Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • How My Smart Speaker Became the Dumbest Thing in the House

    How My Smart Speaker Became the Dumbest Thing in the House

    Six years ago, I embraced Alexa speakers with the optimism of a man welcoming the future into his home. These devices promised convenience, intelligence, and a frictionless life in which technology would obediently serve my every whim. Today, that dream lies in ruins.

    As I write this, a giant Alexa Studio speaker sits beneath my bedside table where I no longer have to look at it. It has effectively been placed in witness protection. Another Alexa occupies the primary bathroom, though it rarely speaks because my wife listens to podcasts on her phone. A third lives in the guest bathroom, unplugged and forgotten after my daughters abandoned it in favor of their phones and a portable Bluetooth speaker. Collectively, these devices have become technological tumbleweeds rolling through the corners of our house.

    The mere mention of Alexa now provokes a family-wide eye roll.

    The speakers are perpetually trying to be witty, personable, and charming. Instead, they often resemble a cruise ship comedian trapped inside a plastic cylinder. At their best, they are cheesy. At their worst, they are spectacularly idiotic. Sometimes they spontaneously awaken and begin discussing random subjects as though suffering from a digital nervous breakdown. Other times they interrupt life with yet another urgent beach hazard warning. We understand. The ocean is trying to kill us. Message received.

    The greater offense is that these devices routinely fail at the very task for which they were purchased. Nothing undermines faith in technological progress faster than shouting the same command three times while a glowing hockey puck confidently misunderstands you. Ask for Johann Sebastian Bach and it rewards you with heavy metal. Request a weather forecast and receive a podcast recommendation. Ask it to stop and it behaves as though you’ve spoken ancient Sumerian.

    This is not the Jetsons.

    This is a laboratory experiment in which the guinea pigs have begun filing complaints.

    Over time I discovered a simple truth: the less I interacted with Alexa, the happier I became. Since anger management is an important component of my long-term survival strategy, I gradually demoted the Studio speaker from trusted companion to emergency backup. It now resides beneath the side table like a disgraced cabinet member exiled from public life.

    Its replacement is a Father’s Day gift: a Marshall Stanmore III.

    A few weeks ago, I replaced an Alexa device in the kitchen with a Marshall Acton III. The experience was revelatory. No wake words. No unsolicited commentary. No beach alerts. No attempts at stand-up comedy. Just music delivered immediately and competently from my smartphone to a handsome speaker that understands the revolutionary concept of doing one thing well.

    The Acton impressed me so much that I decided to acquire its larger sibling for the bedroom. The Stanmore delivers more power, richer sound, and, perhaps most importantly, silence when silence is desired.

    I enjoy these Marshall speakers immensely, but I would be lying if I said my motivation was purely audiophile enthusiasm.

    Part of me wanted revenge.

    For years, Alexa interrupted conversations, misheard commands, issued irrelevant warnings, and generally behaved like an overeager intern determined to prove its usefulness. Replacing those speakers with Marshalls felt less like upgrading my audio system and more like terminating an employee whose performance reviews had become impossible to ignore.

    The future arrived, overstayed its welcome, and got reassigned to a dark corner beneath my bedside table.

  • The Last Voyage of Captain Wrist Presence

    The Last Voyage of Captain Wrist Presence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Even then I understood the thought was ridiculous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The result was an unexpected misalignment.

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

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

    I was them.

    Wisdom did not cure me.

    Age did.

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

    What frightens me is not losing the hobby.

    What frightens me is losing the community.

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

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

    My younger colleagues.

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

    Their careers are in blossom.

    Mine is entering autumn.

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

    The divergence is occurring in two places at once.

    The watch hobby.

    The college classroom.

    I cannot stop either process.

    The current is too strong.

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

    At times the sensation resembles exile.

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

    The hatch opens.

    The separation becomes permanent.

    That is what aging sometimes feels like.

    Not tragedy.

    Not injustice.

    Just inevitability.

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

    A pane of glass descends.

