Cinemorphosis

Category: FOMO and Its Discontents

  • The Death Car Dilemma: How One Man Escaped the Camry-Accord Abyss

    The Death Car Dilemma: How One Man Escaped the Camry-Accord Abyss

    At nearly 64, with four decades of college writing instruction corroding his patience, Aiken Riddle found himself drowning in self-disgust. His life, once measured in lectures and essays, had shrunk to a tormenting question: Camry or Accord? He obsessed over the choice as though he were deciding between Catholicism and Presbyterianism, his eternal soul dangling in the balance. The absurdity wasn’t lost on him. He had genuine problems—blood markers creeping north, a torn rotator cuff ruining kettlebell workouts, rooms that needed paint, twin daughters who needed driver training, retirement forms stacked like gravestones, and joint bank accounts to secure before death turned his finances into a probate nightmare for his younger wife. Yet he couldn’t stop watching the YouTube videos and Reddit pages comparing the new Camry and Accord. 

    He vacillated like a madman.

    One day while driving to his twins’ high school to pick them up, he would see an Accord and would say to himself with a sigh, “Ah, the Accord EX-L in Canyon River Blue. A very peaceful color. Not a bad car to die in.” Then another voice would say, “It’s a car, not a coffin, dummy!” Then he’d retort: “But this will be the last car I ever buy. Surely, it is my Death Car.” Upon which he’d rebuke himself, “God, you’re morbid! How can I live with you? Get away from me!”

    Then the next day while picking up his girls from their school, he’d see a Camry SE in Heavy Metal and would say, “Ah, the Camry seems to be made for that color. Everything fits perfectly. Plus for under thirty-three K, I’m getting a taste of Lexus.” Upon which his other self would say, “At least you’re not talking about death. That’s an improvement.” Then he would say, “But the Accord is a quieter ride. I need quiet. Plus, the Accord dealership is walking distance away. I can drop off the Accord and walk home. That tips the advantage to Accord. But, wait, people are saying that the new Accord body style looks like an old Ford Taurus. Can I live with such ridicule?”

    Over the ensuing days, he would go back and forth. It reached the point that his wife could tell by his body language that he was about to talk about his Camry-Accord dilemma and she would interrupt him even before he opened his mouth: “Stop right there, buster! I don’t want to hear it. Just make your damn decision!”

    So he was alone in his torment. 

    One day he woke up and said he didn’t need a car. He calculated that for the last decade he had only driven three thousand miles a year. That hardly merited getting himself a new car. The decision was final: His daughters would take the old Accord and he’d give the newer one to his wife. He would simply borrow their cars when he needed them. 

    The decision was genius. He would not be less obliged to drive when he felt his driving skills had compromised over the last decade. He was by nature a recluse. His decision to not buy a car helped his cause. Why spend forty thousand dollars so I can behold a rarely-driven car in my garage before returning to the living room to play the piano or watch Netflix?

    He learned that sometimes a decision is not either/or. There is sometimes another option, and not getting anything can be the best one of all.  

  • When the Radio Becomes God: Eavesdropping on Despair

    When the Radio Becomes God: Eavesdropping on Despair

    The word “satisfactory” can be a bit of an oxymoron. There’s not much that is satisfying about being satisfactory when the word is a proxy for mediocrity and ennui. To be in life’s sweet spot of income, career, and social status may feel like a prison. To keep your “satisfactory” status, you may be playing house, as they say. You go through the motions of what is considered respectable but feel empty inside. You may find yourself to be the unflattering subject of the famous Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.” The song’s theme is the shock of waking up inside your own life and not recognizing how you got there. David Byrne delivers his lines like a dazed preacher, cataloging the trappings of middle-class success—“a beautiful house,” “a beautiful wife”—yet always undercutting them with the anxious refrain, “Well, how did I get here?” The song captures the disorientation of modern existence, where routines and consumer comforts can feel alien, as if someone else scripted your life while you were sleepwalking through it. Beneath its hypnotic bassline and tribal rhythm, the song is less celebration than existential panic: a reminder that time moves in one direction, that choices pile up invisibly, and that one day you might look around and realize the current has carried you somewhere you never meant to go. The song came out as a video in 1981 and remains one of the most famous videos ever made.

