Cinemorphosis

Category: FOMO and Its Discontents

  • The Consumer Shangri-La

    The Consumer Shangri-La

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Man Who Would Be Watch

    The Man Who Would Be Watch

    For over ten years, I had a YouTube channel mostly dedicated to my tormented relationship with watches. If you wanted to watch a man losing his mind as he travailed inside the fever swamp of watch addiction, you had come to the right place. Perhaps the algorithms encouraged me to become even crazier for the sake of audience capture. Or perhaps I didn’t need the algorithms. I was doing an excellent job of becoming unhinged by my watch obsession all by myself. Just pause on that for a moment. I didn’t need the algorithms to go crazy. I had done it the natural way. Give me a round of applause.

    But like all good things, that particular kind of crazy came to an end. As I entered my sixties, my bandwidth for dealing with that kind of stress diminished, and new priorities took its place: staying healthy, planning for retirement, and recognizing that I had very little time left to worry about rotating watches on my wrist. As a result, my watch obsession lost much of its intensity. My relationship with watches is vastly different today from what it was even five years ago.

    How much I’ve changed became apparent yesterday when I was cleaning out my office at work. I found a notebook from several years ago in which I had written dozens of what were supposed to be my Master Lists of the Ultimate Watch Collection. In my attempt to arrive at a definitive Master List, I had revised it over and over. Some lists contained only five premium watches. Others had a dozen. Still others fell somewhere in between. I recognized the frenzied handwriting of a man trying to save himself from drowning in quicksand.

    When I opened the notebook and examined those lists, I was overcome with pain. I could see a man dealing with enormous anxiety, using his watch obsession as a diversion from confronting its real causes. Of course, the real causes of anxiety could never have been about watches or the Great Watch Questions: Is my Holy Grail a Tudor, an Omega, or a Grand Seiko? The true causes surely had more to do with love, connection, and mortality.

    But the man who made those lists was oblivious to that fact. He believed that arriving at the Ultimate Master Watch List would somehow bring him peace. He was clearly delusional.

    As I studied those lists, I saw a man struggling with unresolved personal torment. Reading them was painful because they gave me a window into someone I barely recognized. At the same time, I did recognize him, but only from a great distance.

    I was reminded of the terrible scene in The Man Who Would Be King when Peachy Carnehan, played by Michael Caine, holds the crowned head of Daniel Dravot, played by Sean Connery. The crowned head was the end result of a man’s misguided quest to become a god.

    My story was the same but slightly different. In the movie version of my past life, there was no crowned head. Instead, there was a severed forearm with an eight-inch wrist adorned with a luxury timepiece. I was the star of a movie titled The Man Who Would Be Watch.

    Because I’m no longer that man, my YouTube channel has changed. I talk more about the challenges of being in my sixties, retirement, and my misalignment with a world I barely recognize. By charting the course of my actual life, I am violating the principles of social media branding. I’ve deviated from my previous watch obsession, which means I’ve abandoned what business strategists call my content pillars and content buckets.

    A business strategist would shake his finger at me and say, “Do not abandon those content pillars and content buckets. Those are the tools that give audiences recognizable themes, comfort, and familiarity. Those are the tools that keep your audience coming back for more.”

    I would like to offer that business consultant a rebuttal.

    First, I’m all for content pillars and content buckets. I chronicled my watch addiction with honesty and due diligence, but the addiction was like a riverboat on a fast-moving river. It was bound to slow down and enter a tributary. In my case, the tributary was this small matter of age and mortality. I can’t pretend that the riverboat is still at the beginning of its journey. It’s nearing the end. No amount of business strategy, or tossing around terms like content pillars and content buckets, is going to stop that.

    My YouTube channel was always about chronicling my obsessions. If those obsessions were reconfigured by life events beyond my control, such as growing older, then the moral thing to do was to comment on those changes. In that regard, I’ve done nothing to abandon my channel’s mission or brand. I’ve stayed true to it.

    For many years, I was The Man Who Would Be Watch. But now I’m more like Peachy Carnehan. I’m the storyteller. I may be broken and half-crazed, but at least I’m still alive.

    What good is maintaining your content pillars and content buckets if you’re no longer around to deliver them?

  • Consumerism Dies Before You Do

    Consumerism Dies Before You Do

    As you get older, the pangs of consumerism recede until you reach a state of materialistic ennui. Many of the things that once possessed your imagination lose their potency and luster. Stripped of their power, they appear like a heap of gray ash. Their very existence seems to mock the idea of consumerism itself. A false religion, you now call it. But it was a very real religion in your youth, when certain consumer goods had the power to transform you into the kind of person you aspired to be.

