Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • The Promised Planet

    The Promised Planet

    One afternoon, drifting into a post-workout nap after a particularly glorious kettlebell session, I heard a famous writer tell a popular podcaster that nobody reads books anymore.

    Nobody.

    Not even him.

    He explained that social media had colonized his attention span. Years of feeding his narcissism to the digital machine had apparently consumed whatever brain cells were once responsible for sustained reading. There was something startling about hearing this confession from a public intellectual. It was like hearing a Michelin-starred chef announce that he now survives entirely on vending-machine burritos.

    The timing could not have been worse.

    I had recently completed writing a collection of fifteen stories. I had spent years dragging them through countless revisions, rescuing them from weaker incarnations, sanding rough edges, amputating dead passages, and rebuilding them sentence by sentence until they finally resembled what they were supposed to become. I was absurdly proud of them. I glowed with satisfaction. My pecs still felt inflated from kettlebell presses, and my literary vanity was enjoying a similar state of expansion.

    Then reality barged into the room.

    Nobody reads anymore.

    A bestselling author now sells perhaps ten thousand copies and celebrates as though he has conquered Gaul. An obscure author such as myself sells precisely zero. The arithmetic was not encouraging. My glow dimmed. My pumped-up ego suffered a rapid deflation.

    That evening I climbed into bed feeling mildly bereaved. I instructed my smart speaker to play classical music. It responded by offering business reports. I asked again. It played ZZ Top. I asked a third time. More ZZ Top. By the tenth attempt, after what felt like a hostage negotiation, it finally surrendered and delivered Johann Sebastian Bach.

    As the music drifted through the room, I picked up several books.

    I didn’t care about any of them.

    I tried another.

    Nothing.

    I opened my Amazon wishlist and scrolled through hundreds of titles accumulated over years of optimism. History. Biography. Philosophy. Literature. Politics. Books I had once believed would transform my life.

    I wanted none of them.

    It wasn’t exactly boredom. It wasn’t exactly depression. It was something murkier—a kind of spiritual flatness. An intellectual anemia.

    Part of my mood may have stemmed from guilt. My wife and twin daughters were exploring London and Paris. I had stayed behind. The long flights felt intolerable, and if I was honest, my curiosity about Europe had faded. I had wandered its streets decades earlier. Returning now felt like rereading a novel whose plot I already knew. The enchantment was gone.

    I comforted myself with thoughts of an upcoming family trip to Miami. A five-hour flight I could survive. Noise-canceling headphones would seal me off from humanity, and I could retreat into the biography of some legendary athlete. Sports biographies had become my literary comfort food. They soothed me while jet engines roared and the earth drifted by thirty thousand feet below.

    Seeking rescue from my malaise, I purchased a discounted book for a dollar.

    A dollar.

    Even at that price I felt overcharged.

    The subject was humanity’s search for belonging and meaning. On paper this sounded promising. In practice it felt like an essay stretched onto a medieval torture rack until it reached book length. Every chapter seemed padded with repetition and filler. The author’s central insight could have fit comfortably on a cocktail napkin.

    I abandoned it after a few pages.

    Disgusted with both the book and myself, I opened YouTube.

    Then salvation arrived.

    The algorithm presented a kettlebell instructor demonstrating an exercise called thrusters.

    The movement was brutal: a clean, followed by a squat, followed by an overhead press. It looked demanding, athletic, and slightly insane.

    My ennui evaporated instantly.

    I wrote the word “thrusters” into my Google Docs notebook.

    One word.

    That was all it took.

    Suddenly I was excited about tomorrow. I could picture myself waking before dawn, walking into the garage, and attempting this new movement. The anticipation generated more enthusiasm than hundreds of books, dozens of streaming shows, and an entire internet overflowing with content.

    This realization disturbed me.

    I was sixty-four years old. By all cultural expectations, I should have been entering the season of deep reading and contemplation. I should have been savoring great books the way aristocrats savor caviar. Instead, I was ricocheting around the house like a Labrador retriever waiting for someone to throw a tennis ball.

    The truth was difficult to deny. At this stage of my life, only a handful of things reliably pierced the fog. Discovering a beautiful chord progression on the piano. Finding a new kettlebell movement. Learning some technique that made me eager to wake up the next morning.

    Had YouTube not delivered that single word to me—thrusts—I might have spent the entire day wandering through a desert of boredom.

    That is what unsettled me most.

    Not that I couldn’t find a book I wanted to read.

    Not that Europe no longer called to me.

    Not even that writers themselves were abandoning books.

    What unsettled me was how little it took to reignite my enthusiasm. One word on a screen. One exercise. One tiny challenge awaiting me at dawn.

    At sixty-four, after all my reading, writing, teaching, traveling, and philosophizing, the thing that saved the day was not Bach, literature, or civilization.

    It was a kettlebell.

    A simple piece of iron kept me anchored to the tangible world of effort, fatigue, and discipline. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my mental health depended on thousands of kettlebell swings, goblet squats, cleans, and presses performed each week in the garage. That modest space had become my monastery, my therapist’s office, and my refuge. There, amid the clank of iron and the rhythm of controlled exertion, I could process the absurdities, anxieties, and distractions of modern life. The garage was the one place where the noise of the world receded and reality reasserted itself.

    The next day while enjoying the small thrill of introducing new kettlebell movements into my workout—single- and double-handed thrusters, reverse-lunge thrusters, and offset cleans—I had a podcast murmuring in the background, as I usually do. Few pleasures rival the discovery of a new exercise. It is like finding a hidden room in a house you thought you knew by heart.

    The podcast featured Bill Maher interviewing Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria. Levinson spoke candidly about addiction, explaining that his own began at age eleven with pharmaceuticals. Addiction, he said, would be a central theme in Euphoria’s final season because it had become one of the defining forces of modern life.

    Levinson then turned to OnlyFans. He described an industry generating revenues comparable to major entertainment sectors while gradually degrading many of the people who participate in it. The descent, he suggested, is often incremental. A few suggestive photos become a stream of content. The stream becomes a livelihood. The livelihood becomes an identity. Before long, the dream of escaping the drudgery of a conventional job transforms into something more unsettling. You become both entrepreneur and product. You begin exploiting yourself for an audience whose appetite is never fully satisfied. The result is a kind of spiritual erosion. The person becomes hollowed out, exhibiting many of the same compulsive traits associated with addiction.

    Maher agreed and argued that most people fail to grasp how profound a cultural shift OnlyFans represents. He said we now live in a “masturbation economy.”

    As I worked through a set of offset cleans, his observation lingered in my mind.

    I have spent the past several years reading about declining rates of dating, sex, marriage, and face-to-face social interaction among younger generations. Increasingly, many people appear content to retreat into simulations of intimacy that deliver pleasure without requiring vulnerability, compromise, rejection, or genuine connection.

    I was reminded of a stand-up routine by Chris Rock. Reflecting on his divorce, infidelity, and pornography addiction, Rock explained that therapy helped him recognize the damage pornography had done to his ability to connect with other people. His provocative way of describing it was that pornography had made him “autistic”—not in the clinical sense, but in the sense that he had become trapped inside his own head, detached from the emotional realities of those around him.

    Listening to Maher and Levinson, I found myself wondering whether this condition had escaped the boundaries of individual pathology and become cultural.

    What if the isolated, screen-mediated existence once associated with addiction is becoming normal?

    What if more and more people prefer substitutes to relationships, simulations to experiences, and curated fantasy to the friction of actual human life?

    What if the dystopia is not approaching but has already arrived?

    As someone who teaches critical thinking and spends an unhealthy amount of time searching for the defining themes of modern culture, I immediately began thinking about how I might frame this discussion in a classroom.

    Maher’s terminology, “the masturbation economy,” works perfectly on television. It grabs attention. It provokes. It entertains.

    But in a college classroom, I would probably use a different phrase.

    I might call it the Solitary Consumption Economy or the Self-Gratification Marketplace.

    Students could then examine the argument that platforms like OnlyFans are not merely examples of personal empowerment but symptoms of a larger cultural shift toward self-exploitation, alienation, dopamine dependency, and emotional isolation.

    Viewed this way, OnlyFans is not an anomaly. It is the logical extension of several trends that have been developing for decades.

    One precursor is the modern obsession with optimization.

    Why endure the messiness of courtship when technology can deliver a carefully curated fantasy tailored to your preferences?

    Why invest time in building a relationship when digital alternatives can be scheduled conveniently between deadlifts and protein shakes?

    Why risk rejection when algorithms offer endless affirmation?

    Optimization culture promises efficiency in every domain of life. The problem is that many of life’s most meaningful experiences are inherently inefficient. Friendship, romance, family, and community require patience, sacrifice, awkwardness, misunderstanding, and compromise. Remove those elements and you often remove the humanity as well.

    A second precursor is the social conditioning produced by the pandemic.

