Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • When “Your Truth” Stops Being Believable

    When “Your Truth” Stops Being Believable

    Helen Lewis’ Atlantic essay “The Death of Millennial Feminism” observes that Lindy West “is the most successful feminist writer of her (and my) generation,” propelled by raw, often self-deprecating confessionals and “viral takedowns.” She had the ears of women everywhere. She became the loudest evangelist for feminism and a tireless promoter of “fat positivity.” Then she wrote a memoir that brought it all to a halt. Adult Braces reverses many of the feminine ideals she once championed.

    Much in the book makes Lewis cringe, but one detail stands out: West allows her partner to enter a throuple with another woman—someone significantly thinner than West. She concedes that her once-admired feminist life was, in Lewis’s words, “a buffed-up version of the truth.” She describes feeling alienated from like-minded writers in editorial spaces. The online scorn she endured was more debilitating than she had admitted. And her body-positivity project falters under the weight of her own confession: “I am at my biggest when I am at my saddest.”

    West’s self-mythologizing of her past undermines the credibility of her present claims. Lewis is therefore skeptical of West’s assertion that she finds fulfillment in a polyamorous relationship in which her partner pursues other women, while West herself undergoes cosmetic dentistry—perhaps to remain competitive in these newly charged dynamics. 

    Equally dubious is West’s claim that she is rejecting monogamy, framed as “a system of ownership,” partly to please her mixed-race partner. The reliance on progressive clichés to justify what appears to be a self-abasing arrangement lends her argument an air of strained rationalization. It also reflects the same intellectual evasiveness that helped fuel her rise in the 2010s, when social media rewarded this kind of performative certainty.

    If Lewis finds any consolation in her irritation, it is that “basically no one else believes” West’s claims of polyamorous happiness. The book has not landed as intended.

    Lewis is at her sharpest when she expresses a dry, almost surgical pity for West’s disbelief that readers are unconvinced. She writes: “Nonetheless, I do feel great sympathy for West. How was she to know that the great omerta of Millennial Feminism—that we had to take whatever people said about their life stories at face value—had broken?”

    As Lewis pulls back the curtain on West’s method, she arrives at a harsher conclusion: feminism was never the central principle. The organizing force was a highly curated self, elevated by moral certainty and insulated from critique. West’s work encouraged others—teenagers included—to treat intense emotion as authoritative truth, to equate feeling with reality.

    Lewis argues that this elevation of emotion was not liberating but coercive. “Perhaps the greatest hallmark of Millennial Feminism was how harshly it treated women,” she writes. “We were the ones who were supposed to give up our boundaries, rewrite our sexualities, and defenestrate our heroines.” Doubt became a liability. Fallibility, a form of shame. In reality, both are conditions of sanity.

    For that reason, many women—including Lewis—walked away. To remain required submission to groupthink and to a mythology that, as she puts it, “required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy.”

    Meanwhile, as this strain of feminism frayed, countervailing forces emerged on the right—forces often just as reductive, just as intellectually numbing. The result is not correction but polarization: competing orthodoxies shouting past one another, while common sense and moral clarity struggle to regain a foothold.

  • The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

    The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

    When you pitch a book, the publisher asks a question that feels less like business and more like interrogation: Why must this exist? Why this book, now, and not another? What justifies its presence in a world already swollen with print? The question has teeth. It strips away the soft fog of aspiration and leaves you standing with nothing but purpose—or the absence of it.

    A book is not a monument to your desire to “be published.” It is not your name in lights, your moment on the marquee. That impulse—vanity dressed as vocation—is the surest path to creative mediocrity. Purpose is the only defense. Without it, the work collapses under its own self-importance.

    The same cross-examination applies to everything else we produce. A blog post, a video, a channel—why does it exist? To collect attention? To be applauded by a tribe? To monetize a persona? To assemble the vague scaffolding of a “brand”? These are not answers; they are evasions.

    What, then, is my brand? Nothing coherent. I wander. I collect. I react. I move through the culture like a flâneur with a notebook, jotting down whatever strikes the nerves—ideas, trends, obsessions—and trying to distill some fragment of meaning from the debris. This is not a brand. It is a habit of attention. It resists consolidation. It refuses to become a product.

    I did write a book recently—a real one, nearly seventy thousand words. But even that resisted form. It wasn’t a narrative or an argument so much as a catalog of compulsions about watch enthusiasts: short, sharp definitions of obsessive behavior. A lexicon of affliction. Did it need to exist? I can argue that it did. The market delivered a quieter verdict. A few dozen copies moved. Meanwhile, a fifteen-minute video built from the same material drew thousands. The idea survived in video form. The book format did not.