    But all of that is gone now. You notice that the objects you once valued are dead to you. You may drive past a car that in your youth overwhelmed you with frisson and longing, but now it has all the emotional power of reaching into the back of your pantry and finding a lonely, slightly moldy Idaho potato.

    Driving to my daughters’ high school yesterday afternoon to pick them up, I stopped at a red light beside a white BMW coupe with impossibly large wheels adorned with sport spokes. The wheels alone probably cost close to ten grand. I felt nothing. This complete lack of emotional connection to the BMW made me think of the 90s, when a BMW was a talisman of masculinity, power, and success. Now I regarded it the way I would a small fly on my windshield, a mild visual cue requiring no response.

    The BMW made me think of the box containing four mechanical diver watches that sits near my desk. For the last year, I’ve opened the box only out of obligation, occasionally winding one of the watches to make sure it still works. Wearing one of these beautiful divers does nothing for me anymore. I don’t feel elevated in any way. I feel nothing. I have died to these watches. I have considered selling them or giving them away, but I’m content to leave them in the box as a reminder of who I once was. I am not that person anymore.

    I could not will myself to love those mechanical divers any more than I could will myself to love an eighty-thousand-dollar BMW. The signs are strong enough that I can definitively say I have entered a new realm: the condition of consumerist lassitude. I suppose I could tell you how liberating all this is, how I feel free from the idols that once possessed me, but that would suggest I have been blessed with joy. Such is not the case. This boredom with luxurious things is accompanied more by weariness and malaise.

    My state of languor reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague at the college over a decade ago. We were talking about happiness, and I remember exactly what I told him: “Happiness is not an abundance of things. It’s the absence of bullshit.” This remark strikes me as more true today than it did ten years ago. Nearly sixty-five, I am grateful that I have no dire health problems requiring me to visit clinics and endure the rigors and tedium of invasive tests. I have reached a new realm in which, every day I wake up relatively healthy and discover that I have lived to see another day, gratitude asserts itself so strongly that there is little room in my brain for materialistic idolatry.

    I woke up this morning, made coffee, sat at my computer, did some writing, and glowed with the anticipation that in a couple of hours I would enter my garage, turn on a podcast, and experience the bliss of an hour of kettlebells. No BMW or mechanical watch can do that for me. Those things no longer have the incandescence they once had. The infatuation is gone. I can’t say they have died. It’s the other way around. I have died. I am dead to those things. The more I cling to health and life as I enter life’s final chapters, the more I die to the status symbols that once captivated my imagination.

    This is not wisdom or virtue. It’s closer to bandwidth. I simply don’t have enough room in my brain to muster the emotional pageantry and hype over things that don’t contribute to my health and well-being. That I have died to fussy, high-maintenance luxury watches and sexy sports cars, and in their place desire more reliable things, makes me boring and practical. And that is a good thing. It brings me back to the words I shared with my colleague. Life is not about being surrounded by opulence. It’s about being unfettered by unnecessary complications. With so little time left, I find myself purging those complications with methodical ruthlessness. I am in a new landscape now, with new duties and obligations. Dying to luxury items was one of those obligations, and I didn’t die to these things by an act of will. It seems nature did it for me.

  • A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    Like many of my fellow Boomers, I’ve gone down a commonly trodden and forlorn path in the realm of dwindling friendships. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I took friendship for granted. It came as naturally as going to the gym, shopping for clothes, going to clubs, and eating lunch at a cafe. These endeavors were often accompanied by friends. In the 80s and 90s, long conversations on landline phones were also part of the fabric of my social life. That I merited a two-hour phone conversation was no big deal. People found me engaging. My self-worth wasn’t something I questioned. It was simply a matter of fact that I was worthy of a two-hour conversation on random topics.

    Spending time with friends diminished in my late thirties and forties. I would go to a restaurant once every other month or so with colleagues. As I grew apart from some of them and others retired, I did not notice that their disappearance was not accompanied by replacements. My friendship count went down. Meanwhile, I acclimated to life in the cave, my expression for retreating into a suburban enclave and learning to entertain and distract yourself as you disconnect from the beehive of life.

    As engagement farms sprouted up around 2010 and offered frictionless, half-baked social interaction, my habits of isolation worsened because superficial parasocial interactions substituted for in-depth, messy, real ones. These digital engagements proved unsatisfactory. Engagement on these platforms was not authentic friendship. It was a brief burst of dopamine. When the dopamine died, you were left hungry for real social interaction. These engagement farms, in other words, were the equivalent of junk food. You could overconsume the processed stuff while remaining emotionally malnourished.

    Fifteen years of this social deprivation, combined with the chaos and false euphoria of attention-capture platforms, lulled Boomers like me into a state of social isolation that became our new normal.

