Cinemorphosis

Category: FOMO and Its Discontents

  • The Exit Watch That Blew the Exit

    The Exit Watch That Blew the Exit

    There comes a moment in every watch influencer’s career when he announces, with ceremonial gravity, that he has found his Exit Watch. This watch, he assures his audience, is different. It stands apart from the rest of the collection not merely in design, but in destiny. It promises completion. Closure. A sense that the long pilgrimage through steel and lume has reached its ordained end.

    The watch is so magnificent that it demands narrative consequences. The influencer hints at “big changes.” New content. A reimagined channel. Perhaps fewer uploads, perhaps deeper reflections. The implication is clear: the Exit Watch has not merely ended a collecting phase—it has matured the man.

    Then the watch arrives.

    It is flawless. Better than expected. The case sings. The dial radiates authority. The bracelet feels engineered by monks. The unboxing video trembles with reverence. For approximately forty-eight hours, the influencer experiences peace.

    Then something goes wrong.

    The watch does not quiet desire. It amplifies it. Instead of satiation, there is hunger—acute, feral, unprecedented. The Exit Watch behaves less like a sedative and more like a stimulant. New watches begin to haunt his thoughts. He starts browsing late at night. He rationalizes. He reopens tabs he swore were closed forever. The collection multiplies wildly, untethered from logic or restraint.

    Within months, the spiral is complete. The influencer is on the brink of losing his sanity, his marriage, and his house—saved only by a merciful uncle who wires sixty thousand dollars to send him to a rehab facility in the Utah desert. There, stripped of his collection, he learns to play the flute, hunt his own food, and live without Wi-Fi. He emerges thinner, quieter, and reconciled to a solitary G-Shock Frogman, worn not for pleasure but for survival.

    This is Exit Watch Reversal: the affliction in which a watch intended to conclude a collecting arc instead detonates it. The subject does not experience closure, but acceleration—as though the watch has unlocked a previously dormant appetite and handed it the keys.

  • Applause Collapse and the Perils of a “New Direction”

    Applause Collapse and the Perils of a “New Direction”

    There comes a moment in every watch influencer’s career when he believes—sincerely, even nobly—that his audience is ready to applaud his growth. He has done the hard work. He has pared down. He has purified. Five watches remain, all on straps, each presented as evidence of restraint and moral clarity. The comments are approving. The tone is reverent. He is, at last, becoming free.

    Naturally, this serenity bores him.

    So he shakes things up. Three new watches enter the fold. The collection now stands at eight—four on straps, four on bracelets—symmetry restored, balance achieved. He announces a “new direction.” He films a YouTube video about his “evolving philosophy.” He speaks earnestly of equilibrium, versatility, and personal growth. The framing is careful. The lighting is soft. The music is tasteful. He waits for the applause.

    It does not come.

    Instead, the comment section turns cold. The audience, once indulgent, becomes prosecutorial. I thought you were healing. This feels like relapse. You were doing so well at five. The verdict is unanimous and devastating: the addiction has returned. What’s worse is not the criticism itself, but its accuracy. The influencer feels it immediately, like a clean punch to the ribs. The comments articulate the doubt he was trying not to hear.

    Shame sets in. He replays the video and cringes at his own rhetoric. “Quest for balance” now sounds like a euphemism. The watches feel heavier on the wrist. Within weeks, he detonates the entire enterprise. Seven watches are given away. One remains, kept on a strap, stripped of pleasure and worn more as a reminder than an object of joy. He deletes his YouTube channel. He nukes Instagram. He earns a kettlebell certification. He eats clean. He helps clients. He speaks of social media with quiet contempt, like someone describing a former addiction he has sworn never to touch again.

    This is Applause Collapse: the moment an influencer unveils a carefully staged transformation, expecting affirmation, only to encounter moral disappointment so severe that disappearance feels like the only honest response. It is not the loss of praise that breaks him. It is the realization that the crowd was not watching his journey—they were auditing his compliance.

