Cinemorphosis

Category: FOMO and Its Discontents

  • How Moral Rot Gets a Corporate Takeover

    How Moral Rot Gets a Corporate Takeover

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

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

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

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

  • Your Inner Thirteen-Year-Old Still Sits on the Thrown

    Your Inner Thirteen-Year-Old Still Sits on the Thrown

    Grown men like to pretend they have escaped adolescence. They acquire careers, mortgages, spouses, children, retirement accounts, cholesterol numbers, and opinions about property taxes. They learn to discuss interest rates without giggling. They attend funerals. They replace water heaters. They become, by every outward measure, adults.

    And yet somewhere inside the sixty-something man sits a thirteen-year-old boy whose hormones have just detonated.

    The boy remembers when the world fizzed like a glass of Alka-Seltzer. He remembers Eva Gabor floating onto Match Game, Adrienne Barbeau on Maude, Dahlia Lavi in Catlow, Jennifer O’Neill in Summer of ’42, Ursula Andress in Dr. No, Nancy Archer and Honey Parker in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and Mary Ann and Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. These women did not merely appear on television or movie screens. They altered atmospheric pressure. They made the furniture hum. They turned an ordinary Tuesday night into an annunciation.

    Half a century later, the man remembers them with an intensity he finds embarrassing.

    He should be past all this. Good God, he is in his sixties. He has accomplishments. He has experience. He has endured loss, raised children, paid bills, navigated marriage, watched his parents age, and contemplated his own mortality. Surely all this should have transformed him into that mythical creature known as the Mature Man.

    And to some extent it has.

    But not enough.

    Because deep inside him, untouched by the decades, the thirteen-year-old remains seated on his throne.

    Call it Adolescent Apotheosis: the elevation of one’s adolescent self into the supreme version of the self, the golden incarnation against which every subsequent stage of life seems slightly fraudulent. The boy is not merely remembered. He has been canonized.

    At first the man assumes this is nostalgia. But nostalgia doesn’t explain the voltage.

    Neither does sex.

    Certainly sex is involved. Let us not insult the evidence. The thirteen-year-old did not admire Adrienne Barbeau because of her comic timing.

    But what he really worships is the consciousness he possessed when he first saw these women. At thirteen, desire had arrived before disappointment had acquired tenure. The future stretched before him like an enormous amusement park whose gates had just opened. Anything might happen.

    The women became icons of this state. Eva Gabor, Jennifer O’Neill, Honey Parker, Mary Ann, Ginger, Adrienne Barbeau—stained-glass saints in the Church of Infinite Possibility.

    This is why seeing their photographs decades later can produce such disproportionate emotion. He isn’t merely looking at Adrienne Barbeau.

    He is looking through her.

    On the other side is himself at thirteen: absurd, frightened, libidinous, hopeful, ignorant, unfinished—and magnificently alive.

    The sixty-something man possesses things the boy could not imagine: maturity, competence, money, domesticity, fatherhood, knowledge. He should regard these as victories.

    And he does.

    Sort of.

    That is his shame.

    Because none of them make the world fizz.

    Sometimes he suspects that everything after adolescence has been an elaborate diplomatic mission conducted on the boy’s behalf. The adult travels through the world collecting experiences, possessions, accomplishments, and relationships, periodically returning to the palace to report his findings.

    The boy listens politely.

    “Very impressive,” he says.

    “Now tell me about Honey Parker.”

  • My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    You insist on living near the ocean, but not because you have any romantic desire to surf, bodyboard, or frolic in the waves like a sunscreen commercial. The beach serves a higher purpose. It calms you simply by existing. You need to smell the salt air, hear the muffled percussion of the surf, and watch the horizon dissolve into infinity. What you do not need is to step into the Pacific’s suspicious broth of runoff, seaweed, sunscreen residue, and whatever else civilization has politely donated to the tides. Nor do you wish to experience the tactile indignity of sand infiltrating every crevice of your body, clothing, luggage, and soul. During vacations in Oahu or Miami, you dutifully reserve a room overlooking the beach, then spend the day luxuriating beside the resort pool, periodically glancing toward the ocean with profound gratitude that you are not actually in it.

    Deserts present a similar paradox. From a safe distance they possess a cinematic grandeur, a landscape sculpted by eternity itself. Up close they reveal themselves to be an elaborate rehearsal for the apocalypse. Every cactus appears armed, every rock radiates hostility, and every gust of wind feels like the opening chapter of Mad Max. Your lips chap. Your skin shrivels. Your eyeballs seem to lose moisture by the minute. After forty-eight hours you become convinced you are quietly mummifying while still alive.

    Snow fares no better. Others speak reverently of winter wonderlands. You see an aggressively inhospitable climate masquerading as a Christmas card. Snow closes roads, freezes lungs, transforms ordinary errands into survival expeditions, and renders every hillside one unfortunate sneeze away from an avalanche. Even aesthetically it disappoints. An endless field of white is less majestic than monotonous, as though nature had forgotten to finish painting the landscape. Icicles, meanwhile, look less like decorations than nature’s collection of sharpened stakes awaiting an unfortunate passerby. One of your life’s quiet triumphs has been constructing a life that requires almost no interaction with snow whatsoever.

