Cinemorphosis

Category: FOMO and Its Discontents

  • Retiring the Satyr

    Retiring the Satyr

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The challenge became learning not to romanticize it.

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

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

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

    The task of replacing that vision must be overwhelming.

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

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

    Eventually reality intervenes.

    You have a career.

    You have a spouse.

    You have children.

    You have obligations and people who depend on you.

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

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

    Such people are not role models.

    They are cautionary tales.

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

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

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

    That search becomes the next great adventure.

    Not the search for another thrill.

    Not the search for another conquest.

    The search for a life worth inhabiting.

  • The Last Voyage of Captain Wrist Presence

    The Last Voyage of Captain Wrist Presence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Even then I understood the thought was ridiculous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The result was an unexpected misalignment.

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

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

    I was them.

    Wisdom did not cure me.

    Age did.

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

    What frightens me is not losing the hobby.

    What frightens me is losing the community.

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

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

    My younger colleagues.

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

    Their careers are in blossom.

    Mine is entering autumn.

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

    The divergence is occurring in two places at once.

    The watch hobby.

    The college classroom.

    I cannot stop either process.

    The current is too strong.

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

    At times the sensation resembles exile.

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

    The hatch opens.

    The separation becomes permanent.

    That is what aging sometimes feels like.

    Not tragedy.

    Not injustice.

    Just inevitability.

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

    A pane of glass descends.

    Not hostile.

    Not malicious.

    Just real.

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

    But the hatch has already sealed.

    There is no reentry.

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

  • The Garage Door That Aged Me

    The Garage Door That Aged Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    That is how aging sometimes feels.

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

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

    Then comes the whip.

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

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

    The garage door was my Balrog.

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

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

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

    “I strayed out of thought and time.”

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

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

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

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

  • How a Zip Code Became a Retirement Plan

    How a Zip Code Became a Retirement Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    That distinction matters.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

    Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

    In the 1960s, while attending backyard pool parties as a child, I witnessed a ritual that today would likely end the gathering, the marriage, and perhaps someone’s standing in the neighborhood Facebook group.

    The scene always began the same way. The wives lay stretched across poolside loungers like contented seals basking on a warm rock. Their skin glistened with tanning oil. Some drifted in and out of sleep beneath oversized sunglasses. Others were absorbed in paperback novels such as Valley of the Dolls, lost in worlds more glamorous than the suburban tract homes surrounding them.

    Relaxation, however, was a dangerous condition. The husbands regarded it almost as an invitation.

    I would see them gathering in small clusters, exchanging mischievous glances and whispered instructions. Then, with all the stealth of burglars planning a jewel heist, two or three men would creep toward the unsuspecting target. One grabbed the arms. Another grabbed the ankles. Before the woman could register what was happening, she was airborne.

    Splash.

    The victim surfaced in a burst of profanity and shock, treading water while trying to understand why the people closest to her had just transformed her into the afternoon’s entertainment.

    The husbands, meanwhile, doubled over with laughter. They laughed with the self-congratulatory delight of men convinced they had just performed comedy worthy of prime-time television. What they had actually performed was a public reminder of who possessed the power and who was expected to absorb the indignity.

    Eventually the woman climbed from the pool, dripping and annoyed. She would shake her head, towel herself dry, and wait for the laughter to burn itself out. Then came the final act of the ritual: she was expected to be a good sport. Boys will be boys. No hard feelings. Back to the lounge chair. Back to the conversation. Back to the novel.

    And so the party continued.

    No sociology professor is required to decode what was happening. The message was delivered with all the subtlety of a brick through a window. The prank was never merely a prank. It was a small public demonstration of dominance disguised as horseplay. The husbands enjoyed a privilege that permitted them to humiliate; the wives were expected to absorb the humiliation gracefully.

    You rarely see such scenes today because the cultural lens has changed. What once passed for harmless male shenanigans is now recognized for what it often was: a form of casual cruelty. The laughter remains the same. What has changed is our willingness to mistake it for innocence.

    Whenever I think about those afternoons, I am reminded of Mad Men. One of the show’s great insights is that the madness of mid-century masculinity was not simply its sexism but its astonishing lack of boundaries. Entitlement flourished because it was rarely challenged. And entitlement is inherently abusive because it operates as a zero-sum arrangement. One person enjoys the privilege of acting on every impulse; another person is expected to accommodate those impulses without complaint.

    The tragedy of entitlement is that it does not merely diminish the subordinate. It corrodes the entitled as well. When a culture teaches people that every whim deserves immediate gratification, it quietly exempts them from the responsibilities of adulthood. Why develop self-command when the world conspires to indulge your impulses? Why grow up when you can remain a child and still be handed the privileges of a man?

    Looking back, what strikes me most about those thirty-something husbands was not their authority but their immaturity. They were not imposing patriarchs so much as oversized boys wandering through a civilization that mistook self-indulgence for masculinity.

    The culture celebrated this condition. It built monuments to it.

    Consider the bachelor pad, that sacred temple of male self-mythology. Magazine spreads presented it as a technological wonderland and erotic paradise. The walls were covered in rich wood paneling. A bear rug lounged dramatically on the floor. Intricate models of futuristic cities sat on shelves like trophies from an imagined age of progress. With the clap of a hand, a television descended from the ceiling. A hidden panel slid open to reveal a gleaming liquor cabinet stocked with enough bourbon to anesthetize an elephant.

    The bachelor pad promised that its owner was no ordinary man. He was sophisticated. Connected. Mysterious. He knew where the best restaurants were, which stocks to buy, and which jazz records proved his superior taste. He was always three steps ahead of everyone else and at least five steps ahead of the poor fools living in split-level homes.

    Yet all the razzle-dazzle could not conceal the obvious truth. Behind the secret compartments, imported scotch, and carefully groomed mustache often stood a man-child. The gadgets were sophisticated. The owner was not. The bachelor pad frequently resembled a twelve-year-old boy’s fantasy that had been granted an unlimited expense account.

    Even as a child, I sensed that something was off.

    The world of the 1960s projected confidence, prosperity, and order, but beneath the polished surface ran a current of instability. The adults were supposed to be creating safety and predictability. Too often, they generated turbulence instead. The atmosphere felt less like responsible adulthood than a perpetual fraternity party conducted by people with mortgages.

    Children notice these things.

    We notice who gets to laugh.

    We notice who becomes the punchline.

    We notice who is expected to absorb the humiliation and pretend it never happened.

    Most of all, we notice the gap between what adults claim to be and what they actually are. Long before we possess the vocabulary to describe entitlement, narcissism, or arrested development, we can feel their effects. We can sense when the people entrusted with maintaining order are, in fact, manufacturing chaos.

    And that was the contradiction at the heart of the era: a generation that possessed unprecedented authority often behaved as though authority itself exempted them from maturity.

    Perhaps that is why so many of us flocked to The Brady Bunch every Friday night. The show offered a fantasy of domestic civilization. Here was a blended family that somehow functioned as a cooperative unit. Problems were discussed instead of weaponized. Nobody humiliated anyone for sport. Lessons were learned. Conflicts were resolved. The adults behaved like adults.

    Compared to the poolside kingdoms of suburban entitlement, the Bradys looked less like a sitcom family than a utopian experiment.

    Longing for the Brady family’s utopian world seeped into my dreams and shaped my childhood. Let me take you back to the blistering summer of 1971, when I was nine. My family and four others staked their claim to a slice of rugged paradise on Mount Shasta. For two weeks, we fished, water-skied, dodged hornets, and lazed under the drone of a massive battery-operated radio pumping out The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night. It should have been idyllic. Should have been.

    One morning, as the other families fried pancakes and bacon and prepped their fishing gear, I was still in my tent, cocooned in the greatest dream of my life. I wasn’t just sleeping—I was transcending. In my dream, I had met The Brady Bunch in San Francisco, by a gleaming red cable car downtown. Their faces were radiant, practically angelic, and their smiles said it all: I had been chosen. I was going to be the newest Brady kid. Mike and Carol had already signed the adoption papers at some conveniently nearby government office. It was official.

