Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • Mediated Persona Fatigue

    Mediated Persona Fatigue

    Sometime in the 1990s, I encountered two words about television that fascinated me. The first was médiatique: possessing the kind of face, presence, and personality that translates well through a camera. The second was mediated: knowing how to perform once the red light comes on—polished, relaxed, articulate, confident, seemingly spontaneous while remaining completely aware that thousands or millions of people may be watching.

    At the time, these qualities seemed impressive. Television still possessed a certain distance and glamour. Not everyone could stare into a camera and appear comfortable. Most ordinary people, confronted by a lens, suddenly became aware of their hands, forgot how their mouths worked, and developed the facial expression of someone being questioned by customs officials.

    Then came YouTube.

    Then TikTok.

    Then Instagram Reels.

    The rare skill became an industry.

    Millions of people learned how to become médiatique. They mastered the raised eyebrow, the conspiratorial lean toward the camera, the strategic pause, the widened eyes, the incredulous head shake, the sudden whisper, the explosion of outrage, the knowing smirk. They learned to speak in hooks. They learned to manufacture urgency. They learned that apparently nothing in human experience could simply be interesting. It had to be INSANE.

    At first, this new breed of camera personality could seem engaging. After sufficient exposure, however, I developed what I call Mediated Persona Fatigue: the exhaustion produced by prolonged contact with people who have optimized every gesture, vocal inflection, facial expression, and emotional reaction for maximum engagement.

    Eventually, you stop seeing the personality and start seeing the machinery.

    The intimacy begins to feel synthetic. The enthusiasm feels pharmaceutical. The spontaneous outrage arrives with suspicious punctuality. These people no longer strike me as companions sharing something interesting. Increasingly, they resemble dopamine peddlers standing on digital street corners, opening their trench coats and whispering, “Psst. Want to see something absolutely crazy?”

    The commodity is attention.

    The subject hardly matters. Murder. Politics. Celebrity divorce. Watches. Football. Restaurants. Skin cream. A disagreement between two strangers at Costco. Everything gets processed through the same engagement refinery and converted into thirty-second pellets of stimulation for an audience whose attention span is already being sandblasted into oblivion.

    I thought about this last night while my wife and I watched Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel. The docuseries was generally excellent, but inevitably it reached the point where the filmmakers had to demonstrate how enormous the case had become online.

    Up came the social-media personalities.

    There they were.

    The faces.

    The voices.

    The incredulity.

    The histrionics.

    The solemn promise that somebody was about to “spill the tea” concerning an actual murder.

    I felt immediate revulsion.

    Part of my reaction may simply be generational. Perhaps I am an aging man standing on his porch demanding that the influencers get off his lawn. Fair enough. Every generation eventually discovers that the communication style of the next generation sounds like civilization being fed into a wood chipper.

    But I suspect something larger is happening.

    We may be approaching Engagement Saturation: the point at which techniques designed to capture attention become so ubiquitous that they begin repelling the very audience they were designed to attract.

    The raised eyebrow once worked.

    So everyone raised an eyebrow.

    The dramatic pause worked.

    So everyone paused dramatically.

    Outrage worked.

    So everyone became outraged.

    The reaction face worked.

    So the internet filled with adults staring at thumbnails as though they had just witnessed the Resurrection in the parking lot of a Cheesecake Factory.

    Eventually the entire digital environment begins screaming at once.

    And when everyone screams, screaming loses its power.

    This is why I have difficulty believing the current social-media aesthetic can continue indefinitely. Human beings habituate. Yesterday’s stimulation becomes today’s background noise. The influencer must therefore become louder, faster, more emotional, more intimate, more outraged, more revealing. The engagement economy contains its own escalation mechanism, and eventually the needle reaches the red zone.

    Something has to give.

    Perhaps the next form of charisma will be restraint.

    Perhaps the radical media personality of the future will sit in front of a camera, speak in complete sentences, refrain from widening his eyes, and allow three consecutive seconds to pass without a jump cut.

    Perhaps someone will tell us something interesting without promising that it will blow our minds.

    Perhaps understatement will become exotic.

    I hope so.

    Because watching millions of people trapped inside this social-media hellscape—performers frantically stimulating audiences who require increasingly intense stimulation—feels less like communication than a civilization repeatedly pressing the button on a laboratory cage.

    I have to believe this particular chapter of media culture will eventually exhaust itself.

    After enough Mediated Persona Fatigue and Engagement Saturation, calm and composure may become a form of rebellion.

  • The Walking Companion Principle

    The Walking Companion Principle

    A few weeks before the beginning of what would be my final fall semester teaching college writing, my family spent a week in Carlsbad.

    One morning we ate breakfast at the French Corner. I ordered a savory crepe and drank coffee softened with milk, cinnamon, and honey. The meal achieved that increasingly rare equilibrium in which you leave neither hungry nor incapacitated. I was full but not bloated, caffeinated but not vibrating, satisfied without immediately wondering what I might eat next. For several fleeting minutes, I experienced something approaching perfection. The meal did not merely fill my stomach; it seemed to quiet some hidden chamber of the soul that normally conducts emergency meetings around the clock.

    Then we wandered into downtown Carlsbad.

    My family disappeared into a used record store while I remained outside. I have never understood the romance people attach to the smell of old books, record sleeves, and aging paper. To enthusiasts, the aroma evokes libraries, childhood, discovery, civilization. To me it smells like mildew wearing a tweed jacket.