    Instead, you are captivated by what you call Unicorn Cities—those mythical communities that seem to have discovered the cheat code to geography. They enjoy unusually pleasant weather, attract unusually decent people, and somehow escape the afflictions suffered by neighboring regions. Port Angeles occupies a privileged place in this private mythology. Nestled within Washington’s Banana Belt, it promises milder temperatures than logic suggests it deserves. You are endlessly fascinated by it. You consume photographs, weather reports, and travel videos with almost devotional enthusiasm. Yet you have no real desire to go. Visiting would replace imagination with reality, and reality almost never survives comparison with imagination.

    So congratulate yourself for remaining loyal to your quiet corner of Southern California, where you leave town only reluctantly, tan in your own backyard for fifteen minutes a few afternoons each week, and venture to Hawaii or Miami once or twice a year merely to sit beside an immaculate swimming pool while gazing at the ocean from a respectful distance.

    You are, after all, a Threshold Tourist.

    A Threshold Tourist prefers to remain at the edge of an experience rather than surrender to it, extracting its beauty, symbolism, and emotional nourishment while politely declining its inconveniences. The destination is not meant to be conquered or consumed. It is meant to be contemplated. Paradise, in your estimation, is best appreciated from the balcony.

  • The Young and the Larval

    The Young and the Larval

    A year ago, I attended a family birthday party in Studio City. Hundreds of cheerful, talkative guests wandered around a lavish backyard pool shaded by thick stands of trees. The setting felt less like Los Angeles than a country estate in Provence. Beneath a canopy, guests feasted on fragrant Middle Eastern food while a white-haired band by the deep end of the pool played one boomer anthem after another. It was a celebration of long lives, old friendships, and accumulated memories.

    Most of the guests were in their seventies.

    While eating lunch, I spoke with my cousin’s husband, a retired ophthalmologist and former hospital administrator. A man who had once occupied positions of enormous responsibility, he told me the greatest surprise of old age wasn’t aching joints or declining stamina.

    It was invisibility.

    “People look right through you,” he said.

    His remark landed with the force of an unwelcome prophecy. Your accomplishments, reputation, expertise, and decades of experience quietly evaporate. Whatever authority once entered the room ahead of you no longer accompanies you through the door. You undergo what I call Aura Expiration: the quiet disappearance of the prestige, authority, and social recognition accumulated over a lifetime once age strips away the culture’s fascination with achievement and status.

    Yesterday’s distinguished physician becomes today’s anonymous old man standing patiently in line at Trader Joe’s.

    Aura Expiration ushers you into something even stranger. You enter what I think of as Social Hades: the peculiar stage of life in which a person remains physically present while gradually disappearing from society’s field of vision. You are neither fully among the living nor entirely absent. You become ghostlike—a witness rather than a participant—despite possessing more knowledge and experience than many of those who unconsciously dismiss you.

    Your very existence reminds younger people of the one truth they spend enormous energy avoiding: they, too, are running out of time.

    Naturally, there are ways to resist. You can dye your hair, chase fashion, cultivate the illusion of perpetual youth, or loudly insist that you are “still relevant.” But there is something tragic about watching a person wage war against chronology. The struggle itself often accelerates the indignity. Better to heed the biblical warning against kicking against the goads. Some losses are not defeats but transitions.

    Reading Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, I was struck by his observation that the Greeks imagined the afterlife as Hades, “an underworld where men’s shadows lead a sort of half-life: slow, comatose, larva-like, hardly aware.”

    I cannot help wondering whether this image grew partly from ordinary observation. Perhaps Hades resembled the fate awaiting the elderly in every civilization: still alive, yet treated as shadows; still capable of thought, yet gently ushered to the margins where they could cease interrupting youth’s fantasy of immortality.

    I have little interest in fighting that social reality. At best, younger people will treat me with courteous indifference. At worst, they will regard me as an inconvenient reminder that every fashionable face eventually wrinkles and every energetic stride slows.

    There is, however, one form of aging against which I intend to fight with all the stubbornness I possess.

    I refuse to let my mind become larval.

    I intend to keep reading difficult books, pursuing arguments, changing my mind when evidence demands it, writing essays, asking inconvenient questions, and remaining incurably curious. I would like to live forever, if only because I desperately want to know what happens next.

    Besides, history has a wicked sense of irony.

    Many young people imagine themselves to be in the thick of life merely because they inhabit the latest trends, wear the correct clothes, speak the approved vocabulary, and faithfully repeat the fashionable opinions of their tribe. Yet conformity has a way of anesthetizing curiosity. The mind quietly hardens while the body remains young.

    That is the true danger.

    Such people suffer from what I call The Larval Mind: a state of intellectual dormancy in which curiosity, skepticism, and independent judgment have withered away, leaving a person easily manipulated by fashion, ideology, algorithms, or tribal consensus. Their bodies pulse with youthful energy while their minds drift through life half-asleep.