  • Gunmetal, DLC, and the Case Against Babying a Watch

    Gunmetal, DLC, and the Case Against Babying a Watch

    If you’re a watch collector, you’ve probably flirted with the idea of a black watch. At some point, the monochrome seduction gets you. A black case on a matching bracelet has a severity to it—stealthy, self-contained, faintly militant. I’ve fallen for it more than once. I’ve owned some genuinely beautiful black watches.

    I no longer own any of them.

    Such is life in the fever swamp of watch addiction, where flipping is not a behavior but a temperament. Watches arrive. Watches depart. Attachments form briefly and dissolve without ceremony.

    Take me back to around 2012. I owned two PVD-coated Seiko kinetic divers: the SUN007 and the SKA427P1. They were handsome, purposeful, and—contrary to every online hand-wringing session about coatings—remarkably resilient. I never scratched them. Not once. And yet they’re gone, casualties of some forgotten bout of restless dissatisfaction.

    Here’s the dangerous part: you can still find them brand new on eBay. I know this because I went looking. The prices are tempting. I felt the familiar tightening in the chest as I typed the model numbers. Relapse always begins with “just checking.”

    Another repeat offender from my past was the Citizen Promaster Sky BY0084-56E. I owned that watch no fewer than seven times over a decade. That’s not ownership—that’s a custody arrangement. Unlike PVD, the Citizen used Super Titanium treated with Duratect—often described as DLC. Marketing aside, the material difference is real. Stainless steel sits around 200 on the Vickers hardness scale. DLC-coated Super Titanium pushes north of 1,000. That’s not invincible, but it’s not cosplay either.

    In real life, that translates to this: the clasp will show desk-diver scuffs, because clasps always do. The rest of the watch? It shrugs off normal wear with indifference.

    Which brings me to the present. In a couple of days, the Citizen Super Titanium Gunmetal Diver NB6025-59H will return to my collection. Its DLC coating reads more dark gray than true black—an advantage, frankly. I plan to take it traveling. Miami. Hawaii. Heat. Salt water. Airport bins. Sunscreen. Sweat. This watch is not entering witness protection. It’s not being boxed, babied, or preserved for a future auction. It’s being worn.

    I’m glad to have one black—or gunmetal—watch in the rotation. It’s a welcome disruption from stainless steel, a visual reset. But there’s a caveat worth stating. Black watches are all about proximity. Up close, the details are rich and seductive. From a distance, they collapse into silhouette—lume floating in darkness. If you need your watch to announce itself across a room, black may frustrate you.

    For me, that quiet severity is the point.

  • The Hot Take Is the Chronic Cough of Something Gone Wrong

    The Hot Take Is the Chronic Cough of Something Gone Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    And that’s the trap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    So what should we do instead?

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

  • The Myth of the Ultimate Watch Collection

    The Myth of the Ultimate Watch Collection

    There is no such thing as an ultimate watch collection. That fantasy survives only in Instagram grids and forum signatures. In real life, your taste sharpens, clarifies, narrows—and that clarity does bring you closer to something satisfying. But it never brings closure.

    The problem is not the watches. The problem is us.

    We are capricious animals. One day we crave restraint; the next day we want spectacle. Nostalgia ambushes us and sends us chasing a watch tied to some earlier version of ourselves—college years, first job, first illusion of competence. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. A watch can be a time machine or a dead end.

    Then there’s money. Grail pieces often cost so much that they can’t be worn without anxiety. They live in safes, not on wrists. You admire them abstractly but never bond with them. On the other end, budget watches sometimes fail the respect test. You want to love them, but something feels compromised—finish, heft, presence. The relationship never quite takes.

    So if there is a destination, it isn’t perfection. It’s the sweet spot.

    The watch isn’t too small or too large. It isn’t priced so high that you fear it, or so low that you dismiss it. It isn’t dull, but it isn’t shouting either. You can look at it from different angles and keep finding reasons to linger. It holds your attention without demanding it.

