Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • Breaking Up with the Protein Powder Industrial Complex

    Breaking Up with the Protein Powder Industrial Complex

    The deeper I dug into protein powders, the less convinced I became. What I’d been calling “nutrition” was really convenience dressed up in a plastic tub—processed, low in fiber, and shadowed by questions about heavy metals. So I scrapped the shortcuts. Instead, I built a rotation of four plant-based staples that quietly do the job: plain soy milk, pumpkin seeds, nutritional yeast, and hemp hearts.

    Now, my breakfast writes itself: oats or buckwheat groats folded with soy milk, pumpkin seeds, and hemp hearts—a meal that actually feels alive instead of engineered. For lunch and dinner, I toss the same mix with nutritional yeast into sautéed tofu, quinoa or millet, roasted sweet potatoes, and dark greens like broccoli or kale.

    Knowing exactly where my protein comes from—and how clean those sources are—has wiped out the low-grade anxiety that came with every scoop of powder. I’m no longer buying peace of mind from a supplement jar. I’ve reclaimed it in the kitchen, where real food and a decent spice rack make every meal something worth anticipating.

  • The Wrap Is the Wet Handshake of Tortillas

    The Wrap Is the Wet Handshake of Tortillas

    The Wrap—the pretentious, joyless burrito alternative that slithered into American lunch culture during the 1990s—remains an enduring insult, both culinary and conceptual. It is not a burrito, a falafel, or even a respectable sandwich. Those are categories with histories, boundaries, and soul. The Wrap, by contrast, is the menu equivalent of a corporate mission statement—vague, overpromising, and spiritually empty.

    Marketed as healthy and progressive, it is in fact a sad slurry of “lite” mayonnaise, cold protein, and moral posturing, encased in a tortilla that resembles a damp résumé. The Wrap promises wellness but delivers wetness. Its cold, papery sheath—sometimes greenish with “spinach,” sometimes orangish with “tomato-basil”—cracks under the weight of its own self-importance.

    A burrito is proud, hot, and complete—a working-class symphony of beans, rice, and molten cheese, wrapped in a warm, elastic tortilla designed to survive both gravity and appetite. The Wrap is its sterile cousin, born not in the markets of Juárez but in a boardroom buffet in Palo Alto. One feeds the soul; the other lectures it.

    If the burrito is street poetry, the Wrap is PowerPoint. Burritos radiate grease-stained authenticity; wraps arrive pre-sliced at corporate retreats, accompanied by a motivational slogan.

    And yet, there is something eerily modern about the Wrap—its prefab perfection, its sanitized efficiency. It is the edible ancestor of AI: an algorithm of health and convenience, engineered to look human but taste like compromise. The Wrap, in short, is the uncanny valley of lunch—soulless, identical, and faintly threatening. I fear, as with AI, that it may someday evolve, learn to mimic pleasure, and finally take over the world, one sad office lunch at a time.

  • The Double-Minded Man on His Exercise Bike

    The Double-Minded Man on His Exercise Bike

    Thoughtful theists often find themselves backpedaling from the most odious doctrines of their faith until what remains is no longer recognizably orthodox. Some manage this theological detour while keeping their faith intact. Others slide further down the slope until their religion becomes something more universal, even Unitarian—a faith stripped of dogma and distilled to moral simplicity: love thy neighbor, serve the poor, practice charity, and call it good.

    Within Christianity, the spectrum is wide. On one end stand the infernalists of the Augustinian school, firm in their vision of eternal punishment. On the other are the universalists who, following Origen, imagine purgatory as a place of cleansing rather than damnation, with the possibility of post-mortem salvation. Some, like Martin Gardner and H. G. Wells, found orthodoxy itself to be a spiritual illness in William James’s sense—a sickness of the soul that required liberation. Others, like Dale Allison, hold to faith but jettison the Augustinian vision of perdition. And then there is philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, who takes orthodoxy at its word and concludes that if God authored it, He cannot be moral.

    As one nears death, it would be comforting to have these matters settled—to face eternity with the theological equivalent of a neatly tied bow. But such closure eludes those of us who remain agnostic, chastising ourselves as James’s “double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”

    I do, however, possess a few fragments of certainty. I reject Rousseau’s sentimental fantasy that human nature is innately good and can serve as our moral compass. I’ve seen enough of humanity to know we are corrupt, self-deceiving creatures who must wrestle with our yetzer hara—our bad inclination, as Jewish tradition calls it. Yet I’m not entirely convinced, as Paul was, that we are hopelessly depraved. Perhaps Paul and I are lost causes, but that doesn’t make the condition universal. The Jewish notion of meeting God halfway—using the strength He gave us—differs sharply from Paul’s portrayal of helpless man collapsing before the mercy seat. One path is desperate; the other is disciplined.

