Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • The Gospel According to the Donkey Calf Raise

    The Gospel According to the Donkey Calf Raise

    Though both are skeptics of institutional religion, public intellectuals Sam Harris and Alain de Botton arrive at the same uncomfortable conclusion: secular life suffers from a poverty of ritual and community. Religion, for all its theological disputes, excels at gathering people together and giving shape to life’s milestones. The secular world has become remarkably proficient at dismantling these institutions, but far less capable of replacing them. The result is a culture populated by isolated individuals wandering through private existential crises, each convinced that loneliness is a personal defect rather than a social condition.

    Human beings require more than ideas.

    They require liturgies.

    Which brings me to the Donkey Calf Raise.

    The Donkey Calf Raise is bodybuilding’s enduring proof that lifters will gladly sacrifice dignity upon the altar of hypertrophy. Popularized by Arnold Schwarzenegger—who sometimes performed the exercise with one or two training partners literally sitting on his lower back—it required the lifter to bend forward at the waist while rising onto his toes under load, resembling less a Greek god than a hardworking mule carrying humanity’s collective insecurities. To the uninitiated, it looked like an elaborate fraternity prank. To serious bodybuilders, however, it was sacred doctrine. There existed an unshakable belief that any exercise capable of making you look completely ridiculous was almost certainly producing extraordinary results.

    As a teenage bodybuilder in the 1970s, I encountered the Donkey Calf Raise long before I ever attempted one. It appeared in magazine after magazine beside Arnold and the era’s other legends. Performing it was more than an exercise. It was a catechism.

    It announced your membership in the tribe.

    Mention the Donkey Calf Raise to a poseur and he would blink at you with the vacant expression of someone who had wandered into the wrong religion. The authentic bodybuilder, by contrast, knew exactly what you meant. He had suffered through it himself. Shared absurdity had become shared identity.

    That is how rituals work.

    Their power lies not in their efficiency but in their ability to bind strangers into a community through shared sacrifice. The Donkey Calf Raise built more than calves. It built belonging.

    I remember those rituals with genuine affection, though I harbor no illusions about what followed.

    The Donkeys eventually disappeared.

    The needles arrived.

    Performance-enhancing drugs gradually replaced eccentric exercises as the primary badge of authenticity. The gym atmosphere changed with them. What had once resembled a fraternity of disciplined eccentrics increasingly resembled an arms race conducted by chemically inflated men stalking the weight room in genie pants, glaring suspiciously at one another, each convinced that everyone else was simultaneously inferior and somehow cheating. The laughter diminished. The paranoia increased. That was when I quietly exited the bodybuilding world.

    Religious rituals, by contrast, possess remarkable staying power.

    Church picnics. Bingo nights. Food drives. Car washes. Bowling leagues. Litter cleanups. Potlucks where every casserole has a family history longer than some civilizations. The specific theology may evolve, but the rituals endure because they satisfy permanent human needs: fellowship, continuity, service, and shared purpose.

    The Donkey Calf Raise enjoyed no such immortality.

    Spot a group of lifters performing Donkeys in a commercial gym today and your first instinct would not be admiration. You would assume someone was filming a comedy sketch. The ritual has become unintelligible because the culture that gave it meaning has vanished.

    That realization reminds me that when I say I loved bodybuilding, I am speaking of a particular moment in its history, not the entire enterprise. The 1970s were its Golden Age—a peculiar blend of discipline, camaraderie, eccentricity, and optimism. Later decades often replaced those virtues with pharmacology, narcissism, and escalating displays of reckless bravado.

    Since 2005 I have trained alone in my garage, accompanied by talk radio, podcasts, and audiobooks. I enjoy the solitude. It allows me to think.

    But I have no romantic delusion that solitary exercise is equivalent to belonging.

    A garage gym can strengthen the body.

    It cannot replace the tribe.

    That is why Harris and de Botton are right. Human flourishing requires more than correct ideas or optimized routines. We long for rituals that make us feel part of something larger than ourselves. The Donkey Calf Raise, absurd as it looked, accomplished precisely that. It was a sacrament disguised as an exercise, a ridiculous little liturgy through which a generation of young men found fellowship, identity, and, if only for a moment, the comforting illusion that they were carrying one another’s burdens instead of merely someone sitting on their backs.