    So I waited on the sidewalk and did what I often do when temporarily deprived of distraction: I conducted an inventory of my deficiencies.

    Twenty extra pounds.

    Inconsistent discipline.

    A tendency to overthink everything.

    And, increasingly, the suspicion that I required more regular companionship than I had previously been willing to admit.

    Then I saw two men walking toward me.

    They appeared to be in their early seventies, and I assumed they were retired. Both wore safari hats, T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes. Their phones rested harmlessly in their back pockets rather than occupying the command center of their consciousness. They walked side by side, talking with the effortless rhythm of men who had probably traveled this route together hundreds of times.

    They laughed.

    They listened.

    Neither seemed compelled to dominate the conversation, check a notification, document the walk, measure engagement, cultivate a personal brand, or inform the world that he was currently walking.

    They were simply two men walking.

    Their calves caught my attention. These were not gym-manufactured calves, inflated through heroic campaigns involving protein powder, compression sleeves, and motivational playlists. They were walking calves: lean, hard, unremarkable, the product of thousands of ordinary miles accumulated without fanfare. Both men looked younger than plenty of men twenty years their junior because their bodies had quietly become advertisements for moderation.

    I envied them immediately.

    Certainly I envied their leanness. I am not spiritually advanced enough to pretend otherwise. But what I really envied was the life their bodies implied.

    These men had apparently solved a problem I had been treating as several different problems. They did not need to schedule exercise and then separately schedule friendship. They had fused the two. Their physical fitness and social fitness occupied the same hour.

    They had discovered what I began to think of as The Walking Companion Principle: one of the most valuable pieces of retirement infrastructure is another human being who reliably walks beside you.

    Consider the efficiency.

    Walking provides cardiovascular exercise, mobility, sunlight, fresh air, routine, and protection against the gradual transformation of the human body into upholstered furniture. A companion provides conversation, laughter, accountability, perspective, and evidence that you still exist outside your own head. Combine the two and you have created a remarkably sophisticated health intervention requiring almost no technology.

    Shoes.

    Friend.

    Walk.

    Repeat tomorrow.

    No bestselling self-help book is required. No wellness retreat in Sedona. No twelve-week optimization protocol administered by a forty-two-year-old podcaster who owns a cryogenic chamber and hasn’t eaten a carbohydrate since the finale of Breaking Bad.

    Just show up.

    What unsettled me was that the principle seemed particularly important for retirement while having almost nothing specifically to do with retirement. It was simply a principle for living well.

    You take care of your body.

    You walk every day.

    You eat reasonably.

    You cultivate friendships.

    You show up.

    You repeat the process tomorrow.

    These truths possess none of the glamour of revelation. Nobody returns from a monastery in Nepal and announces that he has discovered the importance of taking a walk with a friend. Common sense suffers from terrible marketing.

    Yet the older I get, the more suspicious I become that common sense may contain considerably more wisdom than the elaborate intellectual systems I’ve spent decades examining.

    Standing outside that record store, I began wondering whether I had spent much of my life practicing Existential Overfishing—casting my line ever deeper into the waters of ultimate meaning while ignoring perfectly good fish swimming near the surface.

    I had contemplated religion, mortality, consciousness, transcendence, identity, purpose, and the possibility of God. I had read books by people who had spent their entire lives thinking about these subjects, followed them into increasingly deep philosophical waters, and occasionally surfaced gasping for air with another seven books I apparently needed to read.

    Meanwhile, two retired men in safari hats walked past me and accidentally delivered the executive summary.

    Move your body.

    Find someone you like.

    Talk.

    Keep doing it.

    Could it really be that simple?

    Is common sense enough?

    Could common sense sometimes be superior to profound religious contemplation?

    Had I submerged myself beneath an ocean of fascinating but largely irrelevant abstractions?

    Had I mistaken intellectual complexity for spiritual maturity?

    Had I spent years searching for the meaning of life while failing to notice some of its operating instructions?

    Had I, after all these years, simply lost the plot?

    The questions left me strangely melancholy because the Walking Companion Principle contained an obvious problem.

    When I retired, who would walk beside me?

    Employment had supplied more social infrastructure than I had realized. For forty years, people simply appeared. Students entered classrooms. Colleagues materialized in hallways. Someone stopped outside my office. Conversations occurred because hundreds of people had been deposited into the same institution at approximately the same time.

    Retirement would dismantle much of that machinery.

    Free time would increase precisely as automatic human contact decreased.

    I could walk alone, of course. I could listen to podcasts. I could listen to audiobooks. I could march five miles while absorbing fascinating information about theology, politics, artificial intelligence, crime, nutrition, or the collapse of Western civilization.

    But headphones are not companions.

    A podcast host does not notice when you fail to show up.

    An audiobook does not laugh at your joke.

    The men disappearing down the Carlsbad sidewalk possessed something I suddenly wanted very badly: another person who expected them to be there.

    I didn’t know whether I would find such a companion in retirement. I didn’t know what could substitute for one if I couldn’t. I didn’t know whether my melancholy was justified or merely another example of my ability to turn an innocent morning into an existential emergency.

    But I had learned something.

    Perhaps retirement would not require some magnificent new philosophy capable of replacing forty years of professional identity. Perhaps the essential architecture would be embarrassingly ordinary: decent food, regular movement, human companionship, curiosity, and enough discipline to show up again tomorrow.

    I stood outside the record store watching the two men disappear into the distance.

    I still didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

    But I knew exactly where I wanted to eat breakfast the next morning.