    Many people discovered that life could be organized around isolation. Work from home. Food delivered. Entertainment streamed. Social interaction filtered through screens. For some, this arrangement felt less like an emergency measure than a permanent upgrade. Why drive across town? Why spend money on gas? Why risk discomfort when one can remain safely cocooned inside a personalized digital environment?

    The result is a culture increasingly comfortable with substitutes.

    And the phenomenon extends far beyond sexuality.

    Today people seek fitness coaching, nutritional guidance, therapy, cooking instruction, financial advice, and life direction through screens. Entire industries now exist to provide virtual versions of activities once rooted in face-to-face relationships and local communities.

    As I thought about all this, I was reminded of an episode of Lost in Space that haunted me as a child.

    The episode, “The Promised Planet,” aired in 1968.

    The Robinson family arrives on a planet populated by perpetual teenagers. The inhabitants speak in fashionable slang, dance compulsively, and embrace a culture of endless stimulation. New arrivals are placed in individual booths where a machine bombards them with loud music and psychological conditioning until they become compliant members of the tribe.

    One of the victims is Penny Robinson.

    After undergoing the process, she stands on a platform, swaying mindlessly to the music while parroting clichés about being “with it” and “cool.” Her father watches in horror. He sees that his daughter has not merely adopted new habits. She has surrendered her individuality. She has become a consumer of slogans and sensations.

    The scene terrified me as a child.

    Watching it today is even more unsettling.

    Written nearly sixty years ago, the episode feels less like science fiction than prophecy. Its creators anticipated a world in which overstimulation, conformity, and technological manipulation would become normal features of everyday life. They imagined a generation pacified not by force but by pleasure.

    The frightening possibility is that they were not predicting some distant future.

    They were describing us.

    The Solitary Consumption Economy may simply be the latest chapter in a story that began long ago—a story in which technology gradually teaches us to prefer stimulation over connection, convenience over community, and fantasy over reality.

    The question is not whether a culture of solitary consumption can generate wealth.

    Clearly it can.

    The question is whether a civilization can flourish when increasing numbers of its citizens spend their lives alone inside their heads, consuming experiences engineered to feel more vivid while becoming steadily more detached from reality itself.

    I was hardly immune to the condition. I felt myself being slowly absorbed into a culture that inflamed the passions with dazzling digital spectacles while leaving the spirit flattened, restless, and curiously numb. At times I felt like Penny Robinson in Lost in Space, trapped inside the conditioning booth on The Promised Planet. The machine bombarded her with stimulation until she surrendered her individuality and emerged smiling, dancing, and repeating fashionable clichés. The horror of the episode was not that Penny was physically imprisoned. It was that she no longer wanted to leave. I sometimes wondered whether the same process was happening to me, only with algorithms instead of loud music, screens instead of booths, and an endless stream of digital amusements replacing the hypnotic dance floor.

    Fortunately, I had a few anchors that kept me from drifting into the hypnotic current.

    The first was kettlebells.

    Kettlebells transported me to a world before algorithms, influencers, and engagement metrics. The moment I gripped the handle, I ceased being a sixty-four-year-old college instructor and became a caveman engaged in urgent labor. I was shoving boulders aside to widen the entrance of my cave before a storm arrived. I was lifting the twelve-foot wing of a dying pterodactyl so I could retrieve the spear I had hurled moments earlier to save my life. There was no room for existential angst while trying not to drop fifty pounds of cast iron on your foot.

    Then there was the piano.

    If kettlebells connected me to my inner caveman, the piano connected me to my inner funeral director.

    Whenever I sat at the keyboard, I found myself composing the same melancholy piece over and over again. At least that is what my family claims.

    “Dad, all your songs sound the same.”

    Of course they do.

    I am not composing individual songs. I am contributing to the great collective symphony of human sadness known in German as Weltschmerz—the sorrow that comes from recognizing the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.

    Some people spend thousands of dollars each year discussing their Weltschmerz with therapists. I process mine through an ebony Yamaha upright. It is considerably cheaper, and unlike a therapist, the piano never asks me how that makes me feel.

    The piano allowed me to grieve.

    Not merely for myself, but for the world.

    For all its absurdities, vanities, and self-inflicted wounds.

    Then there was my exercise bike.

    Technically, it is called a Schwinn Airdyne AD7.

    I prefer its proper name:

    The Misery Machine.

    The Misery Machine operates according to a simple principle: the harder you work, the more enthusiastically it punishes you for your ambition.

    Most cardio equipment is cooperative. You pedal. It politely accepts your effort.

    The AD7 is different.

    The AD7 takes your effort as a personal insult.

    Its giant fan wheel generates wind resistance proportional to your exertion, creating a relationship that feels less like exercise and more like a blood feud.

    The machine seems to say:

    “Oh, you think you’re in shape? You think you’re going to dominate this workout? Let’s investigate that claim.”

    Pedaling is only the beginning.

    Your arms must simultaneously push and pull large moving levers, transforming the experience into a full-body interrogation. Before long your legs are burning, your shoulders are aching, and your lungs are negotiating surrender terms.

    The machine possesses an almost supernatural ability to match your suffering dollar for dollar. Every attempt to overpower it simply persuades it to become more difficult.

    After a hard session, I stagger away drenched in sweat, humbled, exhausted, and oddly grateful, as though I have survived a mugging administered by a highly competent physical therapist.

    I have considered quitting the AD7 many times.

    It consumes an alarming amount of energy.

    Its location does not help.

    Wedged between the living-room wall and the sofa, it places me on public display for my family. There I sit shirtless, wearing gym shorts, with a towel wrapped around my head to prevent sweat from pouring into my eyes. I look less like a disciplined athlete than a man experiencing a minor psychological crisis.

    The real embarrassment, however, lies in the elaborate fantasies I invent to motivate myself.

    My goal is always the same: burn at least seven hundred calories in under an hour.

    To achieve this, my brain constructs increasingly ridiculous scenarios.

    Suppose I reach four hundred calories by the thirty-minute mark.

    In that case, all my colleagues receive half a million dollars tax-free.

    Naturally, they are watching me on a giant monitor.

    A scrolling ticker beneath the screen provides real-time analytics:

    Calories Per Hour: 842

    Fatigue Level: Severe

    Probability of Reaching 400 Calories at 30 Minutes: 98%

    Probability of Reaching 770 Calories at 60 Minutes: 89%

    Butt Fatigue: Catastrophic

    Confidence Level: Medium

    My colleagues watch nervously from their homes.

    “If he hits the target,” one exclaims, “I’ll finally be able to buy a house!”

    Another is already browsing beachfront property.

    A third is planning an early retirement.

    Meanwhile, I continue pedaling through escalating misery, carrying the financial hopes and dreams of people who do not know they are participating in my delusion.

    This, I suppose, is my version of mental gamification.

    Some people use productivity apps.

    Some use motivational speakers.

    I imagine an audience of financially desperate coworkers depending on my ability to survive a torture device disguised as an exercise bike.

    And somehow, absurd as it is, it works.

    Another reason I can’t quit the AD7 is that a part of me craves the punishment.

    It is difficult to overstate humanity’s appetite for self-inflicted suffering. Pain, like pleasure, has a way of making us feel intensely alive. In a culture that anesthetizes us with endless consumption, relentless marketing, algorithmic manipulation, and data mining, punishment can feel strangely restorative. At least it cuts through the fog.

    To put it more simply, without the punishment administered by my exercise bike, I would be bored.

    And boredom is no trivial enemy.

    It reminds me of Father John Misty’s song “Bored in the USA.” The narrator is a weary casualty of consumer culture, a man who has purchased so many products that he has gradually become one himself. Somewhere along the way, he misplaced the larger ambitions and romantic ideals of his youth. The life he was promised never arrived. In its place he received subscriptions, pharmaceuticals, and a collection of possessions that stare back at him with perfect indifference.

    He feels cheated.

    He wants a refund on the Faustian bargain he signed decades earlier, but he suspects the return policy has expired. To cope, he medicates himself. The pills help him endure the boredom, depression, and low-grade despair of modern life, but they cannot cure them. He is a man drowning in ennui, anhedonia, and spiritual exhaustion.

    I recognize those enemies.

    I can hear them rattling the doorknob.

    They arrive disguised as apathy, distraction, and the temptation to stop caring. They whisper that effort is pointless, that curiosity is overrated, that another hour of scrolling might somehow satisfy the hunger that scrolling itself created.

    So I fight back.

    I sit at the piano and pound out another melancholy composition dedicated to the great human tradition of Weltschmerz. I swing kettlebells until my lungs burn and my forearms ache. I climb aboard the AD7 and pedal through fresh layers of misery.

    I do these things with a mixture of fear and fury, hoping that boredom, anhedonia, and despair will decide there are easier victims elsewhere and leave me in peace for another day.