  • My First Apocalypse

    My First Apocalypse

    Struggling with a persistent and indefinable mental malaise, Emmanuel Carrère eventually found relief when his psychiatrist prescribed an antipsychotic medication advertised as a treatment for “erroneous beliefs.” The phrase amused him. It sounded less like a pharmaceutical claim than a diagnosis of the human condition. If his life had been governed by erroneous beliefs, perhaps the drug was aimed less at his brain than at his philosophy.

    As a hormone-soaked adolescent, I suffered from my own spectacular assortment of erroneous beliefs.

    One of the most consequential arrived courtesy of Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling The Population Bomb. The book convinced me that civilization stood on the brink of collapse. Humanity would soon drown beneath its own numbers. Famine, drought, and social chaos were not distant possibilities but tomorrow’s weather forecast.

    Under those circumstances, dating struck me as a curious misuse of time.

    Why cultivate romance when the planet was preparing for its own obituary?

    Why ask a girl to the movies when we would soon be rationing freeze-dried food aboard lunar colonies, assuming we survived long enough to board the shuttle?

    My imagination raced well beyond Ehrlich’s predictions. In my private apocalypse there would be no health clubs, no squat racks, no barbells, and, worst of all, no gravity worthy of serious resistance training. Without a gym and a steady supply of protein, my hard-earned physique would evaporate. I pictured myself shrinking into the shape of a tomato balanced precariously atop four toothpicks. The image horrified me with an intensity wildly disproportionate to the fate of civilization itself.

    Most teenagers worry about acne.

    I worried about post-apocalyptic muscle atrophy.

    Love became a luxury for people foolish enough to believe there would still be a future. Courtship seemed almost irresponsible. Civilization was ending, and I had more pressing concerns than holding hands at the mall.

    Looking back, I marvel not at how mistaken I was but at how eagerly the adolescent mind embraces catastrophe. Young people are naturally drawn to grand narratives. Some expect salvation. Others anticipate doom. Both stories offer the same seductive promise: that ordinary life is about to be interrupted by something world-altering.

    In my case, the world never ended.

    The apocalypse quietly expired.

    My erroneous beliefs, however, proved far more resilient than Paul Ehrlich’s predictions.

  • When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    Emmanuel Carrère writes that in 1990 he was “touched by grace.” For the next three years he attended Mass every day, immersed himself in the Gospel of John, and filled some twenty notebooks with commentaries. Looking back, he remembers remarkably little of that period and has made no effort to recover it. His amnesia suggests that grace, at least in its fanatical form, can be exhausting enough to become something one prefers to leave buried.

    I underwent my own conversion in 1976.

    I was touched not by grace but by the bodybuilding bug.

    Like every true conversion, it demanded far more than outward behavior. It required a new vocabulary, new authorities, new rituals, and a new vision of salvation. My sacred texts were Iron Man, Strength & Health, Muscle Builder, and MuscleMag International. My saints were Ron Teufel, Frank Zane, Robbie Robinson, Mike Mentzer, and Tom Platz. Their routines were studied with the seriousness medieval monks reserved for Augustine.

    Every afternoon I retreated to my father’s office and sat before his IBM Selectric typewriter. Carrère filled notebooks with reflections on John’s Gospel. I filled page after page with workouts.

    The process bordered on liturgical.

    KSFX drifted through the room, playing the O’Jays, the Four Tops, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Miracles while I stared at the page like a theologian confronting an elusive doctrine. I would type a routine, scrutinize it, decide that my split routine lacked perfection, tear it from the machine, crumple it into a ball, and begin again. Sets became sentences. Repetitions became revisions. Every workout was a rough draft of the body I believed I was destined to become.

    What I sought was not merely a better pump.

    I was searching for the Platonic Workout, the one perfect arrangement of exercises that would lift me beyond ordinary muscular development into something approaching spiritual transcendence.

    It was absurd.

    It was also glorious.

    The ritual calmed me, excited me, and filled me with hope all at once. Every newly typed workout promised that next week, finally, I would become the person I had imagined myself to be.

    The conversion had other liturgical requirements.

    On more than one occasion I composed these workouts wearing nothing but a Speedo because it somehow placed me in the proper state of mind. Serious theological work demanded proper vestments.