    There could be a gender factor here. My wife maintains real friendships, and she notices my deprivation in that department. She wants me to put time and energy into my “social health,” as she calls it. I agree that engaging in real friendships would be good for my social health and, in turn, put less pressure on her. The problem is that I don’t have a magic wand. I can’t say abracadabra and have a friend materialize like a genie from a bottle.

    Social entropy is a real and insidious thing that can’t be reversed overnight. I worry that you reach an age and become so entrenched in routines and habits that you cross the Isolation Rubicon, making a return to a normal and healthy social world extremely difficult.

    In this new landscape, where landline phones and two-hour conversations have become extinct and we spend much of our time in parasocial engagements, I can appreciate some of these mediated communications. By and large, people are friendly on my YouTube channel and Instagram page. I don’t diminish these interactions. I simply see them for what they are. They are limited because they exist in the digital sphere. They cannot substitute for real interaction.

    I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with two Trader Joe’s clerks, both in their late twenties. One was scanning my food items. The other was bagging them. I told them that 99% of the time I shop at Trader Joe’s at eight a.m., and I want to be out of the store by 8:45 because I notice that each passing hour brings more people, stress, and anxiety. I told them that one time I had to come in at three p.m. for emergency provisions when my wife’s friends from out of town showed up. I walked into a crowded Trader Joe’s and didn’t even recognize the place. Nor did I recognize the customers.

    “These aren’t my people,” I said.

    My dismay at feeling like an alien during my afternoon shopping spree made the clerk, a short woman whose arms were generously covered with tattoos, stop scanning my groceries. She let out a loud belly laugh. I could see the self-abandoned joy in her face. Making her laugh in that moment was more gratifying than a decade of social-media engagements. You cannot substitute real engagement with parasocial interplay.

    But real engagement is increasingly rare. If I shop at Target, there is no clerk. I scan the items myself while a robot admonishes me if I don’t place them in the designated bagging area.

    A lot of my social deprivation is of my own making. I am lazy, sullen, egotistical, and introverted. While I can be entertaining, I am usually tolerated in low doses. Regardless of what I think about myself, the world does not owe me a bevy of friends waiting on my doorstep to join them in some madcap adventure or other.

    I feel dumb that back in 2010 I was enticed by the so-called social-media corporations. Relying on engagement farms for a morsel of social interaction while curating some energetic persona full of moxie and frisson was pure chicanery. The fact that I substituted this curated nonsense for real life was my fault. I played myself. I let the engagement-farm companies play me as well.

    I don’t have an easy solution to my social health, but I can see the landscape clearly. I am sobered enough after decades of curating a dazzling persona to end that folly. Wherever life takes me from this point on, I’m going there without the fakery.

  • The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    Dementia and cognitive decline are real concerns in old age. Think of them as the hurricane forming somewhere offshore. You don’t know if it will hit you, but you prepare anyway. Stock up on water and canned beans. Nail plywood over the windows. Make sure you have quick access to the potato cellar.

    Old age requires its own hurricane preparations. Don’t carry excess body weight. Maintain normal blood pressure. Go easy on sugar. Exercise. Avoid alcohol. Don’t smoke. If your hearing deteriorates to the point that you withdraw from conversation and retreat into your own head, get a hearing aid. Keep your mind active. Build what researchers call cognitive reserve—the brain’s capacity to withstand some of the damage associated with aging and disease while continuing to function.

    You can challenge yourself by playing a musical instrument, doing crossword puzzles, starting a podcast, learning something difficult, or writing a multigenerational novel. Think of these pursuits as mental exercise, potentially as important to your aging brain as going to the gym five days a week is to your aging body.

    But not all mental exercise is equal.

    Consider journaling, that beloved sacrament of wellness culture. Journaling requires a physical notebook, your favorite pen or mechanical pencil, perhaps a steaming mug of tea positioned nearby for atmosphere. For this one noble endeavor, you have gone off the grid. You are the intellectual equivalent of outdoorsman Euell Gibbons, wandering through the wilderness and surviving on the edible portions of pinecones.

    Writer and professor Katie Roiphe challenges our assumptions about this supposedly healthy practice in her essay “Is Journaling Bad for You?” Her objections are formidable. For one thing, your journal is never as private as you imagine. Eventually some nosy relative will root through your belongings like a truffle sow and unearth thoughts never intended for public consumption.

    Worse, those thoughts may be misunderstood. They may even repel people who once loved you. The disparity between the person they thought they knew and the creature muttering from the pages of your private notebook may be too great to reconcile.

    You may not particularly enjoy meeting your former selves, either.

    Reading your journals twenty years later can become an archaeological excavation of every insecurity, obsession, grievance, humiliation, and catastrophically stupid opinion you once possessed. Instead of illuminating the present, your journal can lure you backward. Like Lot’s wife, you become fixated on what lies behind you and eventually turn into a pillar of salt—though perhaps one with very good handwriting.