  • The Solitary Consumption Economy

    The Solitary Consumption Economy

    Yesterday, while enjoying the small thrill of introducing new kettlebell movements into my workout—single- and double-handed thrusters, reverse-lunge thrusters, and offset cleans—I had a podcast murmuring in the background, as I usually do. Few pleasures rival the discovery of a new exercise. It is like finding a hidden room in a house you thought you knew by heart.

    The podcast featured Bill Maher interviewing Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria. Levinson spoke candidly about addiction, explaining that his own began at age eleven with pharmaceuticals. Addiction, he said, would be a central theme in Euphoria’s final season because it had become one of the defining forces of modern life.

    Levinson then turned to OnlyFans. He described an industry generating revenues comparable to major entertainment sectors while gradually degrading many of the people who participate in it. The descent, he suggested, is often incremental. A few suggestive photos become a stream of content. The stream becomes a livelihood. The livelihood becomes an identity. Before long, the dream of escaping the drudgery of a conventional job transforms into something more unsettling. You become both entrepreneur and product. You begin exploiting yourself for an audience whose appetite is never fully satisfied. The result is a kind of spiritual erosion. The person becomes hollowed out, exhibiting many of the same compulsive traits associated with addiction.

    Maher agreed and argued that most people fail to grasp how profound a cultural shift OnlyFans represents. He said we now live in a “masturbation economy.”

    As I worked through a set of offset cleans, his observation lingered in my mind.

    I have spent the past several years reading about declining rates of dating, sex, marriage, and face-to-face social interaction among younger generations. Increasingly, many people appear content to retreat into simulations of intimacy that deliver pleasure without requiring vulnerability, compromise, rejection, or genuine connection.

    I was reminded of a stand-up routine by Chris Rock. Reflecting on his divorce, infidelity, and pornography addiction, Rock explained that therapy helped him recognize the damage pornography had done to his ability to connect with other people. His provocative way of describing it was that pornography had made him “autistic”—not in the clinical sense, but in the sense that he had become trapped inside his own head, detached from the emotional realities of those around him.

    Listening to Maher and Levinson, I found myself wondering whether this condition had escaped the boundaries of individual pathology and become cultural.

    What if the isolated, screen-mediated existence once associated with addiction is becoming normal?

    What if more and more people prefer substitutes to relationships, simulations to experiences, and curated fantasy to the friction of actual human life?

    What if the dystopia is not approaching but has already arrived?

    As someone who teaches critical thinking and spends an unhealthy amount of time searching for the defining themes of modern culture, I immediately began thinking about how I might frame this discussion in a classroom.

    Maher’s terminology, “the masturbation economy,” works perfectly on television. It grabs attention. It provokes. It entertains.

    But in a college classroom, I would probably use a different phrase.

    I might call it the Solitary Consumption Economy or the Self-Gratification Marketplace.

    Students could then examine the argument that platforms like OnlyFans are not merely examples of personal empowerment but symptoms of a larger cultural shift toward self-exploitation, alienation, dopamine dependency, and emotional isolation.

    Viewed this way, OnlyFans is not an anomaly. It is the logical extension of several trends that have been developing for decades.

    One precursor is the modern obsession with optimization.

    Why endure the messiness of courtship when technology can deliver a carefully curated fantasy tailored to your preferences?

    Why invest time in building a relationship when digital alternatives can be scheduled conveniently between deadlifts and protein shakes?

    Why risk rejection when algorithms offer endless affirmation?

    Optimization culture promises efficiency in every domain of life. The problem is that many of life’s most meaningful experiences are inherently inefficient. Friendship, romance, family, and community require patience, sacrifice, awkwardness, misunderstanding, and compromise. Remove those elements and you often remove the humanity as well.

    A second precursor is the social conditioning produced by the pandemic.

    Many people discovered that life could be organized around isolation. Work from home. Food delivered. Entertainment streamed. Social interaction filtered through screens. For some, this arrangement felt less like an emergency measure than a permanent upgrade. Why drive across town? Why spend money on gas? Why risk discomfort when one can remain safely cocooned inside a personalized digital environment?

    The result is a culture increasingly comfortable with substitutes.

    And the phenomenon extends far beyond sexuality.

    Today people seek fitness coaching, nutritional guidance, therapy, cooking instruction, financial advice, and life direction through screens. Entire industries now exist to provide virtual versions of activities once rooted in face-to-face relationships and local communities.

    As I thought about all this, I was reminded of an episode of Lost in Space that haunted me as a child.

    The episode, “The Promised Planet,” aired in 1968.

    The Robinson family arrives on a planet populated by perpetual teenagers. The inhabitants speak in fashionable slang, dance compulsively, and embrace a culture of endless stimulation. New arrivals are placed in individual booths where a machine bombards them with loud music and psychological conditioning until they become compliant members of the tribe.

    One of the victims is Penny Robinson.

    After undergoing the process, she stands on a platform, swaying mindlessly to the music while parroting clichés about being “with it” and “cool.” Her father watches in horror. He sees that his daughter has not merely adopted new habits. She has surrendered her individuality. She has become a consumer of slogans and sensations.

    The scene terrified me as a child.

    Watching it today is even more unsettling.

    Written nearly sixty years ago, the episode feels less like science fiction than prophecy. Its creators anticipated a world in which overstimulation, conformity, and technological manipulation would become normal features of everyday life. They imagined a generation pacified not by force but by pleasure.

    The frightening possibility is that they were not predicting some distant future.

    They were describing us.

    The Solitary Consumption Economy may simply be the latest chapter in a story that began long ago—a story in which technology gradually teaches us to prefer stimulation over connection, convenience over community, and fantasy over reality.

    The question is not whether such a culture can generate wealth.

    Clearly it can.

    The question is whether a civilization can flourish when more and more of its citizens are living alone inside their heads, consuming experiences that feel increasingly vivid while becoming increasingly detached from the world itself.

  • The Death of Reading and the Rise of Thrusts

    The Death of Reading and the Rise of Thrusts

    One afternoon, drifting into a post-workout nap after a particularly glorious kettlebell session, I heard a famous writer tell a popular podcaster that nobody reads books anymore.

    Nobody.

    Not even him.

    He explained that social media had colonized his attention span. Years of feeding his narcissism to the digital machine had apparently consumed whatever brain cells were once responsible for sustained reading. There was something startling about hearing this confession from a public intellectual. It was like hearing a Michelin-starred chef announce that he now survives entirely on vending-machine burritos.

    The timing could not have been worse.

    I had recently completed writing a collection of fifteen stories. I had spent years dragging them through countless revisions, rescuing them from weaker incarnations, sanding rough edges, amputating dead passages, and rebuilding them sentence by sentence until they finally resembled what they were supposed to become. I was absurdly proud of them. I glowed with satisfaction. My pecs still felt inflated from kettlebell presses, and my literary vanity was enjoying a similar state of expansion.

    Then reality barged into the room.

    Nobody reads anymore.

    A bestselling author now sells perhaps ten thousand copies and celebrates as though he has conquered Gaul. An obscure author such as myself sells precisely zero. The arithmetic was not encouraging. My glow dimmed. My pumped-up ego suffered a rapid deflation.

    That evening I climbed into bed feeling mildly bereaved. I instructed my smart speaker to play classical music. It responded by offering business reports. I asked again. It played ZZ Top. I asked a third time. More ZZ Top. By the tenth attempt, after what felt like a hostage negotiation, it finally surrendered and delivered Johann Sebastian Bach.

    As the music drifted through the room, I picked up several books.

    I didn’t care about any of them.

    I tried another.

    Nothing.

    I opened my Amazon wishlist and scrolled through hundreds of titles accumulated over years of optimism. History. Biography. Philosophy. Literature. Politics. Books I had once believed would transform my life.

    I wanted none of them.

    It wasn’t exactly boredom. It wasn’t exactly depression. It was something murkier—a kind of spiritual flatness. An intellectual anemia.

    Part of my mood may have stemmed from guilt. My wife and twin daughters were exploring London and Paris. I had stayed behind. The long flights felt intolerable, and if I was honest, my curiosity about Europe had faded. I had wandered its streets decades earlier. Returning now felt like rereading a novel whose plot I already knew. The enchantment was gone.

    I comforted myself with thoughts of an upcoming trip to Miami. A five-hour flight I could survive. Noise-canceling headphones would seal me off from humanity, and I could retreat into the biography of some legendary athlete. Sports biographies had become my literary comfort food. They soothed me while jet engines roared and the earth drifted by thirty thousand feet below.

    Seeking rescue from my malaise, I purchased a discounted book for a dollar.

    A dollar.

    Even at that price I felt overcharged.

    The subject was humanity’s search for belonging and meaning. On paper this sounded promising. In practice it felt like an essay stretched onto a medieval torture rack until it reached book length. Every chapter seemed padded with repetition and filler. The author’s central insight could have fit comfortably on a cocktail napkin.

