Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • In Search of the Certainty XLE

    In Search of the Certainty XLE

    You can’t understand consumerism until you understand that, in its most potent state, consumerism is a religion that relies on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Consumers mistake eye-catching representations of ideal beauty, happiness, success, and perfection for the ideals themselves. They pursue these commercial shadows, believing that acquiring them will bring them closer to an absolute state of fulfillment.

    What this means is that in late August of 2018, I did not buy a Honda Accord 2.0 Sport. I bought a Honda Serenity. I bought the car because it had handsome features, a reasonable price, and, most importantly, represented coziness and peace of mind. Roomy, vanilla bland, and reliable, the Accord represented Serenity. That was the automotive absolute I wanted, far more than adrenaline, muscle-flexing, or status-seeking.

    My absolute shattered eight years later when reports emerged in the fall of 2026 that three major Honda engines were susceptible to overheating and blown head gaskets, resulting in repairs costing several thousand dollars. I did not buy the worst of the three engines, the 1.5-liter turbo. However, my 2.0-liter turbo was reportedly susceptible to the problem, significantly diminishing my confidence that my Honda would reach 250,000 miles without major repairs. In other words, I no longer owned a Honda Serenity. I owned a Honda Anxiety. Had I bought the 1.5-liter version, I would have been stuck with the Honda Anxiety Deluxe.

    To Honda’s credit, the company extended warranties to 150,000 miles on certain 1.5-liter turbo engines and naturally aspirated four-cylinder engines paired with electric motors in hybrid models. I don’t get an extended warranty with my 2.0-liter, but I have the consolation that my engine apparently didn’t carry enough risk to qualify for one.

    In contrast to my 2018 Honda Anxiety, my wife has a 2014 Honda Serenity, an Accord with a naturally aspirated four-cylinder engine that is legendary for going well over 250,000 miles without major problems. With my wife’s 2014 Accord going to our daughters, who are close to getting their driver’s licenses, and my wife happy to take my 2018 Accord, which I have not told her I have renamed the Anxiety, I am in the market for a new car.

    I’ve set my sights on the Accord’s major competitor, the Toyota Camry. Returning to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I know I am not really buying a Camry. I’m buying a Certainty XLE. At least that’s what I’m hoping for. Toyota’s long track record of making reliable hybrid powertrains gives the Camry its appeal. Do I really believe in this reliability in an absolute sense? No. Everything is relative. Therefore, relatively speaking, the Toyota Camry comes closer to being the Certainty XLE than any other model I can think of.

    Is it dangerous to live inside Plato’s Allegory of the Consumer’s Cave? I’m sure it is. For one, we can suffer from unrealistic expectations. Also, many products are more illusion than substance. However, that is not true of all consumer goods.

    I have a Yamaha upright piano, which I love. I have always found Yamaha pianos, both uprights and grands, to produce the Sweet Sound of Heavenly Angels. My ebony piano represents such bliss, and it delivers. I enjoy my Yamaha so much that if I ever had a bigger house to accommodate a grand piano, Yamaha would be my choice. In this case, the substance and the absolute are one and the same.

    Meanwhile, I’m locked in on the Certainty XLE. I’ve read that the LE, with its smaller tires, will give me even better gas mileage at a lower price. But those 16-inch wheels somehow make the Certainty less fun to own. I can aspire to optimization without denying myself some emotional reward. I am not an absolutist, after all.

  • Confessions of a Recovering Hot Take Addict

    Confessions of a Recovering Hot Take Addict

    I remember being enamored with the hot take about a decade ago. To post something brief and witty in a spontaneous, explosive response to a news event and create the verbal equivalent of a basketball dunk seemed powerful and elevating, especially in a world that was becoming increasingly chaotic and unrecognizable. Showing rapier wit online could turn a frumpy guy sitting at his mechanical keyboard into the verbal equivalent of prime-time Michael Jordan.

    That wouldn’t be me, though. My ability to deliver hot takes is probably slightly above average. I may be too long-winded or too slow to process things. Whatever the case, I’m no hot take champion. But I sure envied the hot take mavens. For a while, I thought excelling in that realm was a ticket to success and self-worth.