  • The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement

    The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement

    At eight o’clock on Friday morning, I was moving through Trader Joe’s at my customary speed, which is somewhere between brisk shopping and evacuation. I hurled groceries into my cart with the urgency of a man who had been informed that at precisely 8:30 he would turn into a giant pumpkin.

    This is not because I dislike Trader Joe’s. I love Trader Joe’s. But at sixty-four, I have developed an almost religious scrupulosity about time. Friday morning has a sequence. Shop. Drive home. Unload groceries. Put everything away. Work out. Shower. Eat lunch. Nap. Then begin the afternoon shift of academic work and personal creative projects. Disturb the sequence and the entire day threatens to collapse like a poorly stacked Jenga tower.

    So there I was, scrutinizing a gigantic Japanese sweet potato, when I encountered a former colleague.

    He had taught Spanish and Italian at the college and had been retired for years. Now in his eighties, he is a petite man who nevertheless carries himself with tremendous dignity: chest out, posture erect, eyes bright and alert. He looked less like someone retreating from life than someone who had simply been reassigned to another department.

    He smiled.

    I faced a decision.

    Ordinarily, I might have offered a friendly greeting and continued moving. Conversation is dangerous when you are operating under a timetable. One innocent “How have you been?” can metastasize into twelve minutes, and twelve minutes at Trader Joe’s means the workout gets pushed back, which pushes lunch back, which pushes the nap back, which eventually threatens civilization.

    But this man deserved better than a drive-by salutation.

    So I stopped.

    We talked for several minutes. Nothing profound. Retirement. Teaching. Life. The ordinary conversational currency exchanged by two former colleagues standing beside produce while other shoppers maneuver carts around them.

    Then we parted.

    Ten minutes later, I encountered him again in the pasta-sauce aisle.

    He was holding a small jar of lemon pesto.

    “You have to try this,” he said.

    I looked at the jar.

    Lemon pesto was not on the schedule.

    Nevertheless, politeness prevailed. I took it, thanked him, placed it in my cart, and continued my race against the pumpkin.

    By lunchtime I had forgotten about it. Then, while assembling my usual salad—arugula, tuna, garbanzo beans, diced Japanese sweet potato—I noticed the jar. I opened it and added two teaspoons.

    I took a bite.

    Good Lord.

    The salad was magnificent.

    The lemon cut through the tuna. The pesto coated the arugula. The sweetness of the Japanese potato played against the acidity and herbs. Ingredients I had eaten dozens of times suddenly seemed to have hired a new conductor. I sat there staring at my bowl with the astonishment of a chemist who had accidentally discovered penicillin.

    It was easily one of the best salads I had ever made.

    And I owed it to the retired foreign-language professor I had almost been too busy to talk to.

    This is The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement: the older and more regimented your life becomes, the more important it is to leave small openings through which the unexpected can enter.

    The principle becomes especially important as retirement approaches. Retirement frightens me partly because I can imagine life contracting. Fewer colleagues. Fewer students. Fewer accidental conversations. Fewer reasons to encounter people outside the familiar perimeter of family and friends. You can respond to this contraction by becoming increasingly efficient, arranging your days into immaculate little compartments—exercise here, lunch there, nap precisely there—until you have constructed a beautifully organized life in which absolutely nothing unexpected can happen.

    This is the dark side of time management. You become so skilled at protecting your time that eventually you protect yourself from life.

    The antidote does not require moving to Tuscany, learning Mandarin, or taking up hang gliding at eighty-two. Novelty can arrive in humiliatingly modest packages. Talk to someone you ordinarily would have hurried past. Listen when he recommends something. Put an unfamiliar jar in your shopping cart. Allow two teaspoons of something new to contaminate the immaculate machinery of your routine.

    At sixty-four, approaching retirement, I am understandably preoccupied with what I am about to lose: professional identity, colleagues, income, structure, relevance, the daily friction of being required somewhere. But perhaps one defense against that contraction is remarkably simple. Keep the aperture open. Keep listening. Keep accepting small invitations into experiences you did not schedule.

    My retired colleague had been out of the classroom for years, but that morning at Trader Joe’s he taught me something anyway.

    I had interrupted my schedule for a few minutes.

    The return on the investment was enormous.

    Two teaspoons of lemon pesto.

    And evidence that the world was not finished surprising me.

  • The Bureaucratic Metabolism Principle

    The Bureaucratic Metabolism Principle

    One of the more disturbing observations in Annie Lowrey’s The Time Tax is the sheer scale of the administrative machinery Americans have constructed in the name of providing government services. Lowrey describes a federal apparatus supported by millions of contractors and expenditures measured in trillions of dollars. You might reasonably assume that an institution possessing such staggering resources would operate with the terrifying efficiency of a Swiss watch. Surely, if you feed enough money, personnel, computers, consultants, administrators, contractors, databases, task forces, oversight committees, and strategic initiatives into a system, eventually somebody will answer the telephone.

    You would be wrong.

    Something peculiar happens as bureaucracies grow. Rather than becoming progressively more efficient, they can become increasingly preoccupied with administering themselves. More employees require more managers. More managers require more departments. More departments require more coordination. Coordination requires meetings. Meetings generate initiatives. Initiatives require implementation teams. Implementation teams require assessment. Assessment requires data. Data requires software. Software requires contractors. Contractors require contracts. Contracts require compliance officers. Compliance officers require reports demonstrating compliance with the procedures established to monitor compliance.

    Eventually, you have constructed an enormous administrative perpetual-motion machine whose principal accomplishment is keeping itself in motion.