    Then there is the problem of introspection cosplay.

    You may believe you’re plumbing the depths of your psyche when you’re really performing the role of Thoughtful Person. Instead of being brutally honest with yourself, you curate your introspection. Journaling becomes an exercise in self-regard, another platform for presenting yourself to an audience—even if the audience consists entirely of you.

    You become like the gym novice who spends two hours at the fitness center every day talking to people, listening to music, watching television, drinking smoothies, checking his phone, and occasionally wandering onto a treadmill. Six months later, he stands before the mirror bewildered that he has somehow failed to transform into an Olympic decathlete.

    But the fact that journaling can be done badly—and occasionally with disastrous consequences—is not an argument against journaling. It is an argument against performative journaling.

    If you can be unflinchingly honest with yourself, by all means journal. If you understand, in accordance with Sturgeon’s Law, that 90 percent of everything you write will be crap, by all means journal. If you approach your inner life with the same rigor that someone brings to a serious circuit-training session—working rather than posing, examining rather than admiring—then by all means journal.

    Roiphe’s argument, as I understand it, isn’t really against journaling. It is against confusing the performance of introspection with introspection itself. Beneath her skepticism lies an argument for authenticity.

    And perhaps that brings us back to cognitive decline.

    We worry about forgetting names, losing words, walking into rooms without remembering why we went there. These are frightening possibilities, and we should do what we reasonably can to protect ourselves.

    But there may be another kind of cognitive failure worth fearing: losing the ability to distinguish between examining your life and performing an examination of your life.

    You can fill a thousand notebooks and never confront yourself.

    The handwriting may remain perfectly legible while the mind behind it disappears.

  • Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Convenience is the mother of bad fashion. Think Velcro shoe straps that look less like footwear than medical devices designed for elephantine feet. Think elastic waistbands engineered to accommodate the vicissitudes of your waistline after an unfortunate buffet event. Think synthetic-blend loungewear that is as wrinkle-free as it is odor-harboring.

    But convenience becomes something darker when it promises escape from the natural friction of existence, when the goal is to inhabit a womb-like environment where effort has vanished completely. Think of the Snuggie, that fleece abomination that combines clothing and blanket while announcing to the world that you have become unapologetically dysfunctional. Congratulations. You have reached the apotheosis of bad fashion. You are now wearing your pathology on your sleeve, quite literally.

    If you’re approaching retirement age, you’ll discover an entire industry built around convenience and the premise that after sixty-five your need for it grows exponentially. Follow this road far enough and eventually your life becomes as frictionless as wrinkle-free loungewear, Netflix autoplay, instant oatmeal, and vanilla Ensure.

    You could argue that this is merely another humiliation of old age, another example of one generation falling out of alignment with those behind it. Perhaps that was once true. No longer. We now live in an age when younger generations aspire to much of the same frictionless existence traditionally marketed to the elderly. The generations have finally found common ground: nobody wants to get off the couch.

    This is a problem, according to Gabe Bullard’s Against Convenience, which argues that the mindless pursuit of convenience and frictionlessness can leave us isolated, dehumanized, and infantilized.

    The crank inside me immediately shouts, “Thank you, Captain Obvious, for writing a three-hundred-page padded essay explaining that modern technology has made us lazy.”

    But Bullard has, in fact, written an important, timely, and persuasive book, a much-needed rebuttal to a society mindlessly seduced by the conveniences of modern technology. My crankiness reveals less about the book than it does about my own guilty recognition that I am precisely the kind of person Bullard is writing about. I am, after all, a man who embraces a respectable amount of sloth and convenience. Consider my wardrobe: tank tops, gym shorts, and flip-flops. This ensemble serves as loungewear, sleepwear, errand wear, and exercise wear. Four wardrobes in one. I consider this a triumph of efficiency worthy of self-congratulation.

    Comfort over fashion makes me profoundly happy. When we returned to campus after our pandemic hibernation, my colleagues and I, ranging in age from thirty to sixty-five, seemed to have received the same memo. We wore T-shirts bearing the college logo, dark-wash denim jeans, and extravagantly cushioned walking shoes with names like Brooks Ghost Max 3 and Hoka Bondi 9. These sounded less like orthopedic footwear than race cars capable of reaching two hundred miles per hour at Le Mans.

    Before contemplating the pathologies of frictionless existence in Bullard’s persuasive critique, I made myself a delicious cup of coffee with my Ninja slow-drip coffee maker. It took ten minutes. Then I prepared a bowl of rolled oats with protein powder and berries. Thanks to the microwave, that took fewer than four.

    I am now typing this essay on an aluminum mechanical keyboard while sitting before two 27-inch 4K monitors connected to a Mac Mini smaller than my hand. Its M4 chip runs cool and moves through Google Chrome with frictionless ease.

