Category: culture

How We Went from Breakfast Mascots to Political Tribes

A few nights ago, I watched Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul, the four-part autopsy of a company that promised salvation from combustible cigarettes and instead managed to hijack a generation’s taste buds. Juul framed itself as a public-health crusader. What it actually built was a sleek delivery system for addiction, turbocharged by flavors engineered to lodge themselves deep in the dopamine circuitry of young brains.

Former employees and users all pointed to the same thing: mango. Mango wasn’t just a flavor; it was an event. People didn’t vape mango casually. They marinated in it. Mango was the hook.

Watching this, I was transported back to my own childhood and my first chemical romance: Cap’n Crunch.

There was something about that unholy alliance of corn flour, palm oil, and brown sugar that short-circuited my will. I didn’t want moderation; I wanted saturation. My parents imposed limits, which only deepened my resolve to grow up as fast as possible so I could make my own enlightened dietary decisions—namely, Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I failed to notice the irony that a grown man subsisting on sugar cereal would represent not maturity but infantilization.

Cap’n Crunch’s true genius wasn’t just sweetness. It was proliferation. The same cereal reappeared in endless costumes—Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Crunch—each one offering the illusion of choice. King Vitamin was the most audacious iteration: Cap’n Crunch in a health halo, a masterclass in rebranding junk as virtue. Lipstick on a pig, poured into a cereal bowl.

Then there were the mascots. Quisp the Martian. Quake the muscle-bound coal miner. As a child steeped in superhero comics and Hulk fantasies, I gravitated toward Quake. Strength. Power. Identity. I didn’t realize I was choosing a brand avatar, not a breakfast.

Cereal companies were having a field day. We watched cartoons while eating the very product being advertised between scenes. It never occurred to us that we were being conditioned—trained to celebrate a non-nutritive food substance that dissolved teeth and rewired appetite. The Juul kids didn’t know it either. They thought they were buying into a sleek, adult lifestyle. What they were really purchasing was dependence, with a mango aftertaste.

What troubles me now is that adults don’t seem any less susceptible.

Today, many people consume political tribes the way we once consumed sugar cereal and flavored vapor. Politics has been repackaged as lifestyle branding—complete with slogans, merch, cosplay, and dopamine hits. The substance is thin. The stimulation is constant. Critical thinking is nowhere to be found.

These aren’t political commitments; they’re identity snacks. Sugar rushes masquerading as convictions. Defense of one’s “views” consists of chanting talking points with the same reflexive loyalty I once reserved for Cap’n Crunch. No wonder the country feels like it’s in free fall. We haven’t grown up—we’ve just swapped mascots.

We are a nation of adult children, hooked on political flavors the way kids were hooked on cereal and Juul users were hooked on mango. Politics has become a consumer product: addictive, polarizing, shallow, and wildly profitable. All dopamine. No nutrition.

January 29, 2026
The Hot Take Is the Chronic Cough of Something Gone Wrong

We live in a Hot Take culture, and on balance, hot takes do more harm than good.

For a decade, I feasted on them. Back when it was still called Twitter, my days were seasoned with sharp one-liners, instant judgments, and rhetorical mic drops. It felt bracing at first—intellectual espresso shots delivered in 280 characters. But over time, the feed stopped feeling like conversation and started feeling like a room full of people shouting clever insults at a fire.

About a year ago, I deleted my account. By then, I barely recognized the people I once followed. Everything had gone shrill. Bombast replaced thought. Even the impressive hot takes—clever, ruthless, beautifully phrased—eventually blurred into something anesthetizing. A constant buzz that left me dull rather than informed.

I didn’t quit social media entirely. What I actually want is boring, old-fashioned breaking news. Tell me what happened. Tell me where. Tell me when. I don’t need a verdict within thirty seconds. So now I drift through places like Threads, mostly lurking. Many of the smart people I used to follow migrated there. Some still do what they’ve always done: post headlines and context. Others can’t resist the gravitational pull of commentary. News first, hot take immediately after. Their allies cheer them on inside familiar silos, and the machine rewards escalation.

