasy reveals something profoundly true about watch enthusiasts—and, indeed, about human beings generally. Beneath our fascination with polished titanium, Zaratsu finishing, Swiss escapements, or atomic timekeeping lies a quieter longing. We are not merely searching for the next beautiful object. We are searching for a version of ourselves that no longer requires beautiful objects to feel sufficient.

    That is the collection we never quite manage to complete.

  • The Great Social Media Deconversion

    The Great Social Media Deconversion

    In 2008 I was doing power yoga in my office while listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy, on KFI 640. In the middle of discussing routers, spyware, and the eternal misery of Windows Vista, he casually remarked, “This Facebook thing is a big deal.”

    I had no idea what he meant.

    I wasn’t the sort of person who chased the latest technological revolution. I listened to Leo for a different reason. I loved hearing retirees call in with computers so old they belonged in an archaeological dig. They would ask whether they should keep a desktop that required thirty minutes to boot, wheezed like an emphysema patient opening Microsoft Word, and treated email as an Olympic event, or whether it was finally time to buy “one of these new computers.”

    Facebook barely registered on my radar.

    Then, in the summer of 2009, my wife was pregnant with our twin daughters. It occurred to me that Facebook might be a convenient way to share photos and updates with family and friends. So I created an account.

    Within weeks my friend list exploded like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

    I was enchanted.

    Perhaps this was the medium I had been waiting for all my life.

    Unfortunately, Facebook did not merely connect me to other people. It connected me to the most embarrassing parts of myself. My ego, which until then had lived quietly in the basement, burst upstairs carrying champagne.

    People would discover me.

    I would become famous.

    How many friends could I accumulate?

    How many likes?

    How many followers?

    Would humanity finally recognize my genius now that history had invented the proper delivery system?

    The intoxication was exquisite.

    That was seventeen years ago.

    Looking back, my relationship with Facebook has all the emotional contours of a failed marriage. There was the honeymoon, the infatuation, the passionate commitment, the slow accumulation of grievances, the disappointment, the resentment, and now something even colder than resentment.

    Contempt.

    Or perhaps futility.

    The old expression comes to mind: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

    Another comes from the Book of Acts, where the risen Christ asks Saul, “Why are you kicking against the goads?” Stop exhausting yourself fighting reality.

    That is how social media feels now.

    Not tragic.

    Pointless.

    Because the marriage was built on lies.

    The lies sounded persuasive enough.

    Metrics measure significance.

    Engagement proves value.

    Visibility creates influence.

    Influence creates meaning.

    If enough strangers notice you, your life has somehow become larger.

    It took me years to realize that every one of those propositions was counterfeit.

    The pursuit of attention slowly teaches us to manipulate others.

    Eventually it teaches us to manipulate ourselves.

    The more desperately we chase attention, the more anxious we become.

    The anxiety metastasizes into resentment.

    Soon we are no longer expressing ourselves.

    We are auditioning for an algorithm.

    Attention capture is not meaning.

    Attention capture is not love.

    Attention capture is not flourishing.

    One can dominate the internet and still become another version of Gollum, clutching a glowing ring instead of a precious one.

    A few days ago I watched a fitness YouTuber whose work I normally admire upload one of those interchangeable “What I Eat in a Day” videos. He microwaved leftovers. He poured cereal into a bowl. He assembled a few perfectly ordinary meals to reassure viewers that he was just like them.

    The video felt less like communication than contractual obligation.

    He looked exhausted.

    Not physically.

    Spiritually.

    As though the algorithm had shown up at his front door demanding another sacrifice.

    I watched perhaps thirty seconds before closing the window.

    I did it for his dignity.

    And for mine.

    Now I don’t know what to do with Facebook, Instagram, or my fifteen-year-old YouTube channel.

    They feel less like hobbies than reminders of a marriage that should have ended years ago.

    I still write on my blog.

    Almost nobody reads it.

    Wonderful.

    Obscurity has become strangely liberating.

    I write what genuinely interests me instead of what might seduce an algorithm into distributing me like digital fertilizer across the internet. I no longer feel compelled to manufacture outrage, optimize thumbnails, or package my thoughts into bite-sized dopamine pellets.

    The work belongs to me again.

    People often wonder what comes after divorce.

    The honest answer is that nobody knows.

    You spend a long time discovering who you are after years spent becoming someone else.

    I suspect millions of us are undergoing that same process with social media.

    We experienced the honeymoon.