    One afternoon, after an hour of merciless calf raises, I sat typing when I noticed that my calves were exquisitely tender to the touch. The soreness delighted me.

    My mother walked into the office.

    “Dinner’s ready,” she said. Then she paused.

    “Why are you so happy?”

    I reached down and squeezed my calf.

    “My calves,” I said. “They’re sore.”

    She looked puzzled.

    “Why does that make you happy?”

    I smiled with the serene certainty of a man who had glimpsed the kingdom.

    “They’re growing, Mom.”

    A pause.

    “They’re growing.”

  • Everyone Is Waiting to Be Converted

    Everyone Is Waiting to Be Converted

    In his autobiographical novel The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère describes a television series he once helped develop. The premise is quietly unsettling. In a small rural town, the dead return to life. There are no zombies, no horror tropes, no supernatural spectacle. The dead simply resume their ordinary lives. Your husband comes home from work. Your daughter asks what’s for dinner. Your father sits in his favorite chair. None of them remembers dying. The burden falls not on the resurrected but on the living, who must reconcile themselves to the impossible.

    Carrère uses this premise as a metaphor for religious conversion.

    A genuine conversion does not merely alter a person’s opinions. It kills one self and replaces it with another. The converted person still wears the same face, but something essential has vanished. The old personality has become a ghost.

    Carrère knows this from experience. For three years in the early 1990s he was consumed by Christian faith. Looking back, he regards that intensely devout version of himself almost as one regards a deceased relative: familiar, unforgettable, and yet strangely unrecognizable.

    The same paradox appears in Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Saul the persecutor would have despised Paul the apostle. Paul the apostle would have regarded Saul as spiritually blind. They occupy the same body while inhabiting entirely different moral universes.

    Carrère calls Christianity’s astonishing expansion the Great Mutation. Within a few centuries, roughly a quarter of the known world accepted the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, miracles, eternal life, and the conviction that earthly existence was merely the waiting room for a greater kingdom. Whether one believes those claims is almost beside the point. The historical achievement is staggering. Few ideas have ever transformed so many human beings so thoroughly.

    Reading Carrère made me realize that religious conversion is only one species of a much larger phenomenon.

    Human beings are conversion machines.

    A politically indifferent commuter begins listening to Rush Limbaugh during long drives to work. Months later he is no longer merely listening; he is quoting, arguing, and eventually thinking in Limbaugh’s cadences. The broadcaster has not simply gained an audience. He has acquired disciples.

    Sometimes I amused myself by imagining an absurd sequel.

    Suppose Rush Limbaugh had awakened one morning as a granola-eating vegan who had embraced Buddhism, practiced yoga at sunrise, and urged his listeners to forgive their political enemies because resentment disrupts the universe’s healing vibrations.

    His audience would have experienced something close to theological collapse.

    The prophet had abandoned the faith.

    Followers who had built their identities around his certainties would suddenly find themselves spiritually homeless. Many would scramble toward new authorities with the desperation of refugees. Some might discover John Bradshaw and begin healing their Inner Child. Others would embrace Deepak Chopra and begin assuring bewildered relatives that “the universe has no fixed agenda,” thereby ensuring they would never again be invited to host Thanksgiving dinner.

    The point is that conversion is not confined to religion.

    As Eric Hoffer argues in The True Believer, people burdened by inadequacy rarely seek modest improvement. They crave wholesale transformation. If religion fails to satisfy that hunger, they will seek redemption elsewhere—in politics, psychology, nutrition, fitness, investing, or hobbies.

    As a teenage bodybuilder in the 1970s, my friends and I didn’t merely admire Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    We wanted to become Arnold.

    Protein shakes were our communion wine. Carb loading was liturgy. The biceps pump bordered on mystical experience. We weren’t building muscle nearly as much as we were pursuing salvation.

    This morning I stumbled across a Reddit post from a G-Shock enthusiast celebrating his GW-6900. According to him, the watch had changed his life. He no longer wanted another watch. He had conquered watch addiction. He was cured.

    I smiled because I recognized the language immediately.

    He wasn’t describing a purchase.

    He was describing a conversion.

    His watch had become Damascus on the wrist.

