Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • 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.

  • Your Appetite Has a Billion-Dollar Opponent

    Your Appetite Has a Billion-Dollar Opponent

    You have argued that carrying thirty extra pounds is more than a physical condition. It is the outward symptom of a deeper spiritual disorder you have called Comfort Entrenchment—the gradual surrender of discipline as convenience, abundance, and self-indulgence become so routine that sacrifice begins to feel unnatural. There is truth in that diagnosis, but perhaps you have been a bit too eager to appoint yourself both defendant and judge. Before you sentence yourself to moral failure, remember something you taught your own critical thinking students last semester. Together you examined essays by people who devoted years to losing weight and keeping it off. They were not gluttonous caricatures or spiritually bankrupt weaklings. They were conscientious, intelligent, hardworking people who counted calories, exercised faithfully, and still watched the scale drift stubbornly upward. Their stories complicate the comforting fantasy that every overweight person simply lacks willpower.

    The missing piece is that your struggle does not occur in a vacuum. You are fighting inside an economic system that earns staggering profits by encouraging people to overconsume. The modern food industry has elevated temptation into an applied science. Teams of chemists, food scientists, marketers, and behavioral psychologists labor over formulas that maximize sweetness, saltiness, richness, aroma, and mouthfeel with the precision of engineers tuning a Formula One engine. The goal is not merely to satisfy hunger but to persuade you that one bite deserves another, and another after that. The supermarket is not simply a place where food is sold; it is a battlefield where billions of dollars have been invested in making your restraint less likely to succeed.

    That reality does not absolve you of responsibility, but it does redefine the contest. Your weight is shaped by both an internal struggle and an external one. Internally, you wrestle with Comfort Entrenchment—the habits, rationalizations, and appetites you have cultivated over decades. Externally, you confront an industry that has become astonishingly adept at exploiting precisely those vulnerabilities. Success therefore requires an immense cognitive burden. Every shopping trip, restaurant menu, convenience store, office celebration, and late-night craving demands another conscious decision. It is little wonder that so many intelligent and disciplined people eventually surrender. They are not merely battling themselves; they are competing against an industry that never sleeps and whose annual budget dwarfs their resolve.

    None of this should become an alibi. The last thing you need is a sophisticated excuse for another slice of carrot cake. But neither should you indulge the opposite illusion—that the contest is simple and every failure proves moral bankruptcy. Wisdom lies somewhere between self-exoneration and self-condemnation. Recognize Comfort Entrenchment for the enemy it is, but recognize your other adversary as well: a food culture meticulously designed to keep you consuming. Only by understanding both fronts of the war can you devise effective countermeasures. The first step toward victory is not pretending the battlefield is fair. It is seeing the battlefield clearly.

  • The Museum of Youth

    The Museum of Youth

    The Getty Museum has a way of conspiring with beautiful weather to make mortality feel especially impolite. Today, the sky possessed the crystalline blue one imagines hovering over ancient Pompeii before Vesuvius interrupted everyone’s plans. The museum’s travertine terraces glowed in the California sun, and everywhere I looked were couples in their twenties, impossibly attractive and strolling with the unselfconscious confidence that only youth can afford. Watching them, I found myself seized by an irrational envy. They seemed to possess not merely smooth skin and stronger knees but entire decades still waiting to unfold before them. Their lives resembled gleaming new luxury cars rolling effortlessly off the showroom floor. Mine, by comparison, felt like an old jalopy whose owner had begun listening nervously for unfamiliar noises under the hood.

    I envied what they represented more than who they were. They still possessed unopened chapters, careers not yet exhausted, friendships not yet mourned, dreams still wrapped in factory packaging. Youth carries with it the intoxicating illusion that time is an inexhaustible natural resource rather than a rapidly depreciating asset. Standing among them, I felt like someone who had arrived late to a party only to discover that everyone else was just beginning. I attempted the usual remedies. I reminded myself how fortunate I have been, how much joy my life has contained, how many blessings I scarcely deserved. None of it helped. Self-awareness is an ineffective antidepressant. Instead, I found myself scolding my own melancholy, accusing myself of being simultaneously ungrateful, petty, and embarrassingly sentimental—as though shame were somehow an antidote to longing.