    Not hostile.

    Not malicious.

    Just real.

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

    But the hatch has already sealed.

    There is no reentry.

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

  • The Garage Door That Aged Me

    The Garage Door That Aged Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    That is how aging sometimes feels.

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

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

    Then comes the whip.

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

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

    The garage door was my Balrog.

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

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

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

    “I strayed out of thought and time.”

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

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

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

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

  • The Everyday Vampires Who Feed on Chaos

    The Everyday Vampires Who Feed on Chaos

    Olga Khazan’s article “There’s a Name for the People Who Drain You” examines one of the unavoidable pests of human civilization: the hassler. Hasslers are the emotional pickpockets of everyday life. They drain those around them through relentless criticism, selfishness, bitterness, narcissism, cruelty, cynicism, and, in extreme cases, outright sociopathy. They appear everywhere—in workplaces, families, neighborhoods, and friend groups. No community is immune to them.

    The consequences of prolonged exposure are hardly trivial. To spend years trapped in the orbit of one or more hasslers is to live inside a low-grade psychological emergency. Anxiety rises. Cortisol surges. Depression follows. Autoimmune disorders become more likely. The body keeps score while the hassler keeps talking.

    One of the defining characteristics of the hassler is an appetite for friction. Hasslers are rarely content with peace and stability. They stir the pot, manufacture grievances, incite drama, and transform minor disagreements into theatrical productions. To ordinary people, conflict is exhausting. To the hassler, it is entertainment. The discomfort of others becomes a form of nourishment. Their preferred habitat is chaos because chaos guarantees attention, and attention is the oxygen they breathe.

    Unfortunately, hasslers cannot be avoided entirely. If you belong to a family, workplace, church, club, school, or neighborhood, you will eventually encounter one. They emerge with the reliability of weeds breaking through concrete.

    As I read Khazan’s article, I found myself thinking about the horror film Weapons and its sinister figure, Aunt Gladys. Gladys operates less like a conventional villain than a supernatural parasite. She feeds upon the misery of others with such potency that she seems less human than witch-like. Her power lies not in physical force but in her ability to infiltrate the emotional lives of her victims and convert their suffering into sustenance.

    Viewed through Khazan’s framework, Aunt Gladys may be the ultimate hassler.

    What fascinates me about figures like Gladys is that they often appear strangely hollow. They possess no stable center of their own. They are ciphers, vacuums, nonentities. Because they lack an inner life rich enough to sustain them, they must draw energy from the emotional resources of others. To feed, they must first weaken their prey. They create confusion, vulnerability, self-doubt, and dependency. Only then can they begin extracting what they need.

    In this sense, the hassler resembles a vampire. Not the elegant aristocrat in a velvet cape, but a psychological vampire who feeds not on blood but on attention, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion. The vampire drains the body. The hassler drains the spirit.

    Perhaps this is why hasslers appear so frequently in horror stories. They embody a fear that feels immediately recognizable. Most of us have never encountered a werewolf. Few of us have met a ghost. But nearly everyone has known someone who seemed to feed on conflict, manipulate relationships, and leave every room darker than they found it. Horror films merely give supernatural form to a creature we already know.

    The hassler, then, is not merely a difficult person. The hassler is an archetype. Long before horror movies invented monsters lurking in haunted houses, human beings were already living among people who fed on chaos and misery. The monsters came later. The hasslers came first.

  • Restraint Is the Superpower You Need

    Restraint Is the Superpower You Need

    In a few months I will turn sixty-five, and at first glance I appear to be doing everything right. I swing kettlebells. I pedal my Schwinn Airdyne with the determination of a man trying to escape a prison camp. I accumulate sweat at an industrial scale. My workouts are filled with muscle, stamina, grit, and a willingness to suffer that borders on the theatrical.

    Yet I deserve no bragging rights.

    In fact, I deserve a large serving of Humble Pie with a side dish of Contrition.

    Why?