    Whether I write these reflections out of genuine spiritual torment or simple procrastination before an hour on the exercise bike is unclear. Either way, I’ll mount the Schwinn Airdyne, pedal furiously, and try not to think too much about eternal damnation.

  • The Wizard of Kaiser

    The Wizard of Kaiser

    My daughter woke up with a monstrous eye stye that had slammed her eyelid shut like a faulty garage door. I called Kaiser and was immediately greeted by the robot lady—a voice engineered to sound calm while raising your blood pressure. She asked for my daughter’s birthdate and medical number, which I dutifully recited. Then, in her synthetic cheer, she said, “What else can I help you with?”

    I said, “You didn’t help me with anything, so don’t say ‘what else.’”

    We argued, man versus machine, until she promised to connect me to a human—but not before warning that the wait time could “exceed one hour.” One second later, a live representative picked up. Bureaucratic time, apparently, obeys no earthly laws.

    The human rep began a ritual of verification so thorough I expected her to ask for my high school GPA and the name of my childhood pet. She wanted my address, my medical number, my cell number, and—why not?—the phone numbers of everyone in my family.

    Dealing with bureaucracies always feels like Dorothy trying to get an audience with the Wizard. You ring the bell, and a cranky Gatekeeper appears, demanding proof that you even exist. He wants your bona fides, your credentials, your metaphorical ruby slippers—and unless you flash something that glitters, you’re condemned to wander in the waiting-room purgatory, forever on hold, listening to smooth jazz that mocks your mortality.

    Service, it turns out, isn’t granted. It’s earned—by endurance, patience, and whatever modern magic passes for ruby slippers these days: a good Wi-Fi connection and an unholy amount of persistence.

  • When “Clean” Protein Isn’t: Why I’m Breaking Up with Whey

    When “Clean” Protein Isn’t: Why I’m Breaking Up with Whey

    My friend recently sent me a Consumer Reports article about lead contamination in protein powders, and the findings were sobering. Two-thirds of the products tested exceeded safe daily limits of lead in just a single serving. The plant-based powders were the worst offenders—nearly nine times higher than whey-based supplements—but even whey wasn’t innocent: more than half the samples tested above the safety threshold. According to CR’s senior chemist, no one should be using these products daily.

    I’m almost sixty-four and have relied on whey protein powder for decades. But do I really need that extra fifty grams a day from two scoops? Could I maintain my strength and well-being on 120 grams of protein from food instead of pushing it closer to 170 grams with supplements?

    It seems the answer is yes. The danger of ingesting lead outweighs the marginal benefit of more protein, so I’m setting the powder aside for now. I’m not a purity zealot, but when Consumer Reports finds higher levels of lead now than in past studies, it’s clear the supplement industry can’t produce a truly low-risk product—and that’s reason enough to bow out of the shake game.

    Another reason is a 1978 conversation I had with Mr. Universe Mike Mentzer backstage at a bodybuilding exhibition in the San Francisco Bay Area. I asked him how much protein a day he ate, and he answered about 100 grams a day. “Any more will make you fat,” he said. Granted, Arnold was eating 250 grams as were most bodybuilders at the time. But if Mentzer could thrive on 100 grams, then that’s good enough for me.

  • Discontinued at the Light

    Discontinued at the Light

    At a red light yesterday, ferrying my daughters home from school, my car-spotter’s radar pinged. I scan traffic the way birders scan treelines, always hoping for the rare specimen with that elusive look. Something unusual flashed past—and in a beat I clocked it: a 2023 Nissan Maxima, the model’s final year. A voice in my head muttered, “Discontinued.” The word tolled like a small funeral bell, as if it weren’t about the Nissan at all but about me. You’re nearly sixty-four. You are discontinued.

    I refuse to go out like that. Aging is one thing; embalming yourself in morbid commentary is another. I don’t want to spend the next twenty years muttering “discontinued” at traffic, toast, or mirrors. That’s not wisdom. That’s a tantrum with better vocabulary.