    Some people chase that feeling through complexity. Chronographs seduce with their subdials and mechanical busyness. I tried that path. Instead of enchantment, I got sensory overload. Too much information. Too much pleading. I found myself longing for the blunt honesty of a diver.

    But even a diver has to earn its place.

    It needs salient features. Bold, but not desperate. Visually striking, but instantly legible. Purposeful without cosplay. The Seiko MM300 SLA023 comes to mind. It’s a legend in the Seiko lineup because it commits fully to its identity. Over 44mm wide. About 15mm thick. It doesn’t apologize. If you can carry those dimensions, it rewards you with gravitas and coherence.

    If you can’t, there are alternatives.

    The Seiko Alpinist SBDC209 is a different kind of seduction. At 39.5mm, it’s compact, refined, endlessly stare-able. You can live with it all day without fatigue. On the right wrist, it’s perfect. On mine, it disappears. And when a watch disappears, the answer is simple: no.

    That’s the truth most collectors avoid. The “ultimate” collection isn’t about consensus or rankings. It’s about proportion—between the watch and the wrist, between desire and restraint, between fantasy and daily life.

    You don’t arrive at it once.
    You circle it.
    And if you’re lucky, you pause there for a while.

  • Flying First Class Is a State of Mind

    Flying First Class Is a State of Mind

    I was born in America in 1961, and if I had to explain this country to a foreigner in one image, I wouldn’t reach for the flag or the Statue of Liberty. I’d point to flying first class. Not the policy of it, not the logistics—just the concept. First class is America in an airline cabin. It grabs you by the collar and says, This is how we do hierarchy. We don’t hide it. We parade it down the aisle.

    Yes, we have our obnoxious luxury cars and coastal dream houses, but nowhere is class difference so intimate as on an airplane. You’re breathing the same recycled air as the people sipping champagne up front. You share the same narrow aisle, the same claustrophobic bathrooms, the same airborne flu incubator. 

    The difference is ceremonial. The first-class passenger is already settled—wrapped in a sherpa blanket, nibbling brie, greeted by flight attendants who address them the way courtiers addressed minor royalty. 

    Then comes the procession: coach passengers filing past, stealing glances, marching toward the back where crying babies, bare feet with ambitious toenails, and circulation-threatening seat pitch await. This is the real luxury—not the champagne, but the ceremony and the choreography. The pleasure is sharpened by contrast. As a first-classer, you’re not cruel. You don’t wish misery on anyone. But your comfort glows brighter because someone else is uncomfortable ten feet away.

    And that glow whispers. Not “you’re lucky.” Not “you’re comfortable.” It whispers the more dangerous phrase: you’re special. That’s the real drug of first class—not legroom, but psychological elevation. The sense that you cracked some hidden code of life, that you’ve unlocked a cheat mode where ordinary frustrations can’t touch you. 

    I once heard a comedian joke that in a plane crash, first-class passengers would survive while the rest of us perished. It’s absurd. And yet… it sounds exactly like something we want to believe.

    This is America. You don’t just earn money here. You earn the right to hear that whisper.

    I’ll confess something anticlimactic: I flew first class once, in 1994, thanks to my father, who sent me to his condo in Maui. I remember almost nothing about it. No ecstasy. No glow. Maybe I suffer from flight anhedonia—the inability to experience joy at 30,000 feet. 

    But I have felt the first-class sensation elsewhere. A friend once let me borrow his Omega Planet Ocean. I wore it to Trader Joe’s and found myself standing in line with organic arugula and the faint, ridiculous thrill of superiority. A luxury watch did what a luxury airline seat never could.

    I could afford such a watch. I owned a Tudor Black Bay once. I sold it quickly, like someone who realized halfway through a costume party that he’d come dressed as the wrong person.