    Fortunately, despair has an enemy that rarely receives the credit it deserves: usefulness. Later that afternoon, my teenage daughter and I sat in the museum café eating burgers while the conversation drifted toward her latest fascination—the pop music of the 1970s. Suddenly I was no longer competing with twenty-five-year-olds for possession of the future. I was explaining why certain songs endure, introducing artists she had not yet discovered, and watching her curiosity gather momentum. In that ordinary exchange, something quietly shifted. My value no longer depended upon having decades ahead of me. It depended upon having decades behind me that were worth sharing.

    That afternoon reminded me that envy is often a failure of perspective. I had mistaken youth for significance when significance had been sitting across the table all along. The young couples wandering the Getty possessed one kind of wealth: possibility. I possessed another: memory, experience, hard-earned judgment, and a daughter who still found those things worth hearing. The museum’s masterpieces had survived centuries because they continued to speak across generations. Perhaps that is the better aspiration. We eventually stop being the newest exhibit in the gallery. Our task then is to become one of the paintings that still rewards anyone willing to stop, look closely, and listen.

  • Comfort Entrenchment

    Comfort Entrenchment

    You did not wake up one morning thirty pounds overweight the way you might wake up with the flu. Excess weight is not an event; it is the visible symptom of a long psychological and spiritual decline. For years you cultivated self-indulgence as though it were a birthright, choosing comfort over discipline so consistently that the choices accumulated into a second nature. The result is damage that extends beyond the body. Your appetites have colonized your habits, weakened your resolve, and dulled your capacity to endure hardship. You must therefore confront an uncomfortable truth: you suffer from Comfort Entrenchment—the gradual process by which repeated indulgence in convenience, pleasure, and ease becomes so normalized that discomfort feels intolerable and self-discipline appears unnatural. Over time, luxuries masquerade as necessities, and every sacrifice feels like an injustice.

    If there is consolation, it is that Comfort Entrenchment is hardly your private affliction. It has become one of the defining maladies of modern civilization. Even people of admirable character struggle against it. Consider the journalist Elizabeth Bruenig, a self-described Christian, who remarked during Mike Pesca’s final episode of Not Even Mad that she fears for her soul because each day she falls painfully short of Christ’s command to feed the poor and relinquish worldly comfort. She described herself as “an indoor housecat,” a metaphor of remarkable precision. The indoor housecat is well fed, safe, comfortable, and utterly unequipped for the rigors of the wild. It has traded resilience for security. Comfort Entrenchment performs the same quiet exchange upon us.

    It is no accident, then, that our culture has rediscovered Stoicism with such enthusiasm. Bookstores overflow with translations of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. YouTube channels, podcasts, and newsletters preach voluntary discomfort, discipline, and resilience to audiences hungry for something they can scarcely name. Beneath the fascination with Stoicism lies a widespread intuition that modern life has made us too comfortable for our own good. We sense that our conveniences have become our captors, that the comforts designed to serve us have quietly assumed command. The popularity of Stoicism is therefore not merely an intellectual trend. It is a collective attempt to recover the toughness that Comfort Entrenchment has steadily eroded.

    The good news is that you have correctly diagnosed the disease. Most people never do. The bad news is that diagnosis alone changes nothing. There is no book, podcast, supplement, or inspirational slogan capable of delivering you from this condition. The cure is older and harsher than modern self-help literature cares to admit. You will have to surrender comforts you have mistaken for necessities. You will have to embrace hunger, fatigue, inconvenience, and delayed gratification rather than flee from them. You will have to pass through the fire instead of walking around it. There is no shortcut because the very habits that imprisoned you must be dismantled one sacrifice at a time. Only then will Comfort Entrenchment begin to loosen its grip, allowing you to recover not merely a healthier body but a stronger mind and a more integrated soul.