To be fair, not everyone posting is chasing dopamine. Some journalists are doing real work. They have massive audiences and feel a genuine obligation to interpret chaos in real time. They live in a crucible of praise and abuse, applause and outrage. That kind of constant psychic weather can’t be healthy, but the motive is understandable—meaningful engagement. If this were a pre-digital era, they’d still be doing something similar, just with deadlines instead of feeds. Slower. Quieter. Possibly saner.

But then there’s another species entirely: the professional Hot Taker.

This person has mastered the form. Their posts are short, sharp, structurally elegant. A good hot take is witty, memorable, and instantly legible. It lands. It spreads. It racks up likes and reposts like a slot machine hitting cherries. Success is measurable, public, addictive.

And that’s the trap.

When identity and self-worth become tethered to engagement metrics, the self gets commodified. Everything becomes raw material for the next take. Nuance is a liability. Hesitation is death. The hot take demands boldness, outrage, and certainty—even when certainty is fraudulent.

At that point, the Hot Taker is no longer responding to the world; they are farming it.

I’ve watched thoughtful, decent people slide into this role. At first, their posts are useful. Then they overshare. Then they pick fights they don’t need to fight. Eventually, their online life becomes a series of skirmishes that feel exhausting even to sympathetic observers. They can’t stop—not because they’re evil, but because the machine has trained them well.

So yes, we live in the Age of the Hot Take, where people measure their purpose by their ability to generate applause from the faithful. Hot takes don’t convert anyone. They delight the choir and enrage the opposition. Polarization intensifies. Nothing moves.

Is it unfair to call this a disease? I don’t think so.

First, there’s the hijack. The belief that constant expression equals relevance, that relevance equals worth. It’s a delusion reinforced by numbers. Likes don’t satisfy; they sharpen hunger.

Then there are the consumers. By liking and reposting, they feel they’re participating in history, bending reality toward justice. In practice, they’re mostly helping tribes harden their borders. Everyone believes they’re weaponizing truth. No one notices the epistemic ground eroding beneath them.

When COVID hit, I assumed the crisis would force clarity. Instead, it deepened the divide. Now measles—a disease we already solved—is making a comeback. Science, once the shared floor, has become another battlefield. If pandemics and preventable deaths can’t bring us together, hot takes certainly won’t.

You can fire off the most righteous, viral condemnation imaginable. Measles will still spread.

So what should we do instead?

The answer isn’t attractive. Reality hasn’t hit hard enough yet. Historically, people abandon fantasy only when consequences become unavoidable. Until then, we chatter. We posture. We perform. Hot takes aren’t solutions. They’re symptoms—the chronic cough that tells you something deeper is wrong.

January 28, 2026
While Others Fell in Love, I Was Benching

In 1975, when I was fourteen and already grooming myself for eventual induction into the House of Schwarzenegger, I was struck with existential terror by an article in The San Francisco Chronicle. Futurists, it announced, were preparing us for the inevitable: Earth would soon be too crowded, too exhausted, too used up. Humanity would have to evacuate—via lunar shuttles—and establish solar-powered colonies in outer space.

The article leaned heavily on the ideas of Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton physicist whose vision would later crystallize in The High Frontier. We would live, he proposed, in “artificial, closed-ecology habitats in free orbit,” powered by vast solar arrays. Don Davis supplied illustrations: cottages, rolling green hills, fountains, happy citizens strolling through a weightless Eden that looked suspiciously like a New Age brochure for upscale suburbia.

Then I noticed something horrifying.

Everyone in the drawings was skinny. Not lean. Not athletic. Skinny in a faint, undernourished, anemic way. It dawned on me with the force of revelation: no gravity meant no resistance. No resistance meant no gyms. No iron. No pumping. My muscles would dissolve. I would become what I most feared—a tomato with toothpicks stuck into it, drifting through space in orthopedic sandals.

A forced relocation to an orbital colony wouldn’t just end bodybuilding. It would end me.