    Now I’m sixty-four, and the urge to gloat has evaporated. I don’t want status anymore. I want clarity. I want restraint. I want a temperament that doesn’t need applause from inanimate objects. Wearing an expensive watch I don’t need feels less like success and more like cosplay—me auditioning for the role of a man who’s made it. The problem is, I know the actor too well. Under the costume is not a titan of confidence but an anxious, fractured soul with the spiritual DNA of Franz Kafka and the comedic timing of Richard Lewis. No amount of Swiss engineering is going to fix that. And pretending otherwise would only make me feel like a fool in very fine clothes.

  • Are We Extras in Someone Else’s Luxury Watch Fantasy?

    Are We Extras in Someone Else’s Luxury Watch Fantasy?

    Six weeks with my fifteen-year-old twins is a better sociology course than anything you’ll find at UCLA. Their generation runs on shared experiences—amusement parks, concerts, parties—and the sacred ritual of turning those moments into cinematic TikToks. They love empathy. They love energy drinks. They love boba with the devotion earlier civilizations reserved for gods. They exchange hugs so theatrical they deserve SAG cards. They also love not driving. Why would they? They have concierge parents for that. The car is not transportation; it’s a mobile confessional booth where they talk, text, and disappear into playlists like monks retreating into sonic monasteries. Licenses can wait. I’ll be stunned if either one pilots a vehicle solo before age twenty-five.

    They dress alike, too—hoodies, high-rise jeans, baggy sweatpants. When I pick them up from school, I scan a sea of identical silhouettes and play a grim game of Where’s Waldo: Daughter Edition. It’s like they all emerged from the same fashion assembly line, stamped and released in bulk.

    Then there’s the strangest quirk of all: the generational terror of bare feet. We live in Southern California, where flip-flops are a constitutional right. But when my daughters’ friends come over, I’m ordered—ordered—to put on shoes. Feet are not feet anymore. They’re “dogs,” “grippers,” “claws,” a traveling carnival of anatomical horror. One girl saw my bare feet and reported back like she’d witnessed a crime scene. Since then, I suit up like a hazmat worker whenever teenagers enter the house.

    Watching their collective likes and dislikes has turned me into an amateur René Girard scholar. Girard argued that we don’t want things because they’re intrinsically wonderful; we want them because the tribe wants them first. Desire is social plagiarism. The tribe writes the script, and we perform it thinking it’s improvisation.

    But there’s a dark twin to mimetic desire: mimetic aversion. If the tribe hates something, we learn to hate it, too—even if we never felt a flicker of disgust on our own. Case in point: “I saw your dad’s dogs. Gross.” A moral judgment delivered about toes.

    Naturally, this has sent my twenty-year watch obsession into a philosophical tailspin. When we crave a watch, is it a private passion—or just tribal ventriloquism? Are we collectors, or are we obedient extras in someone else’s luxury fantasy? And if we’re that easily programmed, doesn’t it expose something mildly humiliating about us—our insecurities, our hunger to belong, our weakness for social approval dressed up as taste?

    Maybe understanding desire would clarify us. Or maybe it would only prove how unclassifiable we really are. Some mysteries resist labels.

    Still, in the watch world, mimetic aversion is practically doctrine. Quartz watches are treated like dietary betrayal. You used to grill rib-eyes and now you’re flipping soy burgers? Next you’ll be wearing Crocs and asking for decaf. Show up at the wrong meet-up with a quartz on your wrist and you won’t just lose respect—you’ll lose invitations, subscribers, and possibly citizenship. “Quartz?” they’ll whisper. “Traitor.”

    On the flip side, mimetic desire runs the show just as ruthlessly. Look at the waiting lists. Look at the resale prices. When you buy certain watches, you’re not buying steel—you’re buying absolution. A Rolex Sub isn’t a timepiece; it’s a baptism. The tribe anoints you with holy water and hums a choral anthem over your wrist.

    So yes, the watch hobby is soaked in mimetic desire and mimetic aversion. But here’s my heresy: if you’re a true watch obsessive, those forces barely apply to you. Because your relationship with watches isn’t tribal. It’s theological.