    This is the final insult: even if you can construct an airtight case for a book’s existence, the audience may still decline to care. You can formulate the perfect product—nutrient-rich, elegantly packaged—but if no one consumes it, it sits on the shelf like expensive dog food no dog will eat. And its silence asks the only question that matters, the one you thought you had already answered:

    Why does this exist?

  • When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

    When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

    Kafka called writing a form of prayer. Not as piety, but as precision. Prayer, properly understood, is the act of stepping out of ordinary time—the noisy, transactional churn—and entering a space where attention is no longer scattered but gathered. Writing does the same. It refuses the chaos of profane time and insists, however briefly, on the discipline of the sacred.

    The sacred is not mystical fog. It is clarity stripped of dopamine. It is the quiet room where you examine the state of your own soul without distraction or performance. It is where you test whether your words can survive contact with your actions. It demands humility because it exposes how often they don’t. And it offers a kind of nourishment the chronophage—the great time-eating machine—cannot provide, because it cannot be consumed passively. It must be earned.

    To live thoughtfully is to move between two worlds: the sacred and the profane. You cannot remain in either one. You must descend into the ordinary—work, errands, obligations—but carry with you the standards forged in that quieter space. Otherwise, the sacred becomes theater, and the profane becomes drift.

    So the question arrives, unwelcome but necessary: Do my actions align with my ideals? No. Not yet.

    If they did, my life would contract, not expand. I would eat with intention—three meals, no grazing—and call the absence of snacks what it is: a fast, not a deprivation. I would step away from the digital carnival that thrives on FOMO, because I know its rewards are counterfeit—brief spikes followed by longer, duller lows.

    I would stop buying watches. I already own more than I can meaningfully wear. Two G-Shocks tell perfect time. The rest sit like artifacts of former appetites. Rotation is not variety; it is indecision dressed as sophistication.

    And I would reconsider what I make. If my videos exist to chase attention, to measure my worth in clicks and spikes of approval, then they are extensions of the same problem. The medium is different; the mechanism is identical. But if a video can carry an idea forward—if it can clarify rather than agitate—then it earns its place.

    Writing, then, is not an escape. It is a reckoning. It is the act of bringing the sacred into contact with the profane and asking, without flinching, whether they agree. Most days, they don’t. The work is to narrow that distance.

  • Life Inside the Chronophage

    Life Inside the Chronophage

    You can still read, technically. The eyes move. The words register. But something essential has thinned out. Years inside the chronophage—the great time-eating machine—have rewired the circuitry. You no longer take in ideas; you absorb fragments. You skim life the way you skim a feed. You prefer voices at 1.25 speed, ideas pre-chewed, narratives delivered in twelve-minute installments with thumbnails that promise revelation and deliver stimulation.

    You know what it is. The Internet is not a library—it’s a galactic food court, a neon sprawl of drive-through kiosks serving intellectual fast food. Ninety-nine percent of it is forgettable at best, corrosive at worst. You try to manage your intake. You play the piano. You lift weights. You show up for your family. You perform the rituals of a grounded life. But the residue remains. The machine has had its way with you.

    And then comes the quieter poison: self-pity. No one reads anymore, you tell yourself. Everyone is grazing from the same algorithmic trough. You feel stranded, a refugee from a literate past. You invoke the phrase “post-literate society” not as analysis but as lament. And yet, the only reason you can even diagnose the condition is because you remember something else—an earlier version of attention, slower, deeper, less contaminated. You carry that memory like a fading photograph and call it protection.

    You came across a word last week: chronophage—a system that feeds on your time while convincing you it is nourishing you. It fits too well. The system is not broken; it is functioning perfectly. Its purpose is to consume time, and it does so with industrial efficiency. In the attention economy, attention is not honored—it is harvested. Your mind is not engaged; it is extracted from. There is no mercy in this design. The only consolation is a thin, uneasy solidarity: your mind is not uniquely damaged. It is simply part of a mass casualty you are lucid enough to witness.

  • When the Hobby Becomes a Spectacle of Torment

    When the Hobby Becomes a Spectacle of Torment

    A man in the watch community watched my Frogman video, declared it had caused him “emotional damage,” and proceeded to prove his point by buying Frogman after Frogman in a spree of excess that seemed to be driven more by torment than joy. 

    The watch hobby already carries enough built-in torment. It doesn’t need to be escalated into a public ritual of compulsion. When I share a video about a watch I enjoy, the aim is simple: appreciation, not contagion. Yet in the attention economy, moderation is invisible. What gets rewarded is escalation—bigger reactions, louder confessions, more dramatic spirals. Attention, after all, is a scarce resource, and the surest way to capture it is to weaponize feeling.