That moment revealed two durable truths about my character. First, I did not like change. Even minor disruptions—replacing stereo components, finding a new health club—felt borderline traumatic. The idea of being compelled to move to space was not exciting; it was annihilating. Second, bodybuilding wasn’t a hobby. It was a containment field. Anything that threatened it threatened my psychic infrastructure.

This may explain why girls confused and frightened me.

A few tried, valiantly, to breach my defenses. One was Mary Claybourne, a high school sophomore who had a very obvious crush on me. One afternoon at my locker, she handed me a birthday card. On the front it read: If It Feels Good, Do It! Inside, she had written a note inviting me to ask her out.

I remember standing by a pillar near the courtyard, reading her card, while Mary sat at a picnic table with her friends, looking at me with naked hope. The look was unmistakable. She wanted me to stride across the concrete, tear open my street clothes, emerge in a cape, and sweep her into a romance worthy of daytime television.

Instead, I stared at her beautiful eyes and thought only this: How can I possibly love this girl when civilization is on the brink of relocating to a gravity-free space colony where I won’t be able to bench press?

The question was absurd. Knowing it was absurd did nothing to soften the dread.

Looking back now, it’s clear I wasn’t ready for intimacy. Some teenagers arrive relatively intact, with enough internal coherence to connect to others without panic. I was not one of them. I was fragmented. Provisional. A self still under construction. I wasn’t merely a bodybuilder—I was a builder in the most literal sense. I had to assemble myself first. An embryo cannot date.

And yet, I sometimes wonder if that’s a convenient story. Maybe I should have waded into the shallow end of teenage romance and learned to flail. Maybe sinking a little would have strengthened muscles bodybuilding couldn’t touch. Maybe the gym wasn’t just discipline—it was refuge. A retreat from the unpredictable demands of real life.

What I know now is this: girls represented the same threat as space colonies. I liked them too much. I sensed that if I surrendered to romance, my monastic devotion to iron would falter. I had no talent for balance. If I served one master, I would resent the other.

So, overwhelmed by choice, I chose the one world I could control.

On Friday night, I did not date Mary Claybourne.

I dated the bench press.

January 26, 2026
Why Good Salsa Matters

In 1967, my father took me to the grand opening of a Taco Bell in San Jose, California. This was my first encounter with fast food as spectacle—and with teenagers as a category of human being. They stood behind the registers in a loose formation, and every one of them appeared to be afflicted with the same alarming facial condition. Spots everywhere. An outbreak.

I was five. I did the math available to me. Had a disease swept through the workforce? Did Taco Bell exposure cause lesions? Were the refried beans radioactive?

I asked my father what was wrong with their faces.

“They’re pimples,” he said. Then, without hesitation, he added, “According to Aristotle, God gives pimples to teenagers to teach them humility.”

I knew immediately this was untrue. Not because I had read Aristotle—I hadn’t—but because I knew my father. This was him doing what he loved most: inventing authority on the spot. He also harbored a low-grade contempt for teenagers, whom he regarded as overconfident and undercooked. Acne, in his view, was divine pushback. Cosmic slapstick.

The pimples unsettled me, but they did not interfere with my appetite. I ate my tacos and frijoles under the Taco Bell canopy, admiring the beige stone “Mexican” architecture—the aesthetic equivalent of a sombrero on a filing cabinet. The food itself was a novelty. We didn’t eat Mexican food, and Taco Bell certainly wasn’t Mexican food, but it was a portal. A gateway drug.

Within a few years, my mother was making tacos, burritos, and enchiladas at home. Our Mexican-American neighbors, Mike and Felice Orozco, made salsa from ingredients grown in our own backyards. The salsa lived on the coffee table in a volcanic tureen, like something sacred and faintly dangerous. You could smell it the moment you walked into the living room—chilies, onions, garlic, alive and unapologetic.

The color stopped you. A deep ruby red. Not restaurant red. Not industrial red. Real red. I have eaten excellent salsa over the decades, but nothing has ever matched the salsa Felice Orozco taught my mother to make in the late 1960s. Even now, if a Mexican restaurant brings out a pre-meal salsa that approaches that standard—even halfway—I take it as a sign of moral seriousness.