    Call this the Bureaucratic Metabolism Principle: the tendency of sufficiently large institutions to consume increasing quantities of their own resources simply keeping themselves alive.

    Personnel administer personnel. Departments coordinate departments. Contractors oversee contractors. Administrators supervise administrators. Committees establish subcommittees. Meetings generate follow-up meetings whose primary agenda item is determining what was accomplished at the previous meeting. Every new layer of complexity creates the need for another layer whose purpose is to manage the complexity created by the previous layer.

    The bureaucracy begins to resemble an enormous animal with an increasingly ravenous metabolism. At first, you feed it resources so that it can perform a useful function. But as the creature grows, more and more of what you feed it is required merely to sustain its enormous body. Soon it requires thousands of employees, millions of labor hours, sprawling computer networks, armies of contractors, server farms, consultants, compliance departments, and enough acronyms to construct a second English language.

    The organism no longer eats to serve.

    It serves in order to eat.

  • The Lifeboat Comes with a Ninety-Seven-Page Application

    The Lifeboat Comes with a Ninety-Seven-Page Application

    About a week had passed since I began stumbling across the rocky terrain of retirement paperwork with little to show for my efforts except several new passwords, a collection of confirmation numbers, and an increasingly urgent desire for a Retirement Sherpa. I had also begun the first week of the fall semester—my last—and one afternoon I was home eating leftover taco salad while listening to Fresh Air. Host Tonya Mosley was interviewing Annie Lowrey about her new book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It.

    I stopped chewing.

    Lowrey was describing the very world I had spent the previous week wandering through: forms, portals, applications, eligibility requirements, documentation, telephone calls, administrative delays, and the enormous quantities of unpaid labor ordinary people must perform merely to obtain services supposedly created for their benefit. Her argument was that this labor constitutes a kind of tax—not on our money but on our finite allotment of time.

    Apparently, I had company.

    I had spent the previous week believing I was trapped in my own private retirement hellscape, hacking through Medicare, Social Security, CalSTRS, CalPERS, health insurance, employment dates, passwords, and authentication codes while wondering why nobody had invented the Retirement Sherpa. Now a public-policy writer was calmly explaining on National Public Radio that millions of Americans were trapped in much larger versions of the same maze.

    Lowrey’s imagery was considerably less Dantean than mine. She was writing a sober public-policy polemic. I was beginning to suspect that Medicare had been designed by demons.

    Nevertheless, we were fellow travelers.

    What Lowrey was describing could be called the Administrative Burden Reversal: the point at which obtaining relief becomes as burdensome as—or more burdensome than—the problem the relief was designed to address.

    Consider the exquisite logic.

    You need assistance because you are sick, poor, disabled, unemployed, overwhelmed, elderly, or otherwise vulnerable. The institution responds by assigning you an unpaid administrative job requiring stamina, executive function, internet access, technological competence, documentation, persistence, telephone endurance, and large quantities of free time.

    In other words, before the government will help you with the problem that has diminished your ability to function, you must demonstrate an extraordinary ability to function.

    The lifeboat has arrived.

    Unfortunately, there is a ninety-seven-page application attached to it, which you must complete while drowning.

    Once you see this mechanism, you begin noticing how dramatically the Overton Window of acceptable bureaucratic labor has expanded. Create an account. Verify the account. Create a password. Authenticate the password. Enter the security code. Upload the document. Prove your identity. Locate the certificate. Call the agency. Navigate the telephone tree. Wait on hold. Get transferred. Get disconnected. Call again. Discover that the department you need is open between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on alternate Wednesdays during months containing the letter R.

    None of these demands, considered individually, seems outrageous.

    That is how the system gets you.

    One hoop becomes five hoops. Five become twenty. Eventually you are spending an afternoon proving to an institution that you are the same person the institution has been corresponding with for thirty years, and nobody finds this remarkable.

    My own predicament was comparatively benign. I was trying to emancipate myself from forty years of labor and begin collecting retirement benefits. Nobody was threatening to take away my oxygen. If I had to spend another afternoon figuring out Medicare, I could make another cup of coffee, complain theatrically, close the laptop, and return tomorrow.

    Lowrey’s examples revealed what happens when the stakes are much higher.

    Someone with impaired breathing cannot obtain assistance because the benefits portal was open for only two days. Someone loses access to the machinery necessary to exercise the right to vote and cannot retrieve it from the digital morass. A person with autism spends hours on the telephone being bounced among disconnected functionaries who cannot coordinate with one another and is ultimately denied care. An aspiring entrepreneur spends two years and $200,000 trying to obtain permission to open a store before finally abandoning the venture. A woman who should legally owe no tax is instead taxed at forty percent because she cannot obtain the IRS certificate proving her eligibility. A physician applies to renew her work visa, repeatedly asks the government about its status, receives no meaningful response, and eventually loses the ability to practice medicine.

    At that point, bureaucracy ceases to be merely annoying.

    It becomes power.

    And buried inside that power is a magnificent hypocrisy.

    Government agencies demand almost supernatural precision from the people who depend upon them while frequently granting themselves enormous latitude for confusion, delay, contradiction, lost paperwork, unanswered telephone calls, and administrative chaos.

    Call this the Asymmetrical Competence Principle: the bureaucratic arrangement whereby the citizen is required to perform with meticulous accuracy while the institution reserves the right to operate with astonishing sloppiness.

    Miss your deadline by one day and your application may be denied.

    The agency ignores you for four months and this is called processing.