    Carrère observes that most of us live comfortably in two parallel worlds. One contains our practical routines: paying bills, driving to work, buying groceries. The other houses our transcendent convictions, the stories that persuade us our lives are moving toward redemption rather than mere survival.

    That second world is never empty for long.

    If we lose one faith, another waits patiently around the corner. It may arrive dressed as a political movement, a diet, a fitness program, a philosopher, or even a watch. We flatter ourselves that we are rational creatures who occasionally become believers.

    The evidence suggests the opposite.

    We are believers searching for the next conversion.

  • The Prophet of the Squat Rack

    The Prophet of the Squat Rack

    My middle school P.E. coach and Olympic weightlifting instructor, Lou Kruk, was not merely a teacher. He was a force of nature. Standing well over six feet, barrel-chested beneath tight T-shirts or black turtlenecks, sporting a Tom Selleck mustache, wavy brown hair, perpetually tanned legs protruding from gym shorts, and a voice that rumbled like Wolfman Jack after three cups of espresso, Kruk looked less like a school employee than the star of an action movie who had wandered onto campus by mistake.

    The mythology surrounding him only enlarged the legend.

    He drove a bronze Porsche. Rumor had it he spent weekends sailing with impossibly beautiful blonde women who, in our adolescent imaginations, might as well have been Scandinavian supermodels. Whether any of it was true hardly mattered. At thirteen, facts were powerless against charisma.

    To us, Lou Kruk embodied manhood itself.

    Naturally, we craved his approval with the desperation of medieval squires hoping to earn a knight’s blessing.

    So we lifted.

    Not casually. Fanatically.

    Kruk demanded perfect technique. He regarded sloppy form as a moral failure disguised as athletic incompetence. A wandering knee or rounded back earned immediate correction, usually delivered with enough volume for the entire class to hear. Public embarrassment was simply another teaching aid. If you couldn’t discipline your body, he reasoned, you probably couldn’t discipline your life.

    He preached through barbells rather than sermons.

    Discipline.

    Precision.

    Toughness.

    Master yourself before the world masters you.

    Oddly enough, Kruk possessed another passion that seemed entirely at odds with Olympic lifting.

    Henry Mancini.

    Instead of blaring hard rock through battered speakers, our weight room echoed with Mancini’s lush orchestrations. As we practiced snatches, clean-and-jerks, and deep squats, elegant movie themes drifted through the air. Kruk had assembled a respectable stereo system, transforming what should have resembled a dungeon into something closer to a strangely sophisticated temple of iron.

    We trained with style.

    Some of us trained with obsession.

    I belonged to the second category.

    Soon I wasn’t content to squat only during workouts. I squatted beside my locker. I squatted while inching forward in the cafeteria lunch line. I squatted during P.E. while playing goalkeeper as soccer balls sailed harmlessly overhead. If there was an idle moment lasting more than five seconds, I considered it wasted unless my knees were bent and my thighs were burning.

    Eventually my classmates stopped calling me Jeff McMahon.

    I became “Squats.”

    At the time, I regarded the nickname as a badge of honor. I was no longer merely a skinny kid trying to become stronger. I had become an exercise, a living advertisement for relentless self-improvement.

    Only years later would I understand what was really happening.

    I wasn’t simply building legs.

    I was constructing an identity.

    The barbell had given me my first Great Mutation—not because it transformed my body overnight, but because it convinced me that reinvention was possible.

    And once a boy discovers the intoxicating possibility of becoming someone else, he spends the rest of his life wondering whether one more transformation might finally make him whole.

  • The Hairball Apocalypse and the Courage to Snake a Drain

    The Hairball Apocalypse and the Courage to Snake a Drain

    Hair buildup in the shower drain has clogged the primary bathroom about half a dozen times over the past twenty-four years. The warning signs never change. Murky, fetid water begins rising inside the marble shower basin, and with it rises my imagination. Within seconds I have diagnosed tree roots invading the pipes, a collapsed main sewer line, catastrophic plumbing failure, and the financial ruin that surely follows.

    Reality is considerably less cinematic.

    We’re talking about hair.

    I have called plumbers in the past. This time I decided to become one—or at least impersonate one.

    I borrowed my neighbor’s hand-held auger and spent the evening crouched over the shower, sweating through my shirt while my knees protested every minute on the tile floor. The auger finally broke through the clog. Victory. I turned on the shower, watched the water disappear, and congratulated myself.