    I abandoned it after a few pages.

    Disgusted with both the book and myself, I opened YouTube.

    Then salvation arrived.

    The algorithm presented a kettlebell instructor demonstrating an exercise called the thrust.

    The movement was brutal: a clean, followed by a squat, followed by an overhead press. It looked demanding, athletic, and slightly insane.

    My ennui evaporated instantly.

    I wrote the word “thrusts” into my Google Docs notebook.

    One word.

    That was all it took.

    Suddenly I was excited about tomorrow. I could picture myself waking before dawn, walking into the garage, and attempting this new movement. The anticipation generated more enthusiasm than hundreds of books, dozens of streaming shows, and an entire internet overflowing with content.

    This realization disturbed me.

    I was sixty-four years old. By all cultural expectations, I should have been entering the season of deep reading and contemplation. I should have been savoring great books the way aristocrats savor caviar. Instead, I was ricocheting around the house like a Labrador retriever waiting for someone to throw a tennis ball.

    The truth was difficult to deny. At this stage of my life, only a handful of things reliably pierced the fog. Discovering a beautiful chord progression on the piano. Finding a new kettlebell movement. Learning some technique that made me eager to wake up the next morning.

    Had YouTube not delivered that single word to me—thrusts—I might have spent the entire day wandering through a desert of boredom.

    That is what unsettled me most.

    Not that I couldn’t find a book I wanted to read.

    Not that Europe no longer called to me.

    Not even that writers themselves were abandoning books.

    What unsettled me was how little it took to reignite my enthusiasm. One word on a screen. One exercise. One tiny challenge awaiting me at dawn.

    At sixty-four, after all my reading, writing, teaching, traveling, and philosophizing, the thing that saved the day was not Bach, literature, or civilization.

    It was a kettlebell.

  • The Woman Who Mistook Defiance for Freedom

    The Woman Who Mistook Defiance for Freedom

    Sarah Miller’s essay, “A Diehard Drinker Accidentally Quits,” begins with a complaint. She is irritated by the younger generation’s suspicion of alcohol and by the growing cultural enthusiasm for sobriety. To Miller, drinking is not merely a recreational habit. It is one of the last remaining expressions of humanity in a world increasingly obsessed with optimization, efficiency, and self-improvement. Why obsess over liver health, she wonders, when the planet is overheating and the news cycle resembles a parade of civilizational breakdowns? Abstaining from alcohol strikes her as less like wisdom than another form of puritanism disguised as wellness.

    Her social circle reinforced this belief. These were not derelicts slumped on barstools. They were productive professionals who folded alcohol into what they considered meaningful and life-affirming pursuits. They made homemade wine. They experimented with elaborate sangrias and cocktails. Drinking was not a vice. It was culture, creativity, fellowship, and pleasure.

    Miller’s relationship with alcohol began early. At seven years old she drank Molson Export Ale with her father. As she grew older, she noticed that alcohol transformed him into a darker, more cynical version of himself. It had the opposite effect on her. Drinking made her feel buoyant, expansive, and at peace. Alcohol became less a beverage than a companion, helping her reconcile herself to a world that often seemed irrational and exhausting.

    She drank throughout high school and college and came to a simple conclusion: she preferred the person she was when she drank. As a young adult, she settled into a routine of two or three drinks a day. Once or twice a week she endured a hangover substantial enough to make the next morning miserable but not severe enough to inspire change. Every couple of weeks she drank heavily enough to lose two full days to recovery.

    Gradually, however, alcohol stopped delivering its promised rewards. One evening she verbally attacked a close friend, apologized for her behavior, and then celebrated the reconciliation by pouring herself another drink. The absurdity of the sequence escaped her at the time.

    By her mid-thirties she experimented with Alcoholics Anonymous but quickly abandoned it. She could not convince herself that she belonged. The people around her told stories of spectacular collapse—lost jobs, ruined marriages, arrests, blackouts, and public humiliation. Compared to them, she seemed almost respectable. Her drinking lacked the cinematic drama she associated with alcoholism. She was not self-destructive enough to qualify.

    Soon afterward she met a man whose appetite for alcohol exceeded even her own. His drinking eventually drove her into Al-Anon, the organization designed for people whose lives are affected by alcoholics. The irony was remarkable. She could identify addiction in her boyfriend clearly enough to attend support meetings, yet she remained blind to the same disease operating within herself.

    Al-Anon taught her several painful lessons. She learned that she could not fix another person. She learned that obsessing over someone else’s problems could become a convenient distraction from confronting her own. Most importantly, she learned what alcoholism actually looked like. Armed with that understanding, she left her boyfriend. Yet she still refused to apply those lessons to herself.

    In retrospect, Miller recognizes that her denial was strengthened by cultural trends she claimed to despise. The more society celebrated sobriety, the more stubbornly she defended drinking. If everyone else was abandoning alcohol, she would cling to it with greater enthusiasm. Her drinking became an act of rebellion.

    She devoured memoirs written by alcoholics and reassured herself with the same comforting refrain: “I’m not half as bad as they are.”

    Meanwhile, reality was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Her nightly half-bottle of wine had a peculiar tendency to expand. The measurements became elastic. She developed what she calls “creative geometry,” a talent for convincing herself that large pours were somehow modest ones. Promises dissolved. Four drinks a week became twenty-five. Twenty-five became forty.

    By her fifties, desperation had replaced confidence. She tried nearly everything. Reiki. Acupuncture. Self-hypnosis. Therapy. Microdosing. Mushrooms. She attempted to address her anger, her judgmental instincts, and her paranoia. Eventually she embarked on what she describes as a psychedelic odyssey involving large quantities of MDMA and psilocybin. The experience produced not enlightenment but grandiosity. She became euphoric, convinced she was communicating with the dead. Even her therapist began expressing concern—not only about her mental state but also about her drinking.

    Miller believes she might have remained what recovery circles call a “high-bottom drinker” indefinitely. Then a romantic disappointment cracked the illusion. After being ghosted by a boyfriend, she found herself drowning in anxiety and grief. A friend handed her a glass of wine.

    She drank it.

    Nothing happened.

    The sadness remained exactly where it was.

    For the first time, alcohol failed to perform its most important function. The medicine no longer worked.

    She decided to attend online A.A. meetings and take a break from drinking. Almost immediately she noticed subtle but profound changes. Going to bed felt pleasant. Daily routines felt distinct and sweet. Waking up without a hangover felt like discovering a forgotten luxury. The anger that had accompanied her for years began to evaporate.

    Then came the realization she had spent decades avoiding.

    Her life had become a nightmare.

    At an A.A. meeting she finally introduced herself by saying, “My name is Sarah, and I’m an alcoholic.”

    The admission did not diminish her. It clarified her.

    Looking back, she now views her elaborate calculations about half-bottles of wine with disgust. The memories strike her as a form of body horror. She sees that her drinking was not self-care, self-expression, or rebellion. It was self-abuse. Every drink carried the same hidden message: I cannot deal with this. I cannot deal with you. I cannot deal with life.

    Sobriety, therefore, became more than abstinence. It became the willingness to face reality without anesthetic.

    Miller’s essay ultimately serves as a case study in the destructive power of the ego. The ego whispers that we are different from everyone else. It assures us that addicts are other people. It convinces us that our flaws are exceptions, our rationalizations are wisdom, and our compulsions are choices. It insists that reality should bend itself to our preferences. When reality refuses, the ego searches for relief, often in the very habits that deepen our suffering.

    The cruelest trick the ego performs is persuading us that self-destruction is self-preservation.

    What makes Miller’s story compelling is that her recovery is not merely a triumph over alcohol. It is a triumph over pride. Her real addiction was not simply to wine but to the belief that she was exempt from the truths that governed everyone else.

    In that sense, sobriety is not merely the absence of alcohol. It is the presence of humility. It is the moment when a person stops arguing with reality and finally agrees to live inside it.

  • Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (a short story)

    Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (a short story)

    When I was five years old and living at the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose, one of my favorite television shows was Daniel Boone. I was fascinated by Boone’s coonskin cap, especially the raccoon tail dangling from the back. To my young mind, it was the height of frontier elegance. Any man bold enough to wear a dead raccoon as a fashion accessory had to possess uncommon wisdom and imagination. Surely such a man knew secrets unavailable to ordinary people.

    One episode lodged itself permanently in my memory. In it, a destitute man lived alone in the wilderness, gaunt with hunger and desperation. A passerby took pity on him and handed him a loaf of bread. The starving man stood beneath a tree and immediately tore into it. He chewed with the ferocity of a man rescued from the edge of extinction. As he ate, he repeated a single word over and over:

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    The word became a prayer, a hymn, a declaration of gratitude. Watching him, I was struck by a revelation that only a child could find astonishing: this man’s happiness came from something as simple as a loaf of bread.

    The next day, life provided me with an opportunity for field research.