    A real watch obsessive is ruled by three forces.

    First, the Svengali Effect. A certain watch doesn’t attract you—it hypnotizes you. It hijacks your agency like a charming cult leader. You try to resist. You fail. The watch plants itself in your brain and grows there like an invasive eucalyptus until surrender feels like destiny. This isn’t imitation. This is possession.

    Second, Horological Fixation. At this stage, your watch stops being a timekeeping device and becomes a visual narcotic. You no longer use your watch to check the time—you commune with the object. The world fades. The wrist becomes a shrine. Eden relocates to forty-two millimeters of brushed steel.

    Third, Horological Transfiguration. You put on the watch and—boom—you’re not just dressed, you’re transformed. James Bond. Jacques Cousteau. Brad Pitt walking into a bar where the jukebox automatically switches to something heroic. The watch doesn’t accessorize you; it authorizes you.

    I’ve known watch obsessives for decades. I know the symptoms. I know the tells.

    So if you live under the Svengali Effect, Horological Fixation, and Horological Transfiguration, René Girard’s mimetic theory doesn’t really apply. The good news: you’re not a phony lemming chasing tribal approval. The bad news: you’re completely unhinged.

    Congratulations. You’re a true watch obsessive—authentic, independent, gloriously insane.

    Now put on your watch. You’ve been Clark Kent long enough. It’s time to rip open the shirt and let the cape fly.

  • Seven Watches, Fifteen Grand, and One Hard Lesson About Growing Up

    Seven Watches, Fifteen Grand, and One Hard Lesson About Growing Up

    People always ask why I started focusing on watches ten years ago on my YouTube channel. The honest answer is awkward: I love watches—but I love food more. Obsessively more. Food has been my lifelong religion. In the early ’90s, when I lived in a bachelor pad that smelled like basil and ambition, my Navy SEAL friend Mike used to call and say, “McMahon, I can hear you chewing through the phone again. Every time I call you, you’re eating. What is it now, Fat Face?”
    “Angel hair pasta with pesto.”
    “Sounds dangerous. I’m coming over, Fat Face.”
    And he would—just in time to demolish everything I’d made. His appetite was powered by military drills and endless surfing sessions in Huntington Beach and Ventura. The man burned calories like a forest fire burns pine needles.

    One day he called again. “I’m heading to Santa Barbara to surf. Come with me.”
    “I can’t surf, Mike.”
    “I know you can’t surf, genius. My girlfriend Nicole will be there. She wants to set you up with her friend, Michelle, from Newport Beach. Now can you surf?”
    That’s how I ended up tagging along on adventures that had nothing to do with waves and everything to do with spectacle.

    Mike lived with his dad, Bob, a former Marine with a voice like a foghorn and a temper to match. Their daily ritual involved shouting matches over lawn mowing, garage messes, and grocery duties—two barrel-chested men poking each other like rival roosters while spittle flew. Five minutes later, the war would end, and we’d be off on a Mongolian beef run with Social Distortion blasting in Mike’s Toyota four-wheeler. Back at the house, they’d watch John Wayne movies, and Bob would open his gun safe “just in case the Duke needs backup.” This was not dysfunction to me. This was home.

    I’m a Boomer. I grew up in a world where anger was normal—where fathers barked orders and discipline came with a belt. When rage becomes your baseline, it’s like living with your brain permanently tuned to a Death Metal station. After a while, you stop hearing the noise. You just call it life. But it isn’t life. I know that now because I’m married to a woman fourteen years younger than me, and we have twin teenage daughters. They do not accept Death Metal Dad. They want something closer to Smooth Jazz—Bach, Earth, Wind & Fire, anything that doesn’t rattle the walls of the house. And they’re right. Rage is not masculinity. It’s a form of intoxication. A dangerous one.