    An eighty-year-old wrestling with Paul, Carrère, Darwin, artificial intelligence, and the future of civilization may be far younger than a twenty-five-year-old who has surrendered his thinking to TikTok, political orthodoxy, influencer culture, or whatever intellectual narcotic happens to dominate the moment.

    Perhaps youth has less to do with birthdays than with curiosity.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is not youth at all.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is refusing to become larval.

  • The Great Social Media Deconversion

    The Great Social Media Deconversion

    In 2008 I was doing power yoga in my office while listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy, on KFI 640. In the middle of discussing routers, spyware, and the eternal misery of Windows Vista, he casually remarked, “This Facebook thing is a big deal.”

    I had no idea what he meant.

    I wasn’t the sort of person who chased the latest technological revolution. I listened to Leo for a different reason. I loved hearing retirees call in with computers so old they belonged in an archaeological dig. They would ask whether they should keep a desktop that required thirty minutes to boot, wheezed like an emphysema patient opening Microsoft Word, and treated email as an Olympic event, or whether it was finally time to buy “one of these new computers.”

    Facebook barely registered on my radar.

    Then, in the summer of 2009, my wife was pregnant with our twin daughters. It occurred to me that Facebook might be a convenient way to share photos and updates with family and friends. So I created an account.

    Within weeks my friend list exploded like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

    I was enchanted.

    Perhaps this was the medium I had been waiting for all my life.

    Unfortunately, Facebook did not merely connect me to other people. It connected me to the most embarrassing parts of myself. My ego, which until then had lived quietly in the basement, burst upstairs carrying champagne.

    People would discover me.

    I would become famous.

    How many friends could I accumulate?

    How many likes?

    How many followers?

    Would humanity finally recognize my genius now that history had invented the proper delivery system?

    The intoxication was exquisite.

    That was seventeen years ago.

    Looking back, my relationship with Facebook has all the emotional contours of a failed marriage. There was the honeymoon, the infatuation, the passionate commitment, the slow accumulation of grievances, the disappointment, the resentment, and now something even colder than resentment.

    Contempt.

    Or perhaps futility.

    The old expression comes to mind: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

    Another comes from the Book of Acts, where the risen Christ asks Saul, “Why are you kicking against the goads?” Stop exhausting yourself fighting reality.

    That is how social media feels now.

    Not tragic.

    Pointless.

    Because the marriage was built on lies.

    The lies sounded persuasive enough.

    Metrics measure significance.

    Engagement proves value.

    Visibility creates influence.

    Influence creates meaning.

    If enough strangers notice you, your life has somehow become larger.

    It took me years to realize that every one of those propositions was counterfeit.

    The pursuit of attention slowly teaches us to manipulate others.

    Eventually it teaches us to manipulate ourselves.

    The more desperately we chase attention, the more anxious we become.

    The anxiety metastasizes into resentment.

    Soon we are no longer expressing ourselves.

    We are auditioning for an algorithm.

    Attention capture is not meaning.

    Attention capture is not love.

    Attention capture is not flourishing.

    One can dominate the internet and still become another version of Gollum, clutching a glowing ring instead of a precious one.

    A few days ago I watched a fitness YouTuber whose work I normally admire upload one of those interchangeable “What I Eat in a Day” videos. He microwaved leftovers. He poured cereal into a bowl. He assembled a few perfectly ordinary meals to reassure viewers that he was just like them.

    The video felt less like communication than contractual obligation.

    He looked exhausted.

    Not physically.

    Spiritually.

    As though the algorithm had shown up at his front door demanding another sacrifice.

    I watched perhaps thirty seconds before closing the window.

    I did it for his dignity.

    And for mine.

    Now I don’t know what to do with Facebook, Instagram, or my fifteen-year-old YouTube channel.

    They feel less like hobbies than reminders of a marriage that should have ended years ago.

    I still write on my blog.

    Almost nobody reads it.

    Wonderful.

    Obscurity has become strangely liberating.

    I write what genuinely interests me instead of what might seduce an algorithm into distributing me like digital fertilizer across the internet. I no longer feel compelled to manufacture outrage, optimize thumbnails, or package my thoughts into bite-sized dopamine pellets.

    The work belongs to me again.

    People often wonder what comes after divorce.

    The honest answer is that nobody knows.

    You spend a long time discovering who you are after years spent becoming someone else.

    I suspect millions of us are undergoing that same process with social media.

    We experienced the honeymoon.

    We believed the promises.

    We invested our identities.

    We discovered the betrayal.

    Now we are wandering through the emotional wreckage trying to remember who we were before engagement statistics became a measure of our worth.

    We are all, in one way or another, losing our religion.

    R.E.M. accidentally wrote the soundtrack for the algorithmic age.

    I have become convinced that social media has diminished us personally, culturally, politically, and spiritually. It rewarded vanity, monetized outrage, industrialized narcissism, and trained us to confuse visibility with virtue.

    But I have also become convinced that this era is ending.

    People are tiring of the performance.

    The masks have grown heavy.

    The applause no longer sounds convincing.

    Something new is approaching.

    Whether it will be better or merely different, I cannot say.

    I only know that the old marriage is over.