    My mother and I had gone shopping at a local plaza. Returning to the car, we loaded our groceries into the back seat, including a fresh loaf of sourdough bread. Before we left, my mother remembered seeing some white divinity and black licorice in a candy store and decided to run back inside.

    “I’ll wait in the car,” I said.

    The moment she disappeared, I launched my experiment.

    I reached into the grocery bag, tore off a chunk of sourdough, and stuffed it into my mouth. Then I began repeating the sacred word from Daniel Boone.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    I was trying to recreate the miracle I had witnessed on television. I wanted to understand what it felt like to be so hungry that a loaf of bread seemed like heaven itself. I wanted to know what true satisfaction felt like.

    Nearly sixty years later, I still remember that moment.

    Something about the image continues to haunt me: the idea of profound hunger meeting simple nourishment. No luxury. No extravagance. No abundance. Just an honest need met by an honest gift.

    The proposition remains irresistible.

    The older I get, the more I understand that the episode was never really about bread.

    It was about hunger.

    The famous biblical phrase tells us that “man does not live by bread alone.” Physical hunger is only one of our appetites. Even when our stomachs are full, our mortgages paid, our homes comfortable, and our refrigerators stocked, we remain restless creatures. We hunger for purpose. We hunger for belonging. We hunger for love, friendship, meaning, beauty, and transcendence.

    We hunger for forms of bread that cannot be purchased at a bakery.

    Music is one of those forms.

    I think of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,“ one of The Smiths’ most beautiful songs. The narrator is starving for connection. Home does not feel like home. It feels confining, lonely, and emotionally barren. He longs to escape into the world and find kindred souls who possess the warmth and vitality missing from his life. He dreams of a surrogate family, a tribe of fellow travelers who might finally make him feel understood.

    He does not know where such people are.

    He only knows he needs them.

    His longing saturates every line of the song. Beneath the wit and melancholy is a desperate appetite for belonging. He is emotionally famished.

    In that sense, he is not so different from the starving man beneath the tree in Daniel Boone.

    Both are hungry.

    Both are waiting.

    Both are searching for the thing that will finally satisfy them.

    The difference is that one seeks a loaf of bread while the other seeks companionship, love, and meaning.

    Yet the emotional experience is remarkably similar.

    A starving man dreams of bread.

    A lonely man dreams of friendship.

    And when either finally receives what he has been seeking, the response is the same. Gratitude. Relief. Fullness.

    For a brief and precious moment, the hunger stops.

    Solitude is another form of hunger.

    My mother, who struggled with clinical depression throughout her life, would sometimes disappear from the world for days at a time. She would retreat to her bedroom, pull the covers around herself, and consume novels with the same urgency that the starving man in Daniel Boone consumed his loaf of bread. Page after page disappeared into her imagination. The stories fed something that ordinary life could not. Friends would call. Invitations would come and go. My mother often chose the company of books instead. She possessed a strong reclusive streak.

    I inherited some of it.

    At times, I feel the same longing for friendship and belonging that animates “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” I understand the desire to find kindred spirits and become part of something larger than oneself. Yet I also understand the opposite impulse. Like my mother, there are days when I want nothing more than to be left alone with my podcasts, my kettlebell workouts, and my piano compositions. A quiet room can feel as nourishing as a crowded gathering. Solitude, when freely chosen, can be its own loaf of bread.

    Hunger takes many forms. Some people ache for companionship. Others ache for silence. Most of us spend our lives moving back and forth between the two, never fully satisfied by either and always searching for the proper measure of both.

    Perhaps religious hunger is the greatest hunger of all.

    I experienced it while watching the 1978 Superman movie. I was a teenage bodybuilder then, full of grandiose dreams and the conviction that I was destined for some undefined greatness. Sitting alone in a dark theater, I watched Superman’s father prepare his son for his mission on Earth. He explained that humanity was a lost and fallen people, wandering in confusion and ignorance. Then came the line that pierced me:

    “They only lack the light to show the way.”

    As those words echoed through the theater, something happened to me. A wave of emotion surged through my body. It felt as if a bright light had been switched on somewhere deep inside me. I began to shake. Tears streamed down my face. I was overwhelmed by a feeling I could neither explain nor resist.

    What moved me was not Superman’s strength. It was his purpose.

    For the first time, I recognized a hunger that had been living inside me all along. I wanted to be a light in the world. I wanted my life to matter. I wanted to help people find their way through confusion, loneliness, and despair. I had no idea how such a calling could be fulfilled. I only knew that the desire burned within me with an intensity I had never experienced before.

    Looking back, I think I was discovering another form of bread.

    Not the bread that fills the stomach, but the bread that nourishes the soul.

    Perhaps this is what people mean by the bread of life: the longing to serve something greater than oneself, to become useful to others, and in that act of service to discover who one truly is. The deepest hunger is not merely to consume. It is to contribute. It is to find a purpose worthy of devotion and, in pursuing it, become fully alive.

    This is not the bread I was raised on.

    I grew up on an entirely different diet of the soul. The culture around me taught that hunger was not a condition to be understood or disciplined but celebrated. Desire was treated as a virtue. Appetite was regarded as a compass. If you wanted something intensely enough, pursuing it was assumed to be an act of authenticity.

    The lesson was repeated everywhere—in movies, television, music, magazines, and the casual conversations of adults. Fulfillment lay just beyond the next indulgence. The good life consisted of feeding every craving and treating restraint as a form of deprivation.

    In that world, desire itself became the bread.

    Longing was not something to transcend but something to obey. Hunger was not a signal pointing toward a deeper need; it was the need. The object of desire mattered less than the pursuit itself. We were taught to trust our appetites, follow our impulses, and regard self-denial with suspicion.

    Most of all, I was taught that carnal desire was the bread of life—that somewhere in the pursuit of pleasure, admiration, conquest, and sensual gratification lay the secret to happiness.

    It took me many years to discover that some forms of bread fill you only long enough to make you hungry again.

    This is not the bread I grew up on. I grew up on a different kind of bread entirely. I was taught that hunger was a good thing and that satisfying that hunger was even better. I was taught that desire itself was the bread. I was taught that carnal lust was the bread of life. 

    I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, an era that treated recreational sex not merely as pleasure but as a pathway to transcendence. Television, movies, music, magazines, and bestselling novels all sang from the same hymnal. Liberation was the new gospel. Desire was the new sacrament. Happiness, we were told, awaited those bold enough to cast aside restraint and pursue every appetite without apology.

    The adults around me absorbed the message. My parents and their friends attended parties where alcohol flowed freely, clothes disappeared, and the soundtrack from Hair supplied the liturgy. Men’s magazines sat openly on living room coffee tables like decorative centerpieces. Nobody hid them. Nobody seemed embarrassed. They were advertisements for a particular vision of the good life.

    As a teenage boy with raging hormones and a vivid imagination, I absorbed the lesson completely.

    The images and stories convinced me that fulfillment lay in becoming a brazen sexual adventurer. I wanted the muscular body, the effortless charm, the magnetic confidence. I wanted admiration. I wanted conquest. What I did not understand was love. I knew little about devotion, sacrifice, responsibility, or the quiet dignity of caring for another person. Society’s vision of transcendence involved acquiring experiences, not serving people. Other human beings existed primarily as supporting characters in the drama of one’s own desires.

    The consequences of such a worldview are predictable. When people become instruments for self-gratification, hurt feelings, disappointment, alienation, and moral confusion inevitably follow. The bill always arrives, even if it arrives years later.

    Yet even after I grew older and recognized the folly of that outlook, a small part of that younger self remained alive inside me. The fantasy did not simply disappear. It lingered like an old song whose melody still occasionally drifts through the mind. The grand vision of endless Bacchanalian delights never entirely surrendered the stage.

    The challenge became learning not to romanticize it.

    There is a temptation to keep looking backward, to imagine that fulfillment was hiding somewhere in those abandoned fantasies. But looking backward can become its own form of captivity. The story of Lot’s wife endures because it captures a permanent human weakness. We long for the places we have outgrown. We become attached to identities that no longer serve us. We mistake fixation for vitality.

    In reality, selfishness, entitlement, and obsession are forms of death. They narrow the soul. They reduce the world to a mirror.

    I suspect this realization is familiar to anyone who has spent time in an addiction recovery program. Every day counselors sit across from people trying to understand the forces that shaped them decades earlier. The challenge is not simply breaking a habit. It is excavating an entire philosophy of life. Somewhere beneath the addiction lies a vision of happiness that proved incapable of delivering what it promised.

    The task of replacing that vision must be overwhelming.

    I cannot speak for addiction counselors. I can only speak from experience.

    A life devoted to unrestrained hedonism eventually exhausts itself. Chaos has a seductive glamour when viewed from a distance, but living inside it is another matter entirely. The endless pursuit of stimulation becomes tiring. The pursuit of novelty becomes repetitive. What initially feels like freedom gradually resembles bondage.