    Two minutes later the water was pooling again.

    Apparently, I had not defeated the enemy. I had merely tunneled through it.

    So I waited for the water to drain, fed the auger back into the pipe, cranked again, and tried another test. This time the shower remained clear for nearly three minutes before surrendering once more to the same soggy defeat.

    The diagnosis had become obvious.

    I needed to go deeper.

    My neighbor owns a drill-powered auger, but when I borrowed the manual one around seven o’clock the previous evening, he answered the door wearing a bathrobe and dripping wet after climbing out of his hot tub. It seemed an inappropriate moment to ask for a plumbing tutorial. Some acts of neighborliness should have limits.

    Today I’ll borrow the powered version.

    Better yet, I have already bought my own. I ordered a RIDGID Power Spin, which works either by hand or by attaching it to my DeWalt drill. The hand crank removes, the drill locks onto the drive shaft, and suddenly I possess a machine whose existence I was blissfully unaware of forty-eight hours ago.

    The RIDGID arrives in a couple of days.

    Now I have to learn how to use the thing.

    This matters for reasons that extend well beyond one clogged shower.

    In principle, I should not have to pay someone hundreds of dollars to spin an auger down a drain. In principle, I should not become helpless every time a clog predictably appears after business hours, on a weekend, or during a holiday. In principle, I should understand that knowledge and self-reliance are among the most effective antidotes to anxiety.

    The clog itself was never the real problem.

    My ignorance was.

    There are, it seems to me, two kinds of homeowners. The first sees a wad of wet hair, sighs, reaches for the proper tool, and solves the problem before dinner.

    The second sees the identical clump of hair and imagines collapsing sewer lines, excavators in the front yard, and a plumbing invoice large enough to require grief counseling.

    I have spent too much of my life belonging to the second category.

    My goal is to graduate into the first.

    So I will arm myself with knowledge, a RIDGID Power Spin, and the quiet confidence that comes from knowing the difference between a plumbing emergency and a hair clump masquerading as one.

    Of course, I also bought plumber’s gloves, work goggles, knee pads, and heavy-duty coveralls.

    I only hope they transform me into a competent handyman.

    Otherwise, I have merely assembled an exceptionally convincing handyman costume.

  • Why a Watch YouTuber Like Myself Must Not Commit the Sin of Narrative Overstay

    Why a Watch YouTuber Like Myself Must Not Commit the Sin of Narrative Overstay

    For fifteen years you made YouTube videos, most of them about watches and the peculiar form of madness that convinces otherwise rational adults that the next dive watch will finally complete them. By now, you have mapped the terrain. You have dissected the psychology of acquisition, status, collector fever, diminishing returns, and the fantasy that fulfillment lies one purchase away. There is little left to excavate. Every new video feels suspiciously like an old one wearing a different thumbnail.

    Meanwhile, you have changed.

    You are sixty-four. Your curiosity has wandered far beyond bezels, lume, and power reserves. You want to make video essays about books, politics, religion, technology, aging, and the strange civilization we have built for ourselves. But YouTube has little interest in intellectual wanderers. It rewards specialists. The algorithm is less a patron of curiosity than a prison warden, forever reminding inmates to stay inside their assigned cell.

    You could obey. You could continue manufacturing watch videos until retirement.

    But doing so would require confronting a condition I call algorithmic senescence: the stage in a creator’s life when the platform’s demand for endless specialization collides with the creator’s natural intellectual evolution, making continued participation feel less like mastery than slow decay.

    The decay itself, however, is not the real tragedy.

    The greater loss is dignity.

    I have developed an almost visceral aversion to seeing myself on camera. It is tempting to blame vanity, age, or the unkindness of high-definition video, but none of those explanations reaches the heart of the matter.

    The face is not the problem.

    The performance is.

    I no longer look like a man animated by genuine fascination. I look like a man trying to resurrect yesterday’s enthusiasm because today’s algorithm still pays for it. There is a painful difference between devotion and obligation, and the camera captures that difference with forensic precision. The eyes know. The voice knows. The audience knows.

    What appears on the screen is not passion.

    It is lingering.