    Questions swirled in my nine-year-old brain: Would I get my own room in their split-level utopia, or would I have to bunk with Greg? And most importantly, how soon would I appear on the show? But just as I was about to find out, reality crashed in like a rude kid on a trampoline. Mark and Tosh, my two so-called friends, yanked me out of my reverie, insisting it was time to go fishing. Fishing? Fishing?! I had just been adopted by The Brady Bunch, and now I had to slum it with worms and hooks?

    I sulked like the overgrown toddler I was. The rest of the day, I stomped around with the scowl of someone who’d been exiled from paradise, my unspoken dream stuck inside me like a splinter. I couldn’t tell anyone. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry, I can’t fish; I was about to move into a Technicolor utopia where no problem is bigger than a 30-minute episode”? Yeah, right.

    “Get with the program,” my dad bellowed, his military tone slicing through the air. “We’re living in the wild.” The wild? I didn’t want the wild. I wanted the Brady kitchen, with its avocado-green appliances and unending love. Instead, I got Mount Shasta, yellowjackets hovering over our food supplies, a fishing pole, and a crushing dose of reality. I was not a Brady, and the sting of it stuck with me longer than the mosquito bites.

    That sulky kid camping on Mount Shasta believed his Brady Bunch fantasy was a rare, precious portal out of his chaotic childhood. Turns out, it was about as unique as a Hallmark card on Valentine’s Day. Like millions of Americans, I grew up dreaming I’d be adopted by the Bradys—soaking up the avocado-colored bliss of choreographed family harmony. But here’s the cosmic joke: while we were glued to the screen, escaping into 30-minute morality plays, the actors’ personal lives were raging dumpster fires. Addiction, affairs, infighting—it was chaos so apocalyptic it made our own messy lives look like spa weekends.

    Should we really expect actors’ off-screen lives to match the squeaky-clean fantasy they sell us? Of course not. Hollywood isn’t built on truth; it’s built on glossy façades. The Brady Bunch is proof. They served us perfectly scripted family bliss, while behind the scenes, they were stuck in their own soap opera. The gap between their TV utopia and reality is as wide as the Grand Canyon—yet we still crave the fantasy. Once you’ve tasted Brady-level wholesomeness, it’s like emotional junk food: artificial but irresistibly comforting.

    In my prepubescence, I not only dreamed I was a member of the Brady family; I dreamed  that my face was in one of the squares on the show’s opening theme song. I’m looking around at my family members, my cheeks bright and cherubic, an eternal youth pumped with a sense of joy and belonging, blind to the off-screen train wrecks that contradicted the Brady’s Edenic wonderland.

    Adolescence put an end to my Brady Bunch fantasies. By then, the Brady family seemed so wholesome, so relentlessly well-adjusted, that they bordered on the monastic. Nobody lusted after anybody. Nobody drank too much. Nobody made catastrophically bad decisions. Every problem was solved in twenty-two minutes and accompanied by a moral lesson. It was a civilization without appetite.

    What I wanted instead was sensuality.

    That is where the Boone’s Farm Apple Wine commercials entered my life. These advertisements took impossibly attractive young women, dressed them in gingham dresses, deposited them in sun-dappled meadows, and surrounded them with rugged, guitar-strumming men who looked as if they had wandered out of a folk album cover. Everyone smiled. Everyone flirted. Everyone appeared to be one sip away from achieving perfect harmony with nature, romance, and themselves.

    Who needed the Brady Bunch when a bottle of apple wine could transport you directly to Eden?

    The commercials were selling more than wine. They were marketing an emerging vision of life that was spreading across America in the early 1970s—a curious blend of sexual liberation, political consciousness, environmentalism, health food evangelism, and openness to alternative realities. This counterculture promised liberation from the buttoned-down conventions embodied by shows like The Brady Bunch. Why settle for suburban order when you could pursue cosmic enlightenment, organic nutrition, and attractive people frolicking through fields?

    The fullest expression of this worldview existed in my hometown at a grocery store called Co-Op.

    Calling Co-Op a supermarket would be like calling Woodstock a music festival. Technically accurate, perhaps, but hopelessly incomplete.

    This was a store “owned by the people.” The employees were unfailingly friendly. The men often sported beards substantial enough to shelter migratory birds and wore survival gear purchased from Co-Op’s adjoining Wilderness Supply Store. Every employee seemed to occupy a different point on the Hippy Spectrum, ranging from mildly eccentric nature enthusiast to someone who appeared capable of receiving stock tips from houseplants.

    Co-Op pioneered innovations that now seem ordinary. It had the town’s first daycare center for shoppers’ children and its first recycling center. Long before environmentalism became corporate branding, Co-Op treated recycling as a sacred civic duty.

    The store’s modest book section served as a literary roadmap to alternative consciousness. There sat Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Peter Tompkins’ The Secret Life of Plants, Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Principle, and, towering above them all like scripture atop an altar, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, the vegetarian bible of the movement.

    The food selection was equally revelatory. Customers could purchase carob honey ice cream, wheat germ, granola, tofu, brown rice, Japanese yams, and alfalfa sprout-growing kits complete with mason jars. For many Americans, Co-Op served as their first introduction to foods that were not beige.

    With its wilderness store, organic produce, alternative literature, and health-food evangelism, Co-Op was more than a place to buy groceries. It was a sanctuary for those rebelling against The Man. Every purchase carried ideological significance. A bowl of granola sweetened with organic honey was not merely breakfast. It was a declaration of independence.

    Unfortunately, every revolution contains its contradictions.

    The counterculture replaced the Bachelor Pad with the Co-Op Halo: the cognitive illusion in which any food purchased at a cooperative grocery store is presumed incapable of causing weight gain, metabolic dysfunction, or excessive calorie consumption. Under the protective glow of the Co-Op Halo, honey ceases to be sugar, granola ceases to be dessert, and a thousand calories of nuts become an act of political resistance. 

    As a child shopping alongside my parents, I observed these earnest Co-Op revolutionaries lumbering through the aisles. They battled corporate food tyranny one overflowing bowl of granola at a time, their expanding waistlines advancing steadily alongside their moral certainty. They looked like freedom fighters who had accidentally launched an insurgency against their own belt buckles.

    What fascinated me was not their hypocrisy but their humanity. The very people striving hardest to improve themselves remained vulnerable to the same blind spots that afflict everyone else. Their intentions were admirable. Their convictions were sincere. Yet their growing girth served as a reminder that even the noblest movements can become intoxicated by their own righteousness.

    It is no surprise that during the Co-Op Revolution, many of its adherents abandoned conventional beds for waterbeds. The traditional spring mattress belonged to the Mad Men era in the same way the gray flannel suit, the martini cart, and the executive desk belonged to it. It was firm, structured, predictable, and unapologetically patriarchal. You slept on top of it, not with it. It reflected a culture organized around hierarchy, discipline, and the assumption that somewhere in the house a father figure knew what he was doing.

    The waterbed represented an entirely different cosmology.

    The spring mattress was Father.

    The waterbed was Mother.

    More specifically, it was Mother Earth, Mother Ocean, Mother Nature, and Mother Womb rolled into a giant vinyl sack filled with heated water.

    The waterbed arrived as part of the Co-Op Halo revolution. It rejected rigidity in favor of flow, conformity in favor of experimentation, and straight lines in favor of psychedelic undulation. If the spring mattress said, “Get a job, mow the lawn, and report to work on Monday,” the waterbed said, “Relax, brother. Time is a capitalist construct.”

    One belonged in Don Draper’s paneled den beside a hidden liquor cabinet and a collection of imported scotch. The other belonged in a room scented with patchouli, illuminated by a lava lamp, and stocked with dog-eared copies of Diet for a Small Planet and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The spring mattress supported the patriarchy. The waterbed floated a rebellion against it.

    At around thirteen years old, I was fully indoctrinated into waterbed ideology.

    After trying the waterbeds owned by friends and neighbors, I became a true believer. The warm vinyl surface felt exotic and futuristic. The gentle waves suggested depths of wisdom unavailable to those unfortunate souls sleeping on ordinary mattresses. I became convinced that immersion in the Great Aquatic Womb was essential to human fulfillment. Sleeping on a conventional mattress suddenly seemed as spiritually primitive as cooking over a campfire.

    Eventually my parents surrendered to the pressure.

    For a brief moment, I believed paradise had arrived.

    Then reality arrived.

    The first warning sign was the algae.