    Cut to 2014 and you’ll find a companion song–Father Misty’s “Bored in the USA.” The song skewers the hollowness of the American Dream by presenting a narrator who has all the trappings of comfort yet feels utterly vacant inside. Over a piano ballad that mimics Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. anthem but inverts its spirit, he lists his modern dissatisfactions—student debt, prescription meds, existential malaise—with a deadpan delivery that borders on satire. The song’s title itself is a punchline: in a land of abundance, the greatest affliction is ennui. Misty sharpens the critique by layering laugh-track chuckles over his lament, exposing the absurdity of personal despair as entertainment. The theme is clear: American prosperity doesn’t guarantee purpose, and in a culture that commodifies everything, even boredom becomes a spectacle.

    Perhaps the precursor to the above songs is Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” (1962).  All three songs wrestle with the discontent lurking beneath middle-class comfort. Reynolds’ folk satire ridicules postwar conformity: rows of identical houses, “ticky-tacky” lives, and the way education, careers, and family structures stamp people into cookie-cutter molds. Byrne picks up this theme two decades later, asking in “Once in a Lifetime” how one can inhabit that prefab life without ever choosing it, caught in the current of routine until bewilderment sets in. Misty, in turn, gives the 21st-century update: not only are the houses still there, but so is the crushing boredom, debt, and medicated detachment that follow from chasing that same ideal. Together, the songs form a lineage of American self-critique—“Little Boxes” mocking the architecture of conformity, “Once in a Lifetime” exposing the existential vertigo inside it, and “Bored in the USA” diagnosing its emptiness in an age of irony and overmedication.

    All three songs—“Little Boxes,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “Bored in the USA”—resonate with Paula Fox’s masterpiece novella Desperate Characters in their shared critique of middle-class paralysis. Fox’s novel follows Sophie and Otto Bentwood, a couple trapped in a Brooklyn brownstone, surrounded by the comforts of professional success yet gnawed by alienation, decay, and a sense that life has slipped beyond their control. Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” mocks the social machinery that produces people like the Bentwoods—educated, well-off, but indistinguishable. Byrne’s “Once in a Lifetime” channels Sophie’s disorientation, the feeling of waking up one day to a “beautiful house” and a “beautiful wife” yet asking, “How did I get here?” Misty’s “Bored in the USA” pushes the critique further, mirroring the Bentwoods’ emptiness with a 21st-century inventory of malaise: debt, pharmaceuticals, and soul-crushing ennui. Taken together, the songs and Fox’s novella expose the fragility beneath affluence, suggesting that comfort without meaning curdles into desperation.

    John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio” joins the chorus. Jim and Irene Westcott are respectable enough to be alumni-brochure fodder, yet their lives hum with nothingness. Then comes the radio, their supposed luxury upgrade—a hulking gumwood cabinet that looks less like a household appliance and more like a coffin standing on end. At first it malfunctions with grotesque noises, coughing and wheezing like a consumptive beast. But when it “works,” its real gift is supernatural: it picks up not Brahms or Mozart but the raw, unedited conversations of the neighbors. Suddenly Irene is granted an unwanted superpower, the ability to eavesdrop on lives stripped of pretense. Through the radio’s crackle, she overhears quarrels, confessions, betrayals, the bitter sediment of other people’s marriages. Respectable couples she once envied are exposed as small, petty, furious, and miserable. Irene becomes both priest and voyeur, holding court over the private sins of her building. The radio doesn’t merely broadcast sound; it rips open walls, tears down curtains, and forces Irene into an intimacy she never asked for but quickly can’t live without. Jim recoils in disgust, but Irene is entranced, feeding on the poison like it’s oxygen. The radio becomes their third eye, their unwelcome oracle, a device that transforms a bourgeois apartment into a haunted theater of human despair.