    Over time, however, I came to see the compulsion to deliver hot takes as a sort of disease, the result of Internet Brain Poisoning, a condition in which the brain is short-circuited by a paradox: It’s getting too much dopamine and starving for dopamine at the same time. This paradox results in less thinking and more reptilian outrage, which in turn compounds the poisoning.

    I could see the poisoning all around me. So could Sam Harris. He had to get off Twitter. It was too toxic and time-consuming. I heeded his lesson. I also contemplated my own disenchantment with hot takes, so I deleted my Twitter-X account a couple of years ago. I still have a Threads account, but I don’t post on it. When I see people trying to deliver hot takes, I cringe at the memories of Internet Brain Poisoning.

    It turns out that trying to find self-worth and belonging through parasocial relationships is a false path that leaves you starving for genuine human connection. You end up lonely and poisoned by the Internet’s false promises and intermittent dopamine surges.

    I’m not completely free from such poisoning. On Instagram, I still post photographs of watches, mostly G-Shocks, and sometimes tell a brief story about something I find meaningful or funny. But I don’t deliver hot takes or hunger for attention the way I used to. My relationship with social media, a branch of behavior modification I prefer to call dopamine farms, has changed, probably for the better.

    If spending time on dopamine farms is the equivalent of bingeing on a banana split, I’ve cut down to one banana split a week instead of eating ten a day. I guess learning to stop grazing on the dopamine farms all day and night is a form of small progress. Recognizing what these dopamine farms do to us may be the first step toward freedom.

    Dopamine farms began imprisoning us and poisoning our brains around 2010, roughly when smartphones made these platforms more accessible and addictive. Sixteen years later, our democratic norms seem to be deteriorating. As Sacha Baron Cohen recently told Scott Galloway on the Pivot podcast, it’s doubtful these dopamine farms can coexist with democracy.

    It turns out that immersion in short-form videos and weaponized misinformation can make us angry, paranoid, and increasingly unable to inhabit a shared epistemic world in which we can agree on basic facts and cooperate for the betterment of our species.

    During this period, as shared reality and democratic norms gave way to cultural and political polarization, I started listening to podcasts by thoughtful people who critiqued the excesses of that polarization. I’ll mention three: Blocked & Reported, featuring Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal; Uncomfortable Conversations, featuring Josh Szeps; and The Unspeakeasy, featuring Meghan Daum.

    These podcasters are excellent thinkers who have done a great job dissecting the tribalism and groupthink of our time. However, I wonder what they’ll be doing as society moves forward and perhaps tires of hearing about cultural and political polarization.

    To their credit, they do much more than deliver hot takes about the current moment. They offer long-form analysis and interviews, and their independent thinking is welcome. However, they often interrogate cultural excesses so ridiculous that at times it seems they’re shooting dead fish in a barrel.

    Groupthink and Internet Brain Poisoning bring out the worst in people and turn them into caricatures. These podcasters have plenty of caricatures to poke fun at and criticize, but I suspect they’re growing tired of the exercise. I suspect they want to move on to something else.

    These three podcasts have given me comfort over the last five years, but I sense a sea change. I suspect they’ll either change direction or eventually cease to exist. When it comes to dopamine farms, Internet Brain Poisoning, and groupthink, I suspect I’m not alone in my disenchantment. There may be a mass exodus from these platforms, although I know the learning curve can be slow.

    This exodus may take time. The sooner the better.

  • When Beauty Stops Telling the Truth

    When Beauty Stops Telling the Truth

    In “I Was Lucky to Be Alive. But I Missed Being Pretty,” Hannah Viederman chronicles her move to New York at twenty-two to become a bar-mitzvah motivator. The job is essentially that of a party entertainer, making sure everyone in attendance is dancing, socializing, and participating in the festivities. Parents who pay good money for this rite of passage want a heightened fantasy that justifies the expense.