    It is the unmistakable look of someone who should have exited several scenes earlier but remains onstage because he cannot quite bring himself to leave. Every upload risks looking less like an act of creation than an appeal for relevance.

    This is another condition entirely.

    It is Narrative Overstay: the unsettling realization that one’s public story has reached its natural conclusion, yet one continues performing it out of habit, audience expectation, or financial inertia.

    The internet is crowded with practitioners of Narrative Overstay. Aging influencers desperately imitate the mannerisms of younger creators. Musicians spend decades touring on songs they no longer inhabit. Television series limp through unnecessary seasons because the ratings remain adequate. Politicians mistake longevity for indispensability. Everyone keeps performing after the story has quietly ended.

    The audience often cannot identify exactly what has changed.

    They simply sense that something essential has departed.

    The urgency is gone.

    The necessity is gone.

    Only the content remains.

    So, for now, I write.

    A blog imposes no algorithmic lane. It allows curiosity to roam wherever it pleases. One day I can write about Frederick Douglass, the next about ultra-processed foods, then TikTok, theology, watches, democracy, or the peculiar sadness of algorithmic civilization. The only governing principle is whether the subject deserves thought.

    Perhaps I will return to YouTube someday.

    But if I do, it cannot be because an algorithm has assigned me another shift inside the watch factory.

    It must be because I once again have something I cannot keep myself from saying.

    Until then, my dignity depends on remaining off camera.

  • The Unlived Life

    The Unlived Life

    In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield compresses an entire philosophy of life into a sentence worthy of Blaise Pascal: “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” On its surface, the book is about writing—showing up every day, overcoming procrastination, and producing meaningful work. In reality, it is about something much larger. It is about the tragedy of the human condition. Every person carries within himself an unrealized version of who he might have become, yet too often that person dies unborn. Resistance is the invisible executioner. It persuades us that tomorrow is a better day to begin, that comfort is wiser than sacrifice, that another hour of distraction is harmless, and that our highest calling can safely wait until after one more episode, one more dessert, one more purchase, one more excuse. By the time we recognize the fraud, life has become a museum of abandoned intentions. We discover, to our horror, that our greatest betrayal was not committed against other people but against ourselves.

    Pressfield has no patience for sentimental psychology. He describes Resistance as “the most toxic force on the planet,” adding with characteristic mischief that it causes more misery than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. Hyperbole, yes—but purposeful hyperbole. He wants to jolt the reader into recognizing that Resistance is not ordinary laziness. It is a corrosive force that slowly deforms the soul. It shrinks ambition into routine, courage into rationalization, and discipline into negotiation. Left unchecked, it transforms gifted people into spectators of their own lives. They spend decades curating plans they never execute, polishing dreams they never inhabit, and congratulating themselves for intentions that never survive contact with reality.

    What makes Pressfield so compelling is that he refuses both fashionable nihilism and fashionable indulgence. He rejects the existential shrug that declares life meaningless and equally rejects the consumerist gospel that happiness consists of maximizing pleasure. His ethic is austere. Work matters. Discipline matters. Routine matters. Character matters. Most of all, contribution matters. Your life is not private property to be squandered in self-absorption. It belongs, at least in part, to your family, your friends, your community, and the civilization that shaped you. The image that repeatedly comes to my mind is not one from Pressfield but from Superman. Before Kal-El leaves Krypton, his father, Jor-El, entrusts him with a mission: become a light to a world wandering in darkness. Pressfield issues a similar summons. Your vocation is not self-expression. It is illumination.

    This is why The War of Art feels less like a productivity manual than a spiritual manifesto. Pressfield believes we inhabit a battlefield. He calls the enemy Resistance. He calls our higher nature “genius,” borrowing the ancient Roman idea of an inner guiding spirit that is “holy and inviolable.” Whatever name one gives it, the struggle is unmistakable. There is a force drawing us upward toward courage, creativity, and service, and another dragging us downward toward vanity, distraction, and decay. Resistance rarely announces itself dramatically. It works with exquisite subtlety. It whispers rather than shouts. It convinces us that procrastination is prudence, that entertainment is recovery, and that comfort is wisdom. By the time we recognize the deception, entropy has already advanced. We find ourselves wandering in the woods, uncertain how we lost the path home.