    And, for the first time in years, that feels less like a loss than a beginning.

  • What Happens After Peak Watch Addiction? 

    What Happens After Peak Watch Addiction? 

    When I uploaded my first YouTube video fifteen years ago, I approached the medium with all the technical sophistication of America’s Funniest Home Videos circa 1990. I had recently fallen under the spell of Seiko and Citizen watches and possessed exactly enough knowledge to be dangerous. I wasn’t a curator. I was a caveman who had just discovered fire. My videos consisted largely of me staring in astonishment at a titanium Citizen Promaster, hoping viewers might catch the same contagious wonder. My outfits were not professional. I was wearing a bathrobe with Cheerios clinging to the lapel and a milk mustache under my nose.

    The set looked as though a laundromat had exploded behind me. Laundry baskets overflowed with unfolded clothes. The lighting was so dreadful that viewers could never be entirely certain whether I was filming from my office or haunting a Medieval dungeon. As for focus, let us simply say that sharp images were treated as an optional feature rather than a design requirement.

    Eventually I purchased a better camera and developed a passing acquaintance with lighting and autofocus. But while I was taking baby steps, YouTube entered the Space Age. Channels began deploying drones over great white sharks, robotic camera rigs that glided through African safaris, helicopters circling erupting volcanoes, and editing suites that looked as though they had been borrowed from Christopher Nolan.

    I, meanwhile, was Fred Flintstone pedaling my Stoneage vehicle into a Tesla convention.

    Curiously, as YouTube marched into the future, I wandered in the opposite direction.

    I rarely make traditional watch videos anymore. Partly that’s because my collection has stabilized. I no longer acquire enough watches to justify another breathless “State of the Collection” update, a genre that now feels about as fresh and exciting as Hootie & the Blowfish.

    But something deeper also changed.

    I became uncomfortable participating in what I now recognize as the economics of envy. Every glossy close-up, every dramatic wrist roll, every thumbnail promising the next grail watch risks manufacturing dissatisfaction in viewers who were perfectly happy with their collections until five minutes earlier. I know because I spent years falling into exactly that trap myself.

    Instead of filming watches, I began interrogating the psychology behind collecting them.

    The channel gradually evolved into something resembling a podcast with occasional wrist shots. I developed a lexicon describing the peculiar madness of watch collecting and eventually self-published a book containing more than one hundred entries. Among them is what I call The Watch Potency Principle: as a collection expands, each individual watch loses a little of its emotional power. Eventually the collector experiences a crisis, sells everything in pursuit of liberation, discovers that liberation is strangely unsatisfying, and begins buying watches all over again. Repeat until death. Tolkien called this Gollum. I called it the process of Gollumification. 

    Having spent years dissecting the disease, I find myself with surprisingly little left to diagnose.

    That leaves my YouTube channel in an awkward adolescence.

    I don’t want to retire it because I genuinely enjoy making video essays. But I no longer possess the manic enthusiasm that algorithms adore. I am still a watch collector, just no longer in my Peak Addiction Period. Unfortunately, emotional equilibrium is terrible for audience engagement. YouTube rewards obsession far more enthusiastically than contentment.

    The truth is, I am also an extraordinarily boring man.

    I live in suburban Torrance. There is precious little cinematic drama in watching me search for a parking space at Costco, call a plumber when the shower backs up, or negotiate a family summit over the proper method for removing a daddy longlegs from my daughter’s bedroom wall. The algorithm craves spectacle. I offer plumbing invoices.

    People sometimes ask why I don’t pivot into politics.

    The answer is simple. Modern politics has become professional wrestling with legislation attached. Policy increasingly serves as the pretext for performance. Every public figure must become either the Hero or the Villain. Every disagreement requires apocalyptic language. Every debate ends with someone declaring civilization itself to be on the brink of collapse.

    I have no talent for that performance because I can see the stage directions.

    If my channel survives, it has to survive because I mean what I say, not because I have mastered the latest choreography of outrage.

    So here I am.

    I am sixty-four years old. I have spent forty years teaching writing, fifty years lifting weights and obsessing over nutrition, and twenty-five years collecting watches. By any reasonable measure, I should know exactly who I am.

    Instead, I find myself confronting an unexpected truth.

    I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

    Perhaps that uncertainty is no longer something to hide.

    Moving forward with the uncertainty is the story.

    If my YouTube channel has a future, I suspect it won’t be about watches at all. It will be about what happens after the obsessions cool, after the algorithms lose interest, and after a man discovers that the hardest collection to curate is not the one in his watch box, but the unfinished life still ticking quietly inside himself.

  • The Watches Were Never the Addiction–It Was the Rabbit Holes

    The Watches Were Never the Addiction–It Was the Rabbit Holes

    Over the past twenty years, I’ve learned that I love watches a little too much.

    Not because I own too many.

    Because I expected too much from them.

    I made two mistakes. First, I convinced myself that the next watch would somehow complete me, that a particular dial, bezel, or movement would usher me into a higher state of existence. Second, I became addicted to flipping watches—not because I disliked them, but because every purchase, every sale, every unboxing delivered another hit of dopamine and another round of approval from fellow enthusiasts online.