    The question Cheever poses—and which Reynolds, Byrne, and Misty circle—is whether too much knowledge of others, or of ourselves, is corrosive. The radio doesn’t merely reveal secrets; it corrupts. Irene begins with curiosity, but soon she’s chained to the cabinet, hypnotized by its stream of confessions and recriminations. What she hears doesn’t just stain her view of others; it infects her own marriage, her finances, even her sense of self. She grows convinced that her life is flimsy, precarious, and wasted, as though the radio is no longer a machine but a judgmental deity, casting its pitiless light on everything she’s tried to keep tidy and respectable. For Irene, the radio becomes both oracle and executioner, transforming her from passive listener into a woman undone by revelation. And that’s the horror Cheever leaves us with: the possibility that self-examination, when magnified by an unblinking device, doesn’t lead to wisdom at all, but to paralysis and despair. Respectability is not protection. The walls are paper-thin. The “satisfactory” life is a coffin with good upholstery.

  • The Fix-It Myth: Why Self-Help is Just a Car Manual for Broken Humans

    The Fix-It Myth: Why Self-Help is Just a Car Manual for Broken Humans

    In her essay “Improving Ourselves to Death,” Alexandra Schwartz skewers our obsession with “setting goals” and the self-help prophets who profit by defining them. These gurus peddle life hacks as if they were cheat codes for existence, promising that with the right app, cue, or wearable gadget, you too can become a shiny human upgrade—an iPhone with abs.

    Their gospel is simple: optimization. A body that runs like a Swiss watch. A brain that hums like a Tesla battery. The result is a consumer barrage of homilies, buzzwords, and dopamine-chasing gadgets—all in service of transforming you into the ultimate product: yourself.

    But Schwartz argues that self-help is nothing more than a mirror, reflecting our dreams, neuroses, and insecurities. And one illusion persists like an American birthright: the Fix-It Myth. The fantasy that we are just machines—cars in need of a tune-up. Find the right manual, grab the right tools, and presto: you’re repaired, maybe even upgraded, ready to roar back onto the freeway of productivity.

    This myth has metastasized in the gig economy, where survival depends on perpetual hustle. We’ve convinced ourselves we must be perfectly fine-tuned—capable of juggling three jobs, dabbling in day trading, and hoarding enough cash to claw our way into a coveted zip code.

    At the core of this delusion is what therapist Phil Stutz calls the “Moment Frozen in Time”: a fantasy snapshot where everything is perfect—you look flawless, your soulmate is flawless, your calendar is conflict-free, and every day is a spa day in Shangri-La. The billion-dollar self-help industry feasts on this fantasy, offering secret codes that promise to deliver the life of a minor deity.

    Gwyneth Paltrow plays High Priestess of the Perfection Myth, hawking jade eggs and kale smoothies as though they were Eucharist wafers. On the Manosphere side, we’ve endured the spectacle of the Liver King—reduced from ancestral beef oracle to fallen fraud—and the smirking jiu-jitsu bodybuilder Mike Israetel, who at least delivers his advice with more honesty than theatrics.

    Stutz, however, refuses to sell the dream. His blunt counter-sermon: life is pain, uncertainty, and work. The faster you accept this, the happier you’ll be—because reality, not fantasy, is the only terrain where resilience and joy can actually grow. Otherwise, you’re just another maladapted child clinging to the hope of effortless bliss.

    And all the while, we’ve marinated in two decades of social media’s dopamine fever swamp: the endless scroll of FOMO, flexing, and fraudulence. Maybe the truest life hack isn’t another app or guru, but closing the laptop, lacing up your shoes, pounding out a five-mile run, and letting endorphins—not Instagram—clear your head.

  • Building a Bulwark Against Dopamine

    Building a Bulwark Against Dopamine

    Charles Duhigg, in The Power of Habit, insists that the real magic of self-improvement isn’t magic at all—it’s repetition, consistency, and time. Muscle memory married to good habits rewires the brain so that willpower stops being a daily knife fight. Instead, habits act as a bulwark, a fortification that keeps temptation outside the walls.