    It is here that Pressfield’s vision begins to overlap strikingly with Christianity. His ideas emerge from a broad stream of Western thought that includes Christianity, Plato, the Stoicism, Romantic notions of genius, Jungian psychology, and the mythic Hero’s Journey. Like Christianity, he believes human beings possess a higher vocation continually frustrated by an internal adversary. Like Christianity, he portrays life as a form of spiritual warfare in which unseen forces contend for the human soul. Like Christianity, he rejects radical individualism, insisting that our gifts exist not merely for self-fulfillment but for service.

    Yet Pressfield ultimately parts company with Christian theology in significant ways. Christianity locates humanity’s highest calling in communion with God, and its deepest tragedy in alienation from Him. Transformation comes through grace as well as discipline. Pressfield, by contrast, places his faith in professionalism, habit, and relentless labor. His highest authority is not God but genius—the inner creative spirit that summons each person toward his vocation. Accordingly, his greatest catastrophe is not separation from God but dying with one’s best work still trapped inside. His universe is fundamentally vocational; Christianity’s is fundamentally theocentric.

    That distinction leaves me with a question I cannot confidently answer. Can the devout Christian and the devoted disciple of Pressfield ultimately arrive at the same destination? Can both escape the wide road of self-indulgence and find the narrow road that leads to genuine human flourishing? I honestly do not know.

    I often think of religions and philosophies as insurance companies. Thousands of offices line the boulevard, each promising protection against humanity’s oldest anxieties. Every one claims to offer security for the soul. Every one publishes its own policy, exclusions, deductibles, and fine print. Christianity itself contains competing agencies. Universalists, Catholics, Calvinists, Orthodox Christians, and countless Protestant traditions disagree about the terms of coverage while affirming they represent the same Provider. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that there is, ultimately, one true household of faith beneath those denominational rooms. I continue to wrestle with whether reality resembles Lewis’s vision of one enduring house or whether human beings, in good faith, may arrive at the same destination by different roads. It is one of the questions that has haunted me for decades, and I suspect it will continue to do so long after I have finished reading Steven Pressfield.

  • Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    In the documentary Queen of Chess, Judit Polgár recounts how she became a grandmaster at the age of fifteen, shattering one of the oldest gender barriers in competitive chess. She entered a world where many male players regarded women not merely as underdogs but as biological impossibilities. Looking back on her extraordinary rise, she credits her parents with many gifts, but one towers above the rest: they taught her always to believe in herself.

    I have heard those words my entire life. Believe in yourself. They are stitched onto graduation speeches, embroidered across motivational posters, and recited by well-meaning adults with the mechanical confidence of people reading assembly instructions. The phrase has always struck me as strangely hollow, a verbal vitamin whose label promises transformation while omitting the active ingredient. Yet when Judit Polgár uttered those same words, they landed differently. Here was someone who had walked into hostile rooms, defeated the world’s strongest players, and emerged victorious. Her confidence had survived contact with reality. That gave the cliché a gravity it had never possessed before.

    Over the months since watching the documentary, I have tried to understand what believing in yourself actually means. It is not wishful thinking, nor is it chanting affirmations in the bathroom mirror before work. It is trust. It is the confidence that your conscious intentions and your unconscious habits are allies rather than enemies. It is the quiet expectation that when difficulty arrives, you will respond with discipline instead of sabotage. Believing in yourself also means possessing the assurance that you belong in rooms where others doubt your right to enter. It is the conviction that closed doors are obstacles to overcome rather than verdicts to accept.

    The difficulty, at least in my case, is that I have accumulated decades of evidence against myself. My adversary has never been an unsympathetic chess establishment. It has been the unruly republic inside my own skull. I resolve to become more patient, then lose my temper over some trivial irritation before lunchtime. I promise to eat sensibly, only to find myself negotiating peace treaties with pizza and signing unconditional surrender documents to apple pie crowned with vanilla ice cream. I announce noble intentions with presidential confidence, while my appetites quietly stage a coup before dinner. After enough of these episodes, self-doubt ceases to be a philosophical problem and becomes a statistical conclusion.

    Then there is vanity, perhaps the most elegant form of self-deception ever invented. Blaise Pascal observed that we expend more effort creating the appearance of virtue than acquiring virtue itself. I have often found that observation painfully accurate. It is easier to curate the image of a disciplined life than to endure the discipline required to build one. Vanity offers applause without achievement, while laziness quietly pockets the bill. Together they form a conspiracy against genuine confidence. You cannot consistently admire a person who repeatedly breaks promises to himself, even when that person happens to be you.