    The watches became secondary.

    The chase became the hobby.

    Fortunately, my collection has settled into something resembling adulthood. I own five Seiko divers and five G-Shocks. After falling under the spell of G-Shock’s atomic precision—watches so obsessively punctual they correct themselves while I sleep—I have found myself drifting back toward my mechanical Seikos with fresh appreciation. As I write this, I’m wearing my Seiko SBDC203 Coastline Diver on a Divecore Waffle strap, watching its blue wave dial catch the light with quiet confidence.

    Oddly enough, I have nothing on my wish list.

    That statement would have sounded impossible a few years ago.

    I still admire watches. I linger over Citizen Attesas, Seiko Astrons, and Grand Seikos. My favorite watch ever made remains the Seiko SLA017, but I suspect our relationship will remain safely one-sided. I’ll admire it from afar on YouTube, where it can continue living its best life without emptying my wallet.

    That realization has spilled into other corners of my life.

    Once you discover that a watch cannot make you whole, you begin looking suspiciously at everything else trying to make the same promise.

    A forty-thousand-dollar Honda.

    A forty-thousand-dollar Toyota.

    A four-thousand-dollar luxury mattress.

    Consumer culture speaks with remarkable consistency.

    “Buy me,” it whispers. “Your new life begins here.”

    No, it doesn’t.

    At best, your new life begins with a slightly nicer object.

    The harder truth is that the improvements I actually want cannot be purchased.

    I want to become healthier.

    I want to lose twenty pounds.

    I want more discipline.

    I want to be fully present for my wife and daughters.

    I want to become the kind of man whose character quietly exceeds his possessions.

    No watch accomplishes that.

    No car does.

    No mattress does.

    The real danger isn’t believing that buying something will make me happy.

    That illusion is almost too obvious.

    The greater danger is subtler.

    It’s the research.

    I can disappear for hours into consumer rabbit holes with the enthusiasm of an archaeologist uncovering a lost civilization. I compare specifications, memorize model numbers, watch endless YouTube reviews, read forum debates, and convince myself that this painstaking investigation is somehow productive.

    It isn’t.

    It’s beautifully disguised procrastination.

    The internet has become a casino where information replaces slot machines. Every click offers the possibility that the next review, the next comparison, the next expert opinion will reveal the perfect purchase. Hours disappear without resistance.

    The acquisition isn’t the addiction.

    The pursuit is.

    That’s the part that frightens me.

    I have an obsessive personality. Obsession can be useful when it is harnessed toward writing, teaching, or improving my health. Left unattended, however, it happily attaches itself to titanium watch cases, mattress coil counts, automobile trim packages, fountain pens, headphones, or whatever shiny object wanders into view.

    Obsession doesn’t particularly care about the subject.

    It simply wants something to consume.

    Going forward, I want to become more suspicious of that impulse.

    Not because curiosity is bad.

    Curiosity is wonderful.

    But there is a profound difference between curiosity that enlarges your life and curiosity that distracts you from it.

    I want to spend fewer afternoons researching products and more afternoons becoming the kind of man who no longer needs them to feel complete.

    The irony is almost embarrassing.

    For years I believed I was searching for the perfect watch.

    What I was really searching for was the discipline to stop searching.

    ***

    For my fellow watch addicts, here is the link to my book The Man Who Lost His Mind to Watches:

  • How I Saved Four Thousand Dollars by Skipping a Bowl of Yogurt

    How I Saved Four Thousand Dollars by Skipping a Bowl of Yogurt

    The first title best captures the essay’s central revelation: the story begins as consumer advice but ends as a confession about misplaced hope.

    My Aireloom mattress is thirteen years old. It still looks as though it came off the showroom floor yesterday. I paid about $2,200 for it back in 2013. It’s a medium hybrid, a compromise I made because side sleepers are forever warned against firm mattresses. The compromise never quite worked. The bed always struck me as too soft, too marshmallow-like, lacking the taut resilience I prefer. Still, I gave myself a lecture every time the thought of replacing it surfaced.

    Don’t be the princess forever searching for the pea. Sleep on the bed you have and get on with your life.

    For more than a decade, that pep talk held.

    Then, last week, the fever returned.

    Thirteen years sounded ancient. Surely I had earned a new mattress. After all, I had just paid off my mortgage. If there were ever a time to reward myself, this was it. Before long I had disappeared into the rabbit hole known as mattress technology, where every manufacturer promises salvation through proprietary coils, artisanal horsehair, glacier-infused foam, or some other miracle unavailable to ordinary mortals.

    I quickly dismissed the overstuffed pillow-top monstrosities. They looked less like mattresses than wedding cakes. I wanted something firm, springy, disciplined—a mattress with posture. After hours of research, I proudly narrowed the field to three finalists: Aireloom, Stearns & Foster Estate, and Beautyrest Black.

    Like an explorer hacking through the jungle with a machete, I congratulated myself on having separated civilization from chaos.

    The excitement wasn’t really about the mattress.

    It was about rebirth.

