Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • Take a Year Off Buying Watches—And See What’s Left

    Take a Year Off Buying Watches—And See What’s Left

    Daniel Samayoa and I met at several watch meet-ups in Long Beach, just outside Mimo’s Jewelry. We quickly discovered a shared fascination not only with watches themselves, but with the strange ways timepieces take hold of the mind. With that in mind, Daniel offers a guest post for my blog Cinemorphosis, examining the psychology of watch addiction and the habits that keep collectors in its grip:

    At a certain point, the habit stops being a hobby and starts looking like compulsion dressed up as enthusiasm.

    We all like new watches. We also all like taking a good shit. That doesn’t mean you should do it ten times a day and call it a hobby.

    The same principle applies to watch collecting. Just because you feel the urge doesn’t mean you need to act on it. That “great value” diver you just discovered—the one you’re convinced is different this time—will likely be worn twice before it disappears into the padded anonymity of your watch box.

    And that’s the problem.

    You tell yourself you’re building a collection, but what you’re really doing is chasing a small hit of excitement with every purchase. The watch isn’t the point. The transaction is. The anticipation is. The brief illusion of completion is.

    Then it fades, and you’re back where you started.

    It shows.

    Some of you don’t have collections. You have accumulation—watch boxes that resemble clearance racks, full of pieces that once felt essential and now feel optional at best.

    Here’s a simple experiment: stop buying watches for a year. Not a month. Not a “cooling-off period.” A full year.

    A one-year hiatus isn’t punishment; it’s diagnostic. When you remove the option to buy, you strip away the easiest form of self-distraction and force the habit into the open. The itch doesn’t disappear—it sharpens. You start to notice when it shows up: late at night, after a long day, in those idle gaps where boredom masquerades as curiosity. Without the relief of a purchase, you’re left to examine the mechanism itself—the rationalizations, the urgency, the quiet belief that the next watch will complete something that has never quite been defined. Over time, the noise subsides. What remains is clarity: which watches you actually reach for, what you value in them, and how much of your “collection” was built on impulse rather than need. The hiatus doesn’t take anything away. It reveals what was never there to begin with.

    More importantly, you’ll be forced to confront what you actually enjoy wearing. Not what impressed you in a YouTube review. Not what felt like a smart deal. The watches that earn wrist time—the ones that fit your life without effort.

    If you own nineteen watches and rotate through four, then you already have your answer. The rest are noise.

    The next time the urge hits, pause. Ask a direct question: does this watch have a clear role in my collection, or am I just bored and looking for stimulation?

    That question alone will eliminate most purchases.

    Then take it one step further: sell what you don’t wear. Not someday. Not when the market is better. Now.

    What remains won’t just be smaller—it will be coherent. Intentional. Yours.

    Because most people don’t need another watch.

    They need restraint.

    And a watch box that reflects decisions, not impulses.

  • Freedom in a Thong: The Theater of Letting It All Hang Out

    Freedom in a Thong: The Theater of Letting It All Hang Out

    Yesterday I watched the final episode of HBO’s Neighbors, and it delivered a character who refuses to be ignored: Danny Smiechowski, seventy-two, sunburned into leather, hair cascading past his shoulders, and dressed—if that’s the word—in a fluorescent yellow-green thong that assaults the eye like a traffic cone with delusions of grandeur. He conducts his workouts in his front yard, a one-man parade of defiance, and reacts to criticism the way a cornered animal does—snarling one minute, weeping the next.

    To his neighbors and the churchgoers across the street, decency means restraint, a baseline agreement about how to occupy public space without turning it into a spectacle. To Danny, decency is the opposite: the right to strip away all constraints, to declare the body sovereign territory. His creed echoes a distant era—the hazy, incense-soaked optimism of the early 1970s, when “freedom” often meant discarding clothing along with inhibition and calling it enlightenment.

    Danny believes the world has failed him by refusing to catch up. He swings between belligerent bravado and wounded self-pity, neither of which strengthens his argument. The result is less a philosophy than a performance—loud, erratic, and increasingly lonely.

    Exiled in spirit from his San Diego suburb, he seeks refuge in Eden, a Florida nudist enclave populated largely by fellow Boomers who seem preserved in amber from the Age of Aquarius. It’s a place where retired engineers and former professionals shed not only their clothes but their timelines, reliving a moment when rebellion felt like revelation. Add cheap wine, a little chemical haze, and a game of naked water polo, and you have a community convinced it has outsmarted the system.

    At the colony’s karaoke bar—equal parts nostalgia lounge and social experiment—Danny encounters a young woman with the clarity of someone who has no illusions about the transaction she’s proposing. She wants a sponsor, not a soulmate. Danny, eager for validation, obliges: shoes, dinner, the usual gestures of misplaced hope. She exits with efficiency. He is left with the bill and a deflated sense of destiny.

    Back in San Diego, Danny does what any committed ideologue would do—he builds his own Eden in his backyard, a private republic of one, governed by the constitution of his own stubbornness.

    The episode raises a question that refuses to stay trivial: why do some people feel compelled to be naked as a permanent state, not an occasional choice? Nostalgia plays a role. For many in that generation, nudity carries the residue of a time when breaking rules felt like breaking through. To be unclothed was to signal membership in a select tribe—the enlightened, the unshackled, the ones who had slipped past the guards of convention.

    There’s also a theatrical element. Just as children dress as superheroes to feel invincible, adults can costume themselves as liberated sensualists. The wardrobe is minimal, but the identity is elaborate. It promises transformation without requiring much beyond attitude.