    Enter one incorrect number and you have provided inaccurate information.

    The agency loses the entire application and asks you to send another copy.

    Fail to respond to a letter by the specified date and you may lose your benefits.

    The agency fails to respond to six of your letters and apparently everyone is having a busy year.

    You must know which form to submit, where to submit it, when to submit it, what documentation must accompany it, which boxes must be checked, which signatures must be witnessed, and which deadline must be observed. The institution may provide contradictory instructions, maintain an obsolete website, transfer you to the wrong department, disconnect your call, misplace your paperwork, and leave your application untouched until your livelihood is endangered.

    There is rarely symmetry in the consequences.

    Your mistake is a failure.

    Their mistake is an inconvenience.

    And this was the revelation that arrived while I sat at home eating leftover taco salad during the first week of my final semester. My retirement paperwork had begun as a personal comedy: an aging professor attempting to escape forty years of employment only to discover that freedom was seventeen thousand forms away. But Lowrey’s argument opened a much larger window. The same administrative machinery that was making me crotchety could make someone else destitute, untreated, disenfranchised, unemployed, or unable to practice her profession.

    Suddenly my Retirement Sherpa seemed less like a comic fantasy and more like an indictment.

    People should not require Sherpas to obtain things they are legally entitled to receive.

    A functioning society should not place Mount Everest between a vulnerable citizen and the assistance supposedly waiting for him at the summit. And if it insists upon building the mountain, it cannot demand that every citizen climb it with the precision of a flawless neurosurgeon while the institution responsible for maintaining the trail conducts itself like puppies playing tackle football.

    Yet that appears to be the arrangement.

    Your paperwork must be perfect.

    The bureaucracy merely has to exist.

  • Be Kind to Linda: She’s Trapped in the Maze Too

    Be Kind to Linda: She’s Trapped in the Maze Too

    As you attempt to retire, you will eventually enter the bureaucratic labyrinth and submit yourself to its ritual humiliations: security codes, two-factor authentication, forgotten usernames, password requirements apparently derived from nuclear-launch protocols, contradictory menus, and websites whose navigation systems seem designed to ensure that no citizen ever reaches his intended destination. After enough exposure, you will feel anger rising inside you. Eventually, a human being will answer the telephone, and you will experience an almost irresistible urge to unload the entire accumulated grievance upon her.

    Don’t.

    This is the Misplaced Rage Fallacy: the tendency to direct your fury at the human being who answers the telephone rather than at the labyrinthine system that necessitated the telephone call. After forty-five minutes of authentication codes, password resets, automated voices, contradictory menus, and a website apparently designed by Kafka’s IT department, you finally reach Linda in Benefits and instinctively regard her as the architect of your suffering.

    She isn’t.

    Linda did not design the website. Linda did not decide that your password must contain twelve characters, one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, two numbers, a hieroglyph, and the blood type of your maternal grandfather. Linda did not send the authentication code to a telephone number you haven’t used since the Obama administration. Linda did not create the seventeen-item telephone menu through which you wandered like a starving hiker lost in the Sierras.

    Linda is trapped in the maze too.

    She just has a headset.

    This brings you to a second discovery, the Institutional Humanity Paradox: the larger, colder, and more impenetrable an institution becomes, the more surprising it is to discover that it is populated by ordinary and frequently decent human beings. There can be a yawning disparity between the personality of a bureaucracy and the character of the people who work inside it. The website treats you like a suspicious package abandoned at airport security. The woman who eventually answers the telephone treats you like a human being.

    This happened to me with CalSTRS. I already had a username and password, dutifully preserved in my records, and naturally neither one worked. I entered them again, because one of the foundational beliefs of modern life is that typing the same rejected password a second time may cause the computer to reconsider its position. It did not. I called CalSTRS, entered the automated telephone labyrinth, requested a callback, and eventually heard the voice of an actual person from the technical-support department.

    She was wonderful.

    For twenty minutes, she stayed on the telephone while we reconstructed my digital identity. She explained that a new system introduced about a year earlier had rendered my previous credentials obsolete, which was comforting in the same way that learning your house key no longer works because someone replaced the house is comforting. Then she patiently escorted me through every miserable step required to establish a new account. She never became impatient. She never spoke to me in the singsong voice adults sometimes use with people who cannot locate the settings menu. She never suggested that the problem was obvious and that any reasonably evolved primate should have solved it without assistance. She was kind, competent, patient, and helpful.

    Eventually, she transferred me to another department so that I could arrange a Zoom appointment. There I encountered another pleasant woman who tried to find me an opening. Unfortunately, the appointments were booked for approximately six weeks. She suggested that I call again the following week and see whether something had opened.

    What was I supposed to do—blame her?

    She had not personally filled the calendar. She had not constructed a retirement system in which someone approaching retirement must schedule a meeting six weeks into the future to discuss how to stop working in the present. She was simply sitting at her desk, looking at the same overstuffed calendar I was confronting from the other end of the telephone.

    She was a cog in the machine, but she had not built the machine.

    This distinction matters. Being rude to the people who take your calls is not merely bad manners; it is strategically idiotic. You are punishing innocent people, alienating precisely those human beings who possess the knowledge necessary to rescue you, and burning emotional fuel you will desperately need during your next gladiatorial encounter with a retirement application.

    Save your rage for the proper target: the system.

    Be kind to Linda.