    A new bed would usher in a new chapter. Better sleep. Better mornings. Better health. Better life.

    Then I mentioned all this to my wife.

    “What do you think?” I asked. “Should we replace it?”

    She shrugged.

    “Our bed still looks brand new.”

    She was right.

    Neither of us had noticed any sagging. No body impressions. No mysterious valleys swallowing us during the night. The mattress had aged with remarkable dignity. Throwing it away would feel less like an upgrade than an act of perfectly good consumer vandalism.

    That conversation forced an uncomfortable realization.

    If I was looking for rebirth, I wasn’t going to find it in a mattress showroom.

    I was going to have to earn it.

    The problem wasn’t beneath me.

    The problem was on top of the mattress.

    Me.

    At 231 pounds, my sleep apnea becomes noticeably worse. My hips absorb the punishment every night as I sleep on my side. At 210 pounds, everything changes. My apnea drops to tolerable levels. My hips complain less. I wake with more energy, more discipline, more confidence. I feel like the man I keep trying to become.

    The mattress hasn’t changed.

    My body has.

    This isn’t a bed problem.

    It’s a food problem.

    If I launched into the psychology of my relationship with food, you’d be condemned to yet another memoir about emotional eating. We already own an entire library of those books. They all tell roughly the same story: we soothe ourselves with food, reward ourselves with food, celebrate with food, grieve with food, and occasionally mistake food for unconditional love.

    I have no groundbreaking theory to contribute.

    Here’s my autobiography in three words:

    I overeat.

    That’s it.

    I snack too much.

    I’m carrying twenty unnecessary pounds.

    So my latest campaign is almost embarrassingly modest. I’m eliminating my afternoon yogurt bowl—the one loaded with Greek yogurt, protein powder, and berries. Instead of eating four times a day, I’ll eat three.

    To soften the psychological blow, I’ll add a couple spoonfuls of Greek yogurt to my morning oatmeal. Lunch and dinner remain unchanged: protein, vegetables, and a sensible serving of rice or sweet potatoes.

    By my estimate, that should lower my daily intake from something approaching 2,900 calories to roughly 2,400.

    Whether my body cooperates is another matter.

    My metabolism possesses the cunning of an experienced labor negotiator. It has an extraordinary talent for reclaiming every calorie I attempt to eliminate. My unconscious mind may simply enlarge my lunch and dinner portions until I find myself back at 2,900 calories while congratulating myself on my “three-meal plan.”

    If that happens, I won’t invent excuses.

    I already know many of my vulnerabilities.

    Family vacations to Miami, Maui, or Coronado have an uncanny way of becoming weeklong festivals of excess. Every meal transforms into a celebration. Every dessert becomes mandatory because we’re making memories. Before long, memory has acquired another five pounds.

    If moderating carbohydrates proves impossible, I have another option.

    I’ve watched friends thrive on a meat-heavy diet.

    Breakfast is black coffee and electrolyte water.

    Lunch is ground beef or turkey bacon with eggs.

    Dinner is salmon or sirloin with salad.

    The simplicity has undeniable appeal. Protein suppresses my appetite better than oatmeal ever could.

    The problem is that I don’t particularly enjoy living that way.

    After several days, handling raw meat and smelling rendered fat throughout the house begins to repel me. I admire the diet more than I want to live inside it.

    Then comes the pharmaceutical path.

    For now, I have no interest in GLP-1 drugs.

    Perhaps history will prove them miraculous. Perhaps five years from now I’ll wonder why I resisted them. But at this stage I remain wary. Reports of pancreatitis, muscle loss, gastrointestinal complications, and other side effects make me feel as though we’re still watching the largest medical field trial in history unfold in real time.

    So I choose caution.

    I’ll begin with the oldest technology available.

    Eat a little less.

    See what happens.

    If nothing changes, I’ll reassess.

    And in the meantime, I have postponed spending three or four thousand dollars on a new mattress.

    Perhaps for another three years.

    The irony is difficult to miss. I nearly convinced myself that salvation lay hidden beneath layers of handcrafted latex, luxury coils, and cashmere ticking, when all along it was waiting in the space between lunch and dinner.

    The mattress was never asking to be replaced.

    Only its owner was.

  • The Wrinkled Prune

    The Wrinkled Prune

    In 1989, I became infatuated with a Pennsylvania band called The Ocean Blue, especially their haunting song “Drifting, Falling.” Naturally, I needed the CD. For reasons that now escape me, I decided to buy it at one of the strangest retail establishments I have ever entered: a Northern California gift shop called The Wrinkled Prune.

    How do I describe The Wrinkled Prune?

    It would be easier to describe what it didn’t sell.

    The store trafficked in novelty candies, decorative soaps, greeting cards, party supplies, imported chocolates, whimsical knickknacks, coffee mugs with forgettable slogans, scented candles, stuffed animals, and dozens of miscellaneous objects whose sole purpose seemed to be occupying shelf space until someone bought them out of mild confusion.

    But merchandise wasn’t the real mystery.

    The real mystery was this:

    Why did The Wrinkled Prune exist?

    And why on earth would anyone give a store that name?