Felice Orozco’s salsa wasn’t just delicious. It was philosophical. It carried an unspoken argument about what survives and what matters. When families pass down food traditions, they’re saying something quietly radical: some knowledge deserves care, repetition, and fidelity. This isn’t about novelty or performance. It’s not about artisanal swagger or bragging rights. It’s about love made practical. Wisdom with onions.

So what was Taco Bell to me as a child? A desecration of Mexican food? No. It was a signpost. A crude outpost with a faint aroma of the real thing. It pointed toward a richer city beyond itself—a place where food meant connection, where flavors carried memory and generosity.

The sign didn’t point south.
It pointed to Felice Orozco’s house.

January 26, 2026
The Potato Diet and the Gospel According to Mel Brooks

Recently, I fell down a nutritional rabbit hole and emerged clutching a potato. Not just any potato, but the cooked-then-cooled kind—Idaho and sweet potatoes transformed into resistant starch, that miraculous category of food that sounds like it should be protesting something. Resistant starch, I learned, behaves like a probiotic: it feeds the gut microbiome, supports immunity, improves metabolic health, lowers cholesterol, and may reduce colorectal cancer risk. It even helps regulate appetite hormones, which is a polite way of saying it tells your brain to stop behaving like a feral raccoon.

There’s a whole taxonomy of resistant-starch foods, but I’m a simple man. I’m focusing on potatoes. I eat them cold from the fridge or gently reheated. Lunch and dinner get a potato. Snacks get a yam blended into yogurt like some deranged Thanksgiving parfait. If it’s an Idaho potato, I dress it up with plain Greek yogurt, nutritional yeast, and a reckless amount of herbs and spices. This is what refinement looks like in 2026.

So far, the results have been suspiciously positive. I feel energized. My gut feels calm and cooperative. I enjoy the strange pleasure of eating potatoes at all hours of the day. The real stars, though, are the yams and sweet potatoes—especially the purple Japanese sweet potatoes, which look like food designed by a medieval alchemist with a sense of humor.

Then came today.

On the Schwinn Airdyne, I felt… powerful. Not delusional powerful. Not “I should enter a CrossFit competition” powerful. Just quietly, inexorably strong. I burned 825 calories in 62 minutes. The last time I broke 800 calories on that bike was three years ago, back when my joints were younger and my expectations were less realistic.

Do I attribute this personal record to my potato regimen? I don’t know. The potatoes could be a placebo. I could be committing the cardinal sin of confusing correlation with causation. More likely, I just had one of those rare days when physiology, psychology, and stubbornness line up like planets.

I don’t expect to hit 800 calories regularly. Seven hundred is already serious business. Eight hundred requires intent. Eight hundred is a flex. It’s bragging rights territory—the kind of obsessive pursuit Howard Ratner brings to the giant black opal in Uncut Gems, except with less jewelry and more sweat pooling under a stationary bike.

There was another factor, too. Today’s ride was a response to yesterday.

My daughters were at Knott’s Berry Farm. My wife was out seeing Leslie Jones. I usually enjoy solitude, but yesterday it curdled. The headlines were bleak. My creative energy flatlined. The world felt slightly out of phase, like a record spinning at the wrong speed. When things get that dark, my internal soundtrack defaults to King Crimson’s “Epitaph”—a song that sounds like it was written for someone weeping against a stone wall at the end of history.

I got through the night with two documentaries: Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! and Secret Mall Apartment. One was joyous defiance. The other was a reminder that some people respond to modern despair by secretly building illegal sanctuaries inside dead shopping centers.

Mel Brooks said something that landed with force. Life is hard. We suffer loss. But piling misery on top of misery—indulging self-pity—only deepens the wound.

I took that personally. I suspect the 825-calorie burn was my way of replying: I hear you, Mel. I love you. I’m choosing motion over rumination.

And so I did.

January 25, 2026
Living in the Bottle: A Life Spent Building Cozy Universes

My parents like to remind me that I grew up poor in a cockroach-infested assisted-living situation in Gainesville, Florida. The place was called Flavet Villages—Flavet, if you lived there, which everyone did because there was nowhere else to go. These were not “villages” in any meaningful sense. They were World War II–era Camp Blanding army barracks, uprooted from Jacksonville and dropped into North Florida like surplus history.