    The water inside the mattress developed its own ecosystem. Before long my bedroom smelled less like a sanctuary of cosmic consciousness and more like a stagnant swamp in which an alligator might reasonably be expected to surface.

    Then there was the simple act of turning over in bed.

    Waterbed enthusiasts described this as floating.

    In practice it felt more like wrestling a small ocean.

    Every movement encountered resistance. Rolling from one side to the other required planning, momentum, and perhaps a permit from the Coast Guard. A careless shift of position could generate enough counterforce to threaten a shoulder, strain a back, or create waves capable of disturbing neighboring counties.

    The temperature was another ongoing adventure.

    The bed was either too cold or too hot.

    One night I was sleeping in what felt like the North Atlantic. The next night I appeared to be poaching myself. I became a full-time regulator of aquatic climate conditions, endlessly adjusting the temperature dial in pursuit of a mythical state known as comfort.

    But the unforgivable sin was the leaking.

    Waterbeds leaked with the determination of a Greek tragedy fulfilling its prophecy.

    Water leaked onto the floor. Water seeped into places water was never intended to go. The flooring suffered. Mildew flourished. Black mold appeared like an invading army. The very object that had promised harmony with nature was now actively introducing nature into my bedroom.

    My dreams of aquatic enlightenment collapsed.

    My rebellion against The Man had become a battle against a giant bag of malfunctioning water.

    The waterbed was not Mother Ocean.

    It was not the Womb.

    It was not a portal to higher consciousness.

    It was a sea monster.

    A damp, bloated, vinyl sea monster that occupied my bedroom, consumed my patience, and robbed me of sleep. The Co-Op Revolution had promised liberation. Instead, I found myself trapped in an endless maritime disaster unfolding six inches above the floor.

    The waterbed craze of the 1970s eventually collapsed for the same reason most utopian experiments collapse: reality refused to cooperate. The waterbed promised liberation from the stiff, joyless conventions of the Mad Men era. Why sleep on a rigid mattress when you could drift upon a warm, undulating sea of consciousness? Why settle for furniture when you could experience a lifestyle? The problem, of course, was that consumers eventually discovered that sleeping on a giant sack of water came with certain drawbacks, including leaks, mold, algae, temperature fluctuations, and the unsettling sensation of spending every night inside an aquarium.

    Its demise symbolized the fading of a larger countercultural fantasy. The waterbed embodied the belief that freedom could be achieved by rejecting structure in favor of flow, spontaneity, experimentation, and vibes. But markets teach lessons with merciless efficiency. Most people did not want to sleep inside a social movement. They wanted a good night’s sleep. The waterbed had promised transcendence and delivered plumbing problems.

    Ironically, while the culture around me chased one New Age revelation after another, I was becoming increasingly indifferent to all of it. That same year I was competing in Junior Olympic weightlifting meets. I was training hard, taking protein supplements, eating aggressively, and building a life around discipline. By the end of the day I was so exhausted that I could have slept comfortably on a sheet of plywood. The waterbed’s promises of cosmic fulfillment meant nothing to me. Just give me a gym, two hundred grams of protein a day, and leave me alone. I had little patience for the endless parade of theories, lifestyles, and consciousness-expanding schemes emerging from the great 1970s Fever Dream. Every month seemed to produce a new revelation that would supposedly transform humanity. I was far more interested in perfecting my squat.

    Then, in 1978, my muscular future was threatened by something far more alarming than a leaking waterbed.

    One morning, while eating a bowl of Wheaties fortified with a scoop of protein powder and a cup of milk, I opened The San Francisco Chronicle and was seized by a profound sense of dread. The article described the predictions of futurists who believed that Earth’s growing population and dwindling resources would eventually force humanity into space. According to the piece, future generations might abandon the planet altogether, traveling by lunar shuttle to enormous solar-powered colonies orbiting the Earth.

    The article highlighted the work of Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, who would later publish these ideas in The High Frontier. Humanity, it explained, might someday live in “artificial, closed-ecology habitats in free orbit,” deriving energy from massive solar arrays.

    The accompanying illustrations by artist Don Davis were breathtaking. They depicted lush green hills, cozy cottages, sparkling fountains, rolling meadows, and smiling citizens living in apparent harmony. It looked like a cross between Disneyland, a nature preserve, and Heaven.

    Yet one detail disturbed me.

    Everyone looked skinny.

    Not healthy skinny. Fragile skinny.

    The men looked as though they had never touched a barbell in their lives.

    Suddenly a terrifying possibility entered my mind.

    What if there were no gyms in space?

    What if the absence of gravity eliminated weight resistance altogether?

    What if there were protein shortages?

    What if the future consisted of floating through a giant space cylinder with the physique of an underfed accountant?

    I imagined my hard-earned muscles slowly dissolving until I resembled what bodybuilders of the era called “a tomato with toothpicks sticking out of it.”

    For a sixteen-year-old weightlifter, this was not merely a concern. It was an existential crisis.

    Around that same time, a high-school sophomore named Mary Claybourne developed a crush on me. One afternoon she approached my locker and handed me a birthday card. On the front it read:

    “If It Feels Good, Do It!”

    Inside she had written a sweet note inviting me to ask her out.

    Mary was adorable. She deserved my attention. She deserved my affection.

    Unfortunately, I was preoccupied with the possibility that civilization might soon abandon Earth and relocate to a giant orbiting habitat where progressive overload would be impossible.

    How could I focus on romance when the future of resistance training itself hung in the balance?

    How could I build a physique I could be proud of if humanity was destined to become a race of floating string beans?

    This was my problem with life. Nothing stayed put.

    One fad arrived promising salvation, only to collapse under its own absurdity. Then another emerged wearing different clothes but making the same promises. Every certainty seemed temporary. Every revelation carried an expiration date.

    I longed for permanence.

    Years later in college, I encountered Alfred North Whitehead’s Religion in the Making. Whitehead suggested that religion arises from humanity’s search for permanence in a world defined by impermanence.

    The idea haunted me because it perfectly described what I had been seeking all along.

    I kept thinking about that waterbed.

    For a brief, glorious moment, I believed I had discovered paradise. I floated in the warm womb, suspended in perfect comfort, convinced I had found a superior way of living. Then the vinyl ruptured. Suddenly I was tangled in torn plastic, immersed in a lukewarm swamp, watching paradise drain onto the carpet.

    I abandoned the waterbed and embraced the self-reliance of weight training. Iron never leaked. Barbells never developed algae. A squat rack did not require water treatment tablets.

    Yet even weightlifting failed to provide the permanence I sought.

    According to the futurists, the planet itself might become uninhabitable. Earth could implode under the weight of its own success, forcing me into exile aboard some gigantic orbiting satellite. There I would drift through the heavens as a refugee from gravity itself, searching for a place to perform deadlifts.

    The waterbed had taught me that comfort could disappear overnight. The space-colony article taught me that even the ground beneath my feet might not be permanent.

    And so the search for permanence continued.

    While other boys pursued girls, I pursued certainty. Unfortunately, certainty proved harder to find than girls.

    By sixteen, I had already sacrificed one potential romance because I was busy calculating how to maintain my biceps after humanity evacuated Earth.

  • Gollumification (a short story)

    Gollumification (a short story)

    I remain haunted by three men I attended high school with. More than four decades later, they are still gnashing their teeth over a missed romantic opportunity so catastrophic in their minds that it has become the organizing principle of their existence.

    The event occurred during the summer after their senior year, that magical season when testosterone, optimism, and stupidity join forces to create lifelong consequences.

    The three friends were driving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to attend a Dodgers game when they found themselves winding through the Grapevine. There, on the side of the highway, destiny appeared: four young women wearing tie-dye bikinis.

    An aging Volkswagen van, baked by the California sun into a shade best described as “burnt pumpkin regret,” had overheated and died. Standing beside it were four beautiful Grateful Dead devotees fresh from a concert and still drifting through the atmosphere on a cloud of music, freedom, and whatever else had been circulating at Dead shows in those years.

    These were not merely attractive women. In the mythology my friends later constructed, they became supernatural beings. They were road-worn muses, desert sirens, barefoot priestesses of possibility. They smelled of patchouli, sunscreen, and poor judgment. Their laughter floated through the air like wind chimes. Their sun-bronzed shoulders glistened beneath the California light. They waved their bikini tops and spaghetti-strap shirts overhead like flags announcing the arrival of a new religion.