    The answer begins with the owner.

    I attended high school with him. I’ll call him T. He drifted around the popular crowd, but never as one of its genuine members. He functioned more like its court jester—the lovable mascot whose chief social responsibility was to laugh at himself before everyone else could. Slightly overweight and perpetually goofy, T possessed a remarkable gift for turning his own awkwardness into entertainment. Whenever something struck him as funny—which was often—he erupted into volcanic laughter. His entire body convulsed. His fists clenched. He bounced on the balls of his feet while his thick black hair flopped wildly in every direction like a malfunctioning wind-up toy.

    Most people recoil from ridicule.

    T converted it into currency.

    After graduation, however, he seemed directionless. His father, a successful businessman, apparently decided that if purpose wouldn’t find his son, perhaps purpose could be purchased. So he bought T a gift shop.

    One afternoon I wandered inside. T stood behind the counter surrounded by several employees—all attractive young women in their late teens. I couldn’t help imagining the father’s reasoning. Maybe ownership would transform his son into a businessman. Maybe responsibility would attract confidence. Maybe confidence would attract a girlfriend. Parents have financed stranger dreams.

    In retrospect, The Wrinkled Prune felt like high school extended by other means.

    The name itself was a form of self-parody. A prune occupies an unfortunate place in the cultural imagination. It conjures wrinkles, old age, constipation, nursing homes, and the slow betrayal of the human body. Throughout adolescence T had made himself the punchline. Why stop now? Why not build an entire business around the joke?

    Unfortunately, self-awareness is not a business model.

    The Wrinkled Prune hemorrhaged money. Within a year it vanished, leaving behind little more than an unforgettable name and my copy of The Ocean Blue. I don’t know what became of T. He always struck me as fundamentally decent—a man less interested in success than in being liked. I hope life eventually showed him more kindness than high school had.

    But I have never forgotten that store.

    In fact, I think nearly all of us carry around some version of The Wrinkled Prune.

    What I’m describing is the vanity project: an enterprise undertaken less because the world needs it than because its creator needs the world to notice it. It is a monument to the self disguised as a public service. In the pre-digital age, vanity projects usually belonged to the wealthy. A millionaire financed an independent film no one watched, published an autobiography no one requested, endowed a museum wing bearing his name, or commissioned an oversized oil portrait in which he appeared to possess the moral gravity of Abraham Lincoln. Vanity required substantial capital.

    Today, vanity has been democratized. For the price of a webcam, microphone, and broadband connection, anyone can launch a podcast, livestream for six hours to an audience of twelve, or begin every video with the solemn declaration, “People have been asking me…” when no such people exist. The internet has transformed vanity from a luxury reserved for aristocrats into a subscription service available to anyone with Wi-Fi. Fortunately, not every podcast, YouTube channel, or livestream is a vanity project. Some genuinely educate, entertain, or enrich public life. The defining question is not whether anyone is watching, but whether the creator would continue producing the work if no one were.

    The desire beneath all this is perfectly human. We want to matter. We want to belong. We want to participate in the conversation instead of watching it through the window. But the digital age has turned belonging into branding. We are encouraged to cultivate audiences instead of friendships, niches instead of curiosities, and identities narrow enough for algorithms to categorize. We are constantly reminded to “find our lane,” as though a human being should resemble a freeway exit.

    I am hardly exempt.

    For fifteen years I maintained a YouTube channel devoted primarily to watches. On its best days, it attracted thousands of viewers. Yet over time I noticed an uncomfortable truth: every new video fueled the very obsession I claimed to be examining. At sixty-four, I have reached the stage of life where accumulation should be giving way to simplification. Instead, the algorithm quietly whispered, “Buy another watch. Make another video.”

    Occasionally I wandered away from watches and made videos about other subjects that interested me.

    The algorithm responded with majestic indifference.

    Business was slow.

    No one wandered into The Wrinkled Prune.

    That lesson was difficult but valuable. Unless you possess genuine expertise or offer something distinctive, a channel devoted to miscellaneous fascinations resembles a gift shop selling decorative soaps, imported candy, birthday balloons, and novelty coffee mugs under one bewildering roof. You are not building an audience. You are stocking shelves. Your vanity insists that the world needs one more opinion. The world politely walks past your front window.

    Eventually, The Wrinkled Prune closes.

    Does this mean we should silence ourselves? Stop writing? Abandon every attempt to contribute?

    Not at all.

    Life unfolds in seasons. There are years when your voice resonates widely and years when almost no one hears it. Neither condition should define your worth. During quieter seasons, remain curious. Read deeply. Listen carefully. Accumulate wisdom rather than followers. If, in time, you discover something genuinely worth saying that improves another person’s life, speak. If not, there is dignity in remaining silent.

    Just don’t open The Wrinkled Prune.