    We believed the promises.

    We invested our identities.

    We discovered the betrayal.

    Now we are wandering through the emotional wreckage trying to remember who we were before engagement statistics became a measure of our worth.

    We are all, in one way or another, losing our religion.

    R.E.M. accidentally wrote the soundtrack for the algorithmic age.

    I have become convinced that social media has diminished us personally, culturally, politically, and spiritually. It rewarded vanity, monetized outrage, industrialized narcissism, and trained us to confuse visibility with virtue.

    But I have also become convinced that this era is ending.

    People are tiring of the performance.

    The masks have grown heavy.

    The applause no longer sounds convincing.

    Something new is approaching.

    Whether it will be better or merely different, I cannot say.

    I only know that the old marriage is over.

    And, for the first time in years, that feels less like a loss than a beginning.

  • The Dishwasher and the Soul

    The Dishwasher and the Soul

    People love to narrate themselves into virtue. They announce that they are resilient, compassionate, emotionally intelligent, enlightened. Fine. But character is not established by autobiography. It is established by collateral damage. The verdict is rendered not by the stories we tell about ourselves but by the people who must live with us.

    By that standard, I don’t receive flattering marks.

    I alienate people. Friendships wither. Members of my own family find me exhausting. I do not know how to repair whatever defect keeps reproducing these outcomes. Self-loathing only deepens the rut. It is like trying to escape quicksand by thrashing harder.

    For years my wife has insisted that I have Asperger’s, though I have never received a formal diagnosis. In 2013, I saw a psychiatrist who concluded that I had escaped my mother’s severe depression and bipolar disorder only to inherit a milder companion: dysthymia, a chronic, low-grade depression that rarely knocks you flat but seldom lets you stand fully upright. I eventually stopped seeing him after realizing that I seemed to be providing more entertainment than receiving treatment. I would leave his office lighter in wallet but not in spirit. The experience merely reinforced my suspicion that therapy, at least in my case, was proving more theatrical than therapeutic.

    So I became my own maintenance department.

    Routine is my antidepressant. I cling to it with the desperation of a fish clinging to water. Remove it, and anxiety rushes in to occupy the vacuum. Home becomes less a residence than a fortified monastery whose sacred relics are my kettlebells, exercise bike, piano, protein powder, creatine, and carefully arranged supplements. Every object reassures me that the machinery of the day can continue without surprise.

    Leaving this sanctuary, even for something as benign as a vacation, often feels less like recreation than exile.

    While other people return from holidays refreshed, carrying photographs and amusing anecdotes, I return as though I have survived a natural disaster. Friends ask, “How was your vacation?” I usually shrug because I honestly cannot answer. It dissolves into a hazy montage of disrupted routines, low-grade dread, and the relief of finally coming home. Rather than becoming more engaged with life, I retreat inward. I regress. I become emotionally unavailable. Sometimes I stay home to spare my family the burden of dragging me through another reluctant excursion. They enjoy themselves more, but they miss me all the same.

    That realization hurts.

    I often feel as though I am the heaviest burden my family carries. I bought us a home in a beautiful coastal suburb. The mortgage is gone. We enjoy financial security and enough discretionary income to live comfortably. Yet I cannot escape Christ’s unsettling question, slightly rewritten for my own circumstances: What does it profit a family to live in a lovely house if the husband and father carries conspicuous gaps in his emotional life?

    If there were a genuine cure, I would pursue it tomorrow.

    A retreat deep in the woods. An ayahuasca ceremony promising psychic rebirth. A religious conversion dramatic enough to rearrange the furniture of my soul. If someone could convincingly promise to transform me from an anxious, melancholy recluse into a man whose presence naturally enlarged the lives of others, I would sign the consent form before they finished explaining the side effects.

    Instead, the dishwasher beeps.

    In half an hour I’ll empty it, wipe down the counters, and make salmon, rice, and salad for my family. It is not redemption, but it is dinner.

    Perhaps this is where real life usually unfolds—not in miraculous transformations but in ordinary competence. I can contribute. I can keep the kitchen running. I can exercise. I can stay away from alcohol. I can show up for the responsibilities that lie directly before me, even if I stumble over the emotional ones that lie beyond them.

    There is an old wisdom about staying in your lane. It is not a cure, but it prevents unnecessary collisions.

    Good physical health is not salvation, but it helps. Financial stability is not happiness, but it removes many unnecessary sorrows. A clean kitchen does not heal the mind, but it gives tomorrow one less disorder to inherit.