    My friends, mechanically gifted but cosmically clueless, leaped into action.

    With grease-stained heroism, they diagnosed the problem, coaxed the van back to life, and restored order to the universe. The women were grateful. Very grateful.

    Then came the invitation.

    Forget the Dodgers game, they said. Come with us to the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival.

    To appreciate the magnitude of this offer, imagine being handed a winning lottery ticket, a backstage pass, and the keys to paradise simultaneously.

    My friends declined.

    They were committed to the Dodgers game.

    Even now, recounting the story causes physical pain.

    Armed with baseball tickets and the situational awareness of ornamental shrubbery, they thanked the women, climbed back into their car, and drove away. Behind them, the hippies disappeared into the California horizon, presumably continuing their lives completely unaware that they had become the central tragedy in three future divorces.

    My friends remember almost nothing about the baseball game.

    Not a single play.

    Not a single pitch.

    Not a single inning.

    But they can describe, with forensic precision, the exact moment they drove away from those women. They remember the sunlight, the smell of the road, the angle of the van, the sound of the laughter, and the fluttering of tie-dye fabric in the wind.

    Mention the incident today and they transform.

    Reason departs.

    Perspective evaporates.

    They begin snapping at one another like feral animals fighting over a scrap of meat. Each insists the others were responsible. Each argues that his entire life would have unfolded differently had they accepted the invitation.

    Their present lives barely register. Their former wives, their careers, their accomplishments, and their friendships all fade into the background. Spiritually speaking, they remain stranded on that highway, staring at those women as if they represented the entrance to a lost kingdom.

    The story would be funny if it were not so sad.

    The obsession has consumed them.

    They are bitter. They are divorced. They are trapped.

    They have spent decades worshipping a fantasy.

    What they believe they lost was not a romantic encounter. It was transcendence itself. They have convinced themselves that heaven briefly opened a window on a sunny California afternoon and that they foolishly chose baseball instead.

    This is what I call Gollumification: the process by which a person becomes spiritually deformed through obsessive attachment to a lost opportunity, fantasy, or object of desire, sacrificing present reality in worship of an imagined transcendence.

    The tragedy is not that they missed an opportunity.

    The tragedy is that they never stopped missing it.

    Their humanity has slowly curdled around a single idea: that fulfillment existed on the other side of that decision. Like Gollum clutching the Ring, they have spent decades staring at a false treasure while life continued to unfold around them.

    The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson warned that human beings frequently seek false transcendence through sex, alcohol, drugs, crowds, and ecstatic experiences. These pursuits promise elevation but often produce degradation. We imagine we are ascending toward something divine when in fact we are becoming diminished versions of ourselves.

    My friends illustrate this principle perfectly. They mistook a fleeting moment of possibility for ultimate meaning. They sought transcendence in the wrong place and became enslaved to the memory.

    To be human is not merely to desire transcendence. It is to recognize when that desire has attached itself to the wrong object. It is to notice the onset of Gollumification, slam on the brakes, and reverse the process before obsession calcifies into identity.

    Few people accomplish this.

    Most continue worshipping the lost opportunity, the former lover, the abandoned dream, the imagined paradise. Year after year, they become less flexible, less grateful, less alive. They harden around their regrets until they resemble pillars of salt, forever staring backward at the kingdom they believe should have been theirs.

    The missed opportunity did not ruin their lives.

    Their refusal to stop worshipping it did.

    I can worry about many things. I can worry about politics, the economy, my health, the future, and whether humanity is collectively losing its mind. But is there anything more important than waking up each morning prepared for my daily arm-wrestling match with Gollum?

    There he sits across the table waiting for me.

    He smiles with the confidence of an undefeated champion. He knows my weaknesses better than I do. He knows exactly where the cracks are in the foundation. He knows which temptations still sparkle in my imagination and which regrets still ache when I press on them.

    “Go ahead,” he says. “Try to beat me. Win today if you can. I’ll even let you enjoy the victory. But remember, I have thousands more opportunities. Tomorrow morning. This afternoon. Ten minutes from now. Next week. Next year. I can wait.”

    Then Gollum leans back in his chair and laughs.

    Unlike me, he never gets tired.

    Don’t feel sorry for me. My predicament is not unique. Like millions of others, I suffer from an addiction to shiny objects promising transcendence. What am I addicted to? That is the wrong question. The better question is: what am I not addicted to?

    Human beings have always been vulnerable to false promises of salvation. Some chase money. Others chase status, romance, sex, drugs, fame, luxury, political power, youth, beauty, watches, social media followers, or the approval of strangers. The particulars vary, but the underlying temptation remains the same. We convince ourselves that one more acquisition, one more achievement, one more experience, one more dopamine hit will finally complete us.

    There are tens of millions of us. I am not special.

    My life, like theirs, is defined by the constant struggle against vice, corruption, vanity, and the habits that threaten to reduce me to a lesser version of myself.

    Yet there is another danger.

    It is true that I am flawed. It is true that I have made mistakes. It is true that I possess an impressive talent for disappointing myself. But endlessly dwelling on my failures is simply another addiction wearing a different costume.

    I think of the writer and commentator Ana Marie Cox, who once observed that she struggled with many addictions, but the worst was picking up the bottle of self-loathing and drinking from it all day long.

    What a perfect image.

    Many of us stagger through life intoxicated by our own self-contempt. We nurse old embarrassments. We replay old failures. We rehearse our shortcomings with the diligence of scholars preserving sacred texts. We imagine this habit is a form of honesty or moral seriousness. In reality, it is often another form of self-absorption.

    The person addicted to self-loathing is no less trapped than the person addicted to alcohol, gambling, or pornography.

    Both are attempting to escape reality.

    And both find themselves drifting deeper into captivity.

    This compulsive consumption of self-hatred makes self-forgiveness nearly impossible. Yet self-forgiveness is one of the essential weapons in the fight against Gollumification.

    How can I forgive myself?

    The question sounds simple but feels impossible.

    After all, I know my failures better than anyone. I know the selfishness, vanity, cowardice, and foolishness that inhabit my history. I know the person I have been. Some days I find it nearly impossible to forgive myself for being such a wretched creature.

    But forgive myself I must.

    Forgiveness is not an act of indulgence. It is not a declaration that my failures never happened. It is not permission to continue living badly.

    Forgiveness is the first step in refusing to let my worst moments define me.

    It is the decision to stop worshipping my failures and start transcending them.

    Forgiveness is the commitment to become someone different from the stubborn sinner who generated so much regret in the first place. It is the refusal to spend the rest of my life drinking from the bottle of self-loathing while Gollum grins across the table.

    Because Gollum does not care whether I worship a lost opportunity or a past mistake.

    Either way, he wins.

    The only victory available to me is to stand up from the table, forgive myself, and continue the long work of becoming fully human.

    Once I understood that life is a continual test of character, and the struggle against Gollumification, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

    To be honest, however, there is something discouraging about viewing life as a daily battle against Gollum. I cannot always defeat him in an arm-wrestling match. Even on my best days, victory is incomplete. If I overcome Gollum half the time, I still fail the other half. The prospect can feel exhausting. How can I forgive myself if I remain locked in a struggle I never fully win? How can I live with peace if temptation is always waiting and I never know whether I will emerge victorious?

    The answer may be that the object of forgiveness is not perfection but perseverance. The purpose of self-forgiveness is not to transform me into a flawless person. It is to transform me into a person who continues striving toward the good despite repeated failures. The measure of my character is not whether temptation disappears, but whether I continue returning to the fight. Forgiveness allows me to rise after every fall rather than define myself by the fall itself. The truly unforgivable life is not the life marked by failure. It is the life that abandons the struggle altogether.

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily effective at razzle-dazzling you with objects of false transcendence and getting you to surrender.

    You can retreat into a climate-controlled cocoon furnished with streaming services, snack foods, delivery apps, and algorithmically engineered distractions. You can spend years drifting from one dopamine hit to the next while the world applauds your consumption and politely asks if you would like another. Temptation no longer lurks in dark alleys. It arrives in bright packaging and offers free shipping.