    The job was a welcome improvement over her exhausting schedule of working from five in the morning until eleven at night, juggling catering, babysitting, and staffing jobs at SoulCycle while trying to make it as an actress. As a woman in her early twenties, she was already learning that youth, glamour, and beauty are a kind of drug, and that administering this drug to others can bring success and a sense of self-worth.

    To become a bar-mitzvah motivator, Viederman had to audition against fifty other contenders in tip-top shape, most of whom were professional dancers. She got the job and was delighted. The attire was skimpy, consisting mostly of “too-tight shorts and cheerleader costumes.” She loved the attention the job brought her. She writes, “No matter what happened in the real world, I could stand on a podium in a flash of white lights, looking like the love child of a camp counselor and a prostitute, and feel the desire of a surging crowd.” Staying in shape and performing as a glamorous entertainer gave her a simple, comforting narrative that aligned with the work ethic: Work hard, play the role assigned to you, and reap the rewards.

    But her delight in the limelight came to a sudden halt at twenty-five when she suffered a stroke. She learned from medical experts that strokes among people in their twenties are more common than most people imagine. She also discovered how dramatically a stroke can age a person. She writes, “Having a stroke is like aging 60 years in the course of a few days.” She couldn’t shower on her own. She needed frequent naps. Her vision was blurry. Her hair fell out. She had tremors. The brutality of this new reality brought her dream world to an end. She writes, “Getting sick strips life of its fantasy, like sheets pulled from a mattress for the wash.” I would add a corollary to that insight: Getting old can do the same thing. Youth and beauty are part of a seductive dream, but it’s a confectionary dream that offers few tools for living when things get rough.

    Five years have passed since her stroke, and Viederman has made significant improvements. Her tremors are gone. Her vision has returned. Her face is no longer bloated from steroids. Those years have also given her time to reconsider a distorted value system that made her equate self-worth with the desire her good looks inspired in others. She writes, “I was sick, and now I am better, and I know that youth and beauty are unreliable narrators.” Her job is no longer to be a beautiful body for others to admire and behold. Her new task is to discover what reliable narrator might replace the unreliable one.

    What is the reliable narrator for all of us, sick and healthy, young and old? Perhaps there is no narrator, per se. Perhaps there is a principle worth living by.

    I’m thinking of attorney Reggie Williams, whose story I recently heard on The Moth Radio Hour, in an episode titled “On the Job.” In a story worthy of a screenplay, Williams recounts being unfairly fired by a successful attorney at a time when he and his pregnant wife were struggling financially. Years later, in an ironic reversal, that same attorney had fallen on hard times. Disheveled and desperate, he came to Williams seeking legal advice.

    Williams faced a choice. Should he help the man who had betrayed him when he and his wife were most vulnerable? He decided to help.

    Why? Because Williams had grown up believing that we all encounter other people as we move through life. There’s nothing remarkable about that. What matters is whether those people are better off for having known us.

    That principle offers a more durable foundation for self-worth than youth, beauty, or the admiration of strangers. Viederman’s glamorous appearance could inspire desire, admiration, and envy, but those reactions told her little about her worth as a person. Williams offers another measure: not how others respond to our appearance, but how our actions affect their lives.

    There is also something demanding about his principle. It’s easy enough to be generous toward people who admire us, flatter us, or treat us well. Williams extended his generosity to a man who had treated him badly. He had every reason to refuse, yet he chose to help. His decision suggests that character becomes most visible when doing the right thing offers no obvious reward.

    I don’t think Viederman needs to apologize for missing her beauty. Nor should any of us pretend that aging, illness, and the loss of physical attractiveness are painless. But if youth and beauty are unreliable narrators, perhaps the answer is to stop asking them to tell us who we are. We might instead judge ourselves by a more difficult standard: whether the people who pass through our lives are better off for having known us. That seems a worthy ambition at twenty-five, at sixty-five, or at any age when the mirror begins telling a story we no longer want to hear.