    I do embrace struggle where I can. I like tackling big ideas, exploring subtexts, locating semiotic signs and symbols in popular culture, considering Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of liquid modernity, and interrogating my consumer longings through René Girard’s notion of mimetic desire.

    But here is the problem for anyone mounting a principled defense of friction: convenience can be delicious.

    This morning’s coffee and oatmeal were predictably stupendous. I’m sitting before two enormous monitors with twelve browser tabs open. Telemann is playing through YouTube Premium, with Boccherini and Rossini waiting obediently in the queue. My computer is cool and silent. My coffee is hot. My oatmeal required almost no labor.

    Perhaps Bullard is right that we need friction.

    I’m just not sure I want it before breakfast.

  • I Left My Own Funeral Early

    I Left My Own Funeral Early

    A month before my sixty-fifth birthday, I dreamed I attended my own funeral.

    It wasn’t just for me. A beloved janitor at my college had also died. He and I stood inside a pristine dumpster, apparently scrubbed to a meticulous shine out of respect for the dead. Evidently even in death, the college had standards. I was both the subject of the funeral and a witness to it, simultaneously dead in the receptacle and standing with the other attendees observing my disposal.

    The aching sadness of the dream was undeniable, and it followed me into the morning as I tried to restore normal operations with coffee, oatmeal, writing, and piano practice. None of it worked. I felt sad and scared.

    Seeking consolation, I looked at some titles on my Amazon wishlist: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older; Susan Moon’s Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch and This Is Getting Old: Zen Thoughts on Aging with Humor and Dignity; Catherine Bradbury’s This Way Up: Old Friends, New Love, and a Map for the Road Ahead.

    Seeing these titles depressed me even more.

    I was reminded of 2010. I was forty-eight and overwhelmed with having twins. There were parenting podcasts everywhere. I couldn’t bear them. I was already living the struggle of parenting. The last thing I wanted after a day of actual parenting was to put on headphones and listen to two cheerful people discuss the challenges of parenting.

    The same thing happened during my forty years of teaching college writing. I never developed much tolerance for writing conferences, teaching podcasts, or education seminars. I was already teaching. I didn’t have room in my brain for shop talk and inspirational tidbits about connecting with my students. Occasionally I allowed some external pedagogy to sneak through the back door. I’m not above teaching the Sandwich Paragraph Structure. I have standards, but I also have bills to pay.

    And now death, aging, and retirement have generated their own industry. There are books, podcasts, YouTube channels, retreats, coaches, maps for the road ahead, instructions for the home stretch, and presumably somebody somewhere offering a twelve-week seminar on embracing your authentic elder self.

    It is all too on the nose.

    I’d rather approach death indirectly. I want to sneak up on it and surprise it. I want to be the agentive force, not the other way around.

    Good luck to me.

    Part of the problem is that while I believe in having a purpose and maintaining a positive attitude toward life’s final chapters, conversations about these matters quickly become infested with clichés and saccharine encouragement. Find your purpose. Practice gratitude. Embrace the journey. Age with intention. Become the sage.

    Apparently death becomes less alarming if you surround it with enough inspirational nouns.

    There is no panacea, formula, podcast, or twelve-step plan that removes the sting from your final chapters. Mortality remains stubbornly unimpressed by branding.

    Being old reminds me of a bunch of boomers attending a Rolling Stones concert. The band members themselves are around eighty, and now they’re playing the final encore. Do you stay and savor every remaining moment?

    That sounds good on paper.

    In reality, you’re already thinking about the parking lot.

    The concert peaked about an hour ago. If you stay until the final note, twenty thousand other people will stampede toward the exits at precisely the same moment. Then comes the parking structure. Then comes traffic. You can already see yourself trapped behind a Suburban containing six other boomers discussing their statins.

    So you leave early.

    You hear “Satisfaction” beginning behind you as you make your way toward the exit, congratulating yourself on your strategic brilliance.

    This impulse has an equivalent in aging. Call it Exit Anticipation: the tendency to begin psychologically withdrawing from life because you have become acutely aware that the event is approaching its conclusion.

    You know the peak is probably behind you. You know the concert cannot continue indefinitely. And once you start thinking about the exit, it becomes increasingly difficult to concentrate on the music.

    A sense of futility creeps in. Why start another project? Why buy another piano? Why make another friend? Why write another book? Why become deeply invested in anything when the ushers are already stacking chairs in the back of the auditorium?

    Exit Anticipation whispers that perhaps you should begin disengaging now. Get ahead of the crowd. Beat the traffic.

    It is a dark impulse, but denying it seems more dangerous than acknowledging it. You need to know that the impulse exists precisely so that you don’t obey it automatically. Otherwise, you can spend years leaving a life that hasn’t ended.