  • The First Rule of Diet Club

    The First Rule of Diet Club

    The first rule of dieting is beautifully simple: don’t talk about dieting. The moment you begin enthusiastically recounting your Fourth of July bacchanal—how you mainlined salami, slabs of Muenster cheese, triple-fudge brownies, and vanilla bean ice cream until you were convinced you had one foot in the grave and the other in a podiatrist’s office diagnosing gout—you have already begun sabotaging yourself. Soon your audience will be treated to your target weight, your macros, your supplement stack, your Mediterranean meal plan, and your newly acquired expertise in insulin sensitivity, fibermaxxing, and protein optimization. You will sound like someone who completed an online doctorate in nutrition sometime between dessert and midnight. Unfortunately, the odds that you will still be following the plan by next weekend hover somewhere around the lifespan of a mayfly.

    The irony is that talking about dieting feels suspiciously like dieting. You receive the emotional reward before earning the physical result. Friends nod approvingly while you bask in the warm glow of your imminent transformation. The fantasy becomes so satisfying that the actual work begins to feel almost optional. Meanwhile, everyone else quietly wonders why they have become unwilling participants in your nutritional TED Talk. Like nearly every worthwhile endeavor, dieting rewards execution rather than narration. Calories are indifferent to speeches. Fat cells are unimpressed by declarations of intent. Biology has never once accepted enthusiasm as a substitute for consistency.

    Then comes the humbling realization that your revolutionary plan is neither revolutionary nor particularly new. You have saddled this horse before—roughly a hundred and twenty times. Your success rate for reaching your target weight, less than 5%, is discouraging enough; your success rate for keeping it there is indistinguishable from zero. 

    With this in mind, you briefly entertain the modern miracle of GLP-1 medications, only to discover that the price, potential side effects, and your physician’s reluctance to prescribe them leave you unconvinced. So, in the colorful language of the internet, you decide to raw-dog the process. 

    Beneath all these failed diets lies a more subtle addiction. You are not merely addicted to food. You are addicted to self-reinvention. Every new eating plan promises not simply a smaller waistline but a new identity—a wiser, leaner, more disciplined version of yourself who will finally silence the persistent suspicion that you have somehow fallen short of your own expectations. The tragedy is that this future self often functions less as a destination than as a mirage shimmering just beyond the horizon.

    And yet, abandoning the effort altogether is hardly an attractive alternative. Better to struggle toward health than surrender to gluttony with theatrical resignation. So make your plan. Count your calories. Work out with the kettlebells. Ride the bike. Eat the vegetables. Decline the brownies. But keep your mouth shut. Announce nothing. Promise nothing. Let your bathroom scale and your belt become your only press secretaries. The instant you begin proclaiming your impending metamorphosis, your words become dietary Kryptonite, knocking Superman out of the sky and sending him headfirst into a vat of vanilla bean ice cream. Silence, it turns out, may be the most underrated weight-loss supplement of all.

  • Why Mike Pesca Chose Algorithmic Exile

    Why Mike Pesca Chose Algorithmic Exile

    For more than a decade, Mike Pesca built one of the most respected podcasts in the business. His conversations were thoughtful rather than performative, his interviews nuanced rather than sensational, and his political analysis resisted the tribal certainty that dominates so much online discourse. By conventional standards, he had already succeeded.

    Yet success in today’s media ecosystem is no longer enough. To keep growing, creators must increasingly submit themselves to the demands of opaque algorithms that reward relentless engagement, perpetual self-promotion, and an endless stream of optimized content. Pesca looked at that landscape and concluded that the price of further growth was too high.

    It was not that he lacked the ability to master the algorithm. Rather, he had no desire to become the sort of person whose professional life revolved around pleasing it. The daily rituals required to stimulate engagement struck him as alienating. They demanded a temperament and set of priorities that no longer resembled the person he wanted to be.