    Take my relationship with German Chocolate Cake. I adore it. But I eat it once a year because I never buy it. The thought of driving downtown, circling for parking, and elbowing through bakery lines kills the craving faster than broccoli. If people on TV are flaunting cake, I’ve trained myself to default to popcorn and an apple, which is like swapping bourbon for chamomile tea. Still, despite this culinary Maginot Line, I live fifteen pounds heavier than I want to be—proof that the fortress has weak spots.

    The Internet, however, is a stronger adversary than cake. Social media rewires the brain more ruthlessly than sugar. Twitter/X trained me to think in quips, Facebook taught me to beg for likes like a starving dog scratching at the door. I finally quit both. I post on Facebook once a month and promptly forget about it. I’m saner for it.

    But YouTube? That’s my heroin. I’ve been making watch-obsession videos for over a decade and built a modest following of 10,000. When a video pops, YouTube showers me with fireworks like a slot machine jackpot. When it flops, I get a scolding message: “This video isn’t bringing in as many of your subscribers as usual.” It’s the algorithm wagging its finger like a principal telling me I’ve failed society.

    YouTube has rewired my brain in both noble and grotesque ways. On the one hand, I’m sharper at public speaking, better at spinning essays into expositions, and more skilled at civil engagement with various personalities. On the other hand, I care too much about metrics, let them colonize my self-worth, and live half my life inside the algorithm’s funhouse mirror. I now inhabit parallel universes—the physical world and the YouTube world—fleeing one when the other displeases me.

    The problem is that the Internet’s temptations can’t be quarantined. My work machine is also my dopamine slot machine. One new tab, one click, and I’m plunging into a carnival of junk content, drenched in FOMO syrup and neon distraction. Cal Newport is right: when you toggle between focused work and dopamine junk food, the brain leaves behind a sticky residue that smothers concentration. I’ve felt that sludge firsthand, and I despise myself for swimming in it.

    As Duhigg notes, the brain is “constantly looking for ways to save effort” by making routines automatic. That’s useful for the monk who wakes at dawn to meditate, but disastrous for someone whose screen offers the New Tab to Nowhere. If only I could build a stronger bulwark against the carnival in my browser, I might actually live lighter, work deeper, and—dare I say it—be happier.

  • The Gospel of the Liver King

    The Gospel of the Liver King

    Brian Johnson, better known as the Liver King, is a steroidal cartoon who tried to sell himself as a prophet of “ancestral living.” In reality, he was just another hustler juicing his body with over a hundred grand a year in growth hormones and anabolic steroids. He strutted around Instagram in animal skins, bellowing like a berserk Viking, gnawing raw liver on camera, and flogging overpriced supplements. His entire empire collapsed the moment it was revealed that his shredded physique was less the fruit of caveman purity and more the handiwork of pharmacy-grade science.

    Instead of bowing out in disgrace, he doubled down. Unable to detach from the narcotic glow of internet celebrity, he documented his own unraveling in real time—YouTube became his padded cell, each video another entry in the world’s strangest public diary. He wanted to be remembered as a leader, a liberator from modern malaise, but he became a parody of himself, a sideshow Rambo gone rancid.

    Raw meat became his metaphor—masculinity, toughness, a primal rejection of processed life. But it was also cosplay, a carnival act built for the algorithm, because nothing feeds clicks like a maniac tearing into a bull testicle with his teeth. And young men, starving for meaning, saw not a fraud but a messiah: the steroidal savior who would flex them into the promised land.

    This was kayfabe 2.0. Vince McMahon taught wrestlers never to break character, and Liver King took that gospel straight to Instagram. Only he forgot the cardinal rule: kayfabe consumes you. Live in the gimmick long enough and the gimmick swallows the man. By the end, Liver King wasn’t selling a mask—he was the mask, devoured whole by his own performance.

    His collapse is bigger than one delusional influencer. It’s a commentary on the culture itself: a society so anesthetized by spectacle that it mistakes bombast for wisdom. Idiocracy predicted a wrestler-president peddling electrolytes; we got a shirtless Texan chewing raw liver and pushing HGH cocktails disguised as authenticity. Mike Judge wasn’t satirizing the future—he was reporting it early.