    That may be one of the peculiar psychological challenges of aging. The knowledge that the concert will end can interfere with your ability to hear the music that is still playing.

    My dream understood this before I did.

    There I was, looking at my own body inside a meticulously sanitized dumpster, attending the final ceremony of my existence.

    Did I stay until the end?

    Of course not.

    I wanted to beat the crowd.

    I wanted to beat the traffic.

  • Nobody Ever Needed an Angiogram Because of Too Many Seikos

    Nobody Ever Needed an Angiogram Because of Too Many Seikos

    As I close in on sixty-five and retirement in eight months, I hunger for life changes. A new chapter makes life feel longer. It’s like adding a second story to your house. You get the permits, hire the contractors, endure six months of dust, and your single-story shack becomes a glorious two-story home. Surely you will live longer now.

    A lot of these life changes are fantasies. I find myself looking at real estate. With my suburban Los Angeles home approaching two million dollars in value, I could sell it and buy a sort of mansion in Henderson, Las Vegas, or Orlando, Florida—a place big enough that I could finally trade in my Yamaha upright for a grand piano.

    I know it would be ridiculous to make my wife and teenage twin daughters pack their belongings and move to Nevada or Florida so I could indulge my fantasy of “starting life over.” Such a rebirth in a new land would mostly be a chimera. No matter where I went, I’d still have Netflix, a nearby bagel place, and a Costco. I would have traveled hundreds of miles to discover that I was still me.

    So as a proxy for uprooting my Southern California life, I look for smaller transformations. One has already occurred: my obsessive watch hobby.

    I currently have two discrete collections, Seiko divers and G-Shocks. The Seikos are the expensive ones. I own four mechanical Seiko divers that cost between $1,200 and $3,400 apiece. I spent about $8,100 on those mechanical divers, plus another $1,200 on my iconic quartz Seiko Tuna. Altogether, I have about $9,300 sitting in a box telling time.

    What amazes me is that after twenty years of manically flipping watches—buying and selling them in an addictive frenzy—I stopped buying expensive Seiko divers more than a year ago.

    The last mechanical Seiko I bought, the Coastline Diver SBDC203, was purchased in August 2025. My SLA023, SLA051, SLA055, and quartz SBBN049 Tuna have been around considerably longer. This is a dramatic departure from the years when I could buy and sell a thousand-dollar watch every month as if horological instability were a medical condition.

    Something changed.

    I slowed down until, eventually, I stopped. I have bought nothing in the mechanical realm for more than thirteen months. There was no declaration, act of will, twelve-step program, or magical incantation. The desire simply weakened. I died to the frenzy.

    During this stoppage, however, a far less expensive subcollection appeared. Over the last eight months, I accumulated a modest collection of G-Shocks: the Frogman GWF-1000, Mudman GW-9500, Mudman G-9300, Rescue GW-7900, and King GXW-56-1BJF. I also own the famous GW-5000U, although my wife has largely annexed it.

    I am content with my G-Shocks. I currently have nothing on my wishlist.

    Well, almost nothing.

    I admire the G-Shock GWF-D1000BC with its DLC coating and combi bracelet, but it is an absurdly overqualified Hero Watch for a man who spends most of his time playing piano and doing dishes in a suburban kitchen. At $1,500, buying it would carry a faint whiff of desperation: an aging consumer hoping another cardboard box on the doorstep might generate a fresh squirt of dopamine.

    I have ridden that merry-go-round enough times to know where it stops.

    Buying the Frogman might produce more shame than pleasure, so I am resisting it.

    My watch-wearing habits have changed as well. Ninety-five percent of the time, I wear G-Shocks. They are comfortable, atomic-time accurate, solar-powered, and worry-free. I still look at my Seiko divers and marvel at their beauty, but I no longer feel connected to them the way I once did.

    They belong to my past self.

    They are me living in the one-story house. They are vintage cars I take out for a ten-minute drive every four months before carefully returning them to the garage.

    The G-Shocks are my new companions. The G-Shocks and I live upstairs in my imaginary mansion.

    More important, the affordable G-Shocks comfort me in a way the expensive mechanical watches no longer do. Mechanical watches are beautiful little stress generators. They can require hundreds of dollars in servicing and reward your investment by keeping approximately the correct time.

    My G-Shocks are Tough Solar and synchronize with the atomic clock in Fort Collins. They ask almost nothing of me.

    It is as if the Invisible Retirement Sherpa whispered into my ear: “You don’t need another job flipping and worrying about expensive watches. You already have a new job. Retirement. Put on the G-Shock and get moving.”

    So I did not buy a mansion in Henderson or Orlando.

    I started a new life with G-Shocks.