    Of course, recognizing these flaws carries its own danger. Honest self-examination can quickly mutate into sophisticated excuse-making. One can become so fascinated by one’s defects that they begin functioning as permanent alibis. “This is simply who I am,” the inner defense attorney argues, as though diagnosis absolves responsibility. It does not. Accurate self-knowledge should produce accountability, not acquittal.

    That is why I admire Judit Polgár. Her confidence does not appear theatrical or narcissistic. It rests upon competence, discipline, and years of keeping promises to herself. I suspect her parents did more than encourage her to believe in herself. They taught her to become the sort of person who deserved her own trust.

    For those of us who did not inherit that gift so naturally, there is another path. We cannot manufacture self-belief through slogans. We must earn it the old-fashioned way, by repeatedly choosing character over compulsion, humility over vanity, discipline over appetite, and substance over performance. Confidence is not bestowed by motivational speeches. It is accumulated, one kept promise at a time.

  • Aging Gracefully Requires an Understanding of the Drowning Tank Principle

    Aging Gracefully Requires an Understanding of the Drowning Tank Principle

    Sometime in your mid-sixties, you will begin to notice a subtle shift in the social weather. No one will insult you to your face. No one will announce that your expiration date has arrived. Instead, you will encounter what professional wrestling calls “go-home heat”—the unmistakable feeling that the audience is ready for you to leave the stage. Younger colleagues will drift toward one another while conversations quietly form around you instead of including you. Friends will become experts in the polite ghost. Invitations will thin out. You will occasionally find yourself speaking only to discover that the room has already moved on. 

    Resist the temptation to interpret this as cruelty. Much of it is simply the ordinary rhythm of generations replacing one another. You behaved similarly when you were younger, even if you lacked the self-awareness to recognize it. Your obligation now is not to indulge bitterness or self-pity but to practice dignity. 

    Above all, avoid Relevance Panic—the anxious conviction that you can reclaim youth through a sports car, a luxury watch, trend chasing, fashionable slang, or any other theatrical performance of perpetual cool. Such purchases and performances may buy a fleeting glance, but they cannot purchase belonging. When the applause fades, you are left not rejuvenated but embarrassed, having confused attention with affection.

    Whenever I think about growing old, I remember a Batman episode from my childhood. Batman and Robin were trapped inside a gigantic transparent tank while water dripped steadily from above. At first the water barely reached their waists. Then it climbed to their chests, then their shoulders, then their necks. Eventually it hovered just beneath their noses. The horror of the scene did not lie in sudden catastrophe but in relentless inevitability. There was no dramatic explosion, no spectacular villain, only the slow arithmetic of rising water. As a child I feared the tank because it threatened my heroes. As an older man I recognize that the tank was never about Batman. It was about us.

    That memory has become what I call the Drowning Tank Principle: the recognition that every human being occupies the same metaphorical tank while the water of mortality rises with implacable patience. Some people are still standing comfortably in ankle-deep water, convinced the tank is enormous. Others already feel the water pressing against their chests. A fortunate few continue to swim vigorously despite the rising tide. Those farther from the surface often feel an instinctive discomfort around those whose water has risen higher, not because older people have become less worthy but because they embody a future the young would rather postpone contemplating. We recoil from reminders of mortality almost as reflexively as we recoil from pain. The distance is often less an act of malice than an unconscious act of self-protection.

    Understanding the Drowning Tank Principle does not eliminate loneliness, but it transforms it. It reminds you that you are not being singled out by history. You are participating in the oldest drama the human race has ever staged. Every generation eventually discovers that the spotlight moves on, that youth is leased rather than owned, and that relevance has an expiration date. 

    The challenge, then, is not to claw your way back to center stage but to cultivate a deeper virtue: magnanimity. Accept the passing of your season without resentment. Become more generous as your audience grows smaller. Discover satisfaction in usefulness rather than visibility. The final triumph over the rising water is not remaining forever young—that fantasy belongs to fools—but becoming the sort of person who can watch the water rise without surrendering either dignity or grace.