    Standing at this fork in the road, Pesca faced two paths. One led toward greater scale by embracing whatever the algorithm demanded. The other required walking away from a successful enterprise he had spent years building. He chose the latter, entering what might be called algorithmic exile: the voluntary withdrawal from a profession or platform because its algorithmic incentives have become incompatible with one’s identity, values, or conception of meaningful work.

    In doing so, Pesca honored what might be called the Identity Preservation Threshold Principle: the point at which further professional success requires so much adaptation to external incentives that a person refuses to proceed in order to preserve a coherent sense of self. His departure was therefore not an admission of defeat. It was a declaration that there are forms of success not worth pursuing because they demand the slow erosion of the very character that made the work worth doing in the first place.

  • The Torn Rotator Cuff That Taught Me Gratitude

    The Torn Rotator Cuff That Taught Me Gratitude

    In late August of 2025, I tore my left rotator cuff.

    It wasn’t my first encounter with the injury. I had damaged the same shoulder in the 1990s and again in the early 2000s while chasing bigger bench presses. Those injuries announced themselves with unmistakable violence. I felt the shoulder give way beneath the weight, and in that instant I knew exactly what I had done.

    This time was different.

    During my kettlebell workout, nothing seemed wrong. No sharp pain. No alarming pop. No dramatic warning that I had crossed a line.

    The verdict arrived the following morning.

    I woke to a shoulder that had quietly mutinied overnight.

    The culprit wasn’t one reckless repetition but accumulated stupidity. At sixty-three, I had somehow convinced myself that five heavy kettlebell workouts every week was a sensible training program. My rotator cuff politely disagreed.

    I saw an orthopedic specialist, received the diagnosis, and was offered surgery.

    I declined.

    Instead, I committed myself to physical therapy. Resistance bands replaced heavy iron. Tiny, almost laughably simple exercises became my daily ritual. Progress came not in dramatic breakthroughs but in stubborn millimeters. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I climbed out of rotator cuff purgatory.

    Ten months later, the pain is gone.

    My range of motion has returned.

    I wake without the familiar ache that once greeted me every morning.

    Most importantly, I never needed surgery.

    At sixty-four, I consider that outcome a gift.

    Even so, I no longer pretend the injury never happened.

    It changed me.

    First, I accept that my shoulder probably isn’t what it once was. I no longer possess the same explosive confidence during overhead presses and kettlebell thrusters. Rather than arguing with reality, I simply reach for lighter weights.

    Second, I train less often and recover more. Three kettlebell workouts each week are enough. I insist on at least twenty-four hours between resistance sessions, particularly those involving my upper body. On the days in between, I happily climb aboard my exercise bike for an hour of steady cardio.

    Third, I have abandoned my fascination with heavier numbers. Rows, swings, goblet squats—everything has become lighter. Instead of chasing personal records, I chase rhythm, consistency, and smooth movement. My joints have become more valuable to me than my ego.

    Finally, I’ve learned to exercise with gratitude.

    For decades I treated workouts as obligations or competitions. Now they feel more like privileges. Every pain-free session reminds me that movement is something to appreciate rather than assume. Respect has replaced bravado. Caution has replaced impatience.

    Looking back, I feel as though I dodged a bullet.

    The outcome wasn’t perfect. My shoulder carries its history with it, and so do I.

    But I also can’t ignore the alternative futures that never arrived. Surgery never came. Chronic pain never settled in. Permanent disability never took hold.

    Instead, I recovered about as well as a man could reasonably hope after fifty-two years of asking his body to lift heavy things and three months before his sixty-fifth birthday.

    That realization has changed my definition of strength.

    Strength is no longer measured by the amount of weight hanging from a kettlebell.

    It is measured by the wisdom to keep showing up tomorrow.

  • A Hundred Calories, Elaine Pagels, and Dvořák

    A Hundred Calories, Elaine Pagels, and Dvořák

    Yesterday I came within one hundred calories of eating only three meals.

