Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • When Beauty Stops Telling the Truth

    When Beauty Stops Telling the Truth

    In “I Was Lucky to Be Alive. But I Missed Being Pretty,” Hannah Viederman chronicles her move to New York at twenty-two to become a bar-mitzvah motivator. The job is essentially that of a party entertainer, making sure everyone in attendance is dancing, socializing, and participating in the festivities. Parents who pay good money for this rite of passage want a heightened fantasy that justifies the expense.

    The job was a welcome improvement over her exhausting schedule of working from five in the morning until eleven at night, juggling catering, babysitting, and staffing jobs at SoulCycle while trying to make it as an actress. As a woman in her early twenties, she was already learning that youth, glamour, and beauty are a kind of drug, and that administering this drug to others can bring success and a sense of self-worth.

    To become a bar-mitzvah motivator, Viederman had to audition against fifty other contenders in tip-top shape, most of whom were professional dancers. She got the job and was delighted. The attire was skimpy, consisting mostly of “too-tight shorts and cheerleader costumes.” She loved the attention the job brought her. She writes, “No matter what happened in the real world, I could stand on a podium in a flash of white lights, looking like the love child of a camp counselor and a prostitute, and feel the desire of a surging crowd.” Staying in shape and performing as a glamorous entertainer gave her a simple, comforting narrative that aligned with the work ethic: Work hard, play the role assigned to you, and reap the rewards.

    But her delight in the limelight came to a sudden halt at twenty-five when she suffered a stroke. She learned from medical experts that strokes among people in their twenties are more common than most people imagine. She also discovered how dramatically a stroke can age a person. She writes, “Having a stroke is like aging 60 years in the course of a few days.” She couldn’t shower on her own. She needed frequent naps. Her vision was blurry. Her hair fell out. She had tremors. The brutality of this new reality brought her dream world to an end. She writes, “Getting sick strips life of its fantasy, like sheets pulled from a mattress for the wash.” I would add a corollary to that insight: Getting old can do the same thing. Youth and beauty are part of a seductive dream, but it’s a confectionary dream that offers few tools for living when things get rough.

    Five years have passed since her stroke, and Viederman has made significant improvements. Her tremors are gone. Her vision has returned. Her face is no longer bloated from steroids. Those years have also given her time to reconsider a distorted value system that made her equate self-worth with the desire her good looks inspired in others. She writes, “I was sick, and now I am better, and I know that youth and beauty are unreliable narrators.” Her job is no longer to be a beautiful body for others to admire and behold. Her new task is to discover what reliable narrator might replace the unreliable one.

    What is the reliable narrator for all of us, sick and healthy, young and old? Perhaps there is no narrator, per se. Perhaps there is a principle worth living by.

    I’m thinking of attorney Reggie Williams, whose story I recently heard on The Moth Radio Hour, in an episode titled “On the Job.” In a story worthy of a screenplay, Williams recounts being unfairly fired by a successful attorney at a time when he and his pregnant wife were struggling financially. Years later, in an ironic reversal, that same attorney had fallen on hard times. Disheveled and desperate, he came to Williams seeking legal advice.

    Williams faced a choice. Should he help the man who had betrayed him when he and his wife were most vulnerable? He decided to help.

    Why? Because Williams had grown up believing that we all encounter other people as we move through life. There’s nothing remarkable about that. What matters is whether those people are better off for having known us.

    That principle offers a more durable foundation for self-worth than youth, beauty, or the admiration of strangers. Viederman’s glamorous appearance could inspire desire, admiration, and envy, but those reactions told her little about her worth as a person. Williams offers another measure: not how others respond to our appearance, but how our actions affect their lives.

    There is also something demanding about his principle. It’s easy enough to be generous toward people who admire us, flatter us, or treat us well. Williams extended his generosity to a man who had treated him badly. He had every reason to refuse, yet he chose to help. His decision suggests that character becomes most visible when doing the right thing offers no obvious reward.