What I love, even now, is the audacity of the name. Flavet Villages. It’s a master class in rebranding: take a barracks crawling with roaches and give it a pastoral plural noun. It’s the real-estate equivalent of dabbing Vicks VapoRub on your neck and calling it Menthol d’Après-Minuit.

Flavet sat near an alligator swamp and a stretch of forest that felt mythic to me, even then. A Mynah bird lived there—always on the same branch, like a sentry or an oracle—and before bedtime my father and I would walk to the edge of the woods and talk to it. At dusk, the tide dropped, and the swamp revealed itself. Alligator dung, fully expressed. The smell was feral and unmistakable. While most people would recoil, I found it oddly soothing—bracing, even. As if the universe were saying, You’re here. This is real.

As a native Floridian, I sometimes wonder—with a perverse sense of pride—whether my early exposure to fecal alligator swamps permanently rewired my sensory thresholds in ways outsiders could never understand.

One evening, as my father and I stood at the forest’s edge, we heard a distant radio playing Juanita Hall’s rendition of “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific. The song is about an island paradise that seems achingly close yet forever unreachable, and it’s meant to induce longing and melancholy. But I felt none of that. Paradise was already present. I was standing in an enchanted forest with my storytelling father, a talking bird, mythical alligators nearby, and music drifting in like a siren call. This was not longing; this was habitation. I lived in a fairy tale and had no interest in leaving it.

That same ache—for a magical enclosure—returned when I was five and living in the Royal Lanai Apartments in San Jose. The grounds were landscaped with sunflowers and volcanic rock, and as I walked to the playground I would stare at the flower beds and wish I could shrink myself down to Lilliputian size and live inside them forever. That was my first lesson in coziness: the idea that a small, bounded world could feel safer, richer, and more alive than the vast one surrounding it.

Then came I Dream of Jeannie. Barbara Eden’s blonde goddess lived inside a genie bottle—a jewel-lined cocoon with a purple circular sofa and pink satin pillows glowing like some erotic reliquary. More than anything, I wanted to live in that bottle with her. The impossibility of that wish crushed me with the same quiet sadness as “Bali Ha’i.” That the bottle was, in reality, a painted Jim Beam decanter only deepened the metaphor. I was intoxicated by fantasy long before I understood the word.

Flavet Village, the swamp forest, the Royal Lanai flower beds, Jeannie’s bottle—these were all variations on the same theme: cozy ecosystems that stood apart from the real world while quietly shaping how I understood it. Without those parallel universes, reality would have been flatter, harsher, less survivable.

Now, in my sixties, I’ve built a new ecosystem: my watch world. A watch box holding seven watches that I tend like a mother hen, fretting over straps and bracelets, endlessly optimizing the rotation to extract maximum pleasure from time itself. It’s a controlled universe, one I can enter when the outside world becomes too loud or incoherent. I always come back—but I’m aware of the danger. The pull can be strong. Swapping a Tropic strap for a Waffle may calm me in the moment, but eventually I have to step out of the bottle, leave the forest, and reenter a world that demands attention, judgment, and responsibility.

The fantasy sustains me. It just can’t replace the world.

January 25, 2026
Chuck Klosterman, Joe Montana, and the Shape of Greatness

I’ve been reading—and now listening to—Chuck Klosterman on music and culture for over a decade. He’s a rare specimen: a true hipster precisely because he has no interest in being cool and too much interest in ideas to waste time polishing his image. His new essay collection, Football, keeps that streak alive. I’m consuming it on Audible while trying to erase myself on the Schwinn Airdyne, pedaling hard enough to regret my life choices. Every so often, Klosterman drops a line that forces me to slow the bike, release the upper-body levers, and frantically thumb notes into Google Docs like a deranged monk copying scripture mid-martyrdom.