    And yet, beneath the surface, something feels off. At Eden, I saw intelligent, accomplished people—engineers, inventors, individuals who had clearly mastered complex systems. One man, surrounded by photos of extraterrestrials, warned of a creature called Draconian poised to devour humanity. He seemed to believe that rejecting society’s norms—walking naked within the colony’s borders—offered a kind of existential protection. It was as if the abandonment of convention could ward off forces far larger than decorum.

    That’s the paradox. These people are not fools. Many are thoughtful, even admirable in their way. But the lifestyle strikes me less as freedom and more as a carefully maintained illusion—a soft-focus rebellion that never quite matures into anything durable.

    I can observe it with curiosity, even a touch of amusement. But I can’t inhabit it. To me, freedom isn’t the absence of clothing or the indulgence of every impulse. It’s something quieter, less theatrical. What I saw in Eden felt less like liberation and more like a well-rehearsed fantasy—Peter Pan with a pension plan, still refusing to land.

  • The Man Who Collected Timepieces and Ignored Time

    The Man Who Collected Timepieces and Ignored Time

    For more than twenty years, I lived inside the watch hobby like a man living inside a museum—reverent, obsessive, and curiously uninterested in the exhibits’ stated purpose. I rotated Seiko divers, admired their dials like stained glass, felt their rotors hum like distant machinery—and barely cared what time it was. That’s the joke with teeth: the one function watches exist to perform was never the center of my fixation. I wasn’t tracking time. I was courting it. Romance, nostalgia, the giddy satisfaction of gears responding to my wrist’s movement—those were my currencies. Timekeeping was just the pretext.

    G-Shock, in that world, was vulgar. Too digital. Too close to the smartwatch species I distrust—the glowing, needy devices that feel less like tools and more like supervisors. A G-Shock belonged on a mannequin posed mid-adventure, not on a human being trying to convince himself he possessed taste.

    And yet, sometime around 2010, the Frogman GWF-1000 slipped past my defenses. That asymmetrical case had a crooked charisma, like a boxer with a broken nose who still wins fights. I’d think about it, then shut it down with the usual litany: plastic, digital, not my tribe. I repeated those lines for years, the way a man repeats vows he secretly hopes to break.

    About a month ago, something in me stopped negotiating. The impulse didn’t arrive politely; it landed like a fever. I ordered the Frogman from Japan and watched it crawl through customs as if it were being interrogated for treason. Three weeks later, it showed up. I strapped it on.

    And there it was—presence. Not the polished, self-conscious presence of a luxury diver, but a blunt, physical authority. It didn’t ask for admiration. It assumed compliance.

    Then came the real disruption: Tough Solar and Multiband-6. Set it and forget it—except you don’t forget it, because it quietly corrects you. The watch syncs itself to atomic time, and suddenly you are no longer negotiating with approximation. You are pinned to reality. No drift, no romance, no mechanical shrug. Just accuracy, arriving nightly like a silent auditor.

    I didn’t expect the psychological effect. Being anchored to exact time produced a strange calm, the way a well-balanced diet makes you realize how erratic you’ve been eating. My mechanical divers—beautiful, expensive, lovingly chosen—never gave me that. They gave me narrative. The Frogman gave me certainty.

    The numbers didn’t help the old regime either. Five hundred dollars for the Frogman. A little over a hundred for the GW-7900 Rescue. Both delivered the same atomic truth. Meanwhile, my divers sat there—two, three times the price—offering charm, yes, but also drift, maintenance, and the faint suspicion that I’d been paying for the idea of precision rather than precision itself.

    Before I start sounding like a late-night infomercial for resin and radio signals, I need to detour—briefly, and deliberately—to a song that used to haunt my teenage gym sessions: “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone. It would float through the speakers while I benched and curled, all syrup and sentiment, and it filled me with such irritation that I lifted harder just to drown it out. The song wasn’t just bad; it was suffocating in its insistence on emotional purity.

    This matters because the watch hobby is full of that same conversion energy. The language of revelation. The before-and-after testimony. And men, in particular, are suckers for it.

    We don’t adopt hobbies; we convert to them. We don’t adjust our diets; we declare them. We don’t experiment; we renounce and rebuild. One week it’s mechanical purity, the next it’s quartz precision, then solar enlightenment. Each shift arrives with the force of a Damascus-road epiphany, complete with blind spots and overconfidence.

    I know this pattern because I’ve lived it—in watches, in fitness, in every arena where identity can be strapped on, laced up, or swallowed. Men love absolutes. We love the feeling of total overhaul. We love the idea of the metamorphosis so much we may have a figurine on our desk: Thing or Megatron–icons of brute conversion. We mistake intensity for clarity and call it transformation.

    So when I talk about G-Shock, I have to keep one hand on the brake. Because “being anchored to Real Time” has the flavor of conversion, and conversion is intoxicating. It makes you want to declare the past obsolete and the present definitive. It turns a purchase into a philosophy.

    And yet—facts remain stubborn. I’m typing this wearing the GW-7900 Rescue. Tomorrow will be the Frogman. The next day, back to the Rescue. The mechanicals sit in their box a few feet away, arranged with care, untouched—like last year’s tax documents: important, preserved, and no longer consulted.

    That doesn’t make G-Shock a religion. It makes it a correction. Whether I treat it as one or the other will determine whether this is clarity—or just another episode in a long history of well-dressed delusion.

  • When “Your Truth” Stops Being Believable

    When “Your Truth” Stops Being Believable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

    The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Why does this exist?

  • When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

    When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Life Inside the Chronophage

    Life Inside the Chronophage

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

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

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

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

  • When the Hobby Becomes a Spectacle of Torment

    When the Hobby Becomes a Spectacle of Torment

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • You Are No Longer Shopping. You Are Being Stimulated

    You Are No Longer Shopping. You Are Being Stimulated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    AI isn’t going anywhere.

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

    That’s already out of style.