    I don’t think Viederman needs to apologize for missing her beauty. Nor should any of us pretend that aging, illness, and the loss of physical attractiveness are painless. But if youth and beauty are unreliable narrators, perhaps the answer is to stop asking them to tell us who we are. We might instead judge ourselves by a more difficult standard: whether the people who pass through our lives are better off for having known us. That seems a worthy ambition at twenty-five, at sixty-five, or at any age when the mirror begins telling a story we no longer want to hear.

  • The Consumer Shangri-La

    The Consumer Shangri-La

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    Because I’ve been absorbing television commercials since the 1960s, I’ve internalized the belief that suffering is a bad thing. To suffer means there’s a glitch in the system, if you will. Television has always told me: “You’re doing it all wrong. You can buy your way into enough pleasure, comfort, and convenience to iron away those ugly wrinkles of human suffering.”

    To internalize the idea that consumerism can overcome human suffering is to undergo a kind of infantilization. Here’s a case in point: I spent over twenty years obsessing over watches, creating a cozy ecosystem to buffer myself from the anxiety and restlessness arising from an existential vacuum. But creating that buffer only allowed those problems to grow and fester. I was in a strange state. I was hyper-focused on watches, but I wasn’t engaged with the real world or with myself. I was both engaged and disengaged at the same time. My life was full of intense mental activity without meaningful psychological engagement.

    This contradiction points to something we might call Disengaged Hyperfixation: a condition in which intense concentration on a narrow interest creates the illusion of meaningful engagement while the individual becomes increasingly disconnected from relationships, responsibilities, and self-examination. I was deeply engaged in the minutiae of watches but disengaged from the emotional problems that required my attention.

    Disengaged Hyperfixation seems to be central to the business model of the Attention Economy. Create undemanding videos in which you repeat the same thing over and over about how amazing this or that watch is. Tell car enthusiasts how superior their favorite brand is to the competition. Talk about a high-protein diet for the millionth time to high-protein disciples. The brutal fact about the Attention Economy and Disengaged Hyperfixation is that you can get lost in these dopamine farms and piss your life away, only to discover too late that you were never meaningfully engaged with the precious, short time you have here on Earth. That realization brings a despair and anguish no YouTube influencer can cure.

  • I Can’t Remember If I’m Losing My Mind

    I Can’t Remember If I’m Losing My Mind

    If you’re in your sixties, you may be terrified by your cognitive decline because you don’t know the difference between normal aging, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia. You’re eager to make exercise and dietary choices that might slow the decline. You may even consider medication if that’s the best route. More than anything, you want to be informed rather than left in the dark.

    My concerns about memory loss began in my late fifties when I noticed that if I didn’t play one of my piano compositions every couple of weeks, I would forget parts of it. Around sixty-four, I noticed more forgetfulness. I would share a story with my wife and then repeat it several hours later until she interrupted me to explain that she’d already heard it. In my college classes, I might tell an anecdote in the third week and repeat it in the tenth, only to hear students laughing and pointing out my redundancy. Once I left the burner on low after making pasta sauce, and another time I left my work keys in the door at work. In both cases, I was multitasking. Doing several things at once has become more of a liability than ever.

    Like many people in my age bracket, I became fearful. I didn’t know what constituted normal cognitive aging and what might point to something more serious.

    I needed a guide, so I did some research and came upon Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory: What’s Normal, What’s Not, and What to Do About It, by neurologist Andrew Budson and neuropsychologist Maureen O’Connor. They begin with Step 1, an explanation of normal and abnormal memory loss. They write “that the difference between normal and abnormal memory isn’t necessarily the type of problems that occur but rather the frequency and severity of those problems.”

    They describe memories as episodes: having a meal, completing a workout, going to a movie, and so on. These episodes create coherent stories full of sensory details. No one has perfect memory or recall, so let go of that myth. There are many reasons we fail to remember things. If you’re not paying attention to your surroundings but are going through the motions on autopilot, or you’re distracted, you’re less likely to remember what happened.

    The authors observe that anxiety and depression can interfere with memory. So if you’re a self-absorbed depressive who spends too much time living inside his own head, you may not be particularly attentive to the external world.