Today’s line stopped me cold: “Greatness is about the creation of archetypes.” He was talking about the Beatles. Not record sales. Not chart dominance. Greatness, he argued, is the act of filling an archetypal mold so completely that everyone who follows can only approximate it. They may be talented, even brilliant, but they’re echoes, not origins. The mold has already been cast.

That idea made me think of Klosterman as a fourth grader, devastated when the Cowboys lost the 1982 NFC Championship to the 49ers on Joe Montana’s pass to Dwight Clark. I was living in the Bay Area then, and Montana instantly became something more than a quarterback. He wasn’t a flamethrower like Elway or a mythic warhorse like Staubach. He was smaller, calmer, unnervingly steady. He slew the Goliath that had humiliated the Niners for years. Montana wasn’t just great—he was David with a slingshot. That archetype mattered more than his stat line, and for a time it made him the greatest quarterback alive.

I’m not a Beatles devotee, but I understand why people place them on that pedestal. Archetypes don’t require personal devotion; they require recognition. You can see the mold even if you don’t want to live inside it.

Earlier in the book Klosterman expressed his genuine, hard-earned contempt for Creed—contempt earned the old-fashioned way, through actually listening—and my mind wandered to the opposite of greatness: a strange kind of cultural infamy where a band becomes a symbol rather than a sound. That’s when I realized I’d mixed up Creed with Nickelback, which led me down a brief but intense psychological spiral when I couldn’t find the documentary Hate to Love: Nickelback on Netflix. That film makes it painfully clear that Nickelback’s “crime” is not incompetence or fraud. They’re talented, professional, and wildly successful at pleasing their audience. Their real achievement is unwanted: they became the most socially acceptable band to hate.

Nickelback’s loathing isn’t sincere. It’s ritualized. Once social media weaponized contempt for them, sneering became a form of virtue signaling—a low-effort way to broadcast cultural superiority without doing the work of listening. Most of the haters probably couldn’t name three songs. The scorn isn’t about music; it’s about belonging.

Which is why I’d love to talk this through with Klosterman. He’s the right mind for it. Also, he might help me straighten out my chronic band confusion. This isn’t new. When I was five, I used to confuse the Monkees with the Beatles. Apparently, my brain has always had trouble keeping its mop-tops and punchlines in their proper bins.

January 21, 2026
Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

“Always be closing,” Alec Baldwin snarls in Glengarry Glen Ross, playing Blake, a blustering emissary of pure cortisol sent to terrify a roomful of salesmen into obedience. Closing, he tells them, is the only thing that matters. Not effort. Not integrity. Not sanity. Close or die. The line is famous because it taps into something already rotting inside us. We don’t just want to close deals; we want to close life. Getting married is a close. Deciding on a religion is a close. Graduating college is a close. Buying a house, buying a car, settling on a diet, hitting a goal weight—each one dangles the same promise: after this, I can rest. After this, I’ll be done.

The culture worships closers. Closers are decisive. Closers have plans. Closers stride forward with laminated confidence. Closers collect ceremonies, milestones, certificates, and Instagram captions. Closing is marketed as maturity itself—the moment when uncertainty is evicted and order takes possession of the premises. Winners close. Losers waffle. That’s the myth.

But closing is a con, and a lazy one at that. It sells the toddler fantasy of permanent comfort: arrive somewhere and stay arrived. Life, unfortunately, does not honor this contract. It leaks, mutates, backslides, and doubles back. I once knew a couple who were desperate to permanently break up with each other. So they got married as a strategy for divorce. They believed the divorce would provide closure—clean lines, sealed chapters, emotional foreclosure. Instead, they remarried. Then divorced again. Then they remarried. Then got another divorce. Closure didn’t show up. It never does. The story simply kept going, indifferent to their paperwork.

The same lie infects consumer life. I know a man who believed salvation came in the shape of a Rolex Explorer. Ten thousand dollars later, he congratulated himself on having found his Exit Watch—the final piece, the closing bell. Within months, he was browsing watches that made the Rolex look like an appetizer. The watch didn’t close anything. It became a monument to the futility of the attempt.