    Around 7:30 in the evening, I made my daughter a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder, sliced peaches, banana, and vanilla unsweetened soy milk. She lost interest before she finished. Three lonely tablespoons remained in the bowl.

    As I carried it to the sink, a familiar voice appeared.

    “Don’t let perfectly good food go to waste.”

    Naturally, I obeyed.

    I polished off the leftovers before rinsing the bowl, thereby adding roughly one hundred unnecessary calories to my day under the noble banner of environmental stewardship.

    It’s remarkable how virtue always volunteers to represent appetite in court.

    Oddly enough, I didn’t feel especially guilty. One hundred calories is hardly the nutritional equivalent of robbing a bank.

    Later that evening, while my wife visited with friends, I watched Perfect Days. It is one of those rare films that quietly restores your faith in ordinary goodness. Its protagonist cleans public toilets with such humility and grace that he makes most ambitious people seem spiritually impoverished.

    The film’s generous silences reminded me of La Strada. Both movies revolve around souls so guileless they expose the vulgarity of everyone around them. As I watched Perfect Days, I kept thinking, This has the same moral weather as La Strada.

    Yesterday also taught me three lessons.

    The first concerns hunger.

    Going five or six hours between lunch and dinner is uncomfortable.

    That’s all.

    It isn’t torture.

    It isn’t a crisis.

    It isn’t an emergency requiring immediate intervention by almonds, protein bars, or peanut butter.

    It’s simply a mild inconvenience.

    Seeing it stripped of melodrama made me realize something about myself. If I insist on pampering every small discomfort, I’ll never accomplish anything worthwhile. I have no trouble punishing myself on the Airdyne or during a hard kettlebell workout. Physical exertion doesn’t intimidate me.

    Resisting the urge to snack?

    That turns out to be the harder discipline.

    And that’s precisely why I need to practice it.

    The goal is straightforward: 230 pounds down to 210.

    No heroics.

    Just consistency.

    The second lesson concerned reading.

    Or rather, the uncomfortable realization that I haven’t really been reading.

    Twice I “read” Elaine Pagels’ Why Religion? on my Kindle.

    Now I’m listening to the audiobook.

    The difference is almost embarrassing.

    The audiobook has revealed a memoir that is moving, intellectually rich, and deeply humane. I feel as though I’m absorbing ten times more than I ever did with the Kindle. My earlier readings now strike me less as acts of reading than as acts of turning pages while my mind wandered off to inspect some unrelated shiny object.

    Apparently my eyes were reading.

    My brain had clocked out.

    The only way I genuinely read on a Kindle is as a form of critical study. I sit at my desktop with the Kindle open on one monitor and Google Docs on the other. I take notes, write commentary, formulate questions, and argue with the author. That’s reading.

    Collapsing into bed with a Kindle at night turns out to be something else entirely.

    I’m beginning to suspect that bedtime belongs to printed books or audiobooks, while the Kindle belongs at my desk, where it can be interrogated rather than merely glanced at.

    Ironically, as I write this, another possibility occurs to me. Perhaps a split-screen setup on my laptop—with the Kindle on one side and Google Docs on the other—would recreate that same active engagement away from my desktop.

    That idea sounds far better now than it did five minutes ago.

    The third lesson came courtesy of Dvořák.

    Ever since buying a Marshall Stanmore III for the bedroom, I’ve fallen even more deeply in love with classical music. Last night I typed Dvořák’s name into the SiriusXM search bar, and the app rewarded me with an endless procession of Eastern European composers.

    The sound pouring out of that speaker is breathtaking.

    Rich.

    Warm.

    Expansive.

    The music doesn’t merely occupy the room.

    It ennobles it.

    In fact, it may be sabotaging my Kindle reading. Faced with music that beautiful, why would I pay attention to the printed page? The orchestra wins every time.

    Then bedtime arrives.

    I reach for the power button.

    And a strange thought enters my mind.

    Turning off music this beautiful feels almost morally questionable.

    Surely another symphony wouldn’t hurt.

    Perhaps just one more movement.