    As I read Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory, I see an ongoing theme: You need to train yourself to pay attention. As the frontal lobes age, certain aspects of attention and executive function can become less efficient. The result may resemble some symptoms of ADHD. I was never diagnosed with ADHD, but I’m convinced I’ve had some of its traits all my life. If that’s the case, my aging frontal lobes have given me a new layer of ADHD-like symptoms over an already existing layer.

    The authors discuss strategies for improving attention, including the use of stimulants such as coffee. I drink my morning coffee religiously. My attention is at its best in the morning, when I do my best reading and writing.

    At the end of Chapter Two, titled “How Does Memory Change in Normal Aging?,” the authors explain that spending over an hour trying to find your car in a parking lot is not normal. This made me wonder whether I’ve been cognitively impaired all my life. Like my maternal grandmother, I have a horrible sense of direction. In 1980, during my sophomore year in college, it took me nearly half an hour to find my car. For the last decade or so, whenever I park in a giant garage, I photograph the identifying numbers so I can find my car later.

    My wife has known me for nearly thirty years. Throughout that time, she has observed that I live too much inside my head. We’ve all heard the cliché of the absent-minded professor. I’ve lived up to that cliché since I was in my thirties. I’ve shown up to class wearing slacks with tags and vertical strips of tape still affixed to them or wearing my shirt inside-out, only to be made aware of these sartorial violations by my attentive students. Old age may simply make the absent-mindedness more pronounced. In more serious cases, however, memory and navigation problems can point to Alzheimer’s disease. Warning signs include getting lost while driving and being unable to use familiar visual cues to find your way back, regularly forgetting appointments, repeatedly losing things, and asking the same questions or telling the same stories without remembering having done so. Such patterns can reflect the rapid forgetting associated with Alzheimer’s disease.


    I do repeat myself. For two consecutive weeks, I forgot that Thursday evening was when I was supposed to take one of my daughters to see her therapist. I also left a stovetop burner on, although that happened only once. So I’m not sure where I stand.

    I called my doctor to arrange a phone consultation and a cognitive assessment.

    One screening questionnaire discussed in the book is the AD8. Answering yes to two or more questions can indicate possible cognitive impairment that warrants further evaluation. It does not, by itself, establish Alzheimer’s disease or any other brain disorder.

    I answered yes to exactly two questions. Number 3 states: “Repeats the same things over and over (questions, stories, or statements).” I repeat myself, but usually only once. Does that count as a yes? Then there’s Number 7: “Trouble remembering appointments.” I forgot my daughter’s therapy appointment twice in a row and was so mortified that I doubt I’ll forget again. Does that count?

    Ambiguity is not helpful here, but the authors make a statement about dementia that is not ambiguous. They write that “Dementia indicates impairment of daily function due to problems with thinking and memory.”

    So the question is this: Is my daily functioning impaired? And that leads to a second question: How severe does the impairment have to be before it crosses the threshold into dementia?

    I suspect the next chapter of my life will involve exploring that second question more rigorously through cognitive testing, medical consultation, and lifestyle changes designed to protect my memory.

    I need to find out whether I have something called subjective cognitive decline, a condition in which people perceive a deterioration in their cognitive abilities even though standardized testing may show normal performance. I know I’m not the same person I used to be. I feel compromised, and I worry that this compromise may point to greater memory loss later in life.

    Or perhaps I have mild cognitive impairment, in which measurable cognitive difficulties don’t substantially interfere with independent daily functioning. Some people with this condition develop dementia, while others remain stable or even improve. The risk depends on the underlying cause, so I can’t assume that I face a fifty-fifty chance of developing dementia.

    Dementia is a general term for cognitive decline severe enough to interfere with independent functioning. It isn’t synonymous with Alzheimer’s disease, which is one possible cause. The authors define Alzheimer’s more specifically, writing that “Alzheimer’s is a brain disease characterized by amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.” The disease often affects memory-related structures, including the hippocampus, before progressing through other regions of the brain.

    Regular aerobic exercise, a healthy diet, and an active social life are among the habits associated with better cognitive health and a lower risk of dementia. Addicted to exercise and partial to a Mediterranean-style diet, I do reasonably well in the physical health department, although I could stand to lose thirty pounds.