    And yet, there is something deeply American in the Liver King’s fall: the grift, the spectacle, the refusal to relinquish the stage even when the show is over. His tragedy is that of a man who wanted love, found instead an algorithm’s approval, and now cannot escape the cage of his own creation.

  • The Gospel of Broccoli

    The Gospel of Broccoli

    For the last two decades, I’ve gorged myself on a certain genre of book: part self-help, part pop psychology, part personal confession, and part armchair sociology. They’re all cut from the same cloth. Sometimes the title is blunt and monosyllabic—Grit, Flow, Blink. The kind of title that slaps you with FOMO and whispers: you’re missing out on the one great discovery of our age.

    The author inevitably casts themselves as an intellectual Indiana Jones, unearthing some dark corner of human frailty—our laziness, our compulsions, our doomscrolling brains—and holding it aloft like a cursed artifact. But don’t worry: they’ll swap your vice for a virtue. Where once was sloth, you’ll now install grit. Replace despair with tenacity, chaos with routine, cowardice with courage. Each quality is presented as if it were a rare mineral dug from the Earth’s molten core, not something your grandmother muttered at you over meatloaf.

    I’ll grant them this: these books are smooth. The anecdotes are lively, the arguments persuasive, the storytelling slick enough to convince you that eating your vegetables is an act of revolution. And yet—I wince. These books are built on a template so predictable you can spot the seams. They’re self-help in disguise, draped in academic robes to save the reader the shame of browsing the “Inspiration” aisle.

    Their authors remind me of medieval minstrels and troubadours, wandering into our living rooms and cubicles to hose down our cobwebbed souls with disinfectant. They don’t strum lutes anymore—they host podcasts, deliver TED Talks, and keynote conferences. We line up for their sermons because they make us feel clean. They are the secular priests of our age, baptizing us in chapter-length homilies and promising to purge our modern sins.

    The journey they lead us on is as predictable as a Disney ride: first the dark woods of dysfunction, then the bright meadows of redemption. The simplicity borders on smugness, and yet—I still buy the ticket. Why? Because sometimes I need to be scolded into eating my broccoli. These books are broccoli dressed up in filet mignon plating: familiar, obvious, slightly sanctimonious, but undeniably good for me in small, bitter doses.

  • Autopilot or Choice: The Battle Beneath Our Habits

    Autopilot or Choice: The Battle Beneath Our Habits

    In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg challenges the comforting illusion that we live as fully self-possessed beings. Our existence, he argues, is far more random than we’d like to admit. Take the man who staggers home from work and pours himself a gin and tonic. The drink delivers its fleeting pleasure, but the deeper harm lies not only in the alcohol—it lies in the complacency of unexamined rituals, the sleepwalking habits that shape a life. Duhigg leans on William James to make the point: “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”

    By contrast, when I come home, I reach for sparkling water or diet 7-Up over ice. I probably get the same sensory refreshment as the martini drinker—minus the alcohol. What matters most is that I asserted a choice instead of slipping into autopilot.

    I apply this principle elsewhere. Because I know I tend to drive more aggressively than I’d like, I deliberately leave ten minutes earlier than most people would. That way, I don’t have to be a jackass on the road. Every time I make a conscious choice like this, I chip away at the pull of mindless behavior.

    Duhigg presses us to do the same: make deliberate decisions, rewire our routines, and stop letting unseen patterns run our lives. He cites a Duke study revealing that more than 40 percent of people’s daily actions aren’t conscious choices at all, but habits. From Aristotle onward, philosophers puzzled over why habits exist; now, neuroscience explains not only how they form but how they can be reshaped.

    The book’s central claim is hopeful: we aren’t doomed by our bad habits. We can change them, reprogram our brains, and redirect our lives—if we understand how the mechanics of habit work. I’d assume that anyone picking up Duhigg’s book already has the self-awareness and motivation to attempt change. In the short run, thoughtful people can transform themselves. The greater challenge comes later, when complacency sneaks back after the initial enthusiasm fades. That’s when I wonder if Duhigg’s manifesto offers not just inspiration, but a lasting answer.