    But there is a cost to that performance. When a hobby becomes tethered to the language of “emotional damage,” something has gone wrong. The line between enjoyment and dependency blurs, and what should be a small, contained pleasure metastasizes into something heavier—something that follows you around, nags at you, drains you.

    The only countermeasure is deliberate restraint. We have to regulate our intake of the digital world the way we regulate food—set limits, step away, return to the analog. Read a book. Play the piano. Lift something heavy. Walk outside without a device narrating your existence. Relearn what it feels like to occupy your own life without commentary.

    If someone discovers the Frogman and it brings them genuine satisfaction, that’s a good outcome. But if it becomes another entry point into a cycle of restless acquisition and theatrical distress, then the watch is no longer the problem—it’s the system surrounding it.

    I can’t control what anyone does after watching a video. No one can. The only thing I can do is speak plainly about the effect this environment has on me, and about the boundaries I’ve had to build to keep a hobby from turning into something corrosive. That’s not a solution. It’s a discipline. And it’s ongoing.

  • You Are No Longer Shopping. You Are Being Stimulated

    You Are No Longer Shopping. You Are Being Stimulated

    As a “well-informed consumer,” you may discover—too late, of course—that you’ve built your own cage and furnished it with glowing screens. The hours of scrolling, the endless debates over “the best,” the obsessive rituals designed to avoid buyer’s remorse, the chorus of disembodied voices instructing you what to purchase and what to shun—all of it has rewired your attention. Each swipe delivers a small electric thrill, followed by a quieter, more persistent anxiety. What you call “research” is, in practice, a carefully engineered agitation. You are no longer shopping. You are being stimulated.

    And so the identity of the “well-informed consumer” begins to collapse under scrutiny. You are not informed; you are saturated. You resemble less a discerning buyer and more a laboratory animal, dutifully pressing the lever in hopes that the next pellet will finally satisfy. It never does. The cycle resets. The wheel spins.

    This is Consumer Epistemic Fog: a condition in which the sheer volume of opinions, reviews, rankings, and “definitive guides” does not sharpen judgment but dissolves it. Clarity is replaced by static. Confidence erodes into hesitation. The more you know, the less you trust yourself to act. In the end, the tragedy is not that you might make the wrong purchase—it is that you can no longer make a decision at all.

  • Acid-Washed Jeans and Artificial Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of Instant Cool

    Acid-Washed Jeans and Artificial Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of Instant Cool

    I have a confession that belongs in the Museum of Bad Decisions: I wore acid-washed jeans in the 80s. Not casually. Not ironically. I wore them to teach college writing at twenty-four, convinced I was the cool professor—the kind of man who could annotate a thesis statement and headline a Duran Duran video without changing outfits.

    The problem, of course, is that everyone thought they were that guy. Acid-washed jeans thrived because they delivered instant mythology. You looked like you had lived—hard, fast, dangerously—when in reality you had simply survived a trip to the mall. They were rebellion by chemical treatment, authenticity by rinse cycle. For a brief, glittering moment, that illusion worked. But illusions collapse under mass adoption. When everyone looks distressed, no one looks interesting. The jeans had nowhere to go; they began at maximum volume and stayed there, screaming. Eventually, the culture regained its hearing, glanced downward, and realized it had dressed itself like survivors of a denim-related explosion. Acid wash didn’t fade—it was exiled.

    I think about that rise and fall when I look at my students’ shifting attitude toward AI. In 2022, AI arrived like those jeans: a miracle fabric promising salvation from drudgery, writer’s block, and the existential dread of the blank page. It offered pre-fabricated brilliance—the intellectual version of showing up to the gym already sweating. Students embraced it with the same breathless certainty that this time, finally, the shortcut would make them exceptional.

    Now? They roll their eyes. They call it cringey.

    What changed is not the technology but the perception of authenticity. Factory-installed insight, like factory-installed distress, has become suspect. My students are not naïve; they have finely tuned detectors for fraud. They live in a world saturated with performance—the influencer selling a life they don’t live, the hollow expert recycling borrowed ideas, the unprepared instructor filling class time by sharing his dreams and domestic dramas while they politely tune him out and read Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the entire oeuvre of J.K. Rowling. 

    AI, at its worst, slots neatly into that ecosystem. It produces language that sounds like thinking without the inconvenience of actually thinking. And my students can hear the hollowness.

    This does not mean AI is useless. At its best, it belongs alongside Word, Google Docs, and Grammarly—a tool, not a personality. But tools do not build a self. They do not generate voice, conviction, or the slow accumulation of insight that makes writing worth reading. Lean on them too heavily, and the result isn’t mastery—it’s dependency dressed up as efficiency.