    Thank the technical-support representative who spends twenty minutes resurrecting your account. Be gracious to the benefits counselor who cannot manufacture an appointment that doesn’t exist. Remember that these people also have mortgages, families, passwords, insurance companies, malfunctioning websites, dental appointments, aging parents, and bureaucracies of their own. At five o’clock they remove their headsets and become civilians again, whereupon some other institution begins tormenting them.

    Never confuse the personality of an institution with the character of the people imprisoned inside it.

    And when you feel yourself reaching the point at which you might begin screaming at innocent strangers, close the laptop. Walk away from the battlefield. Have a healthy snack. Lie down for a restorative nap with your eyeshades and cucumber mask. Allow your nervous system to forget the existence of authentication codes.

    Tomorrow you can return refreshed in body and spirit.

  • The Vicarious Retirement Effect

    The Vicarious Retirement Effect

    For the last few years, several colleagues about ten years younger than I am have been asking me the same question with suspicious regularity:

    “When are you going to retire?”

    At first, I wondered if they knew something I didn’t. Perhaps my teaching evaluations had collapsed. Perhaps students were complaining that the old man kept referring to something called a “newspaper.” Perhaps a secret departmental committee had concluded that I was blocking the natural advancement of younger faculty and was waiting for me to shuffle toward the exit so someone else could inherit my office.

    But that wasn’t it.

    They didn’t want to get rid of me.

    They wanted me to escape.

    More precisely, they wanted me to escape first.

    Call this the Vicarious Retirement Effect: the tendency of still-employed colleagues to become unusually invested in someone else’s retirement because his departure allows them to rehearse their own escape psychologically. The prospective retiree becomes an advance scout sent beyond the walls of the institution to determine whether civilization exists on the other side. Does the pension arrive? Can you afford groceries? Do you become bored? Do you lose your identity? Do you wander around Costco at eleven in the morning wearing sweatpants and staring blankly at rotisserie chickens? Or do you appear six months later rested, solvent, twenty pounds lighter, and glowing with the serene expression of a man who has not attended a committee meeting since May?

    My colleagues want data.

    I am the probe.

    If I successfully land on Planet Retirement and begin transmitting photographs of myself reading novels at ten in the morning while they are sitting through a presentation on Student Learning Outcomes, I will have established the existence of intelligent life beyond academia.

    Their hunger for escape seems to have intensified after COVID. Something happened during those strange lockdown years when millions of people stopped commuting and discovered that a surprising amount of professional life could be conducted from a spare bedroom while wearing shorts. The workplace, once regarded as an immutable fact of adult existence, suddenly became negotiable. Meetings that had previously required forty people to drive across town, locate parking, find a conference room, and spend ninety minutes breathing the same recycled air were reduced to little rectangles on a laptop screen.

    Then the campuses reopened.

    People returned carrying dangerous knowledge.

    They knew what it felt like not to be there.

    At the same time, teaching itself had changed. Years of smartphone saturation had not exactly produced a renaissance in sustained attention or recreational reading. Students accustomed to receiving information in fifteen-second bursts were now being asked to read twenty-page essays containing paragraphs that stubbornly refused to dance, sing, or display subtitles. Then generative AI arrived, offering exhausted students the opportunity to outsource the inconvenience of thinking altogether. Suddenly professors who had spent careers teaching people how to write found themselves reading enormous quantities of synthetic prose generated by machines that could produce five pages of grammatically polished oatmeal in approximately eight seconds.

    For some of my younger colleagues, this appears to have accelerated the retirement clock by a decade.

    They aren’t necessarily miserable. They still care about students. They still take pride in teaching. But I can sense an emerging reluctance to volunteer for the next great transformation of higher education. They survived the pandemic. They survived Zoom. They survived smartphones. They survived declining reading stamina, assessment initiatives, learning-management systems, administrative acronyms, and enough pedagogical reforms to fill an archaeological museum.

    Now AI has arrived carrying a flamethrower.

    At some point, even conscientious educators begin looking toward the next generation and thinking: You know what? You guys handle this one.

    COVID also produced another curious phenomenon among Californians approaching retirement age: the Great Zillow Migration.

    My colleagues began spending their lockdown afternoons browsing houses in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. They weren’t moving, exactly. They were conducting reconnaissance. A four-bedroom house in Albuquerque appeared on the screen for approximately the price of a detached garage in Southern California, and suddenly a person who had never expressed the slightest interest in New Mexico was researching property taxes, summer temperatures, crime statistics, and the distance from Santa Fe to the nearest Trader Joe’s.

    The fantasy was remarkably specific.

    They wanted to leave California without actually leaving California.

    They wanted the enormous affordable house in Arizona but also the Trader Joe’s. They wanted Texas prices but California produce. They wanted New Mexico solitude but a Costco within twenty minutes. They wanted a quiet desert neighborhood, central air-conditioning, excellent broadband, decent Thai food, and a yoga studio where the instructor had somehow been imported directly from Manhattan Beach.

    Give them those things and Albuquerque started looking like Tuscany.

    This is why my retirement has become strangely important to people who are still a decade away from their own. When they ask, “So, are you really retiring?” there is sometimes an unmistakable gleam in their eyes.

    They aren’t asking about me.

    They’re asking about themselves.

    They want to know whether escape is possible. They want someone they trust to cross the border first, establish a settlement, and send word back that the natives are friendly and the pension checks clear.

    So I will go.

    I will venture beyond the faculty parking lot into that mysterious territory where Mondays are indistinguishable from Saturdays and nobody knows what a Student Learning Outcome is. I will establish whether a man can survive without checking his college email. I will determine whether the human nervous system can recover from four decades of grading freshman composition papers.