    But the social component is more disturbing. Antisocial, introverted, and depressive, I’ve failed considerably in the social health category.

    My wife began worrying about my lack of a social life a few years ago. She was also the first to express concern about my memory loss. So I got off my butt, started doing some research, called my doctor for an appointment, and decided to become proactive about my cognitive health.

    I know a retired martial arts instructor who used to be an officemate at the college. I need to reach out to him and see whether he’ll join me for an hour-long walk at the beach every week. That kind of social routine could be a first step.

    I’m not hopeless. I didn’t dismiss my wife’s concerns. I took them seriously and responded appropriately. I just hope I haven’t done too little too late. If I do have a serious form of memory loss, my goal, as the authors advise, is to manage it so that it doesn’t take over my life.

    One thing is clear. Memory loss can lead to anxiety and depression, and anxiety and depression can produce cognitive symptoms that resemble dementia. So I may be dealing with a recursive loop, one condition feeding the other in a vicious cycle of what has sometimes been called “pseudodementia.”

    One thing I know that fights depression and learned helplessness is knowledge.

    I must continue the deep dive.

  • The United States of Memory Foam

    The United States of Memory Foam

    Last night I dreamed I was working out with kettlebells in my garage. Overcome by a sudden restlessness, I decided to venture away from home by doing a long Farmer’s Walk, an exercise in which you hold a heavy kettlebell in each hand and walk a significant distance as if carrying two suitcases. I decided to take a walk across the entire country.

    As I journeyed through America, I discovered that everyone was an aspiring influencer. The product everyone was advertising on social media was mattresses, the kind that arrive at your doorstep compressed into a box and then inflate before your eyes. Everywhere I went, people were pretending to sleep, wearing fake, blissful smiles while recording video selfies. Living rooms, bedrooms, and other areas of the house had been transformed into home studios. People were so absorbed in their influencer activities that they no longer spoke to one another. Conversation had died. People lived alongside one another but were psychologically worlds apart.

    I decided to walk a considerable distance to Influencer City, where a woman who presided over all the influencers lived at a luxurious resort. She was known as the Influencer Queen. When I arrived, she was having tea and biscuits with her associates beside a swimming pool.

    They regarded me with some curiosity, a man in his sixties carrying two kettlebells. I could see the Queen’s concern, so I assured her that the kettlebells weren’t weighing me down. Something else was crushing me, I explained. I was discouraged by the fragmentation of society. Everyone had devoted themselves to the futile mission of selling dubious mattresses.

    Surrounded by her entourage, the Influencer Queen listened intently, as though my words had affected her deeply. But just as I was reaching the heart of my criticism, someone whispered in her ear that the swimming pool needed renovations, and she immediately lost interest. She turned to her entourage and began discussing the renovations as though I were no longer standing there.

    Realizing that she had no interest in my concerns, I walked away. Forlorn, I tried to make my way home, but I had no idea where I was. I spotted a neighborhood in the distant sunset and decided to try my luck in that direction. The kettlebells remained surprisingly light, but my heart was heavy. In the distance, I heard an aspiring influencer discussing coil count and gel-infused memory foam.

    I sighed in despair. Americans knew everything about memory foam but had forgotten how to talk to one another.

  • One Flew Over the Cozy Nest

    One Flew Over the Cozy Nest

    I was approaching sixty-five when the idea of something being cozy or not became the operating principle through which I viewed the world. The mildly entertaining, sentimental TV show Best Medicine was cozy because the small coastal fishing village of Port Wenn, Maine, was built on community connection and trust, qualities increasingly scarce in a country becoming paranoid, isolated, and unhinged by weaponized misinformation and cultural and political polarization.

    The LG TV interface I had to use was bonkers, with flashing lights and a runaway cursor that produced chaos rather than efficient navigation. Replacing this frustrating operating system with a Roku device would make the TV cozy. Having a lightning-fast Chromebook with premium hardware and guaranteed security updates was cozy, but its buggy replacement, the supposedly more premium Googlebook with half-baked software, was not cozy.