    Eventually reality intervenes.

    You have a career.

    You have a spouse.

    You have children.

    You have obligations and people who depend on you.

    Maintaining a double life becomes increasingly difficult. You cannot simultaneously inhabit the stable world of family and responsibility while pursuing the perpetual turbulence of adolescent fantasy. Domesticity and satyrhood occupy different planets.

    The older I became, the more I understood that fear has its proper place. Not fear of pleasure itself, but fear of the destruction that follows when pleasure becomes life’s highest value. The consequences are not merely moral. They are practical. Relationships fracture. Finances collapse. Trust evaporates. Even those fortunate enough to avoid financial ruin often leave behind a trail of emotional wreckage.

    Such people are not role models.

    They are cautionary tales.

    The challenge, then, is not merely abandoning an old identity. It is discovering a new one.

    The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that hope is like finding a new garment. I have always loved that image. A garment shapes how we present ourselves to the world. It signals who we believe ourselves to be.

    When the costume of the satyr no longer fits, something else must take its place.

    That search becomes the next great adventure.

    Not the search for another thrill.

    Not the search for another conquest.

    The search for a life worth inhabiting.

    Sometimes we are too blind, too impatient, or too preoccupied with our ambitions to recognize that the heavenly garment is already draped across our shoulders. We spend years searching for a destiny, an identity, a purpose, convinced that fulfillment lies somewhere beyond the next horizon. Only much later, looking back across the decades, do we realize that we were already wearing the very garment we sought. We simply lacked the wisdom to recognize it.

    I am one of those people.

    As I write this at sixty-four, I find myself looking back to the age of twenty-seven. The year was 1989. It was my final week in Oakland. My belongings were packed into boxes. My future hovered before me in a haze of excitement and uncertainty. I was preparing to leave Northern California for the desert, where I had accepted a full-time position teaching college writing. The move felt momentous, as though I were crossing not merely a few hundred miles of highway but an invisible border between one life and another.

    Before making the four-hour drive through the furnace heat of an August afternoon, I took my car in for service. While mechanics disappeared beneath the hood, I wandered through the loose ends of my final days in Oakland. I had no idea I was standing on the threshold of the life I was meant to live. At twenty-seven, I believed my real story had not yet begun. Looking back now, I can see that it already had.

    This is the story of a day when I was exactly the person I was supposed to be and was too oblivious to recognize it.

    Hungry for lunch while my car was being repaired, I walked to a nearby food court. It occupied an industrial corner of Oakland where the landscape seemed engineered to extinguish hope. Warehouses, loading docks, chain-link fences, and cracked asphalt stretched toward the horizon. The building itself looked less like a place to eat than an aircraft hangar awaiting condemnation.

    Inside, a dozen small eateries lined the walls beneath humming fluorescent lights that washed everything in a pale, exhausted glow. The air smelled of frying oil, grilled meat, bleach, and diesel exhaust. Most of the customers were laborers in reflective vests and steel-toed boots. They sat alone at scarred tables, staring into burritos, chow mein, and paper cups of coffee with the vacant gaze of people whose workday was only half over. No one lingered. No one laughed. The entire place felt like a refueling station for the worn-down and overworked—a temporary shelter before they returned to the machinery, noise, and concrete waiting outside.

    I ordered a combo plate. I no longer remember what it was exactly—chicken and rice perhaps, or some equally forgettable meal. While waiting for my order, I bought a large glass of cold orange juice.

    I was about to take my first sip when a commotion near one of the counters caught my attention.

    A young man, about my age, was struggling to remain upright. He was tall and painfully thin, dressed in faded jeans and a blue T-shirt. His face was pale. His legs trembled beneath him. He explained that he had just sold blood so he could afford something to eat and now felt as though he might pass out.

    An older man behind a Greek food counter looked at me and said, “Give him your orange juice.”

    Without hesitation, I carried the glass over.

    The young man began to sink toward the floor. I slipped an arm around him and held him as he dropped to one knee. With my other hand, I lifted the orange juice to his lips.

    He drank.

    I can still see his eyes.

    Nearly thirty-eight years later, I remember them with startling clarity.

    What struck me was not merely hunger. I had seen hungry people before. What I saw in that moment was a profound loneliness, a depth of sadness and wanting that went far beyond the need for food. This was a man who needed more than calories. He needed kindness. He needed dignity. He needed someone—anyone—to care whether he existed.

    As I held him, I knew instantly that the combo plate I had ordered would never be mine.

    It belonged to him.

    What I did not know at the time was that I was wearing the garment I had been searching for all along.

    I did not know that fulfillment had arrived quietly and without fanfare.

    I did not know that for a brief moment I was exactly the person I was meant to become.

    At twenty-seven, I still believed happiness would arrive through achievement, adventure, romance, status, or some future version of myself that was stronger, wiser, and more accomplished. Yet in that forgotten food court, surrounded by tired workers and fluorescent lights, none of those things mattered.

    What mattered was lowering myself to help another person.

    What mattered was service.

    What mattered was love.

    The bread we hunger for most is rarely the bread we imagine. We spend years chasing appetites, ambitions, pleasures, and identities, believing they will finally satisfy us. All the while, the deeper hunger waits patiently beneath them.

    The daily bread is not merely what sustains the body.

    It is what enlarges the soul.

    Whenever I hear the words, “Give us this day our daily bread,” I do not think of loaves, bakeries, or even hunger.

    I think of the sadness in that young man’s eyes.

    And I remember the afternoon when, without realizing it, I found the nourishment I had been seeking all along.

  • Retiring the Satyr

    Retiring the Satyr

    I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, an era that treated recreational sex not merely as pleasure but as a pathway to transcendence. Television, movies, music, magazines, and bestselling novels all sang from the same hymnal. Liberation was the new gospel. Desire was the new sacrament. Happiness, we were told, awaited those bold enough to cast aside restraint and pursue every appetite without apology.

    The adults around me absorbed the message. Parents and their friends attended parties where alcohol flowed freely, clothes disappeared, and the soundtrack from Hair supplied the liturgy. Men’s magazines sat openly on living room coffee tables like decorative centerpieces. Nobody hid them. Nobody seemed embarrassed. They were advertisements for a particular vision of the good life.

    As a teenage boy with raging hormones and a vivid imagination, I absorbed the lesson completely.

    The images and stories convinced me that fulfillment lay in becoming a brazen sexual adventurer. I wanted the muscular body, the effortless charm, the magnetic confidence. I wanted admiration. I wanted conquest. What I did not understand was love. I knew little about devotion, sacrifice, responsibility, or the quiet dignity of caring for another person. Society’s vision of transcendence involved acquiring experiences, not serving people. Other human beings existed primarily as supporting characters in the drama of one’s own desires.

    The consequences of such a worldview are predictable. When people become instruments for self-gratification, hurt feelings, disappointment, alienation, and moral confusion inevitably follow. The bill always arrives, even if it arrives years later.

    Yet even after I grew older and recognized the folly of that outlook, a small part of that younger self remained alive inside me. The fantasy did not simply disappear. It lingered like an old song whose melody still occasionally drifts through the mind. The grand vision of endless Bacchanalian delights never entirely surrendered the stage.

    The challenge became learning not to romanticize it.

    There is a temptation to keep looking backward, to imagine that fulfillment was hiding somewhere in those abandoned fantasies. But looking backward can become its own form of captivity. The story of Lot’s wife endures because it captures a permanent human weakness. We long for the places we have outgrown. We become attached to identities that no longer serve us. We mistake fixation for vitality.

    In reality, selfishness, entitlement, and obsession are forms of death. They narrow the soul. They reduce the world to a mirror.

    I suspect this realization is familiar to anyone who has spent time in an addiction recovery program. Every day counselors sit across from people trying to understand the forces that shaped them decades earlier. The challenge is not simply breaking a habit. It is excavating an entire philosophy of life. Somewhere beneath the addiction lies a vision of happiness that proved incapable of delivering what it promised.

    The task of replacing that vision must be overwhelming.

    I cannot speak for addiction counselors. I can only speak from experience.

    A life devoted to unrestrained hedonism eventually exhausts itself. Chaos has a seductive glamour when viewed from a distance, but living inside it is another matter entirely. The endless pursuit of stimulation becomes tiring. The pursuit of novelty becomes repetitive. What initially feels like freedom gradually resembles bondage.

    Eventually reality intervenes.

    You have a career.

    You have a spouse.

    You have children.

    You have obligations and people who depend on you.

    Maintaining a double life becomes increasingly difficult. You cannot simultaneously inhabit the stable world of family and responsibility while pursuing the perpetual turbulence of adolescent fantasy. Domesticity and satyrhood occupy different planets.