  • The Day I Refused to Laugh

    The Day I Refused to Laugh

    I suspect that had Augustine grown up in Manchester in the 1980s, he would have been a diehard fan of The Smiths. Many of the band’s songs, driven by Morrissey’s forlorn persona, explore feelings of alienation, melancholy, and longing. The narrator of “The Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” sees the world as a forsaken place where estrangement from its relentless barbarism seems inevitable. The narrator of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is broken and restless, aching to find some ultimate source of peace. “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” expresses the raw pain of feeling like an incurable misfit.

    Augustine as a misfit is a powerful theme in Catherine Conybeare’s biography Augustine the African. Conybeare emphasizes that Augustine was African, not Roman in the sense of being a native Italian. He spoke Latin, but he could not hide his accent. He was insecure about his heritage and wrote and thought as an outsider in the Christian world. He never felt at home in Italy, where he spent five years of his life. Most of his life was spent in what is now Algeria and Tunisia. Feeling out of place in a world dominated by Rome had a powerful influence on how he approached his faith and argued with others.

    In modern parlance, we might say Augustine had a chip on his shoulder. Feeling embattled can make us surly and unpleasant, but it can also give us an advantage: We never get too comfortable in the tribe. We never become complacent, drinking the same Kool-Aid as everyone else inside the same silo. We may share some beliefs with these people, but we remain inclined to push back against their conventions.

    In some cases, our perennial identity as the misfit may sharpen our critical thinking skills. We benefit from what might be called Outsider Consciousness: a heightened awareness of society’s assumptions, contradictions, and unwritten rules that develops from living within a culture without feeling fully accepted by it. Belonging can make us feel cozy, but that comfort sometimes comes at the price of conformity and complacency. Estrangement, on the other hand, keeps us uncomfortable enough that our default setting becomes one of scrutiny.

    Feeling like an outsider reminds me of 1973, when I returned to California from Nairobi, Kenya, and attended Earl Warren Junior High. The drinking and pot smoking at Earl Warren were a sharp contrast to my life at Nairobi International School, where I had played with the British version of G.I. Joe dolls, called Action Man.

    One afternoon, four boys approached me, and their leader, Kent Daniels, said he wanted to share a joke. He proceeded to tell a long, tedious story that made no sense, after which he and his friends laughed heartily. I stood there and said, “I don’t get it. It’s not funny to me.”

    Kent patted me on the back and said, “You passed the test. We wanted to see if you’d laugh just to go along with the group. We wanted to make sure you weren’t a chump.”

    By refusing to laugh at something I didn’t find funny, I had established credibility. I was accepted by the group precisely because I hadn’t tried too hard to please them. Kent and his friends were smart. They didn’t want just anyone in their fold. A person had to be intelligent, adhere to an honor code, and perhaps bring something of value through his Outsider Consciousness.

    To this day, I remain fascinated that Kent and his friends had devised a way of testing another person’s authenticity. That I passed their test remains a badge of pride. I suppose Morrissey would have appreciated the occasion, though he might have found something more tragic in it than I did. After all, I was simply a twelve-year-old boy who refused to laugh at a joke that wasn’t funny. Never was. Never would be.

  • In Defense of Halloween

    In Defense of Halloween

    A few days ago, my daughter asked me if I liked Halloween.

    “No,” I said. “It’s gauche.”

    She wasn’t surprised by my predictably grumpy answer. I dislike Halloween, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because I can be more sour than is healthy for a human being. In fact, I’m sour on all holidays because I resent consumer society dictating that I must be ebullient about something I don’t particularly care about.

    But if I’m honest, Halloween can and should be defended. The spectacle of children ranging from three to thirteen going door to door in strange neighborhoods is more than quaint. It’s a ritual in which suburbanites acknowledge that hiding inside their comfortable enclaves is unhealthy and reflects a primitive fear better suited to terrified peasants hunkering down in their potato cellars during shortages and outright famines. Halloween issues a beckoning call: “Hey, suburbanites, it’s time to crawl out of your potato cellars, show some generosity, and engage with the world.”

    Halloween is really about resisting the impulse to hide inside our drywall cocoons and tell the rest of the world to fend for itself. It reminds suburbanites that they need to emerge from their proverbial Bat Caves and acknowledge the existence of their neighbors.