    This is, I admit, the most luxurious problem I’ve ever had.

    I won’t lose sleep over it.

    If my greatest dilemma is choosing between Dvořák and Elaine Pagels before bed, I have wandered into the safest corner of the First World.

  • My Diet Revolution Will Not be Livestreamed

    My Diet Revolution Will Not be Livestreamed

    Today marks my first day of abandoning snacks and eating only three meals.

    I’m already making minor adjustments. I think I’ll add a couple of eggs to lunch to help carry me through the long stretch between 11:30 and 5:00. After dinner, I’ll finish with a small crystal bowl of Greek yogurt, berries, and a drizzle of honey—not as a fourth meal, but as a civilized period at the end of the sentence. It softens the psychological blow of eliminating my beloved post-nap yogurt-and-protein-powder ritual without turning dessert into another calorie ambush.

    As I write this, about four and a half hours after lunch, I won’t pretend it’s effortless.

    I notice the absence of the snack.

    My stomach notices it.

    My brain notices it even more.

    It keeps floating little suggestions.

    “You know, one handful of almonds wouldn’t count.”

    “A spoonful of peanut butter is practically medicine.”

    “Surely Greek yogurt exists outside the jurisdiction of snacks.”

    My appetite has hired an exceptionally creative attorney.

    But the discomfort is remarkably ordinary.

    I’m not suffering.

    I’m not wandering the Sahara with cracked lips and hallucinations.

    I’m simply a little hungry.

    If tolerating that mild inconvenience helps me lose twenty pounds, it strikes me as an excellent bargain.

    The larger lesson has nothing to do with nutrition.

    It’s about refusing to become a baby.

    Modern life encourages us to interpret every minor discomfort as an emergency requiring immediate relief. Hungry? Eat. Bored? Snack. Tired? Caffeinate. Restless? Scroll. We have become connoisseurs of eliminating even the slightest irritation before it has a chance to teach us anything.

    Perhaps that’s why ordinary self-discipline now gets marketed as though it were a heroic expedition.

    Someone skips dessert for three days and suddenly there’s a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a line of merchandise celebrating their “journey.”

    I have no interest in becoming that guy.

    You will not see me posting a dramatic video titled How I Defeated Hunger and Reclaimed My Life.

    There will be no livestream documenting my courageous decision to survive the dangerous interval between lunch and dinner.

    No inspirational soundtrack.

    No slow-motion footage.

    No sermon about embracing pain.

    Because there is no pain.

    There is only structure.

    There is only routine.

    There is only a modest reduction in calories.

    Sometimes common sense is refreshingly unglamorous. It doesn’t require a manifesto, a support group, or a motivational speech. It merely asks us to tolerate a small amount of discomfort in exchange for a much larger reward.

    That hardly qualifies as heroism.

    It’s just growing up.

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

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

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

    Not because I own too many.

    Because I expected too much from them.

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

    The watches became secondary.

    The chase became the hobby.

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

    Oddly enough, I have nothing on my wish list.

    That statement would have sounded impossible a few years ago.

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

    That realization has spilled into other corners of my life.

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

    A forty-thousand-dollar Honda.

    A forty-thousand-dollar Toyota.

    A four-thousand-dollar luxury mattress.

    Consumer culture speaks with remarkable consistency.

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

    No, it doesn’t.

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

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

    I want to become healthier.

    I want to lose twenty pounds.

    I want more discipline.

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

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

    No watch accomplishes that.

    No car does.

    No mattress does.

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

    That illusion is almost too obvious.

    The greater danger is subtler.

    It’s the research.

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

    It isn’t.

    It’s beautifully disguised procrastination.

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

    The acquisition isn’t the addiction.

    The pursuit is.

    That’s the part that frightens me.

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

    Obsession doesn’t particularly care about the subject.

    It simply wants something to consume.

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

    Not because curiosity is bad.

    Curiosity is wonderful.

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

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

    The irony is almost embarrassing.

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

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

    ***

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