  • Sleeping with the Enemy: My Twelve-Year War with a Hybrid Mattress

    Sleeping with the Enemy: My Twelve-Year War with a Hybrid Mattress

    Twelve years ago, I spent about $2,500 on a California king hybrid mattress. Choosing the firmness felt less like shopping and more like negotiating a peace treaty between two warring factions of my anatomy. My heart wanted extra firm. My hips, burdened by the indignity of side sleeping, demanded something more forgiving. Conventional wisdom insisted that side sleepers need cushioning, but too much softness has always struck me as a design flaw masquerading as luxury. A plush mattress feels like a bed that has already lived a long, difficult life before arriving in your bedroom. Firmness, by contrast, exudes confidence. It says, “I’ve got you.” Plush whispers, “Good luck.”

    So I compromised and bought a medium-firm hybrid. It was the sensible decision. It was also, I suspect, the wrong one.

    I was never in love with the mattress. It relieved some pressure on my hips, but every night I found myself wishing I had ignored the sleep experts and trusted my instincts. Over the years, the compromise became a nightly ritual. Around one in the morning, I would abandon the bedroom and migrate to the living room.

    There, oddly enough, awaited my favorite bed.

    The couch itself deserves little credit. We bought it online six years ago because it looked handsome, not because it possessed any detectable concern for the human spine. It sits low, feels stiff, and offers about as much cushioning as a church pew. To make it habitable, I purchased a three-inch self-inflating camping mattress—a miraculous piece of engineering that silently inhales air without a pump and transforms an indifferent couch into something approaching civilization.

    My nightly arrangement has become embarrassingly elaborate. One pillow supports my head. Two more live beneath my knees whenever I rotate onto my back. A velvet blanket completes the ensemble. Together they create what I affectionately call my homeless encampment.

    My wife finds the nickname less amusing than I do.

    Whenever guests are coming over, she politely reminds me that respectable families generally do not display camping equipment in their living rooms. So I dismantle the encampment long enough to preserve the illusion that functional adults live here. Once our visitors leave, however, the mattress returns to its rightful place. As an added bonus, it triples the comfort of the couch for watching television.

    Fortunately, my wife doesn’t resent my nightly migration. If anything, it benefits both of us. I wake several times each night to visit the bathroom, while she sleeps lightly enough to awaken if a moth lands too aggressively on the windowsill. Sleeping in the living room allows me to use the guest bathroom and grants her several uninterrupted hours of sleep.

    I’ve discovered I’m hardly alone. My cousin does the same thing. So does my father-in-law.

    This raises an important scientific question.

    Is couch migration a uniquely male phenomenon?

    Perhaps our prehistoric ancestors developed the habit as a survival strategy. Maybe every few hours one caveman would quietly relocate to another corner of the cave to keep saber-toothed tigers from developing predictable dining habits. Somewhere an evolutionary psychologist is no doubt preparing a grant proposal entitled Nocturnal Male Couch Migration: An Adaptive Response to Pleistocene Predation. I wish that scholar the best of luck. I have more pressing concerns.

    Namely, buying another mattress.

    After twelve years, my hybrid has begun exhibiting the subtle symptoms of mattress middle age: faint depressions, a hint of fatigue, and support that now feels more nostalgic than structural.

    Buying a mattress was already maddening twelve years ago. Even then, the process resembled defending a doctoral dissertation in applied sleep science. You had to choose among innersprings, memory foam, latex, hybrids, pillow tops, Euro tops, plush, medium, firm, and the delightfully evasive category known as luxury firm—apparently invented for shoppers unwilling to admit they had absolutely no idea what they wanted.

    Today the situation has descended into magnificent absurdity.

    Modern mattress shopping requires fluency in pressure mapping, copper infusion, graphite cooling, zoned lumbar support, phase-change materials, edge reinforcement, biometric sleep tracking, AI-adjustable firmness, and enough proprietary foam technologies to qualify for military clearance. Every manufacturer assures you that its latest innovation has finally solved humanity’s oldest engineering challenge: lying down.

    By the time you’ve compared enough models, you’ve forgotten what sleep even feels like.

    Buying a bed now resembles selecting a spacecraft for a mission to Mars. All you wanted was eight peaceful hours. Instead, you’ve accidentally enrolled in graduate school.

    My strategy this time is refreshingly simple. I’ll buy a firm hybrid mattress and let a two-inch topper negotiate peace with my hips. The mattress will provide the confidence; the topper can handle diplomacy.

    That leaves only one obstacle: the mattress showroom.

    These retail stores exert a mysterious gravitational pull on commission salespeople whose weekly Costco runs apparently depend upon whether my hips achieve emotional closure on Mattress Number Seven. As I stretch out on one bed after another, I can almost hear them calculating mortgage payments from the angle of my shoulder.

    The alternative, of course, is ordering a mattress online.

    But buying a bed you’ve never tested strikes me as the consumer equivalent of accepting a mail-order bride. More often than not, the relationship ends with both parties discovering the true meaning of the word incompatibility.

    So I’ll brave the showroom.

    I’ll smile politely at the salespeople.

    I’ll pretend not to notice the desperation in their eyes.

    And I’ll wear long pants and socks.

    After watching thousands of strangers climb onto those mattresses in their bare feet, I refuse to expose my own. A man may lose his dignity to age, insomnia, and nocturnal couch migration, but there is no reason to surrender it barefoot in a mattress store.