    I hunger for other changes as well, particularly regarding health and diet. Last night I dreamed I was at a party. I went into the hosts’ bathroom, pulled up my shirt, and confronted a gut that did not inspire confidence. I was overcome with dread—not simply because of my expanding lower torso but because of what it represented: a man so consumed by food noise that he could not control himself.

    I lowered the watch noise.

    Could I lower the food noise?

    That raises a harder question: How do we lower unwanted noise in the first place? My appetite for expensive watches died largely on its own. I didn’t wrestle it into submission. Food is another matter.

    And the stakes are considerably higher. Nobody ever needed an angiogram because he bought too many Seikos.

    Recently I spoke with my eighty-one-year-old aunt in Minnesota. After experiencing shortness of breath and dizziness, she underwent an angiogram, the same procedure my grandfather had in his late seventies. Heart blockages have appeared on my mother’s side of the family. If changing my diet could reduce my chances of eventually following them into the cardiac catheterization lab, I would like to make that change now.

    But what would that diet look like? Do I go for the gold standard and become plant-based? What happens then? Do I become a social pariah, a weirdo, a scold—the guy interrogating the waiter about chicken stock while everyone else is trying to order dinner?

    And would I really care if the diet helped keep my arteries open?

    So from both a health and moral standpoint, I fantasize about becoming vegan in much the same way I fantasize about moving into a mansion in Henderson. The vegan life represents another new chapter, another second story added to the house.

    For now, however, veganism, like fleeing Los Angeles, remains a chimera.

    Meanwhile, I am typing on a satisfyingly clicky mechanical keyboard with my trusty G-Shock Rescue on my wrist.

    Change is not impossible.

    Sometimes you notice only after it has already happened.

  • Fran Lebowitz Never Retired

    Fran Lebowitz Never Retired

    You can’t really understand the depths of retirement and all its complications without considering the life of New York personality Fran Lebowitz. She published two celebrated collections of essays more than forty years ago, and that more or less sums up her career as a productive writer.

    You could say she retired from writing, but that is too simple. You could say writer’s block ended her writing career, and that would be closer. But Lebowitz calls it a “writer’s blockade” and has compared her extended writing hiatus to the Vietnam War. She doesn’t know exactly how it started, and she never figured out how to end it. It just dragged on for decades, apparently without a viable exit strategy.

    Ordinarily, an artist who stops producing art enters a strange posthumous existence while still alive. The old work remains, but the artist begins haunting it.

    This does not apply to Fran Lebowitz.

    Deprived of her writing, the public got something better: Fran Lebowitz.

    She began showing up at colleges and auditoriums, answering questions with the same intelligence, irritation, precision, and wit that once appeared on the page. In this regard, Lebowitz became a professional personality. There is no blockage when she speaks. Nothing can stop her extemporaneous verbal wit.

    She is the consummate example of what I call Personality Migration: the transfer of one’s professional value from the original craft into the personality developed through decades of practicing it. Lebowitz’s wit migrated from the written page to spontaneous speech. The writer stopped writing; the writing voice survived.

    You would like to think that retirement might offer some variation of Personality Migration—that after leaving your profession, you could transfer your accumulated skills into another endeavor that highlights the best parts of your personality.

    This is easier said than done.

    It might even be dangerous to hold up Fran Lebowitz as a retirement guide. For one thing, she is a delightfully cranky genius, the epitome of the New York elite in the best sense. “Coastal elite” is usually a pejorative suggesting pretentiousness, trendiness, and pseudo-intellectualism. Lebowitz is something rarer: an authentic intellectual, so intelligent and culturally self-contained that she sometimes seems to exist outside ordinary space and time.

    Paradoxically, she is also more present in physical space than the rest of us.

    Fran Lebowitz lives without smartphones, computers, social media, and microwave ovens. She has observed that people staring at their phones are not actually where they are standing. Their bodies are present, but their minds have been abducted. They are displaced, distracted, and disoriented. The machine has hijacked the brain while the owner continues walking down the sidewalk.

    Lebowitz anchors us to reality. She also appears remarkably uninterested in vanity or delusions of grandeur. She has a delicious disregard for “her legacy,” what people think of her now, or what they might think of her after she dies. Not surprisingly, she has developed a following among younger people who find her analog, vanity-free existence strangely liberating. She has become fashionable largely by refusing to participate in fashion.

    When I think about Lebowitz’s migration from writer to traveling personality and try to identify her appeal as she speaks before sold-out auditoriums, I am reminded of Harry G. Frankfurt’s slender philosophical book On Bullshit.

    We live in a world saturated with bullshit. Advertising bullshit. Corporate bullshit. Political bullshit. Social-media bullshit. Self-help bullshit. Personal-brand bullshit. We swim through so much of it that we eventually lose the ability to smell it.