    The world will not object if you quit the struggle. On the contrary, it will happily assist you. Fresh temptations will appear on your phone, your television, your computer, and eventually your doorstep. At some point, however, a terrible realization emerges. You are no longer directing your life. Your cravings are directing it for you. As a result, you are becoming Gollum. 

    At that moment, you cease to be the protagonist of your own story. You become a supporting character in a drama written by your appetites, a bit player taking orders from every craving that wanders onto the stage. Perhaps you will grow numb to this reality and drift into a comfortable spiritual death, cushioned by convenience, entertained into submission, and surrounded by enough snacks and streaming content to dull any remaining sense of alarm. Or perhaps the discomfort will refuse to leave. Perhaps it will linger like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps it will haunt you until the life you have built begins to resemble a horror movie disguised as a luxury resort.

    That haunting may prove to be a gift. It may force you to confront the fact that you have been living in your own version of the Sunken Place, sinking ever deeper into passivity while your impulses seize control of the steering wheel. The tragedy is not that temptation exists. The tragedy is that you have mistaken indulgence for freedom and captivity for comfort. At some point, if you are fortunate, a voice will break through the fog. It will not whisper. It will not negotiate. It will issue a command as urgent as any ever spoken in a Jordan Peele horror film:

    Get out.

    The process of emancipating yourself from whatever hell you have wandered into is one of life’s essential tasks. Whether the prison is addiction, vanity, resentment, consumerism, or some other self-inflicted captivity, freedom rarely arrives on its own. 

    It helps to have role models—people who have somehow escaped the Sunken Place while the rest of us continue orbiting the same destructive habits.

    I have such a role model. His name is The Lonely Collector.

    I met him on the watch forums and social-media platforms where watch enthusiasts gather to discuss their latest acquisitions, compare collections, and reassure one another that purchasing yet another timepiece is not a symptom of a deeper problem. These communities often resemble support groups designed by the addiction itself. They are places where people seek solace and commiseration but rarely recovery. Imagine a convention of alcoholics held inside a liquor store. The attendees nod sympathetically as one another describes their struggles, then recommend a particularly excellent bottle that just arrived from Scotland.

    The watch world can be like that.

    Yet somehow The Lonely Collector moved among us untouched. While the rest of us disappeared down the timepiece rabbit hole, emerging weeks later clutching limited editions and obscure Japanese-market references, he remained curiously immune. He could admire a watch without needing to own it. He could discuss a new release without calculating how quickly he could justify purchasing it. He possessed a form of psychological insulation that bordered on the supernatural.

    I often imagined him wearing some kind of invisible protective suit, the sort of flame-retardant gear stuntmen wear before walking through walls of fire on Hollywood movie sets. Around him, collectors were exploding into fits of acquisition fever, setting their wallets ablaze in pursuit of the next grail watch, while he calmly strolled through the inferno without so much as singeing an eyebrow. He seemed to understand something the rest of us did not: that collecting a watch and being possessed by the desire to collect watches are two entirely different things.

    I met the Lonely Watch Collector about six years ago in the digital bazaar of watch enthusiasts, where grown men gather to convince one another that a slightly different arrangement of steel, sapphire, and gears constitutes a life-changing event. We became friends across several watch forums and social-media platforms. His Americanized name was Peter. He was a Vietnamese immigrant who worked in the tech industry and lived in the Dallas area.

    One day he sent me a message that immediately distinguished him from the usual crowd of enablers and acquisition evangelists. He confessed that he was, like me, a watch addict. Not a casual enthusiast. Not a collector. An addict. His condition had become so severe that he eventually sold every watch he owned, including pieces that cost nearly ten thousand dollars. In their place he bought a twenty-dollar Casio F91.

    The move struck me as both absurd and profound. Imagine a man abandoning a wine cellar filled with rare vintages only to drink tap water for the rest of his life.

    Peter explained that the Casio served a purpose beyond telling time. It was a daily reminder of how thoroughly the hobby had colonized his mind. Every glance at its tiny digital display reminded him of the sharp jaws of the addiction from which he had escaped. The humble plastic watch became a form of self-discipline, a wearable warning label. He never wanted to return to those feverish days when every waking hour was spent chasing the next purchase, the next dopamine hit, the next fantasy of completion that vanished the moment the package arrived.

    At the time he was in his mid-thirties, married, and raising a newborn child. He had decided that his attention was a finite resource. Every ounce of mental energy spent obsessing over watches was energy unavailable to his wife, his son, and the life unfolding directly in front of him. He chose his family over watches.

    Over the years he would occasionally contact me. He would compliment one of my latest acquisitions, mention that he had watched another video from my YouTube channel, where I often explored the psychology of watch addiction, and then close with the same refrain.

    He was still wearing the Casio.

    The statement was never delivered with judgment. He never lectured me. Never told me to sell my collection. Never suggested I quit the hobby. Yet I could feel the unspoken message beneath his words. It radiated from the quiet contentment he seemed to have found. He had escaped a maze that many of us were still wandering. Without saying so directly, he wanted me to find the exit as well.

    Then, about a year ago, I noticed that he had vanished.

    Not from my life specifically. From the platforms themselves.

    His accounts disappeared. No dramatic farewell. No manifesto. No final post announcing his liberation from the algorithmic plantation. He simply left.

    I found myself oddly moved by his disappearance. He had already been a hero of mine for replacing a small fortune in luxury watches with a twenty-dollar Casio. But abandoning social media entirely elevated him to an even higher category. Even more important than escaping the watch addiction, he had escaped from the social media platforms. 

    Most of us treat these platforms as public squares. However, they are closer to dopamine troughs—vast digital feedlots where human attention is harvested, processed, and sold. Every notification is a pellet tossed into the cage. Every scroll promises stimulation and delivers restlessness instead.

    Peter walked away from all of it.

    I have experienced watch-related FOMO countless times. I have watched men on YouTube peel the protective plastic from a new Panerai, Omega, or Tudor with the reverence of archaeologists uncovering a sacred relic. For a moment, I would feel the familiar pang—that small stab of desire convincing me that happiness was apparently one purchase away.

    But that feeling was insignificant compared to the FOMO I felt when I thought about Peter.

    I did not envy his watches. He no longer had any.

    I envied his freedom.

    He had escaped not only the watch fever dream but also the sprawling digital carnival that feeds it. He had walked away from the endless cycle of acquisition, validation, comparison, and display. No wrist shots. No watch forums. No YouTube rabbit holes. No dopamine pellets dispensed by algorithms disguised as communities.

    Sometimes I imagined becoming like him.

    Of course, being afflicted with a healthy case of vanity, I never imagined quietly disappearing the way Peter did. No. In my fantasy, I would announce my departure with a bombastic YouTube video worthy of a retiring televangelist, a defeated Roman emperor, and a recovering addict all rolled into one.

    The thumbnail would feature me staring solemnly into the camera beneath giant yellow letters:

    I AM LEAVING THE WATCH HOBBY.

    The video would begin with a dramatic pause.

    “God has told me to quit collecting watches.”

    Another pause.

    “I do not wish to quit collecting watches. Quite frankly, I would prefer to buy several more. But this is no longer a matter of my will. It is a matter of God’s will.”

    At this point I would lean toward the camera as if preparing to reveal the final secret of existence.

    “Today, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to discuss freedom. Not the freedom we celebrate, but the freedom we counterfeit. We tell ourselves that every indulgence is an act of self-expression. We call surrendering to our impulses freedom. We call compulsive consumption freedom. We call addiction freedom.”

    Then I would hold up a luxury watch.

    “This is not freedom.”

    A dramatic pause.

    “This is jewelry for Gollum.”

    I would continue.

    “We are undergoing a process I call Gollumification. We clutch our precious possessions with trembling fingers and then congratulate ourselves for being independent thinkers. We mistake obedience to our appetites for self-mastery. We chain ourselves to desires and then celebrate the length of the chain.”

    By this point the comments section would be in flames.

    Half the audience would accuse me of having a nervous breakdown. The other half would demand to know whether I was selling my collection.

    Meanwhile, Peter would be sitting somewhere in Dallas wearing his twenty-dollar Casio, helping his kid with homework, blissfully unaware that I had just uploaded a forty-five-minute philosophical monologue about the spiritual dangers of luxury watches.

    And that contrast is precisely why he won.