    The older I became, the more I understood that fear has its proper place. Not fear of pleasure itself, but fear of the destruction that follows when pleasure becomes life’s highest value. The consequences are not merely moral. They are practical. Relationships fracture. Finances collapse. Trust evaporates. Even those fortunate enough to avoid financial ruin often leave behind a trail of emotional wreckage.

    Such people are not role models.

    They are cautionary tales.

    The challenge, then, is not merely abandoning an old identity. It is discovering a new one.

    The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that hope is like finding a new garment. I have always loved that image. A garment shapes how we present ourselves to the world. It signals who we believe ourselves to be.

    When the costume of the satyr no longer fits, something else must take its place.

    That search becomes the next great adventure.

    Not the search for another thrill.

    Not the search for another conquest.

    The search for a life worth inhabiting.

  • The Last Voyage of Captain Wrist Presence

    The Last Voyage of Captain Wrist Presence

    As you grow older, some of the things that once enchanted you begin to lose their magic. The familiar tingle of anticipation fades. The objects remain the same, but the spell weakens. If that enchantment is tied to a shared passion—a hobby, a subculture, a tribe—you will eventually find yourself drifting away from the people who still feel its pull. You will resist at first. You will tell yourself that nothing has changed. But something has. Eventually, the separation becomes undeniable.

    You have undergone Hobby Drift: the slow, often involuntary separation from a hobby community that occurs when one’s interests, priorities, and sources of meaning evolve in different directions from those of fellow enthusiasts.

    When I think about Hobby Drift, I think about watches.

    Over the past twenty years, I have forged more friendships through watches than I ever expected possible. Grown men from around the world bonded by steel bracelets, dial colors, lume shots, and the feverish conviction that the perfect collection was only one purchase away. Watch collecting is a peculiar brotherhood. Half support group, half addiction clinic. We compare scars from impulse purchases and premature sales. We confess our relapses. We laugh at our own insanity while secretly browsing for the next acquisition.

    My own horological delirium began in 2005 when I was forty-three years old and convinced that mechanical watches were tiny machines capable of repairing the machinery inside me.

    Twenty years disappeared in a blur of rotating bezels, sapphire crystals, and “just-in-case” divers purchased for adventures that never materialized.

    My attraction to watches is too complicated to reduce to a single cause, but vanity was certainly among the chief conspirators. I was obsessed with what collectors call “wrist presence.” I would see an actor on television wearing an expensive watch and become convinced that the watch was somehow responsible for his confidence, authority, and charisma. I wanted that presence. I wanted that commanding aura. I wanted the illusion of completeness.

    Even then I understood the thought was ridiculous.

    Unfortunately, understanding folly and escaping it are two different things.

    I was an emotional child afflicted with Horological Completionism: the recurring fantasy that one more watch purchase will finally complete one’s collection, identity, or emotional life.

    Then, at sixty-four, mortality tapped me on the shoulder.

    The watch hobby’s siren song did not disappear. It simply became quieter.

    The obsession remained, but something fundamental changed. After two decades, desire finally dimmed beneath the growing awareness that timepieces are no match for time itself. I still wear my watches. I still admire them. But they no longer occupy prime real estate inside my head.

    I have undergone Chronological Surrender: the acceptance that no collection of clocks, watches, calendars, or timekeeping devices can grant mastery over time itself.

    The result was an unexpected misalignment.

    Many younger collectors remained in a state of Horological Messianism: the belief that the next watch will deliver transformation, completion, confidence, status, or personal salvation.

    I do not judge them because I know exactly how it feels.

    I was them.

    Wisdom did not cure me.

    Age did.

    I did not reason my way out of the obsession. I simply reached a point where the obsession could no longer sustain itself. Mortality walked into the room and changed the conversation.

    What frightens me is not losing the hobby.

    What frightens me is losing the community.

    For more than twenty years, watches provided connection, friendship, conversation, and belonging. To drift away from the hobby is, in some sense, to drift away from a part of myself.

    Yet as unsettling as this misalignment is, another one frightens me even more.

    My younger colleagues.

    While I prepare for retirement, they are building careers. They are refining lectures, designing courses, earning tenure, publishing work, and imagining futures that stretch decades ahead of them.

    Their careers are in blossom.

    Mine is entering autumn.

    My final year in the classroom has made me acutely aware of Generational Divergence: the growing separation between individuals at different stages of life, where the same institution simultaneously represents arrival for one generation and departure for another.

    The divergence is occurring in two places at once.

    The watch hobby.

    The college classroom.

    I cannot stop either process.

    The current is too strong.

    I feel less like a participant than a passenger being carried somewhere I did not choose to go.

    At times the sensation resembles exile.

    It reminds me of a scene from Battlestar Galactica. A condemned traitor stands behind a pane of glass as the airlock hisses. He pleads. The crew watches silently. No one is cruel. No one is angry. The decision has simply been made.

    The hatch opens.

    The separation becomes permanent.

    That is what aging sometimes feels like.

    Not tragedy.

    Not injustice.

    Just inevitability.

    There comes a point when those still living inside the warm illusion of endless tomorrows begin, without realizing it, to drift away from those who have glimpsed the shrinking horizon.

    A pane of glass descends.

    Not hostile.

    Not malicious.

    Just real.

    You tap on the glass and wave, hoping to climb back into the cockpit of youth’s ambitions, anxieties, and grand illusions.

    But the hatch has already sealed.

    There is no reentry.

    There is only the quieter work that remains: embracing the season you have been given, building meaning instead of collections, and helping younger travelers navigate a road whose ending they cannot yet see—but inevitably will.

  • The Garage Door That Aged Me

    The Garage Door That Aged Me

    I miss my old Genie garage door opener and the vanished age of competence it represented. The old Genie operated according to a refreshingly primitive philosophy: electricity goes in, button gets pushed, garage door goes up. It demanded nothing more from its owner than a functioning thumb and a basic understanding of cause and effect. It belonged to a world where machines served human beings rather than requiring human beings to audition for the privilege of operating them.

    The new Genie belongs to a different civilization entirely. It greets you like a twenty-year-old Silicon Valley intern conducting a security clearance. Before the garage door will consent to rise six feet into the air, you must download an app, create an account, verify an email address, enable Bluetooth, grant permissions, update firmware, agree to seventeen pages of terms and conditions, and perhaps burn a small offering before the altar of the Cloud. The old Genie made you feel like the master of a machine. The new Genie makes you feel like a bewildered medieval peasant petitioning an invisible digital bureaucracy. Nothing reminds an aging homeowner of his mortality quite like discovering that the garage door now speaks fluent smartphone while he still speaks fluent button.

    Wanting buttons instead of apps is a sign of misalignment. The older I get, the more I recognize this condition. Misalignment occurs when the world quietly changes languages while you continue speaking the old one. It is one of the defining afflictions of the geriatric class. At sixty-four, I found myself replacing the Genie of Old with the Genie of New, and I required assistance from my wife. This was not a proud moment.

    Together we entered the garage. I watched as she climbed a ladder, removed the white plastic cover from the unit, located the Bluetooth button hidden somewhere in its technological intestines, and synchronized our phones. She programmed the second remote I had purchased from Amazon. She solved every problem that had defeated me. When I thanked her, she responded with the kind of observation only a spouse can deliver: gentle in tone, devastating in effect.

    I was, she explained, exactly like one of her sixth-graders. I had no patience. I wanted the universe to suspend operations until my problems were solved. Unfortunately, the universe had declined my request. New problems kept arriving. New technologies kept appearing. My misalignment with the world kept widening.

    At that moment, I realized I had entered a new phase of life. I was no longer merely impatient. I was becoming dependent. My brain still functioned perfectly well, but it no longer possessed the elasticity it once had. Technology evolved like a city rebuilding itself overnight. I evolved with the speed of continental drift.

    In that moment of horror, my thoughts turned to Moria.

    When you’re old, you must prepare for what I call Morian Drift: the gradual sensation that the world has moved on without you, leaving you to wander through the ruins of once-intuitive systems while younger people navigate effortlessly through technological labyrinths you barely understand.

    Moria was once the magnificent underground kingdom of the dwarves, a city of glittering halls, colossal pillars, and staggering wealth. But the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. They awakened the Balrog, a primordial demon of shadow and fire, and their civilization collapsed into ruin. By the time the Fellowship arrives, Moria has become a haunted tomb filled with darkness, crumbling bridges, and the lingering memory of greatness.

    That is how aging sometimes feels.

    You find yourself standing on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, staring at a technological Balrog that younger generations dismiss as a routine software update.

    The Balrog itself is one of Tolkien’s great monsters: a towering demon wrapped in shadow and flame, carrying a fiery whip and trailing a serpentine tail. It embodies chaos, power, and the consequences of pursuing progress without restraint. During the battle, Gandalf confronts the beast upon the bridge. He wins. The bridge shatters. The monster falls.

    Then comes the whip.