  • The Keystone Habit: How One Change Rewires the Rest of Us

    The Keystone Habit: How One Change Rewires the Rest of Us

    Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business argues that vice, self-indulgence, and addiction operate on a neurological level. If we can deliberately rewire those pathways, we can free ourselves from much of our self-destructive behavior. Written more than a decade ago, the book anticipates the same themes that now surface in places like Reddit’s “Nofap” movement, where porn addicts admit their compulsions damage relationships and stunt growth, so they commit to abstinence—except with their partner. Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation makes a similar case, charting how dopamine overload leads to the inevitable crash of pleasure into misery.

    Duhigg opens with Lisa, an addict whose husband left her, likely exhausted by her behavior. When she finally saw how deranged her habits had become, she had the spark to change. She replaced her old compulsions with exercise and healthy eating. It’s the familiar “rock bottom” story: you face yourself stripped of illusions. Or as Marc Maron puts it, “Life hands you your ass on a stick.” Only when pride dissolves are you ready for answers.

    As someone who has wrestled with addictions and grown up with alcoholic parents, I read this story with recognition. The researchers studying Lisa’s brain found something striking: her old neural patterns were still visible, but they had been overridden by new ones. The impulses hadn’t vanished—they’d simply been crowded out. And while she overhauled many habits, it was quitting smoking that made the real difference. Duhigg calls this a “keystone habit.” In his words: “By focusing on one pattern…Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well.”

    The same principle applies to organizations: find the keystone habit, nurture it, and the ripple spreads across the whole system.

    I learned another useful term from the book: “behavioral inhibition.” It resonates painfully, because from 7 to 10 p.m. I suffer relentless food cravings. By then I’ve usually reached 2,300 calories, and eating more destroys my calorie deficit. But television sabotages my self-control—everywhere I look, people are drinking rosé, eating pizza, ice cream, carrot cake. Triggers, triggers everywhere. If I hid in an igloo, maybe I’d get ripped abs, though the view would be grim.

    Still, I’ve seen the power of a keystone habit. My mornings begin with coffee and buckwheat groats mixed with protein powder. Then I study a book and take notes, as I’m doing now. If I skip this, I get swallowed by the Internet, a dopamine carnival of watches, consumer temptations, and FOMO. I unfollow Instagram “safari” channels that inevitably mutate into half-naked influencers shaking their butts in gym close-ups. Once seen, such images can’t be unseen. Now I choose carefully.

    Replacing bad habits with good—writing, piano, exercise—changes not only my productivity but my temperament. I become friendlier, more patient with my family. But when I binge on Internet dopamine, I snap at people. I become “that guy.”

    The contrast reminds me of something Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin confessed in America’s Team: “We are all imperfect people. And each of us has at least two people in all of us; the person you show everybody and that person you never show to anybody.”

    We curate public personas and believe our own polished lies, all while a darker self hides in the shadows. But once life hands you your ass on a stick, integrity becomes your only way forward. Rewiring the brain isn’t just a neurological project. It’s a moral one.

  • Dopamine Nation: Self-Help Without the Fairy Dust

    Dopamine Nation: Self-Help Without the Fairy Dust

    I’ve never trusted the mythology of self-help books—the fairy tale that you identify Problem X, buy a book, read a few hundred pages, and Problem X vanishes. What I do believe is that a self-help book, at best, can make you stare harder at your demon, dull its sharper edges, and maybe hand you a strategy or two to keep it from devouring you whole.

    That’s why Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence punched me in the gut. Her blunt lesson: dopamine addiction—whether through scrolling, swiping, shopping, or vaping—doesn’t lead to pleasure but to misery, pain, and the hollowing-out of your agency. Reading her, I shuddered at the years I wasted feeding my brain with Internet sugar highs.