    I needed an audience to imagine my liberation.

    Peter simply liberated himself.

    Could I ever forgive myself for not possessing Peter’s strength? For lacking his discipline? For remaining vulnerable to the vanity and compulsions that he had managed to escape?

    I did not know.

    But I knew I had to try.

    In many ways, that is the reason for telling this story. Not to celebrate Peter as some flawless saint, nor to condemn myself as uniquely weak, but to confront a question that lurks beneath every addiction and every act of self-deception: What would it mean to become a little more free than I am now?

    Peter answered that question by quietly walking away.

    I didn’t hear from Peter for about a year, but one day he commented on my YouTube channel that he and his wife were visiting family in Los Angeles, and he suggested we meet for coffee at a local cafe. 

    The coffee shop possessed the warm, cultivated coziness that modern cafés seem to manufacture with scientific precision. Sunlight spilled through tall front windows and settled across weathered wooden tables polished smooth by years of elbows, laptops, and lingering conversations. The air carried a mingled perfume of freshly ground coffee beans, toasted pastries, steamed milk, and cinnamon. A low murmur of conversation drifted through the room, punctuated by the occasional hiss of the espresso machine and the clatter of ceramic cups meeting saucers.

    Peter sat at a corner table with his wife and two young children. I had expected to find him alone, but instead I found a scene of quiet domestic happiness. The children, perhaps two and four years old, sat absorbed in coloring books spread across the table. They worked with the intense concentration that only young children can summon for such endeavors. One would occasionally hold up a page for parental approval while the other remained determined to keep every crayon stroke inside the lines.

    Peter’s wife, Pam, an attractive redhead in her mid-thirties, watched over them with an easy smile, alternating between conversation and gentle supervision. Both she and Peter had their arms covered in an impressive collection of tattoos. Yet whatever rebellious or edgy associations I once attached to tattoos evaporated almost immediately. The two of them radiated warmth, kindness, and ease with one another. They possessed that unmistakable quality found in genuinely happy couples: a relaxed affection that requires no performance and no explanation. Watching them interact with their children, it became clear that the tattoos were merely decoration. The deeper story was written in their patience, their attentiveness, and the quiet contentment they shared as a family.

    Around them, the coffee shop’s usual cast of characters carried on with their rituals. Young professionals peered into glowing laptops. Students hunched over textbooks as though preparing for oral examinations before a medieval tribunal. A retired couple shared a muffin and the morning’s gossip. Yet the scene at Peter’s table seemed somehow untouched by the surrounding bustle. The children colored. The parents relaxed. The aroma of coffee drifted through the air. It was the sort of ordinary family moment that often passes unnoticed while it is happening but later returns in memory with surprising clarity and affection.

    Peter introduced me to his wife as his “YouTube hero.”

    I immediately objected.

    “I can’t be your hero,” I said. “You’re my hero.”

    After all, Peter had accomplished something I had not. He had escaped. He had walked away from the watch addiction, abandoned social media, and returned to the land of the living. While the rest of us were still debating the merits of sapphire crystals and limited editions, Peter had slipped out of the casino and gone home.

    Pam laughed.

    As a therapist, she had developed a dim view of social media. What had once seemed novel now struck her as tacky—a vast digital theater in which people carefully curated evidence that their lives were perpetually delightful. The result was a form of psychological vandalism. People scrolled through these highlight reels and concluded that everyone else was happier, prettier, wealthier, more successful, and more fulfilled than they were.

    “People think we’re perfect,” Pam said. “But we have our struggles.”

    The statement caught me off guard.

    From where I sat, they looked like the cover photo for a family counseling brochure. Two adorable children. A happy marriage. Meaningful careers. The sort of family that made you assume the universe had quietly decided to be generous.

    Then Pam explained that she suffered from clinical depression.

    There were periods, she said, when the depression became so severe that she could go months without being emotionally available to her husband or children. I found this difficult to reconcile with the woman sitting across from me. She appeared warm, attentive, thoughtful, and fully engaged. She looked like the last person who would disappear behind a wall of emotional darkness.

    Yet there she was describing a battle that remained invisible to everyone except those closest to her.

    The irony was striking. Here was a therapist who attended therapy herself. Here was a mental-health professional who required help from other mental-health professionals. After years of trial and error, she had finally found the proper balance of medication—enough to keep the depression from swallowing her whole but not so much that it dulled her emotions and left her disconnected from the people she loved.

    The conversation reminded me how deceptive appearances can be. Social media trains us to judge lives from the outside, but real life operates differently. Everyone is carrying something. Some burdens are simply hidden beneath better lighting, flattering camera angles, and carefully edited captions.

    The family sitting before me was not perfect.

    They were something far more impressive.

    They were real.

    I sat there taking in the scene before me. The children colored quietly. Peter and Pam exchanged the effortless glances of people who genuinely liked each other. The entire family radiated a warmth that was difficult to describe and impossible to fake. To my surprise, I felt myself getting emotional. I wanted so badly for them to be happy that my eyes began to sting.

    To distract myself, I pointed at the small Casio on Peter’s wrist.

    “Peter,” I asked, “how did you do it? How did you walk away from the watch addiction?”

    He didn’t hesitate.

    “It’s like this,” he said. “I think of addiction as a hot stove. You touch it and it burns like hell. After a while, you stop romanticizing the stove. You stop admiring the stove. You stop writing poems about the stove. You realize the stove can hurt you. Once you see it for what it is, it becomes easier to stay away.”

    I laughed.

    “But you still watch my YouTube channel. That’s like an alcoholic hanging around a liquor store. Every week some lost soul gets on camera, complains about his watch addiction, and then spends twenty minutes showing off shiny watches.”

    Peter laughed.

    Tall and slender, with short dark hair, sharp features, and glasses that gave him the appearance of a thoughtful professor, he seemed amused by the accusation.

    “I watch cooking competition shows,” he said. “I enjoy the craftsmanship, the attention to detail, the incredible food. But I know I’m not going to spend twelve hours making those dishes. It’s entertainment. Your videos are the same thing. I can enjoy watching them without feeling compelled to live that life.”

    “I’m a cautionary tale,” I said.

    That earned a laugh from both him and Pam.

    The two of them shared a piece of banana bread while looking at me with the kind of affection usually reserved for eccentric relatives.

    “You see me for what I am,” I continued. “But you don’t glorify my life. You understand there is no transcendence in watches.”

    Peter smiled.

    “There’s no transcendence,” he repeated.

    The sentence hung in the air for a moment.

    “You have your family,” I said. “You have real things to take care of.”

    Peter reached for Pam’s hand and squeezed it.

    Then he smiled at her.

    “I have no time for fantasies.”

    The simplicity of the statement struck me harder than any self-help book ever could.

    I found myself thinking about the three men from my high school days. I told Peter and Pam the entire story: the broken-down Volkswagen van, the Grateful Dead girls, the invitation to the Summer Solstice Festival, and the decades of regret that followed. I explained how the men had become consumed by what might have been, how they had transformed a brief encounter into a lost Eden, and how they had spent years undergoing the process I call Gollumification.

    As I spoke, I could see that Peter and Pam were enjoying the story.

    “What happened to them?” Pam finally asked.

    “Where are they now?” Peter added.

    I told them.

    They lived alone in modest apartments. They drifted from paycheck to paycheck. Their lives felt provisional, as though they were still waiting for the real story to begin. They possessed no grand purpose, only old grievances. Their conversations revolved around disappointments, regrets, and imagined alternate timelines in which everything had gone right.

    They had become caretakers of a fantasy.

    And that fantasy had slowly devoured them.

    As I spoke, I realized why the story continued to haunt me.

    It wasn’t because of the hippie girls.

    It wasn’t because of the missed opportunity.

    It was because I understood how easily their fate could become mine.

    Every day I struggle not to become one of those men. Every day I fight the temptation to believe that fulfillment lies somewhere else: in another watch, another achievement, another fantasy, another version of my life that never existed.

    Every day I struggle against Gollumification.

    And sitting there across from Peter and Pam, watching their children color pictures while they shared a piece of banana bread, I was struck by a thought so obvious that it felt profound.

    Perhaps transcendence had never been hiding in the Volkswagen van.

    Perhaps it had been sitting quietly at this coffee-shop table all along.