    Halloween is about trust. You trust strangers to walk onto your property in a polite, civil manner. In return, these strangers trust that the candy you give them is, aside from its potent diabetes-inducing properties, safe for human consumption. Pleasantries are exchanged. The ritual of giving and receiving unfolds with good cheer. For one evening, we affirm the principle that a healthy society depends on cooperation, generosity, and trust among its members.

    Halloween is about love. About a dozen times during the evening as I hand out candy, a precious three or four-year-old will struggle to carry an oversized candy bag to my doorway and is so shy that he or she can barely manage to say “trick or treat.” I look at the child and then look at the doting parents standing by my front gate. I know that look. My heart melts because I am witnessing the most precious thing on earth. My inner grouch has been wonderfully annihilated.

    Halloween, then, is an antidote to suburban cynicism, withdrawal and misanthropy. The problem isn’t that we celebrate Halloween on October 31 and open our doors to the world. The problem is that we open our doors only once a year.

  • The Consumer Shangri-La

    The Consumer Shangri-La

    Much to my chagrin and consternation, I have been on a quest for the Consumer Shangri-La, a tiny world in which I surround myself with products that are not only the best in their category but somehow elevate me to a state of transcendence. I’ve become obsessed with coffee rankings involving the seven brands of dark roast sitting on my kitchen counter; fortified soy milk and the way it symbolizes virtue and health in Trader Joe’s recyclable, Edenic green-and-white carton; Greek yogurt and kefir with their magical, life-renewing probiotic properties; oatmeal and buckwheat groats mixed with hemp seeds, promising fiber and a nutritional bonanza; creatine with its supposed power to ward off depression and grant me eternal youth; my half dozen solar Multiband 6 G-Shocks and the comfort of reliable atomic time; my stable of Brooks Ghost Max walking shoes, which make me feel as though I’m floating on clouds while commiserating with the gods; and padded noise-canceling headphones that transport me into the paradise of Baroque oboe concertos, soothing the savage beast inside me.

    All of this is nonsense, of course. To my credit, I’m trying to break free from my consumer obsessions and make room in my brain for heavier intellectual pursuits, such as tackling the newest biography of Augustine, an irascible chap with little tolerance for anyone who deviated from his orthodoxy. I’m also two-thirds finished with my book, but for the last forty-eight hours, I’ve had difficulty writing. I wrote a chapter for my book and a blog post two days ago, but since then, my consumer obsessions have gotten the better of me.

    The good news is that I haven’t been spending time on social media, a hellish place I refer to as the dopamine farms. Unfortunately, abandoning those farms has not diminished my consumer obsessions, as I had hoped. I suspect these preoccupations are distracting me from the emotional challenges of turning sixty-five two days ago and watching so many friends develop cancer and other serious ailments. I wonder whether these late-life chapters generate an anxiety that compels me to retreat into a consumer bubble.

    This retreat may be explained by something that afflicts many of us as we grow older: Terror Management Theory. As the reality of our inevitable death becomes more immediate, we seek refuge in systems that promise certainty, permanence, and protection against the chaos of existence. By elevating our beliefs, values, and possessions into seemingly unquestionable sources of security, we construct psychological bulwarks against the terrifying realization that our bodies will deteriorate, our lives will end, and much of what we cherish lies beyond our control.

    I’m sixty-five, and more and more of my friends are developing serious illnesses or passing to the other side. Yet there I was this morning, standing at my kitchen counter, listening to my Ninja coffee maker make its final gurgling sounds before beeping to announce that my dark roast was ready. I poured it into my giant cream-colored mug, added a generous splash of fortified organic soy milk, and contemplated whether I had finally found the perfect coffee. I knew, of course, that none of these products could protect me from the indignities of aging or the certainty of death. But for the next fifteen minutes, I had a perfect cup of coffee, and that seemed to be enough.