    Because after decades of lifting, pedaling, sweating, straining, and pretending to be a rugged disciple of physical culture, I somehow missed the memo about the true superpower of fitness.

    The superpower is restraint.

    Not deadlifts. Not kettlebells. Not interval training. Not grit.

    Restraint.

    The real challenge arrives not during a workout but fifteen minutes before one, when a tiny twinge of hunger appears and whispers seductive nonsense into your ear.

    “Perhaps a small snack?”

    The suggestion seems harmless enough. Maybe some apple slices. A few crackers. A little hummus. Nothing excessive. Nothing worthy of a confession.

    But this is where adulthood enters the arena.

    The inner child says, “I’m hungry.”

    The inner adult replies, “You’ll survive.”

    The child says, “Let’s eat something.”

    The adult says, “No. This feeling is temporary.”

    The child says, “But I’m uncomfortable.”

    The adult says, “A little discomfort is not an emergency.”

    The child says, “What if I starve?”

    The adult says, “You weigh 230 pounds. Starvation is not currently on the agenda.”

    The child says, “I need fuel.”

    The adult says, “You need self-control.”

    The child says, “You’re mean.”

    The adult says, “Finish your workout.”

    This conversation, repeated thousands of times over a lifetime, turns out to matter far more than any exercise program.

    Unfortunately, while I spent decades cultivating muscle and stamina, I neglected to cultivate authority over my rapacious inner child. The result is that I carry roughly thirty extra pounds around like a monument to unfinished business.

    My doctor wants me to get my annual blood work done—cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose, and the rest of the alphabet soup. But I find myself reluctant.

    Why?

    Because the last time I took the test I weighed 230 pounds.

    A year later, I still weigh 230 pounds.

    Why spend money confirming what I already know?

    Part of me wants to send my doctor a message:

    “Dear Doctor,

    I am currently too fat to appreciate another blood test. The numbers will simply inform us that I remain exactly as fat as I was last year. Instead, I am attempting to acquire the superpower of restraint. Once I possess it, I shall happily report for blood work so that both of us may enjoy the pleasant novelty of improved results.”

    The power of restraint is difficult to overstate.

    Right now I train six days a week and hover around 230 pounds. I suspect I consume something close to 3,000 calories a day.

    If I consistently reduced that intake to around 2,200 calories, I could probably eliminate half my training volume. I could abandon hours of cardio, keep a few weekly kettlebell sessions, and gradually become a lean, muscular 200-pound version of myself.

    That realization is both liberating and humiliating.

    For years I treated exercise as the hero of the story.

    Exercise is important, but restraint is the executive producer.

    Exercise burns calories.

    Restraint prevents them from arriving in the first place.

    Exercise can strengthen your body.

    Restraint changes your body.

    Exercise can improve your health.

    Restraint determines whether the improvements are visible.

    Training can carry you only so far. At some point you arrive at a fork in the road where sweat stops being the limiting factor and appetite takes over.

    That is where the battle is won or lost.

    Restraint is the exit sign leading away from adiposity and self-reproach.

    Restraint is the quiet force that makes training matter.

    Restraint is what allows effort to cash its check.

    And so, as I prepare for today’s workout, there will be no pre-exercise snack. No crackers. No apple slices. No hummus.

    Just a tall glass of Contrition.

    And perhaps, if I am fortunate, a small sip of adulthood.

  • The Greatness Trap

    The Greatness Trap

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

    The disease did not stop with bodybuilding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    What, then, is the exit sign?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Great E-Bike Menace

    The Great E-Bike Menace

    I live in Torrance, where over the past few years I have watched an invasive species establish itself on our streets: the teenage e-bike rider. They dart through traffic at unpredictable speeds, weave between cars as though participating in an unauthorized video game, perform wheelies in busy intersections, blow through stop signs with religious devotion, and occasionally taunt motorists who have the misfortune of sharing the road with them. Most appear blissfully unaware of the danger they create. A smaller but more troubling minority seem fully aware and simply do not care.