    For me, sobriety isn’t about alcohol or drugs. It’s about anger. That means I have to watch my triggers like a hawk. One of the biggest? New watches. Shiny new objects flip the switch in my brain. Suddenly the Death Metal station is humming again, and I’m spiraling into desire, anxiety, and self-reproach. I know feeding my watch addiction makes me miserable, and when I do something that makes me miserable, I get angry at myself. Then I become a joyless human being—Grandma Sour Pants in sneakers. My family doesn’t want to be around me, and frankly, neither do I.

    The irony is that money isn’t the problem. I’m at a stage in life where I could buy any watch I want. But sanity is expensive. I own seven watches worth about fifteen grand in total, and even that feels like mental labor—keeping the rotation straight, remembering what I have, managing the noise in my head. If I owned twelve, I’d lose my grip entirely. My watch friends tell me, “Life is short. Buy what you want.” Those are words of indulgence, not wisdom. Indulgence has never made me happy. Indulgence is just infantilism in a tuxedo. A man-child with a credit card is still a man-child—and no man-child is happy. He buys things to outrun loneliness, and the things always lose the race.

    Ninety-five percent of my watch purchases were impulsive. Which means ninety-five percent of them were evidence of my own immaturity. I sold most of them at a loss—not because I needed the money, but because I needed my dignity back.

    I come from the Me-Generation, raised in California in the ’70s on a steady diet of self-worship. Rob Lowe’s memoir Stories I Only Tell My Friends nailed it for me. He described the Counterculture as the Worship of the Self—whatever the Self wants, the Self gets. No brakes. No compass. He watched people overdose, vanish, and destroy themselves in Malibu’s sunlit fantasyland. The message was simple: when desire becomes sacred, reality becomes optional—and disaster becomes inevitable.

    I am a watch freak. When I see a watch I love, my brain lights up like I’ve just taken a hit of something illegal. Desire surges. Anger follows. The loss of control is what really enrages me. Rob Lowe had to go to rehab to escape his fantasy life. I don’t want rehab for watches. I want a hobby that fits inside reality instead of dragging me out of it. I want pleasure without compulsion. Enjoyment without obsession. A life without permanent FOMO.

    And here’s the final joke on me: even talking about this makes me nostalgic for being fifteen in Santa Monica and Malibu in 1976. I start looking backward like Lot’s wife, and I can feel myself turning into a pillar of salt. The Death Metal station is warming up again. That’s my cue. I need to change the channel—before I buy another watch and call it happiness.

  • The Watch I Want vs. the Life I Actually Live

    The Watch I Want vs. the Life I Actually Live

    For the past month I’ve been circling the black titanium Citizen Attesa CC4055-65E the way a moth circles a very handsome, very unnecessary flame. It’s not even obscenely priced—roughly the cost of a Lenovo mini business PC with an Ultra 7—so my brain keeps pitching it as “reasonable.” I picture it on my wrist: sleek, dark, stealthy, broadcasting a silent message of confidence, competence, and maybe a little controlled menace. The fantasy version of me wears it everywhere. The honest version of me pauses and asks a less flattering question: where, exactly, am I going that requires this level of cinematic wrist presence?

    That’s when the self-audit begins. Would I really wear it, or would I merely own it—like one of those tasteful paintings people hang in their living rooms to prove they have a soul, then never look at again? But that analogy collapses on contact. A painting is for the wall. A watch is for the wrist. One is meant to be admired from across the room; the other is meant to live on your body, accumulating scuffs and stories. When I buy watches, what I’m really buying is a version of myself in motion—someone who leaves the house, enters public life, and performs a coherent aesthetic identity in the wild. The problem is that most days, I don’t need a public uniform. I need something comfortable while I work, run errands, and live in my own cave like a reasonably civilized hermit.