    My students understand this. That’s why the fever has broken. The early hype—the belief that AI would function as a kind of intellectual superpower—has lost its grip. The spell didn’t shatter because AI failed. It shattered because people learned to recognize the difference between something that helps you think and something that pretends to think for you.

    Acid-washed jeans didn’t disappear because denim stopped working. They disappeared because people grew embarrassed of the shortcut.

    AI isn’t going anywhere.

    But the illusion that it can make you interesting just by wearing it?

    That’s already out of style.

  • Why I’m Not Fully G-Shockified (Yet)

    Why I’m Not Fully G-Shockified (Yet)

    A month ago, I fell—hard—for the G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000. Not a mild infatuation. Not a passing curiosity. A full conversion experience. Within days, I recruited two accomplices—the GW-7900 Rescue and the GW-6900 Three-Eyed Monster—and suddenly my mechanical divers, once the crown jewels of my collection, were sitting in the watch box like retired prizefighters telling stories no one asked to hear.

    Let me be clear: I have not renounced them. I still admire the Seiko SLA055. I still regard the quartz Tuna SBBN049 with something close to reverence. But admiration is not the same as use. Once you’ve tasted atomic time—precise, indifferent, quietly superior—it’s difficult to return to the charming imprecision of mechanical watches. You don’t switch back from filtered water to a garden hose unless nostalgia is doing the driving.

    And I’m not alone. Since confessing my condition, I’ve received a steady stream of testimonials. Men who bought a GW-M5610 or a GW-5000U and quietly stopped wearing everything else. Not because they planned to. Not because they declared war on their collections. But because the G-Shock—comfortable, accurate, frictionless—refused to leave their wrist. Their curiosity still wandered, their addiction still whispered, but the watch stayed put. Anchored. Unmoved.

    This phenomenon deserves a name: G-Shockification.

    It is the moment when a watch enthusiast, steeped in the romance of mechanical horology, is overtaken by the brute efficiency of atomic precision. At first, there is resistance. Then rationalization. Finally, surrender. Variety collapses. The rotation dies. The watch box becomes a museum, and the G-Shock becomes the only living artifact. What began as a hobby turns into a single, dominant habit—quiet, practical, and oddly liberating.

    Some resist the change. Some embrace it. Some preach it like a new religion. But they all share one outcome: the mechanical watch, once a daily companion, becomes an occasional guest.

    Which brings me to the uncomfortable question: Have I been G-Shockified?

    The honest answer is: not quite.

    I have my objections. With a G-Shock, I cannot simply glance at the time. I must present the watch to my face like an offering, or press a button and summon light—an act that triggers a faint but persistent anxiety about draining the solar charge. In a dark movie theater, the problem becomes almost philosophical. Do I illuminate my wrist and disrupt the room? Or do I behave like a civilized adult and wear something else?

    This is where the quartz Tuna reenters the story.

    Since my G-Shock conversion began, the Tuna has enjoyed a quiet renaissance. It is as if atomic time granted me permission to appreciate quartz accuracy without guilt. At night, it is flawless—constant lume, instant readability, no negotiation required. It does not ask for a button press. It does not demand a ritual. It simply tells the time, like a professional.

    And so I arrive at a compromise.

    I am not fully G-Shockified because I am not willing to tolerate certain frictions: the angle-sensitive readability, the dependence on backlight, the small social calculations about when it is appropriate to illuminate my wrist. These are minor issues, but they are enough to prevent total surrender.

    What I have instead is something more complicated: Hybridification.

    My collection is now split down the middle—four analog watches, four G-Shocks. This is not harmony. It is a negotiated settlement. The G-Shocks govern precision, durability, and daily utility. The analog watches—especially the Tuna—reclaim territory where immediate readability and luminous clarity matter.

    The result is a managed tension between two philosophies:

    • the digital world of accuracy, convenience, and indifference
    • the analog world of presence, legibility, and quiet satisfaction

    It is not a perfect system. But it is stable.

    For now.

  • The Multi-Headed Dopamine Monster

    The Multi-Headed Dopamine Monster

    Any halfway attentive observer eventually stumbles upon a depressing but unmistakable truth: modern life is a carnival of pleasures engineered to be irresistible and endlessly repeatable. Physical indulgence, consumer toys, and the shimmering applause of social media metrics arrive every day like trays of free samples at a supermarket. The problem is not their existence. The problem is their limitless availability. When gratification can be summoned instantly—one click, one swipe, one purchase—the temptation to pursue it with manic dedication becomes nearly impossible to resist.