  • Four Things I Would Tell a New College Writing Instructor

    Four Things I Would Tell a New College Writing Instructor

    If I were giving four pieces of advice to a new college writing instructor, I would say this:

    1. Use popular movies to introduce writing themes because movies reflect shared obsessions, anxieties, and concerns that will resonate with your students.
    2. Since your course content and grading will be on Canvas, give your students feedback as quickly as possible. Don’t make them wait more than 24 hours. Prompt feedback shows students that they matter, especially when you see them only once a week in a hybrid class or not at all in an online course.
    3. Show students how AI can produce lame, overwrought writing that is mostly fluff. At the same time, demonstrate how AI can be a useful tool for improving grammar and sentence structure and for learning how to write sandwich paragraphs and follow MLA format.
    4. If you’re teaching in a classroom, encourage students to appreciate the rare opportunity to gather with people from different walks of life and engage in civil discussions about the controversies of the day. Such exchanges sharpen their critical thinking and social skills while creating an environment that stands in opposition to the toxic polarization infecting so much of society today.
  • The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    Because I’ve been absorbing television commercials since the 1960s, I’ve internalized the belief that suffering is a bad thing. To suffer means there’s a glitch in the system, if you will. Television has always told me: “You’re doing it all wrong. You can buy your way into enough pleasure, comfort, and convenience to iron away those ugly wrinkles of human suffering.”

    To internalize the idea that consumerism can overcome human suffering is to undergo a kind of infantilization. Here’s a case in point: I spent over twenty years obsessing over watches, creating a cozy ecosystem to buffer myself from the anxiety and restlessness arising from an existential vacuum. But creating that buffer only allowed those problems to grow and fester. I was in a strange state. I was hyper-focused on watches, but I wasn’t engaged with the real world or with myself. I was both engaged and disengaged at the same time. My life was full of intense mental activity without meaningful psychological engagement.

    This contradiction points to something we might call Disengaged Hyperfixation: a condition in which intense concentration on a narrow interest creates the illusion of meaningful engagement while the individual becomes increasingly disconnected from relationships, responsibilities, and self-examination. I was deeply engaged in the minutiae of watches but disengaged from the emotional problems that required my attention.

    Disengaged Hyperfixation seems to be central to the business model of the Attention Economy. Create undemanding videos in which you repeat the same thing over and over about how amazing this or that watch is. Tell car enthusiasts how superior their favorite brand is to the competition. Talk about a high-protein diet for the millionth time to high-protein disciples. The brutal fact about the Attention Economy and Disengaged Hyperfixation is that you can get lost in these dopamine farms and piss your life away, only to discover too late that you were never meaningfully engaged with the precious, short time you have here on Earth. That realization brings a despair and anguish no YouTube influencer can cure.

  • The United States of Memory Foam

    The United States of Memory Foam

    Last night I dreamed I was working out with kettlebells in my garage. Overcome by a sudden restlessness, I decided to venture away from home by doing a long Farmer’s Walk, an exercise in which you hold a heavy kettlebell in each hand and walk a significant distance as if carrying two suitcases. I decided to take a walk across the entire country.

    As I journeyed through America, I discovered that everyone was an aspiring influencer. The product everyone was advertising on social media was mattresses, the kind that arrive at your doorstep compressed into a box and then inflate before your eyes. Everywhere I went, people were pretending to sleep, wearing fake, blissful smiles while recording video selfies. Living rooms, bedrooms, and other areas of the house had been transformed into home studios. People were so absorbed in their influencer activities that they no longer spoke to one another. Conversation had died. People lived alongside one another but were psychologically worlds apart.

    I decided to walk a considerable distance to Influencer City, where a woman who presided over all the influencers lived at a luxurious resort. She was known as the Influencer Queen. When I arrived, she was having tea and biscuits with her associates beside a swimming pool.

    They regarded me with some curiosity, a man in his sixties carrying two kettlebells. I could see the Queen’s concern, so I assured her that the kettlebells weren’t weighing me down. Something else was crushing me, I explained. I was discouraged by the fragmentation of society. Everyone had devoted themselves to the futile mission of selling dubious mattresses.

    Surrounded by her entourage, the Influencer Queen listened intently, as though my words had affected her deeply. But just as I was reaching the heart of my criticism, someone whispered in her ear that the swimming pool needed renovations, and she immediately lost interest. She turned to her entourage and began discussing the renovations as though I were no longer standing there.