    That’s why my divers live on straps and not bracelets. Straps belong to real life—coffee runs, grocery aisles, desk time. Bracelets belong to fantasy life—the version of me who is being interviewed on late-night TV or starring in a tasteful indie film about male regret. Since those scenarios remain stubbornly fictional, the idea of strapping on a glossy black titanium showpiece starts to feel like costume drama. And here’s the punchline I can’t dodge: even if I became that public figure tomorrow, it wouldn’t make me happier or more whole. That life is a mirage. Which means the Citizen Attesa, for all its beauty, risks becoming one too—a chimera in black titanium, promising a transformation I no longer believe in.

  • Pluribus and the Soft Tyranny of Sycophantic Collectivism

    Pluribus and the Soft Tyranny of Sycophantic Collectivism

    Sycophantic Collectivism

    noun

    Sycophantic Collectivism describes a social condition in which belonging is secured not through shared standards, inquiry, or truth-seeking, but through relentless affirmation and emotional compliance. In this system, dissent is not punished overtly; it is smothered under waves of praise, positivity, and enforced enthusiasm. The group does not demand obedience so much as adoration, rewarding members who echo its sentiments and marginalizing those who introduce skepticism, critique, or complexity. Thought becomes unnecessary and even suspect, because agreement is mistaken for virtue and affirmation for morality. Over time, Sycophantic Collectivism erodes critical thinking by replacing judgment with vibes, turning communities into echo chambers where intellectual independence is perceived as hostility and the highest social good is to clap along convincingly.

    ***

    Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus masquerades as a romantasy while quietly operating as a savage allegory about the hive mind and its slow, sugar-coated assault on human judgment. One of the hive mind’s chief liabilities is groupthink—the kind that doesn’t arrive with jackboots and barked orders, but with smiles, affirmations, and a warm sense of belonging. As Maris Krizman observes in “The Importance of Critical Thinking in a Zombiefied World,” the show’s central figure, Carol Sturka, is one of only thirteen people immune to an alien virus that fuses humanity into a single, communal consciousness. Yet long before the Virus Brain Hijack, Carol was already surrounded by zombies. Her affliction in the Before World was fandom. She is a successful romantasy novelist whose readers worship her and long to inhabit her fictional universe—a universe Carol privately despises as “mindless crap.” Worse, she despises herself for producing it. She knows she is a hack, propping up her novels with clichés and purple prose, and the fact that her fans adore her anyway only deepens her contempt. What kind of people, she wonders, gather in a fan club to exalt writing so undeserving of reverence? Their gushy, overcooked enthusiasm is not a compliment—it is an indictment. This, Krizman suggests, is the true subject of Pluribus: the danger of surrendering judgment for comfort, of trading independent thought for the convenience of the collective. In its modern form, this surrender manifests as Sycophantic Collectivism—a velvet-gloved groupthink sustained not by force, but by relentless positivity, affirmation, and applause that smothers dissent and dissolves individuality.

    It is no accident that Gilligan makes Carol a romantasy writer. As Krizman notes, romantasy is the fastest-growing literary genre in the world, defined by its cookie-cutter plots, recycled tropes, and emotional predictability. The genre has already been caught flirting with AI-assisted authorship, further blurring the line between creativity and content manufacturing. Romantasy, in this light, is less about literature than about community—fans bonding with fans inside a shared fantasy ecosystem where enthusiasm substitutes for evaluation. In that world, art is optional; happiness is mandatory. Critical thinking is an inconvenience. What matters is belonging, affirmation, and the steady hum of mutual validation.

    When the alien virus finally arrives, it is as if the entire world becomes an extension of Carol’s fan base—an endless sea of “perky positivity” and suffocating devotion. The collective Others adore her, flatter her, and invite her to merge with them, offering the ultimate prize: never having to think alone again. Carol refuses. Her resistance saves her mind but condemns her to isolation. She becomes a misfit in a world that rewards surrender with comfort and punishes independence with loneliness. Pluribus leaves us with an uncomfortable truth: the hive mind does not conquer us by force. It seduces us. And the price of belonging, once paid, is steep—your soul bartered away, your brain softened into pablum, your capacity for judgment quietly, permanently dulled.