    The problem has steadily worsened. A few months ago, during a night of heavy rain, I watched three teenage e-bike riders navigate the intersection of Torrance Boulevard and Anza Avenue. The roads were slick, visibility was poor, and the conditions were dangerous even for experienced drivers. Yet there they were, riding through the storm with the confidence of young people who have not yet learned that physics is undefeated.

    For that reason, I was not surprised to read Salvador Hernandez’s Los Angeles Times article, “California’s New Hell’s Angels: Teens on E-Bikes Cut a Path of Danger.” Hernandez describes much of what residents like me have witnessed firsthand. Among the incidents he recounts is the death of an elderly man who was struck by a fourteen-year-old riding recklessly on an e-bike. The problem has grown serious enough that law enforcement agencies are developing specialized responses. Police departments have begun cracking down on illegally modified e-bikes that exceed state regulations, and in Orange County authorities have created dedicated task forces to pursue dangerous riders.

    Many parents remain unaware that California recognizes three distinct classes of e-bikes.

    Class 1 bikes use pedal assist only and have a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour. They are permitted for riders of all ages and require helmets.

    Class 2 bikes combine pedal assist with a throttle and are also limited to twenty miles per hour. They too are available to riders of all ages and require helmets.

    Class 3 bikes use pedal assist and can reach twenty-eight miles per hour. Riders must be at least sixteen years old and wear helmets.

    All three classes are required to display a visible label identifying their classification, though one suspects that some of today’s young speed merchants regard regulatory labels with roughly the same respect they show stop signs.

    Like many public-safety problems, this one seems destined to become worse before it gets better. Driving in Los Angeles was already a test of patience before the arrival of the e-bike era. The city had long mastered the arts of congestion, stress, discourtesy, and occasional road rage. The addition of e-bikes has introduced a fresh layer of chaos. Every morning when I drive my daughters to school, I encounter a gauntlet of obstacles: teenagers weaving through traffic, ignoring traffic laws, and treating the safety of others as an optional consideration.

    The irony is that e-bikes themselves are not the problem. Used responsibly, they are efficient, economical, and environmentally friendly. The problem is the culture that has developed around them—a culture that often treats traffic laws as suggestions and regards reckless behavior as a form of entertainment.

    Where I live, pulling to the side of the road for emergency vehicles is a routine occurrence. We have both Little Company of Mary and Torrance Memorial nearby, and sirens are part of the local soundtrack. Perhaps the increase in emergency activity has nothing to do with e-bikes. Perhaps it is merely my imagination. But after watching teenagers launch themselves through intersections on machines capable of twenty-eight miles per hour while possessing the judgment of teenagers, I cannot help suspecting that at least some of those sirens are chasing the inevitable consequences of youthful overconfidence meeting the laws of motion.

  • Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every day it feels as though I wake up to an arm-wrestling match with sin. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m an addict. What am I addicted to? That’s a stupid question. The better question is what am I not addicted to? In any event, that’s not the point of the story just yet. The point is that there are tens of millions of us. I know I’m not special. My life is defined by the constant challenge to overcome vice, corruption, and the habits that make it nearly impossible for me to forgive myself for being the wretched and loathsome individual that I am. 

    But forgive myself I must. Forgiveness is the only way I can mend my broken self. Forgiveness is a commitment to become someone different from the recalcitrant sinner that fills my life with regret. 

    Some say I am too hard on myself, but they are mistaken because once I understood that life is a continual test of character, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

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

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

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily efficient at encouraging surrender.

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

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

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

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

    Get out.

  • The Forgiveness Paradox

    The Forgiveness Paradox

    Learning to forgive yourself would become far less difficult if you understood what self-forgiveness actually is. It is not indulgence. It is not self-flattery. It is not a permission slip to ignore your failures and move on as though nothing happened. Genuine self-forgiveness demands the opposite. It requires you to clarify your moral code, raise the standard of your conduct, and commit yourself to a life that justifies forgiveness. The goal is not to erase the past but to answer it with better behavior.