    Lembke makes no bones about the world we live in: a digital carnival of “overwhelming abundance.” She puts it starkly: “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you.” Pleasure and pain, she reminds us, are processed in the same brain circuitry—and the more dopamine that flows, the stickier the addiction.

    The horror story isn’t abstract. Her case studies peel the skin off addiction’s double life: secret compulsions, corrosive shame, shattered relationships. Some people are more vulnerable—those with addictive parents, those with mental illness in the family—but Lembke insists access is the true accelerant. The Internet puts a casino in our pocket; supply breeds demand. Worse, social media monetizes outrage until we mistake 24/7 hair-on-fire hysteria for “normal.”

    Lembke’s most grotesque example is Jacob, a sex addict who literally builds himself a “Masturbation Machine.” She confesses she feels horror, compassion—and dread that she herself is not immune. Her verdict is bleak: “Not unlike Jacob, we are all at risk of titillating ourselves to death.” Seventy percent of global deaths, she notes, stem from modifiable behaviors like smoking, gluttony, and sloth. Addiction, in short, is a slow suicide dressed up as entertainment.

    Part of the problem is philosophical. As Philip Rieff noted in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” We’ve traded the pursuit of goodness for the pursuit of good feelings. Jeffrey Rosen put it more bluntly: classical wisdom insists we should aim to be good, not simply to feel good. Instead, we’re anesthetizing ourselves with meds, therapy-lite, dopamine drip-feeds, and hedonism. And as Lembke observes, hedonism curdles into its opposite: anhedonia, the inability to enjoy anything at all.

    Her prescription? The brutal reset of a “dopamine fast.” Four weeks off your drug of choice to force your brain back to balance. She offers a framework—DOPAMINE (data, objectives, problems, abstinence, mindfulness, insight, next steps, experiment). It’s clever, but the hard truth runs underneath: most addicts, myself included, are not “moderators.” We’re all-or-nothing. For me, the Internet isn’t moderation-friendly; it’s a rabbit hole with no bottom.

    Lembke knows willpower is not enough. She prescribes “self-binding”: physical, chronological, and categorical walls between you and your poison. But in the digital economy—where work and addiction ride on the same Internet rails—such barriers are fragile. Moderation may be the fantasy; abstinence the only real survival strategy.

    So yes, I’m glad I read Dopamine Nation. It clarified the trap, exposed the double life, and framed the fight as both biological and spiritual. But let’s not be naïve. Like all self-help, it’s not a magic pill. At best, it’s a mirror, a warning flare, and a rough map out of the dopamine swamp. The walking out is still on you.

  • The Warm Bath Illusion: Why Pleasure Culture Kills Relationships

    The Warm Bath Illusion: Why Pleasure Culture Kills Relationships

    When you’re married, you’ve closed the deal. You’ve made your public and private commitment to another person. Yet, as Phil Stutz points out in Lessons for Living, this loyalty oath collides with a culture that insists there’s always a better deal waiting. It’s our supposed “divine right” to find that deal, to “look outside ourselves for more.” In other words, FOMO infects the way we relate to our spouses. Stutz writes: “The result is a frenzy of activity, powered by the fear of missing something, which exhausts us emotionally and leaves us spiritually empty.”

    As a therapist to Hollywood’s wealthy actors and producers, Stutz sees people in perpetual pursuit of “bigger and better”—newer houses, flashier careers, younger spouses once they’ve “made it.” They want to “trade up,” convinced they deserve it. But what they crave isn’t a flesh-and-blood partner. It’s a “fantasy companion,” a frozen image of perfection that bears no resemblance to real life. As Stutz notes of one patient, a successful actor: “What he was really looking for was someone with the magical ability to change the nature of reality.”

    Why do so many of us want to change reality? Because reality is messy, uncertain, painful, and demands labor of mind and spirit. Consumer culture promises to scrub away that mess and deliver a “frictionless” existence. It sells us the Warm Bath: a world of perpetual pleasure and no conflict. But the Warm Bath is an adolescent fantasy—an illusion that reality will mold itself to our most immature notions of happiness.