    And if everything works out, I will send a message back to my younger colleagues:

    The air is good. The money arrived. Costco is open.

    Come when you’re ready.

  • The Final-Season Principle of Retirement

    The Final-Season Principle of Retirement

    There I was, deep in the weeds of retirement, hacking my way through forms, passwords, security codes, pension calculations, Medicare applications, and all the other administrative vegetation that grows between a working person and his freedom. Retirement was still two semesters away, but I had already learned that you cannot begin preparing for it too early. I had finally obtained what I had come to think of as my revenue-stream number—the monthly pension figure that answered the most fundamental question of retirement planning: Would I be rich? No. Would I be homeless? Also no. This struck me as excellent news.

    I called my best friend and colleague, Tom, to tell him.

    Tom is seventy-five, a wrestling coach and physical-education instructor, and he has no intention of retiring. For him, leading students through weight training, tennis, pickleball, and wrestling is as natural as breathing. You do not wake up one morning and announce that after careful consideration you have decided to stop respiration. Why, then, would you stop coaching? As long as there are students to train, weights to lift, balls to hit, and wrestlers to instruct in the ancient art of folding another human being into an ottoman, Tom sees no compelling reason to leave.

    I told him that my situation was different. My retirement was approaching. In June 2027, at sixty-five years and eight months, I planned to finish my final semester, turn in my grades, close the office door, and walk away.

    Tom rejected this immediately.

    I couldn’t retire, he told me. I was the only writing instructor teaching the athletes in a face-to-face freshman composition class every fall. The students trusted me. The counselors trusted me. The coaches trusted me. I was loved. I was valued. I was useful. Most important, I was apparently irreplaceable, a status every employee spends forty years secretly craving and then discovers at retirement to be administratively inconvenient.

    Tom offered a solution.

    “If you retire, I can make sure you still teach that one class. It’ll be easy. You drive to campus one day a week, teach the athletes for two hours, and do the rest online. Everyone loves you—the students, the counselors, the coaches. We can’t lose you. Think about it.”

    I did.

    At first, I thought it was a wonderful idea.

    Why wouldn’t I? The arrangement offered nearly everything flattering about work while eliminating much of what I disliked. I could retire while remaining partially unretired. I could keep the class I loved, work with people who appreciated me, maintain my connection to campus, collect some additional income, and preserve the pleasant fiction that an institution of higher education might collapse if I failed to appear on Tuesday morning.

    It was enormously seductive.

    But over the next several days, something became clear.

    I didn’t want another season.

    I began thinking about careers the way I think about television series. The best ones know when to stop. Breaking Bad ended. The Sopranos ended. The Wire, The Americans, and Succession ended. Their creators understood something that television networks, aging rock bands, professional athletes, and tenured professors sometimes have difficulty accepting: the existence of an audience does not obligate you to continue performing.

    There is dignity in recognizing the endpoint.

    Call this the Final-Season Principle: the best time to end a successful career is while the audience still wishes there were another season.

    This sounds obvious until someone offers you another season.

    Then the ego gets involved.

    People still love you. They still laugh at your jokes. Students still tell you that you’re their favorite professor. Coaches tell you nobody can replace you. Counselors want you back. Your friend calls and offers you the professional equivalent of a victory lap: one class, one day a week, two hours on campus. Come on. Just six more episodes.

    This is how shows get into trouble.

    The great television series end while we are still arguing that they could have continued. The unfortunate ones mistake affection for infinite demand. They survive on reputation, nostalgia, and the emotional capital accumulated during their prime years. Nobody wants to insult them. Viewers speak respectfully about what the show once meant to them. They praise the original cast. They reminisce about the magnificent third season.

    They just don’t watch anymore.

    A career can end the same way.

    I have seen professors remain on campus beyond their natural final season. Nobody tells them. Academia is too polite for that. Colleagues praise their extraordinary service. Former students express affection. Administrators present plaques. Everyone behaves with appropriate reverence.

    But something has changed.

    The professor is still standing at the front of the classroom, but the performance has lost some electricity. The material hasn’t changed much in years. Grading has become heavier. Preparation feels more burdensome. Technology becomes increasingly irritating. Meetings that were once merely tedious now feel like violations of the Geneva Conventions. The professor may still be perfectly competent, but competence is no longer the issue.

    The season has ended.

    There can be sadness in watching someone refuse to acknowledge this. After decades of being Professor, Doctor, Coach, Director, or Dean, retirement threatens something more frightening than lost income. It threatens relevance. If students no longer wait outside your office, if colleagues no longer ask your opinion, if your name disappears from the schedule of classes, an unsettling question presents itself: Who am I when the institution no longer needs me?

    So you sign up for another semester.

    And then another.

    You tell yourself the students need you. Perhaps they do. You tell yourself the department needs you. Perhaps it does. But somewhere beneath these noble explanations lurks another possibility: you need them to need you.

    That is precisely the ending I want to avoid.

    I am not leaving because I dislike my students. I love working with them. I am not leaving because I dislike the coaches and counselors. Their affection makes leaving harder. Nor am I pretending that I am incapable of teaching another composition class. I could do it.

    But I can feel the wear.

    My cognitive machinery does not turn quite as effortlessly as it once did. Grading feels heavier. Creating fresh material requires more energy. Performing in front of a classroom takes more out of me. And my tolerance for administrative absurdity—particularly the contemplation of Student Learning Outcomes inside the Byzantine catacombs of Nuventive—has declined to levels that may soon require medical intervention.