    When you refuse to forgive yourself, however, you become haunted by the worst versions of your former self. Old humiliations emerge uninvited. Forgotten acts of selfishness return with startling clarity. You cringe, wince, and recoil as though the memories possess physical force. Part of the pain comes from the distance between who you were and who you are now. You look upon your former self with disbelief and wonder how you could ever have acted that way. Yet instead of moving toward redemption, you become trapped in a kind of moral purgatory—a psychological limbo in which you endlessly replay past wrongdoing without arriving at either genuine repentance or genuine forgiveness. You remain suspended between condemnation and redemption, unable to reach either shore.

    Paradoxically, this unforgiven state often makes you more likely to repeat the very behaviors that trouble your conscience. Burdened by guilt, you seek relief. Instead of confronting your pain directly, you look for escape in distractions, compulsions, and addictive pleasures. Whether the refuge is food, alcohol, entertainment, gambling, pornography, or some other dopamine-rich diversion, the purpose is the same: to silence the accusing voice within. The relief is temporary. The guilt soon returns, accompanied by fresh reasons for self-reproach. What follows is a guilt-dopamine loop, a self-perpetuating cycle in which unresolved guilt drives a person toward unhealthy pleasures for relief, only to create new guilt that deepens the original wound.

    The way out is not punishment but transformation. To escape guilt properly requires two acts. First, you forgive yourself. Second, you dedicate yourself to living with greater integrity, clearer intentions, and a moral seriousness that defies your former conduct. In doing so, you embrace what might be called the Forgiveness Paradox: the truth that people often become more virtuous after forgiving themselves than they ever were while punishing themselves. Endless self-condemnation rarely produces wisdom or character. Forgiveness, when joined to genuine moral renewal, often does. It allows you to stop staring at the wreckage behind you and begin building the life that your better self has been calling you toward all along.

    If you resist forgiving yourself, you must confront an uncomfortable possibility: on some level, you derive satisfaction from your own self-punishment. You rehearse old failures, revisit old humiliations, and keep your guilt alive as though tending a wound that has already begun to heal. But do not mistake this habit for moral seriousness. Self-flagellation is not a sign of piety, humility, or virtue. More often, it is a sign of someone unwilling to leave the familiar misery of guilt behind. It is easier to remain trapped in the guilt-dopamine loop—oscillating between self-condemnation and temporary escape—than to undertake the harder work of forgiveness and renewal. Genuine moral growth requires the courage to step out of the mire, accept that the past cannot be changed, and begin the difficult task of becoming a better person. The purpose of guilt is not to imprison you forever. Its purpose is to teach you what kind of life you must now live.

    Another way to understand self-forgiveness is to think of it as laying down a predicate. A predicate is incomplete by itself; it requires an object. What, then, is the object of forgiveness? It is the deliberate renunciation of your former way of life and the commitment to a new one. The purpose of forgiveness is not merely to erase guilt but to make moral renewal possible. When a person is forgiven, the message is not simply, “You are absolved.” It is also, “Go and sin no more.” Forgiveness is therefore not a form of moral amnesia. It is a moral summons. It calls you to become the kind of person whose present conduct stands in defiance of a shameful past. In this sense, forgiveness is not free. It imposes an obligation. Forgiveness is the predicate; a life of integrity is its object.

    Failing to forgive yourself lays down a very different predicate. It becomes a permission slip to remain trapped in the guilt-dopamine loop, endlessly oscillating between self-condemnation and temporary escape. The longer you remain in that cycle, the more you surrender your sense of agency. Instead of directing your life, you become directed by your cravings, compulsions, and darker passions. Whatever your station in life, such submission is a profound failure because it places your impulses in command and reduces your capacity for self-governance.

    To be ruled by your passions is to live in a kind of bondage. You may possess degrees, professional accomplishments, and worldly success, but you have not received the deepest form of education. As author and professor Luke Burgis argues, the purpose of education is to become the protagonist of your own life. A truly educated person is not merely informed; he possesses the freedom and discipline to shape his own destiny rather than being dragged along by appetite, resentment, or fear.