    Realizing that she had no interest in my concerns, I walked away. Forlorn, I tried to make my way home, but I had no idea where I was. I spotted a neighborhood in the distant sunset and decided to try my luck in that direction. The kettlebells remained surprisingly light, but my heart was heavy. In the distance, I heard an aspiring influencer discussing coil count and gel-infused memory foam.

    I sighed in despair. Americans knew everything about memory foam but had forgotten how to talk to one another.

  • Can Movies Save My Soul?

    Can Movies Save My Soul?

    I write as an agnostic, so this is not a sermon. It is a meditation on Philippians that leads to what I see as three major orientations toward life.

    I’ll begin with Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. I’m fascinated by Philippians because it defines the Christian message in a way that goes against human instinct. Throughout history and across cultures, the human default setting has been to prefer power, convenience, comfort, and pleasure over a life committed to a higher cause. But in Philippians, God comes to Earth, denies himself glory and power, and instead lowers himself to love and serve others. His life becomes a model for us, one that demands imitation.

    If we study his life, we learn that life is not a plaything, a toy designed to provide pleasure and excitement. Contrary to much of modern psychology, with its emphasis on self-agency, autonomy, and self-individuation, life does not belong entirely to us. It contains a purpose greater than our instincts for pleasure, power, and self-actualization. Philippians teaches us that our purpose is to lower ourselves in order to love and serve others. Christianity at its best is a distillation of that message in all its potency.

    Talk is cheap, of course. Many have marveled and wept at the beautiful, albeit challenging, message in Philippians and preached about it, but few have actually lived it. The literature suggests that Saint Francis of Assisi lived such a life. A life of self-renunciation in imitation of Christ, embracing poverty over riches, is rare indeed.

    When I first contemplated this humble life, I framed existence as a choice between two orientations: self-renunciation in service to God or self-gratification in service to our baser instincts. But as I’ve watched and enjoyed Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan discussing movies and culture on the Netflix presentation of the podcast The Big Picture, I’ve come to recognize a third orientation, one that may help explain my agnosticism.

    These three podcasters, who strike me as secular, seem to genuinely love what they do. No doubt about it, they work hard, slogging through hundreds of mediocre movies a year and occasionally encountering a few good ones. They are extremely smart, talented, and passionate about their work. They don’t strike me as greedy people who worship at the altar of money or lead grotesquely hedonistic lives that would make Gollum blush with shame.

    They are cosmopolitan and educated. They believe in smart conversations, the pleasures of nuanced analysis, the wonder of good art, and the power of storytelling. They understand the vitality cinema brings to culture. A successful movie becomes a sort of muse. It informs society. It reflects society. It changes society. It shares a language with society. Fans of Wayne’s World or A Few Good Men frequently quote famous lines, evidence of the permanent stamp these movies have left on them.

    A great movie like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey or Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything creates a text for endless discussion. Such movies transcend entertainment by disrupting culture, changing the way we see things, and illuminating aspects of the human condition we may never have considered.

    To see art, and movies specifically, as a place of transcendence suggests that art, not religion, may be the muscle humanity needs to flex to stay vibrant. This is not a dogmatic transcendence tied to one doctrine or another. Watching The Godfather won’t help you on Judgment Day. But it will make you interrogate the messy relationship between business and family loyalty in new ways.

    Great movies won’t give you a religious doctrine, but they can help you distinguish between sacred and profane time, as in Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping. Movies don’t shut down conversations with absolute dogmas. They open new conversations that keep the mind alive. That’s what I see in the work of the talented Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan.

    I worry that a life of religious certainty, with its monk-like retreat into poverty and blissful prayer, may cut us off from art in all its contradictory, life-beating spectacle. I worry that religious doctrine can become stagnant and two-dimensional in a way that art remains dynamic and multidimensional.

    At the same time, when I contemplate the love described in Philippians, my heart longs for such a life. I wonder if such a life could save me and the lost, self-deceiving souls in Weapons, Eddington, and Bugonia.