    This fantasy always collapses. No “fantasy companion” exists, and even if one did, the Warm Bath curdles into hell. Experiences flatten, pleasures dull, the hedonic treadmill spins us into numbness, and from numbness we fall into rage—blaming the fantasy companion for failing to save us.

    Stutz argues we must abandon the fantasy of love—a stagnant “perfect” photograph—for the messier, real version: alive, unpredictable, and demanding effort. “To put it simply,” he writes, “love is a process. All processes require endless work because perfection is never achieved. Accepting this fact is not thrilling, but it is the first step to happiness. You can work on finding satisfaction in your relationship the same way you’d work on your piano playing or your garden.”

    So if you spend your days marinating in salacious fantasies and stoking your FOMO with consumer culture, you’re killing reality while feeding fantasy. And because you’re putting no work into your relationship, entropy sets in. Bonds fray, affection curdles, and instead of taking responsibility, you blame your partner and draft your exit strategy.

    To keep his patients from falling into this trap, Stutz prescribes three tools.

    The first is Fantasy Control. Fantasies, he warns, can grow “long and involved” until they compete with real relationships. Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” comes to mind. Its narrator is a suburban mediocrity who dreams himself into an edgy artist and seducer of women. Fans saw themselves in him, but the song is ironic: a portrait of a fallen man propping up a drab life with self-mythology. Such fantasies, Stutz says, “hold a tremendous amount of emotional energy.” The more energy you pour into a phantom partner, the less you have for your real one. When fantasies become sexual, the drain is worse. Stutz insists that when fantasies consume you, you must learn to interrupt them. “You’ll resent this at first,” he writes, “but each time you come down to earth you’re telling yourself that you are a committed adult who is strong enough to face reality. This will make you more satisfied with yourself, a precondition to becoming satisfied with any partner.”

    If you’re a boomer like me, this may sound like heresy. Raised in the 60s and 70s, we were taught to unleash the Id, to celebrate fantasies as expressions of the “true self.” The musical Hair didn’t just glorify wild locks but turned them into a metaphor of rebellion against authority. Hugh Hefner and Xaviera Hollander gave us ribald lifestyles to envy. Thomas Harris’s I’m Okay, You’re Okay blessed us with permission to indulge. And the cultural mantra was simple: “Let it all hang out!”

    But Stutz, a boomer himself, has watched fantasies devour his patients. His conclusion is blunt: curbing sexual fantasy is a crucial step toward adulthood and a stronger bond with one’s partner.

    The second tool is Judgment. Fixate on a fantasy partner and you suspend critical thought, surrendering to false perfection. You also sharpen your critique of your real partner until both fantasy and reality are grotesquely warped. To break free, Stutz says, you must recognize this distortion and choose a loving path over a fantasy path. “The process of loving requires that you catch yourself having these negative thoughts and dissolve them from your mind, replacing them with positive ones. You must actively construct thoughts about their good attributes, and let these thoughts renew feelings of attraction toward them.” This habit builds gratitude, restores attraction, and replaces helplessness with control.

    Reflecting on this, I recall Tim Parks’s essay “Adultery,” in which he describes a friend’s affair that destroyed his marriage. Parks likens sexual passion to a raging river that demolishes everything in its path, while domestic life is the quieter work of nest-building. The two impulses are locked in eternal conflict. Some people cannot resist hurling themselves into the river, even knowing it will consume them.

    To pull people out of that river, Stutz prescribes his third tool: Emotional Expression. Here self-expression works in reverse. Just as smiling can make you happier, acts of tenderness can make you feel tender. Stutz advises: when you’re alone with your partner, speak and touch them as if they are desirable. Do this consistently and not only will you find them more attractive, they’ll begin to find you more attractive too.

    It may sound counterintuitive. Who “works” for attraction? But that is Stutz’s point: love is work. Excessive fantasy, meanwhile, is infidelity—not only to your spouse, but to your adult self. Stay shackled to your adolescent hedonist, and like Lot’s wife, you’ll turn into a pillar of salt.