    More important, I want that energy for something else.

    Retirement isn’t merely the absence of work. It is the transfer of a finite resource. Every hour I spend grading an essay is an hour I cannot spend reading, writing, exercising, traveling, being with my family, or discovering what life looks like when it is no longer organized around an academic calendar. Energy becomes more precious as you age. Eventually you have to decide where you want to spend it.

    And at the moment, I need a considerable portion of mine merely to retire.

    There are still Medicare forms to complete, pension systems to coordinate, insurance dates to excavate, passwords to resurrect, documents to locate, appointments to schedule, and websites to enter with the grim concentration of a bomb technician approaching the red wire. I cannot fight the retirement bureaucracy while simultaneously grading freshman essays, creating engaging classroom content, and analyzing Student Learning Outcomes for a website apparently designed by the imperial bureaucracy of Emperor Justinian.

    Something has to give.

    It will be the job.

    So I will call Tom and disappoint him.

    I will tell him how much his offer meant to me. I will tell him that being wanted at the end of a career is an extraordinary gift. I will tell him that I love the athletes, the coaches, the counselors, and the peculiar little community we built together. And then I will tell him no.

    Because the Final-Season Principle contains a truth that becomes harder to understand precisely when people are begging you to stay: being loved is not a reason to keep working forever. Sometimes being loved is evidence that you have reached the perfect moment to leave.

    The show had a good run.

    It wasn’t canceled.

    I ended it.

  • How Moral Rot Gets a Corporate Takeover

    How Moral Rot Gets a Corporate Takeover

    As my writing students and I explore McKay Coppins’s “Sucker: My Years as a Degenerate Gambler,” I realize that sports betting does not lead to a single research question. It opens the door to at least four distinct arguments:

    1. Is sports betting designed to function as a harmless hobby, or does its business model depend on cultivating addictive behavior?
    2. Will the growing alliance between professional sports and gambling eventually produce enough corruption and suspicion to destroy fan trust—and, with it, the sports business model?
    3. Is sports betting so structurally tilted toward the house that a rational understanding of the system should compel us to avoid it altogether?
    4. What does the astonishing normalization of sports betting teach us about the dangers of the Overton Window?

    The fourth question interests me most. Sports betting was once associated with bookies, organized crime, ruined families, fixed games, and moral decay. Now the same basic enterprise arrives on a glowing smartphone, endorsed by Hall of Fame athletes, promoted during broadcasts, and wrapped in the cheerful language of bonus bets, profit boosts, and enhanced fan engagement. A platform capable of exploiting addiction, encouraging corruption, and monetizing human weakness has been repackaged as wholesome mainstream entertainment.

    That transformation may be the most disturbing lesson of the entire unit. The Overton Window shows us that social pathology does not have to defeat our moral resistance in a frontal assault. It can simply change its clothes. Give vice enough celebrity endorsements, corporate partnerships, technological convenience, and relentless exposure, and eventually we may stop seeing vice at all. If my students and I can watch that transformation occur without becoming deeply unsettled by it, then perhaps the normalization is already doing its work.

  • Breakfast Eschatology

    Breakfast Eschatology

    I no longer want to resolve my eschatological crisis.

    I don’t want to determine the nature of substitutionary atonement, theodicy, and eternity. I don’t want to debate whether hell is eternal, corrective, metaphorical, mistranslated, or the unfortunate product of several centuries of theologians getting overexcited. I’m tired of sifting through my epistemic crisis as though somewhere beneath a pile of Greek nouns I will finally uncover the laminated instruction sheet for the universe.

    I’ve also given up on perfection, physical, spiritual, and otherwise.

    What I really want is a good breakfast.

    Not breakfast at home. Home breakfast has its virtues, but it is essentially maintenance. Oatmeal. Yogurt. Berries. Protein. The nutritional equivalent of changing the oil.

    I want to go to a café.

    A good one.

    I want banana-nut French toast, buttermilk pancakes, poblano eggs Benedict, crisp potatoes, and a waitress approaching with a coffee pot before I’ve even noticed that my cup is half empty.

    More importantly, I want people. Lots of them.

    A true breakfast is communal. Certain movies become better when watched in a packed theater, where laughter moves through the audience like electricity. Breakfast works the same way.

    The lonely café is hell on earth.

    Three customers scattered across twenty empty tables. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. A laminated menu curling at the corners. Somewhere in the kitchen, a microwave beeps with the melancholy finality of a hospital monitor.

    Technically, breakfast is being served.

    Spiritually, the place is already closed.

    The packed café is another universe.

    You open the door and hear the glorious racket of human appetite. Forks strike plates. Coffee cups land on saucers. Children negotiate syrup distribution. Servers weave between tables carrying platters of eggs and potatoes. The room smells of coffee, butter, toasted bread, maple syrup, and potatoes surrendering magnificently to the griddle.

    Every table is occupied.

    A line waits outside.

    This is not merely a restaurant.

    This is evidence.

    I call it Breakfast Eschatology: the abandonment of speculation about ultimate salvation in favor of recognizing modest intimations of heaven in the communal celebration of a magnificent breakfast.

    For years, I have worried about the Last Things.

    What happens after death?

    What is the nature of original sin?

    What are the rigors of postmortem salvation? 

    What did the Greek word aiōnios mean before two thousand years of theology climbed onto its back?

    At some point, the soul develops theological indigestion.

    Enough.

    Bring me the poblano eggs Benedict.