    So, for now, gratitude remains my most reliable therapy—not because it erases my defects, but because it keeps them from becoming the only facts I recognize. It reminds me that a life can be imperfect without being worthless, that a man can remain unfinished without being beyond repair, and that sometimes the most meaningful victories are measured not in dramatic breakthroughs but in quietly making dinner when your mind insists you’ve accomplished nothing at all.

  • The Ghost at the End of My Block

    The Ghost at the End of My Block

    An unkempt, unemployed man in his sixties—I’ll call him D—lives on my street. He is painfully thin, wears a beard that seems less grown than surrendered to, and carries the thousand-yard stare of someone who has spent too many years trapped inside his own mind. He is the neighborhood’s resident ghost, the subject of whispered conversations held over hedges and driveways whenever his name comes up.

    I rarely see him anymore.

    With each passing year he seems to retreat another step from the world. According to my neighbors, he now walks his dog only after dark, as if daylight itself has become an adversary.

    The last time we spoke was more than a decade ago. He told me his mother had emigrated from Ukraine. She was still alive then but has since passed away. He admitted he struggled with clinical depression. Once upon a time he earned his living in real estate. He loved photography. He struck me as intelligent, thoughtful, even pleasant. Nothing about him suggested the caricature of the neighborhood eccentric.

    Depression, however, is not content merely to inhabit a person. Given enough years, it colonizes the landscape around him.

    D’s house looks less like a residence than a psychological self-portrait.

    Weeds have risen high enough to conceal much of the property, swallowing the front yard as if nature were quietly reclaiming it. Enormous rocks lie scattered across the lot—not arranged with the intention of landscaping but dumped haphazardly, as though an avalanche had paused just long enough to empty its pockets. A rusted car sits permanently marooned in the driveway, stripped of its engine, one of those eternal restoration projects that never progresses beyond the fantasy stage.

    Then there is the roof.

    Or rather, the absence of one.

    Instead of shingles, enormous black tarps have been stretched across the house like bandages wrapped around a wound too deep to heal. The place resembles less a home than a disaster site awaiting inspectors who never arrive.

    The neighbors tell me D has owned five yellow Labrador retrievers over the past twenty-five years.

    Each one has had exactly the same name.

    Reggie.

    Perhaps it is sentiment. Perhaps ritual. Or perhaps depression dislikes novelty and prefers the comforting illusion that nothing essential has changed.

    Reggie, unfortunately, is also a source of neighborhood diplomacy. D has a habit of letting him roam unleashed, which periodically inspires shouted exchanges with nearby homeowners who are less enchanted by canine freedom than D appears to be.

    Recently, the family next door began an ambitious renovation. They moved out for a year while contractors demolished and rebuilt much of their home at a cost north of half a million dollars.

    During one conversation, one of the neighbors revealed something I had never considered.

    The tarps.

    They aren’t merely ugly.

    They are loud.

    Every windy night they snap, crack, and whip against the roof structure with relentless fury, sounding less like construction material than a chorus of agitated ghosts auditioning for Poltergeist. Sleep becomes impossible.

    So the neighbors arrived at a remarkably practical conclusion.

    Since they were already spending roughly $600,000 rebuilding their own home, they decided to buy D a new roof.

    The cost?

    About $20,000.

    It is an act of generosity, certainly.

    It is also an investment in uninterrupted sleep.

    When you’ve already committed well over half a million dollars to creating your dream home, another twenty thousand begins to look less like charity than an effective noise-canceling device.

    Every neighborhood, it seems, has its own D.

    There is always one house that refuses to cooperate with the local mythology of upward mobility. Every freshly painted facade, every manicured lawn, every luxury SUV in the driveway quietly tells a story of competence, prosperity, and orderly lives. Then there is the one property that interrupts the narrative like an uncomfortable footnote. It reminds everyone that not every life can be renovated with quartz countertops, drought-tolerant landscaping, and a designer front door.

    Some houses broadcast success.

    Others testify to defeat.

    D’s house has become an architectural memoir of prolonged suffering, a place where depression has seeped from the mind into the soil, the weeds, the rusting car, and finally the roof itself.

    Replacing the tarps with shingles will not rewrite that story.

    A new roof cannot cure clinical depression. It cannot restore lost ambition, resurrect old dreams, or persuade a haunted man that tomorrow will be kinder than yesterday.

    But it can silence the ghosts.