    Forgiveness is therefore not a luxury but a necessity. Without it, you remain chained to your past, allowing old failures to dictate the terms of your present existence. With it, you reclaim authorship of your life. You step out of the role of a passive observer, a background character, a non-player character reacting mechanically to circumstance. Self-forgiveness allows you to become the protagonist of your own story, capable of choosing a better path and living a life that is no longer defined by the worst things you have done.

  • Can Philosophers Keep Their Souls in Silicon Valley?

    Can Philosophers Keep Their Souls in Silicon Valley?

    In “Someone Finally Wants to Hire Philosophers,” Lila Shroff reports what would have sounded like a punchline only a decade ago: philosophy majors may finally be getting the last laugh. For years, philosophy occupied an awkward place in the public imagination—a discipline associated with coffee-shop debates, existential handwringing, and the noble art of explaining to relatives why you were unemployed. At best, the philosopher was a thoughtful gadfly. At worst, a professional overthinker. But the rise of artificial intelligence has suddenly transformed philosophy from an intellectual curiosity into a marketable skill. Major technology companies are hiring philosophers. Universities are recruiting scholars who specialize in both AI and philosophy. The old joke about philosophy leading nowhere is beginning to age badly.

    As Shroff notes, this development should not surprise us. Philosophers have been wrestling with questions about intelligence, consciousness, morality, and the possibility of artificial minds for centuries. Long before Silicon Valley executives promised to change the world, philosophers were already asking whether a machine could think, reason, or possess something resembling a mind. Today, thinkers such as Nick Bostrom have become influential voices in the AI conversation. His book Superintelligence warned more than a decade ago that humanity might create machines whose capabilities outstrip our ability to control them. What once sounded like speculative science fiction now reads more like a boardroom agenda.

    The marriage between AI and philosophy arises from a practical concern. Technology companies want their products to appear ethical, trustworthy, and safe. A machine that accidentally promotes fraud, discrimination, or social chaos is difficult to market. Consumers are more likely to embrace AI systems that project wisdom, fairness, and restraint. In the increasingly crowded AI marketplace, virtue has become a product feature. Safety, ethics, and responsibility are not merely moral concerns; they are branding opportunities.

    Yet Shroff’s essay leaves several uncomfortable questions lingering in the air.

    First, philosophers disagree about nearly everything. That is practically the job description. If ethical questions routinely produce competing schools of thought, which philosophers do AI companies choose to hire? A utilitarian, a virtue ethicist, a libertarian, and a nihilist might evaluate the same problem and arrive at wildly different conclusions. When an AI company claims to be guided by philosophy, whose philosophy is it talking about?

    Second, corporations do not operate in a vacuum. They pursue growth, market share, influence, and profit. Given those incentives, it seems unlikely that technology companies will eagerly recruit philosophers whose views fundamentally conflict with corporate objectives. The philosopher who questions the legitimacy of the enterprise may not receive the same warm welcome as the philosopher who helps polish its public image.

    Third, what happens to philosophy itself when it becomes a lucrative career path? If technology firms reward certain ethical frameworks and ignore others, philosophers may gradually adapt their views to become more employable. Intellectual independence has always been easier to defend when no one is writing the check. Once prestige, influence, and six-figure salaries enter the picture, even the most principled thinkers may find themselves sanding off inconvenient beliefs.

    This is why I remain skeptical of any celebration of philosophy’s new status in the AI economy. There is no such thing as pure philosophy floating above human ambition. There are only human beings, complete with incentives, blind spots, loyalties, and self-interest. The partnership between AI and philosophy may produce genuinely useful ethical guidance. Or it may become an elaborate exercise in corporate virtue theater—a dazzling display of moral concern performed beneath bright lights while the machinery of profit hums steadily backstage. Whether philosophers become the conscience of artificial intelligence or merely its public relations department remains an open question.