    Having nostalgic Folgers coffee in the morning was cozy. Shaving with my vintage Gillette razors, which evoked childhood memories of admiring my father during his morning shaves, was cozy. Using a bar of soap for all my shampoo and body wash needs instead of relying on liquid soap in plastic bottles was cozy. Wearing a solar Multiband-6 G-Shock Frogman, with its reliability and atomic accuracy, was cozy. Wearing a tank top emblazoned with Maui or Kona and gray nylon gym shorts, which served as my uniform for sleeping, working out, and running errands, was cozy. Watching true crime and animal documentaries, which sometimes lulled me into a blissful state of half-sleep, was cozy. Learning that the 2.0-liter turbo engine in my 2018 Honda Accord might be susceptible to a blown head gasket, contradicting Honda’s reputation for long-term reliability, was definitely not cozy.

    I had gone overboard with cozy. It had become an operating principle governing all my thoughts. This cozy craze exposed my obsessive personality, which was always searching for an absolute system that explained everything. I knew it was crazy, sometimes laughable, and often annoying, but I couldn’t stop it. Against my will, I had become a terminal patient in a movie titled One Flew Over the Cozy Nest.

    I had to do something. I had to cure myself of my cozy obsession before it was too late. I had to interrogate the flaws of the cozy quest. I began with the foremost principle for combating my pathological desire to cocoon myself in a warm, cozy state. I called it the Universal Law of Diminishing Comfort: The pursuit of comfort can become a source of discomfort. What begins as a sensible effort to eliminate unnecessary aggravation gradually becomes an obsession with eliminating uncertainty itself. In other words, the cure becomes worse than the disease.

    The astute Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified my folly long ago when he warned about the dangers of trying to secure ourselves against life’s uncertainties. We attempt to manage our lives to create an illusion of security while hollowing ourselves out from within. As the cozy lifestyle becomes more cultivated, the soul atrophies.

    Life is chaotic to the point of being terrifying. I turn on my LG TV, try to scroll to Netflix, and inexplicably the cursor exits the Home screen. Suddenly, I’m lost inside a hostile green screen that reads webOS. I need my Roku Ultra 4K so I can find my way back home.

  • The Man Who Would Be Watch

    The Man Who Would Be Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I would like to offer that business consultant a rebuttal.

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

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

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

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

  • Consumerism Dies Before You Do

    Consumerism Dies Before You Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Pumping Iron Against the Dying Light

    Pumping Iron Against the Dying Light

    The desire to work out in the garage with weights, mostly kettlebells for the last two decades, has not abated as I close in on my sixty-fifth birthday. There is no voice inside me saying, “Someday you will hang up your leather workout gloves.” I embrace the workout grind with undying enthusiasm. I remember reading a bodybuilding magazine in the 70s and coming across a quote from a champion bodybuilder: “I’m going to keep training as long as God allows me to breathe.” I’m on the same page. Working out is not an option. It’s as essential as breathing.

    I have to assume that since my first workout in 1974, I’ve been getting a dopamine fix from these training sessions, resulting in stress relief. I have to assume working out is my way of managing anxiety and depression. I have to assume my workouts are addictive in their own right. If I miss a workout, I feel so ungrounded that I become unbearable to myself and others. This makes vacations a challenge. What’s supposed to be a time of stress relief becomes a stress bomb.

    Working out for an hour a day is not just about carving out an hour for exercise. It’s about creating an entire routine built around that hour. The feedings, the naps, the piano, the writing, the creative work, and the chores all revolve around the 10 a.m. workout.

    So the Happy Place, as people might call it, is not just the garage, where the alchemy of resistance and sweat takes place while a radio tuned to news talk hums in the background. It’s the entire daily routine.

    Essential to this routine, after the workout shower and feeding, is the nap. I am so spent after a workout that I demand sixty minutes flat on my back with noise-canceling headphones and one of my favorite podcasts before waking up and having my yogurt bowl. Without that nap, I would not be able to go on for the rest of the day. Something is taken away from me during that morning workout. Something is given back to me after that afternoon nap.