We love the idea of closing because we are exhausted—by the volatility of the world and the chaos inside our own skulls. “Always be closing” offers a fantasy of stillness, a promise that motion can end and anxiety can be put in storage. But it’s just another pressure pitch, no more real than the sales patter Mamet skewered. Life doesn’t close. It revises, reopens, and keeps charging interest. The only thing that truly closes is the sales pitch itself.

January 21, 2026
Why Men Can’t Stop Writing Manifestos

My wife has never been one to traffic in lazy generalizations about men and women, but a few years ago she offered one observation so sharp it lodged itself in my brain. Men, she said, have a peculiar itch that women conspicuously lack: the need to write a manifesto. Not a gentle essay about waking up early to tend tomatoes and eggplant while discovering the joys of fiber and self-care. No. A manifesto is something else entirely—a doctrinal collision, an absolutist thunderclap so brimming with rectitude, so certain of its own world-historical importance, that its author feels morally obligated to broadcast it to the four corners of the earth. Silence would be selfish. Restraint would be unethical.

A manifesto, of course, cannot emerge from a vacuum. It requires a conversion story—preferably violent. The man was once lost, deformed, wandering in a fog of ignorance. Then something happened. The cosmos intervened. He was singled out. Enlightened. Charged with a mission. His truth, having been hard-won and privately revealed, must now be universalized. To keep it to himself would be a crime against humanity. Thus the manifesto is born: part gospel, part grievance, part personal branding exercise.

My wife was not complimenting men. She was diagnosing a particular strain of virulent egotism—one that disguises itself as sincerity and moral urgency while quietly pursuing something else: control. To impose a worldview is to dominate. To dominate is to feel powerful. Strip away the rhetoric and you find that many manifestos are not about helping others live better lives but about arranging the world so it finally stops resisting the author’s will.

Because many men will inevitably produce many manifestos, conflict follows. Doctrines metastasize. Defenses harden. Footnotes sprout like fortifications. Converts gather. Commentaries appear. Some commentaries become so influential they eclipse the original manifesto and establish themselves as superior, corrected versions. The ecosystem expands, competitive and self-referential, like an intellectual CrossFit gym where everyone is chasing the same leaderboard.

What my wife was really saying, I think, is that men don’t create philosophies primarily to serve others. They create them the way athletes build muscle: to compete. A manifesto is intellectual athletics—grandstanding, bluster, and chest-thumping in paragraph form. It’s less a tool for understanding the world than a way to announce dominance within it.

Here is my confession, one I may or may not share when my wife gets home tonight: I, too, feel the pull of the manifesto. The fantasy of a grand conversion, followed by the construction of a flawless, infallible system that explains everything, is intoxicating. But if I’m honest, what draws me to that fantasy isn’t egotism so much as fear. The world is a roiling swamp of ambiguity and uncertainty. A manifesto promises certainty on a silver platter, a pacifier for the anxious adult who wants the noise to stop.

Perhaps my wife is right. Egotism may just be fear in a tuxedo. Men, for whatever reason—biology, culture, testosterone, self-loathing—seem especially adept at projecting their inner chaos onto the world and then mistrusting it for the mess they recognize in themselves. The manifesto becomes a coping mechanism, a way to simulate control in a reality that stubbornly refuses to cooperate.

Women don’t write manifestos because a manifesto lectures. It talks down. It closes the case. Women talk instead. Life, as they seem to understand it, is an open court—conversation, improvisation, shared meaning, surprise, trust. Men, by contrast, barricade themselves inside doctrine, shout it through a megaphone, and grow indignant when no one salutes.

When my wife gets home, I think I’ll abandon the manifesto project. I’ll try something riskier. I’ll start a conversation. I’ll listen.

January 20, 2026
Captain Cancel and the Rise of Domestic Hermit Drift

The other day my wife went to lunch with a longtime friend—call her A—and, as women do with admirable efficiency, they covered marriage in a single sitting. A complained that her husband had been drinking more, growing possessive, increasingly controlling. During the meal, he called her three times. By the third interruption, my wife said, the phone might as well have been sitting at the table demanding a chair. When she told me the story later, I said it reminded me of the Tears for Fears song “Woman in Chains.” She didn’t hesitate. “That’s her life exactly,” she said.