  • Gollumification: How False Paradise Deforms the Soul

    Gollumification: How False Paradise Deforms the Soul

    I remain haunted by three men I attended high school with. More than four decades later, they are still gnashing their teeth over a missed romantic opportunity so catastrophic in their minds that it has become the organizing principle of their existence.

    The event occurred during the summer after their senior year, that magical season when testosterone, optimism, and stupidity join forces to create lifelong consequences.

    The three friends were driving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to attend a Dodgers game when they found themselves winding through the Grapevine. There, on the side of the highway, destiny appeared: four young women wearing tie-dye bikinis.

    An aging Volkswagen van, baked by the California sun into a shade best described as “burnt pumpkin regret,” had overheated and died. Standing beside it were four beautiful Grateful Dead devotees fresh from a concert and still drifting through the atmosphere on a cloud of music, freedom, and whatever else had been circulating at Dead shows in those years.

    These were not merely attractive women. In the mythology my friends later constructed, they became supernatural beings. They were road-worn muses, desert sirens, barefoot priestesses of possibility. They smelled of patchouli, sunscreen, and poor judgment. Their laughter floated through the air like wind chimes. Their sun-bronzed shoulders glistened beneath the California light. They waved their bikini tops and spaghetti-strap shirts overhead like flags announcing the arrival of a new religion.

    My friends, mechanically gifted but cosmically clueless, leaped into action.

    With grease-stained heroism, they diagnosed the problem, coaxed the van back to life, and restored order to the universe. The women were grateful. Very grateful.

    Then came the invitation.

    Forget the Dodgers game, they said. Come with us to the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival.

    To appreciate the magnitude of this offer, imagine being handed a winning lottery ticket, a backstage pass, and the keys to paradise simultaneously.

    My friends declined.

    They were committed to the Dodgers game.

    Even now, recounting the story causes physical pain.

    Armed with baseball tickets and the situational awareness of ornamental shrubbery, they thanked the women, climbed back into their car, and drove away. Behind them, the hippies disappeared into the California horizon, presumably continuing their lives completely unaware that they had become the central tragedy in three future divorces.

    My friends remember almost nothing about the baseball game.

    Not a single play.

    Not a single pitch.

    Not a single inning.

    But they can describe, with forensic precision, the exact moment they drove away from those women. They remember the sunlight, the smell of the road, the angle of the van, the sound of the laughter, and the fluttering of tie-dye fabric in the wind.

    Mention the incident today and they transform.

    Reason departs.

    Perspective evaporates.

    They begin snapping at one another like feral animals fighting over a scrap of meat. Each insists the others were responsible. Each argues that his entire life would have unfolded differently had they accepted the invitation.

    Their present lives barely register. Their former wives, their careers, their accomplishments, and their friendships all fade into the background. Spiritually speaking, they remain stranded on that highway, staring at those women as if they represented the entrance to a lost kingdom.

    The story would be funny if it were not so sad.

    The obsession has consumed them.

    They are bitter. They are divorced. They are trapped.

    They have spent decades worshipping a fantasy.

    What they believe they lost was not a romantic encounter. It was transcendence itself. They have convinced themselves that heaven briefly opened a window on a sunny California afternoon and that they foolishly chose baseball instead.

    This is what I call Gollumification: the process by which a person becomes spiritually deformed through obsessive attachment to a lost opportunity, fantasy, or object of desire, sacrificing present reality in worship of an imagined transcendence.

    The tragedy is not that they missed an opportunity.

    The tragedy is that they never stopped missing it.

    Their humanity has slowly curdled around a single idea: that fulfillment existed on the other side of that decision. Like Gollum clutching the Ring, they have spent decades staring at a false treasure while life continued to unfold around them.

    The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson warned that human beings frequently seek false transcendence through sex, alcohol, drugs, crowds, and ecstatic experiences. These pursuits promise elevation but often produce degradation. We imagine we are ascending toward something divine when in fact we are becoming diminished versions of ourselves.

    My friends illustrate this principle perfectly. They mistook a fleeting moment of possibility for ultimate meaning. They sought transcendence in the wrong place and became enslaved to the memory.

    To be human is not merely to desire transcendence. It is to recognize when that desire has attached itself to the wrong object. It is to notice the onset of Gollumification, slam on the brakes, and reverse the process before obsession calcifies into identity.

    Few people accomplish this.

    Most continue worshipping the lost opportunity, the former lover, the abandoned dream, the imagined paradise. Year after year, they become less flexible, less grateful, less alive. They harden around their regrets until they resemble pillars of salt, forever staring backward at the kingdom they believe should have been theirs.

    The missed opportunity did not ruin their lives.

    Their refusal to stop worshipping it did.

  • The Greatness Trap

    The Greatness Trap

    At fourteen, after watching Pumping Iron, I stared at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique with the reverence medieval peasants reserved for cathedral stained glass. His muscles seemed less like anatomy than a supernatural event. I concluded, with the confidence available only to teenage boys, that all men should look like Arnold. Failure to do so was a form of degradation. You were not a man so much as a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of it, wobbling through life in a state of preventable mediocrity.

    The disease did not stop with bodybuilding.

    In college, I encountered Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov. Their prose represented another form of muscularity. Their sentences flexed. Their imaginations performed feats of strength. Later, listening to Sviatoslav Richter play Sergei Rachmaninoff, I experienced the same sensation. Arnold had built impossible muscles. Kafka built impossible stories. Richter built impossible beauty. All of them seemed to occupy a realm beyond the ordinary, and they inspired me to believe that I must do the same.

    Thus I spent much of my life trapped in what I call The Greatness Trap: the belief that happiness, self-respect, and fulfillment can only be earned through exceptional achievement. Under its spell, ordinary life appears not merely insufficient but vaguely shameful. A quiet existence becomes a form of failure. Every accomplishment must lead to a larger accomplishment. Every summit reveals another mountain. Every victory quickly curdles into dissatisfaction.

    Like Arnold, who once spoke of wanting to be remembered thousands of years after his death, I wanted to leave a mark. I wanted my existence to strike the world with such force that its impact could be called Clout Fist: the invisible power exerted by a person, institution, or cultural force that shapes the thoughts and behaviors of others. Without such influence, I feared my life would dissolve into obscurity. If I was not spectacular, what was I?

    This anxiety lies at the heart of Joshua Rothman’s essay, “Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?” Rothman observes that excellence and ordinariness coexist uneasily because modern society relentlessly pressures us toward optimization. We are told to maximize everything: our careers, our bodies, our relationships, our finances, our hobbies, our personal brands. Existence itself becomes a self-improvement project. Unless we leave a mark, we fear we do not count.

    The result is a culture of hype. Everything must be bigger, faster, richer, more influential, more disruptive, and more unforgettable. We become trapped in an endless escalator of status. Climb one rung and another immediately appears above it. Achievement ceases to satisfy because satisfaction would end the game.

    Rothman points to philosopher Avram Alpert, who describes this condition as greatness thinking—the belief that greatness can somehow cure the disappointments and imperfections of life. Yet greatness, by definition, is rare. If everyone could be extraordinary, the word would lose its meaning. The pursuit therefore condemns most people to a perpetual feeling of insufficiency. We become disappointed not because our lives are inadequate but because our expectations are delusional.

    What, then, is the exit sign?

    Alpert’s answer is to abandon the obsession with being spectacular and embrace Aristotle’s concept of arete—the fulfillment of one’s potential. Under this view, the goal is not to transform yourself into someone else. It is to become the best version of the person you already are. You cultivate your moral and rational faculties. You seek integrity rather than applause. You pursue excellence not because you crave admiration but because you wish to live well.

    These ideas animate Alpert’s book The Good-Enough Life, though his argument collides with a long tradition of thinkers who demand more. Immanuel Kant viewed human beings as obligated to develop their capacities as fully as possible. Friedrich Nietzsche urged us to stretch ourselves toward the Übermensch, a higher form of human existence. Compared to these visions, Alpert’s philosophy can sound almost suspiciously modest.

    Yet Rothman points out that the greatness-oriented philosophies of Kant and Nietzsche often collide with our intuition that ordinary life possesses genuine value. What if greatness is not required? What if a life marked by decency, moderation, friendship, competence, and love is enough?