    I am more than a hopeless workout guy. I am a hopeless nostalgic workout guy. My heart is not just in the gym. It’s in an era. I’m talking about the 70s, the only bodybuilding age I connect with. In my mind, I am training and eating protein bars with Arnold, Draper, Zane, Mentzer, Oliva, Nubret, and others. I am tanning with the greats on Venice Beach and talking about preacher curls, donkey raises, and hack squats until the orange sun sets in the salmon sky. I am connected with others, the dream of eternal youth, and the Life Force.

    Man does not live on bread alone. He lives on myth. I find solace in entering a 70s portal where I am a well-preserved Adonis consuming protein bowls and nutritional shakes. I am reminded of one of John Cheever’s most famous short stories, “The Swimmer.” Aged and washed-up, the main character, Neddy Merrill, decides to swim a chain of swimming pools, which he imagines as the Lucinda River, to travel from a distant house to his home. He imagines himself as a pilgrim embarked on a quest to achieve mythic glory. But all his self-mythologizing distracts him from the brutal fact that his selfish and alcoholic ways have severed his ties with family and friends. He returns to a home that is boarded up and empty.

    Looking at this cautionary tale, I must remind myself that workouts are no panacea. My dependence on them and the routines that surround them can make me more self-absorbed than is healthy for me and my family. But in many ways, it’s too late to go back. When I started working out at thirteen and a few years later saw Arnold and other legends in the movie Pumping Iron, I crossed some invisible Rubicon from which there would be no return.

  • You Can’t Take the 403(b) With You

    You Can’t Take the 403(b) With You

    Jean Chatzky is concerned about retired money hoarders, people who have amassed a considerable sum and are terrified of watching it dwindle. They have spent decades baking a magnificent chocolate cake. Why eat it when it looks so beautiful sitting untouched in the windowsill?

    But this is folly. The money was saved for a reason: to enjoy life, fulfill bucket lists, and eventually circulate back into the economy. Citing the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study in her essay “Americans Aren’t Spending Their Retirement Savings,” Chatzky identifies a “retirement consumption gap”: many retirees spend considerably less than they could while remaining financially secure for the rest of their lives. She puts the gap at about 8 percent for middle-income retirees and as high as 53 percent for the wealthy. The result is an enormous reservoir of money sitting in retirement accounts rather than being used by the people who spent their lives accumulating it.

    This reluctance to spend isn’t merely bad for the economy. It can be bad for the spirit. Chatzky argues that retirees may be better off spending more of their assets in exchange for a higher quality of life. The goal, after all, was never to die with the largest possible account balance. The money was supposed to finance the life.

    Her argument is persuasive, but it doesn’t fully address one deep psychological reason for hoarding money: a large portfolio can sustain the fantasy that we aren’t going to die. The money becomes a chimera of immortality. It whispers, “Look how big I am. As long as I remain intact, I will protect you. But let my numbers dwindle, and perhaps your remaining years will dwindle with them.”

    This condition has a name: Symbolic Immortality. Accumulated wealth becomes something that psychologically transcends mortality, and the retiree begins treating the endurance of the portfolio as evidence for the endurance of the self. More broadly, symbolic immortality appears whenever we invest an object, achievement, institution, or legacy with the hope that some representation of us will survive our biological death. Ernest Becker’s work and later Terror Management Theory explore this human impulse. We live through our children, our art and writing, our careers, buildings bearing our names, and, of course, our money. We dignify these things with grand words such as “legacy,” but lurking underneath the grandeur is something more primitive: we are terrified of disappearing.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with leaving something behind. Children, books, charitable gifts, institutions, and inheritances can extend our influence beyond our lifetimes. The trouble begins when the symbol stops serving life and life begins serving the symbol. The portfolio that was supposed to provide freedom becomes something its owner must protect. The chocolate cake was baked to be eaten, but eating it now feels like destroying it.

    That is why we should take Chatzky’s warning seriously. A large retirement balance can represent prudence and security, but hoarding money merely because spending it makes mortality feel more real is something else entirely. At that point, preserving the money has become more important than living the life the money was accumulated to support.

    Eat the cake.