After a pause, the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to me. “I told A you don’t drink,” my wife said. “You’re not jealous or possessive. But you won’t leave the house. You’re a shut-in.”
“Doesn’t he go to the gym?” A asked.
“Not for twenty years,” my wife replied. “He does yoga and kettlebells at home. He’s been trapped in the man cave ever since. And what scares me,” she added, “is that he’s happy.”

I’m not entirely sure I am happy. I just know my tolerance for annoyance is perilously low, and it drops another notch with each passing birthday. I also know that my friends from my formative college years now live scattered across the country, like artifacts from a previous civilization. We’ve grown apart without drama, which is to say, efficiently. Locally, I have two friends. Tom, a wrestling coach, is either teaching or in Santa Barbara with his girlfriend. I see him about once a year, usually when he drives me to Home Depot so I can transport oversized items back to my cave. My other friend, Pedro, is an engineer who is thirty years younger than I am. The generational differences are… pronounced. We have lunch about four times a year. Add it up and yes—half a dozen social encounters annually qualifies me as a shut-in. Which makes me, by default, an authority on a condition many men my age quietly acquire: Domestic Hermit Drift.

Domestic Hermit Drift is the gradual, mostly unintentional retreat of a married man from friendships and public life into the managed comfort of home, where routine, hobbies, and solitude replace the effort and risk of maintaining relationships. It isn’t fueled by hostility or misanthropy but by convenience, irritability, fatigue, and the slow atrophy of social muscles. As his world contracts, his wife’s often expands, creating an asymmetry in which she carries the invisible labor of social connection, public presence, and emotional buffering. The genius of the drift is its stealth. No announcement is made. No door slams. The man simply mistakes peace for fulfillment and stability for sufficiency.

As an expert in Hermit Drift, allow me to identify the warning signs.

First, your sleepwear, gym clothes, and home clothes become indistinguishable. You sleep in gym shorts and a workout shirt, wear them around the house, exercise in them, shower, and rotate in a freshly washed identical set. You call this efficiency. You experience genuine pleasure in this loungewear optimization and feel morally superior to the sheeple who change outfits multiple times a day. Minimalism, you insist, is a virtue.

Second, while your wife and her friends design custom T-shirts and handmade signs for rock concerts in the desert, you remain home on a Saturday night swapping straps on your diver watches. You build watch-rotation calendars. You track wrist time. You rank your collection by annual usage. The fact that you know you wore your Seiko Marine Master for exactly 863 hours last year strikes you as reasonable, even impressive. Others find it alarming.

Third, because your tolerance for irritation is low, you shop only at dawn, when grocery stores are nearly empty and the few people present are still half-asleep—docile, unthreatening, manageable. You take pride in shopping before the rat race wakes up. This dovetails nicely with your time-management philosophy: bed at nine, up at five. By the time the world stirs, you’ve had your coffee, your steel-cut oats, your kettlebell workout, and your canvas grocery bags—your weekly macros—put neatly away. You are, in your own mind, winning.

The rest of the day unfolds under a regime your wife has named Captain Cancel. Every proposed outing meets a veto. You can’t attend a concert because it might rain, despite cloudless skies. You can’t go to a restaurant because parking is inadequate, and when your wife reminds you of the new parking structure, you explain that it’s widely known to be contaminated with asbestos. A comedian you once loved is playing in Hermosa Beach, but you inform her he hasn’t been funny since the Reagan administration. A trip to Maui is ill-advised due to avian flu, especially dangerous during air travel. A beach picnic is canceled because of a sewage spill that, you explain, has compromised not just the water but the atmosphere. You agree to Taco Tuesday at the local brewery, but it’s too loud. You stuff toilet paper in your ears, announce you’re unwell, and Uber home. You are never invited again. This makes you smile as you drift into a deeply satisfying sleep.

If you recognize any of these traits, congratulations. You are anti-social. You are Captain Cancel. You have chosen your isolation, locked yourself in your cage, and—most importantly—convinced yourself it was the sensible thing to do.

January 19, 2026