    I suspect the answer lies somewhere between these extremes. We should not surrender our aspirations. Human beings are built to grow, create, test themselves, and pursue excellence. Yet neither should we allow a culture saturated with dopamine, hype, vanity, and status anxiety to convince us that greatness and fame are synonymous. Alpert is correct that being “good enough” is often a worthy goal. But I am not convinced that the choice is binary.

    Perhaps the real challenge is to cherish ordinary life while still striving toward extraordinary achievement. Perhaps we can enjoy a family dinner and write a great novel. Perhaps we can appreciate a quiet walk and pursue ambitious goals. Perhaps we can cultivate arete without becoming addicted to applause.

    In that case, the true enemy is not greatness. The true enemy is the delusion that greatness alone can save us.

  • How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    Yesterday I was watching myself play piano on my YouTube channel when I noticed something strange. I could barely focus on the music because my eyes kept drifting toward the Casio G-Shock GW-7900 strapped to my wrist. The watch looked so perfectly correct, so deeply aligned with whatever strange creature I have apparently become, that I caught myself thinking: “That’s it. That’s me. I’m a G-Shock guy.”

    A few hours later I was watching a true-crime docuseries when one of the detectives appeared wearing a Casio G-Shock GWM530. The moment I saw it, some invisible courtroom inside my brain slammed down the gavel.

    Case closed.

    I only want atomic time now.
    I only want resin on my wrist.
    I only want G-Shocks.

    The realization was both satisfying and faintly disturbing, like discovering your subconscious has quietly joined a militant survivalist sect while you were out buying groceries.

    What makes the experience unsettling is that I already possess five beautiful Seiko divers—carefully curated watches representing more than twenty years of obsessive collecting. Those Seikos were not random purchases. They were the result of decades of refinement, experimentation, buying, selling, regretting, and gradually arriving at what I believed was horological enlightenment. They sat in the watch box like sacred artifacts of a fully realized identity.

    Then, roughly four months ago—which psychologically feels more like four geological eras ago—I bought a Casio G-Shock Frogman.

    And the wrecking ball swung.

    The entire architecture of my watch hobby collapsed like a condemned casino in Las Vegas. Out of the rubble emerged a new religion constructed from resin, atomic synchronization, solar charging, and Japanese apocalypse-proof overengineering. I now own five G-Shocks.

    One of them, the Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman, was supposed to be its atomic sibling, the GW-9300. The eBay seller made an honest mistake and shipped the non-atomic version instead. Under normal circumstances this would have triggered a small existential crisis because I have apparently reached the point where the absence of Multi Band 6 synchronization feels like spiritual imprecision.

    But strangely, I didn’t care.

    I bought the watch for half price and immediately designated it my “Hawaii Watch,” reasoning that one does not require atomic synchronization while standing beside an edenic waterfall in Kauai pretending, however briefly, that mortality and property taxes do not exist.

    The whole experience reminds me of something my wife once said about men: they crave violent conversion experiences. In my heart, I know she’s right.

    A suburban man often longs for cataclysm without actual destruction. He wants upheaval without bankruptcy. Reinvention without divorce. Apocalypse without inconvenience. Since detonating one’s real life would be irresponsible, the energy gets redirected into symbolic conversions:

    • watches,
    • motorcycles,
    • kettlebells,
    • backpacks,
    • audio systems,
    • tactical flashlights,
    • sourdough starters,
    • wilderness knives.

    The external change may seem trivial, but psychologically it lands like a thunderclap because obsessive men experience identity through systems of allegiance.

    Objectively speaking, shifting from Seiko divers to G-Shocks is not an event of civilizational importance. No treaties were signed. No governments fell. The stock market did not tremble. Yet inside the mind of an obsessive enthusiast, the transition feels spiritually seismic.

    It genuinely reminds me of Losing My Religion.

    The old religion was:

    • mechanical divers,
    • steel bracelets,
    • sweeping seconds hands,
    • vintage romance,
    • and maritime mythology.

    The new religion is:

    • Tough Solar,
    • Multi Band 6,
    • atomic precision,
    • resin cases,
    • and watches designed to survive tectonic activity.

    The funniest part is that I fully recognize the absurdity of all this. I understand perfectly well that I am a grown man psychologically reorganizing himself around timekeeping devices like a monk discovering a new denomination of Protestantism.

    Which is precisely why I can’t help laughing at myself.

  • The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    There is something faintly dystopian about solitary people spending hours online watching other solitary people perform the microscopic rituals of daily life: tying shoelaces, cracking open cans of diet soda, pouring kibble into a cat’s bowl, unloading groceries with monk-like precision, folding laundry beneath soft lighting while melancholy piano music drifts through the background like emotional Febreze.

    At some point loneliness ceased being merely a condition to endure and became a genre of entertainment.

    You are not simply alone anymore. You are curating aloneness, aestheticizing it, monetizing it, and binge-watching it as though isolation itself were a luxury lifestyle brand. The modern internet increasingly resembles a vast digital aquarium filled with emotionally sedated people observing one another through glass while reassuring themselves that this counts as connection.

    I sometimes wonder if this phenomenon functions as a form of emotional jiu-jitsu. Instead of confronting the pain of alienation directly, people transform it into a consumer product. The loneliness does not disappear; it merely changes costume. By packaging solitude into soothing, carefully curated content, the sharp edge of disconnection becomes dulled. The ache remains, but now it arrives with ambient lighting, artisanal tea preparation, and a Scandinavian throw blanket.

    We now inhabit a condition I would call Consumptive Solitude: the state in which loneliness evolves from a painful human experience into a consumable form of entertainment. Isolated individuals compulsively watch other isolated individuals perform the mundane choreography of domestic life in order to simulate companionship without assuming the emotional risks, obligations, friction, compromise, or unpredictability of genuine human intimacy.

    This pathology is explored in Faith Hill’s essay “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” in which she examines the rise of what she calls “solitude influencers” and what their popularity reveals about contemporary society. These influencers present carefully curated lives of performative isolation: beautiful apartments, immaculate routines, quiet mornings, tasteful meals, dim lighting, tasteful melancholy, and endless scenes of one person existing in exquisitely controlled seclusion.

    The performance contains all the machinery of attention addiction without the inconvenience of actual friendship. There are no difficult conversations, no emotional demands, no conflicting schedules, no awkward silences, no disappointments, and no compromise. The viewer receives the emotional atmosphere of companionship without having to endure another person’s needs or complexity. It is intimacy stripped of reciprocity.

    Naturally, narcissism plays some role in this ecosystem. But narcissism alone does not explain the appeal. Control may be the deeper force at work. Real life is chaotic, humiliating, exhausting, and unpredictable. The solitude influencer offers the fantasy of total environmental management. Everything is calm. Everything is clean. Everything is curated. Nothing intrudes.

    For burned-out viewers, the effect can become psychologically narcotic, almost ASMR-like in its soothing predictability. After spending the day navigating economic stress, social tension, workplace absurdity, family obligations, and digital overload, people retreat into videos of someone silently pouring a glass of chablis while a Haydn sonata drifts through a minimalist apartment that appears untouched by conflict, debt, sickness, or despair.

    As I read Hill’s essay, I kept thinking about the word infantilization.

    The solitude influencer increasingly functions like a pacifier for emotionally exhausted adults. Millions of viewers recalibrate their nervous systems through these carefully controlled simulations of peace and containment. Some no longer wish to engage fully with the real world. Others feel incapable of doing so. Still others may have quietly surrendered altogether.

    And this is where the phenomenon begins to feel genuinely troubling.

    I suspect there is something psychologically regressive about spending one’s days and nights watching solitary performers enact sanitized domestic rituals for passive spectators. At some point, watching people “play house” begins replacing the harder work of building a life oneself. The performance of adulthood slowly replaces adulthood itself.

    Because you can only simulate intimacy, routine, domesticity, and emotional safety for so long before you begin forgetting what genuine growth requires: risk, struggle, awkwardness, responsibility, sacrifice, and contact with real people whose existence cannot be muted, paused, skipped, unsubscribed from, or optimized into aesthetic tranquility.

    The solitude influencer offers peace without vulnerability, companionship without obligation, and emotional atmosphere without genuine human entanglement.

    And that may be precisely why so many people find it irresistible.