    As the Balrog plunges into the abyss, its fiery lash coils around Gandalf’s legs and drags him down into the darkness. The injury is not merely physical. It becomes a life-altering ordeal that carries him through the depths of Moria and up the Endless Stair. The battle ultimately kills him. Victory itself becomes the instrument of his destruction.

    That image stayed with me as I stared at the new Genie opener.

    The garage door was my Balrog.

    Not because it was especially difficult. Not because Bluetooth pairing is inherently terrifying. But because it revealed a truth I had been trying not to notice. My accumulated competence had encountered a new reality and failed. The problem was not the garage door. The problem was the widening gap between myself and the world I inhabited.

    The new Genie delivered what I now call a Balrog Moment: the sudden realization that one’s hard-earned expertise no longer guarantees mastery, forcing a confrontation with aging, obsolescence, and the necessity of reinvention.

    After defeating the Balrog, Gandalf dies. Later he explains his experience in a single haunting sentence:

    “I strayed out of thought and time.”

    That line has haunted me for years because it captures something profound about growing older. You wake up one day and discover that the culture, the technology, and the assumptions that once felt natural have drifted away from you. You have not left the world. The world has left you.

    Fortunately, Gandalf does not remain dead. He returns transformed. The old wizard gives way to a new one. He emerges wiser, stronger, and better suited to the task ahead.

    That is the lesson I took from my garage-door apocalypse.

    The new Genie showed me that I had strayed out of thought and time. But it also showed me that the answer is not surrender. The answer is reinvention. The alternative is permanent residence in Moria, wandering among the ruins while the rest of civilization marches onward without you.

  • The Everyday Vampires Who Feed on Chaos

    The Everyday Vampires Who Feed on Chaos

    Olga Khazan’s article “There’s a Name for the People Who Drain You” examines one of the unavoidable pests of human civilization: the hassler. Hasslers are the emotional pickpockets of everyday life. They drain those around them through relentless criticism, selfishness, bitterness, narcissism, cruelty, cynicism, and, in extreme cases, outright sociopathy. They appear everywhere—in workplaces, families, neighborhoods, and friend groups. No community is immune to them.

    The consequences of prolonged exposure are hardly trivial. To spend years trapped in the orbit of one or more hasslers is to live inside a low-grade psychological emergency. Anxiety rises. Cortisol surges. Depression follows. Autoimmune disorders become more likely. The body keeps score while the hassler keeps talking.

    One of the defining characteristics of the hassler is an appetite for friction. Hasslers are rarely content with peace and stability. They stir the pot, manufacture grievances, incite drama, and transform minor disagreements into theatrical productions. To ordinary people, conflict is exhausting. To the hassler, it is entertainment. The discomfort of others becomes a form of nourishment. Their preferred habitat is chaos because chaos guarantees attention, and attention is the oxygen they breathe.

    Unfortunately, hasslers cannot be avoided entirely. If you belong to a family, workplace, church, club, school, or neighborhood, you will eventually encounter one. They emerge with the reliability of weeds breaking through concrete.

    As I read Khazan’s article, I found myself thinking about the horror film Weapons and its sinister figure, Aunt Gladys. Gladys operates less like a conventional villain than a supernatural parasite. She feeds upon the misery of others with such potency that she seems less human than witch-like. Her power lies not in physical force but in her ability to infiltrate the emotional lives of her victims and convert their suffering into sustenance.

    Viewed through Khazan’s framework, Aunt Gladys may be the ultimate hassler.

    What fascinates me about figures like Gladys is that they often appear strangely hollow. They possess no stable center of their own. They are ciphers, vacuums, nonentities. Because they lack an inner life rich enough to sustain them, they must draw energy from the emotional resources of others. To feed, they must first weaken their prey. They create confusion, vulnerability, self-doubt, and dependency. Only then can they begin extracting what they need.

    In this sense, the hassler resembles a vampire. Not the elegant aristocrat in a velvet cape, but a psychological vampire who feeds not on blood but on attention, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion. The vampire drains the body. The hassler drains the spirit.

    Perhaps this is why hasslers appear so frequently in horror stories. They embody a fear that feels immediately recognizable. Most of us have never encountered a werewolf. Few of us have met a ghost. But nearly everyone has known someone who seemed to feed on conflict, manipulate relationships, and leave every room darker than they found it. Horror films merely give supernatural form to a creature we already know.

    The hassler, then, is not merely a difficult person. The hassler is an archetype. Long before horror movies invented monsters lurking in haunted houses, human beings were already living among people who fed on chaos and misery. The monsters came later. The hasslers came first.

  • How a Zip Code Became a Retirement Plan

    How a Zip Code Became a Retirement Plan

    When my students and I discuss wealth inequality in America, I tell them to stop looking at abstract charts and start looking at real estate. Wealth has many hiding places, but its favorite address is prime property in desirable zip codes. If you want to know who has money, look at who owns the houses everyone else wants but cannot afford.

    Some people inherit these advantages. Others stumble into them through timing. My wife and I are not rich, but in 2002 we purchased a house in Southern California for $450,000 in a neighborhood perpetually described by realtors with the same reverential phrase: “a shortage of inventory.” There are always more buyers than homes. The schools receive high ratings. The tax base is stable. Crime exists, as it does everywhere, but burglaries and auto thefts are footnotes rather than defining features of daily life.

    Over the years, that shortage of inventory became a wealth-generation machine. Today our house could sell for roughly three times what we paid for it. My wife is fifty. I am sixty-four. In about a year, our mortgage will disappear entirely. We did not achieve this outcome through extraordinary brilliance. We happened to buy at a particular moment in history and then stayed put. Age, timing, and geography worked together like silent business partners.

    That reality grants us a degree of financial power that younger generations often do not possess. We are not unusual. Millions of older Americans are sitting atop appreciating assets that have quietly transformed them into members of an accidental property aristocracy.

    The disparity between older and younger Americans has become so pronounced that it may represent the deepest fault line in contemporary American life. This tension forms the backdrop of Joshua Rothman’s essay “Are Americans Too Old?” in which he examines historian Samuel Moyn’s provocative argument that the defining conflict of our era is not between left and right, labor and capital, or urban and rural Americans, but between the young and the old.

    In Gerontocracy in America, Moyn argues that the nation’s character is increasingly shaped not by people in their youth or prime but by those in the final third of life. A less academic translation of the title might simply be: Rule of the Old.

    The demographic trends are difficult to ignore. Americans are having fewer children. People are living longer. The traditional age pyramid is slowly morphing into what Rothman describes as a “top-heavy trapezoid.” In 1920, fewer than five percent of Americans were over sixty-five. By 2060, roughly one-quarter of the population will be.

    Meanwhile, many of the most visible positions of political power remain occupied by people old enough to remember rotary phones, three-network television, and cigarette ads featuring physicians. Younger Americans often feel as though they have been handed a bill for a party they never attended.

    The American Dream once followed a familiar script: go to college, get a job, buy a house, build a family, accumulate wealth. For many Boomers, that script worked remarkably well. To younger generations, however, it can seem as though the ladder was pulled up immediately after the Boomers reached the roof. Young adults today face soaring housing costs, burdensome debt, delayed family formation, and a labor market that often demands far more while offering far less.

    Yet Rothman identifies an irony at the heart of this story. Economically, America increasingly resembles a gerontocracy. Culturally, however, it remains obsessed with youth. The people who hold much of the wealth spend billions attempting not to look old. Every wrinkle is treated as a design flaw. Every gray hair becomes a problem to be solved. We celebrate youthful energy, youthful innovation, youthful disruption, and youthful beauty while entrusting enormous economic and political power to people collecting Social Security.

    The contradiction is almost comic. The nation is governed by senior citizens while being marketed to adolescents.

    Still, Rothman is skeptical of reducing America’s problems to a generational battle. He points to writer Nathan J. Robinson, who argues that Moyn is making a category mistake. The true divide is not primarily between old people and young people. It is between rich people and everyone else.

    Robinson notes that a relatively small slice of older Americans controls a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth. Most seniors are not oligarchs lounging atop mountains of stock certificates. Wealth is not concentrated among the elderly as a class. It is concentrated among the wealthy as a class.

    That distinction matters.

    The retired schoolteacher living on a modest pension has little in common economically with a billionaire hedge-fund manager, even if both qualify for senior discounts at Denny’s.

    In the end, Rothman lands somewhere between the two positions. He agrees that older generations wield disproportionate political influence and that this imbalance deserves scrutiny. Yet he rejects the idea that America’s future should be framed as a generational war.

    After all, every generation is heading in the same direction. The young become middle-aged. The middle-aged become old. Time drafts all of us into the same army eventually.

    The challenge, then, is not to pit generations against one another but to create a society in which each generation can realistically pursue the promises that define the American Dream: economic security, good health, meaningful work, and a hopeful future.

    Otherwise, the dream becomes something stranger and far less noble—a competition to see who can pull the ladder up fastest.