    The results are rarely noble. Self-discipline dissolves. Organization frays. Focus collapses like a folding chair under a heavy guest. In their place arrives a nervous state of agitation accompanied by a dull, persistent suspicion: You are wasting your life on trinkets. The realization is humiliating because it is so obvious. Hedonism, convenience, consumerism, and the intoxicating glow of digital approval are not spiritual achievements. They are simply the brain chasing dopamine like a lab rat pounding a reward lever.

    At first the dopamine feels marvelous. A new gadget, a flattering comment, a few hundred views, the pleasing geometry of a purchase confirmation page. But like all stimulants, the effect fades. The rewards grow thinner. The hits arrive faster but satisfy less. Eventually a quiet despair creeps in. You feel oddly disconnected—from other people, from yourself, from the adult you imagined becoming. You begin asking dangerous questions. Is there anything meaningful enough to lift you out of this quicksand of micro-pleasures? Is there any pursuit capable of competing with the relentless ease of cheap gratification?

    You remember that you possess other faculties—creativity, curiosity, philosophical struggle, the ability to tell a story that might illuminate something about the human condition. These pursuits possess real dignity. Yet they struggle to survive in the same ecosystem as frictionless entertainment and effortless affirmation. The brain, like a spoiled monarch, prefers velvet pillows to hard chairs.

    Eventually the interrogation becomes more specific. The real engine of this predicament is not merely pleasure but technology. Your phone and computer function as a many-headed dopamine creature sitting permanently on your desk. Slaying the monster would be satisfying—but impossible. Unlike alcohol, which the addict can abandon entirely, the digital world is inseparable from modern survival. You need the machine to work, communicate, pay bills, manage life, create things, and occasionally attempt to think.

    So you continue to live beside the creature.

    You read the tidy aphorisms offered by productivity gurus: Be mindful. Stay disciplined. Follow your North Star. But these slogans feel faintly ridiculous when the dopamine cauldron sits inches away—one browser tab from ignition. The advice begins to sound less like wisdom and more like a variety of motivational wallpaper.

    And so you arrive at a strange emotional position.

    You do not yet possess a solution. But you possess something useful: anger. Anger at the machinery of distraction. Anger at the cheapness of digital applause. Anger at your own willingness to accept the bargain.

    It is not a cure, but it is a beginning.

    You can see the problem clearly now.

    The only remaining question is what you intend to do about it.

  • The Loneliness Hypothesis: Is Social Isolation Making America Mean? (college essay prompt)

    The Loneliness Hypothesis: Is Social Isolation Making America Mean? (college essay prompt)

    Read “How America Got Mean” by David Brooks and “The Anti-Social Century” by Derek Thompson. Then watch the comedy special Lonely Flowers by Roy Wood Jr..

    In Lonely Flowers, Roy Wood Jr. argues that increasing loneliness and social disconnection are contributing to a rise in anger, hostility, and violence in American society. Brooks and Thompson also describe a culture that is becoming more fragmented, isolated, and socially brittle.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay that develops a thesis responding to Roy Wood Jr.’s claim. Using the ideas from Brooks and Thompson, argue whether social isolation is a convincing explanation for the rise in cultural hostility and violence. Your essay may support, refute, or complicate Wood’s claim.

    Thesis + Mapping Requirement

    Your introduction must include a thesis that does two things:

    1. Takes a clear position on Wood’s claim about loneliness and violence.
    2. Maps the major reasons that will organize your body paragraphs.

    Example thesis with mapping

    Roy Wood Jr.’s claim that loneliness is fueling violence in America is persuasive because, as David Brooks and Derek Thompson show, the collapse of community institutions, the rise of hyper-individualism, and the retreat into private digital life have produced a society that is increasingly disconnected and emotionally volatile.

    In this thesis, the mapping components are:

    • collapse of community institutions 
    • retreat into private digital life
    • loss of meaningful language
    • loss of intuition to connect with others

    Each of those becomes a body paragraph.

    Essay Requirements

    Your essay should include:

    • a clear thesis with mapping components
    • analysis of key ideas from Brooks and Thompson
    • references to Roy Wood Jr.’s argument in Lonely Flowers
    • a counterargument that challenges your thesis
    • a rebuttal defending your position
    • a concluding paragraph that reflects on what these ideas suggest about modern American culture

    Possible directions for your argument

    You might argue that:

    • loneliness and isolation are making Americans angrier and more volatile
    • loneliness explains some hostility but not actual violence
    • digital life is replacing real community and increasing resentment
    • other forces (economic anxiety, media outrage, politics) are stronger causes of violence