    Fran Lebowitz is a beloved exterminator of bullshit.

    She identifies it, exposes it, and kills it on contact. Better yet, she does this without presenting herself as courageous. There is no heroic pose. She simply appears constitutionally incapable of pretending that nonsense makes sense.

    When you listen to Fran Lebowitz speak, your entire body can quiver with the pleasure of recognition. Someone has finally said the thing without wrapping it in bubble wrap. You experience a kind of catharsis. Your illusions loosen their grip. For a few minutes, the fog clears.

    Who needs therapy when Fran Lebowitz is talking?

  • Latitudinal Man

    Latitudinal Man

     

    An “active-living community” is more than a place. It’s a philosophy. Throw in a dash of Hawaiian shirts, parrot pool floats, and Jimmy Buffett music, and you may be beyond philosophy. You may be in the realm of religion. To get a closer look at this religion, check out Latitude Margaritaville, a retirement community in Daytona Beach. Nearby is the Bar & Chill, where margaritas flow endlessly. Forget the Land of Milk and Honey. You’re in the Land of Tequila and Triple Sec.

    Latitude Margaritaville is a defiant rebuttal to philosophical writers such as Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks, who have built a thriving cottage industry mansplaining to people of retirement age that the secret to happiness is to abandon the pursuit of happiness and replace it with a life of meaning. Decline is humiliating. Preserve your dignity with a moral compass composed of Tolstoy, Augustine, and Kierkegaard. Reading the books and essays of the Brooks Establishment is an invigorating skin bracer. Slap some of their tonic on your face. It’s a bracing way to wake up in the morning, stare into the mirror, and not despair over the fact that you’ll be seventy soon.

    Or maybe it’s not.

    Maybe Latitude Margaritaville is the true path. No pretentious mansplaining here. This is paradise on Earth, starting at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a Beach Collection tract home.

    New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten explores this paradise and its inhabitants in his essay “Retirement the Margaritaville Way.” The people who live amid the cabanas and tiki huts don’t seem lost and lonely. They seem genuinely happy. They seem connected to one another. The place exudes “community” and “active living.” Light classic rock plays all day. You can order cheeseburgers, beer, and margaritas whenever you please. Never leaving high school may be the secret to eternal youth.

    Paumgarten seems taken aback by the sheer amount of happiness he finds in this retirement community. He writes, “The citizens of Latitude Margaritaville testify so consistently to a life of gratification that one suspects, but finds no evidence for, a regimen of happy pills or talking points.” Disgruntlement and curmudgeonliness must exist, he observes, but somehow they remain out of sight.

    What is the secret of a place that can turn even a cranky old bastard into an upbeat senior citizen animated by optimism and joy? In search of the answer, Paumgarten finds “cheerleading pooh-bah” and head of residential community relations Stuart Schultz, who delivers the happiness formula that has eluded Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks: Latitude Margaritaville is “like being in college, but with money and without having to study.” You have a great dorm room, no classes, and there’s always a party.

    Take that, Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks.

    Paumgarten’s exploration of late-life living uncovers a happiness formula that seems to have eluded some of our most celebrated authors. You need to live in the tropics, where it’s balmy all year round. You need a cabana theme with lots of aquatic activities. You need to recreate the high-school burger-joint life. Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. Create a community of financially solvent boomers with the same nostalgic longings. And forbid political conversations, which are anathema to paradise.

    If you adhere to this formula, you can become the happiest person on Earth. Forget Kierkegaard’s Aesthete, forever searching for novel experiences to quell his inner restlessness. Forget Nietzsche’s Last Man, forever seeking consumer comforts and a mindless return to the womb.

    In Daytona Beach, you can become Latitudinal Man.

    Latitudinal Man defies the laws of aging. He unapologetically embraces the nostalgia of his adolescence, cocoons himself from the toxic unpleasantries of political life, and walks around year-round shirtless in bathing trunks and flip-flops, his body smeared with SPF 50 sunscreen while he carries a platter of nachos and wings. If someone asked Latitudinal Man whether he had ever read Arthur C. Brooks or David Brooks, his response would be roughly the same as if someone had asked baseball legend Pete Rose what he thought of the novels of Marguerite Duras and her exploration of emotional disequilibrium and transgressive love.

    What we learn from Latitudinal Man is that perhaps the intellectual elite have led us astray. All this talk of “interiority” and cultivating “an inner life” may not bear fruit. It may even be downright dangerous. Too much interiority could leave you sitting alone in a room reading Kierkegaard when happy hour started twenty minutes ago.

    What is needed is a down payment on Phase Three at Latitude Margaritaville. The villas are selling out fast.

    The boomer hive mind of the Latitudeners awaits you.