    Let’s call morbidity what it is: the childish whining of a narcissist. Who escapes aging? Only the people who don’t get the privilege. Getting old means you’ve been alive for a long time and you’re still here. The refrain—“Discontinued,” “You’re washed up,” “It’s all over”—isn’t just bleak; it’s lugubrious, a mental ailment missing from the DSM-5-TR. Fine, I’ll name it myself: narcissistic morbidity. You moan about your age until you bore everyone around you, including the poor soul trapped inside your skull. You act like you invented birthdays.

    What makes my case extra ridiculous is that I’m in decent shape. I work out. I eat a high-protein diet. Yes, I’m fifteen pounds over fighting weight, but I don’t look like a cautionary tale. I should be grateful, robust, hearty, glad. And yet the diseased little sportscaster in my cranium keeps calling the game: I’ll be driving my daughters, spot a car out of production, and use it as my cue to point at myself—“Discontinued.”

    If I were a comedian, this would be a layup: a man in his sixties drowning in self-pity, heckled by his own internal voice. There’s material for days. But punchlines only work if you know your heckler’s origin story.

    Here’s the reveal: the voice isn’t new. I’ve had it since childhood, a fog machine that kept me holed up drawing and reading while calamity forecasts scrolled across my mind. “The circus will be closed. A lion will escape. There’ll be a riot. Let’s not go. Don’t worry about me; I’ll entertain myself.” “The ice-cream place won’t have my flavor. Let’s stay home; I’ll eat cereal.” “If I throw a party, no one will come. Cancel my birthday this year—and the years after. Who needs a birthday anyway?”

    My gloomy companion even had a cartoon avatar: Glum, the tiny pessimist from The Adventures of Gulliver, late ’60s. Dressed in green, eternally peckish, and permanently resigned—“It’s hopeless.” “We’ll never make it.” “It’ll never work.” “We’re doomed.” He was my first soulmate: snack-oriented, catastrophe-forward.

    Back then TV specialized in a certain archetype—the Dead Weight Character—the one who drags the mission, sandbags morale, and sabotages the plan by simply existing. Land of the Giants fielded Commander Alexander Fitzhugh, a selfish criminal who once gnawed a giant scientist’s rabbit pellets and urged his tiny crew to feast with him because of “nutrition,” a word he repeated over and over as he consumed rabbit pellets. They saw humiliation; he saw survival. Dead Weight comes in many flavors.

    And then there was the greatest Dead Weight of them all: Dr. Zachary Smith of Lost in Space, immortalized by Jonathan Harris, patron saint of theatrical dread. His alliterative insults aimed at the Robot taught me that language could purr, hiss, and bite. Dr. Smith is, frankly, the reason I went to college and became an English major. If you’re going to sabotage a mission, at least do it with diction.

    So if I must live with an inner prophet of doom, I might as well upgrade his elocution. If the voice insists on heckling—calling me discontinued at stoplights and breakfast tables—then give it rhetorical muscle and meter. Let it speak in crafted sentences, not groans. Aging will still arrive right on schedule, but at least the narration won’t be dead weight.

  • The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s freshly minted Enshittification. Early on, he revisits Facebook circa 2010: the honey pot that lured billions before curdling into a slurry of compulsion loops, conspiracy gristle, and industrial-scale data mining. It’s sharp, it’s punchy—and it gave me déjà vu. Then my stomach dropped: I like the coinage, I like the thesis that we’re living through the Enshittocene, but the insights feel old. Jaron Lanier mapped a lot of this terrain eight years ago in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I’ve taught over the last seven years.

    Doctorow’s Amazon chapter triggers the same shrug. The platform seduces us with convenience, tightens its talons, and gradually morphs from glossy marketplace into Temu-adjacent bazaar. True, and thoroughly litigated across a thousand essays and think pieces. We’ve been warned about the house always winning; we don’t need another tour of the casino floor.

    What I wanted—and didn’t get—was a deeper dive into the anthropology of the rot. Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” or “Joan Is Awful” doesn’t just wag a finger at platforms; it autopsies the psyche and the systems. New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka nails the gap: Enshittification is “pointed and efficient,” but reads like “professional blogging extended for three-hundred-plus pages,” leaving you hungry for a larger cultural x-ray that goes beyond the usual suspects.

    To be fair, packaging a messy discourse into one memorable term matters; not everyone read Lanier or binged Brooker. Doctorow’s snark has its uses. A clean label can move an idea from seminar rooms to dinner tables. But once you’ve named the disease, the next move isn’t to repeat symptoms; it’s to map vectors, power centers, and countermeasures with fresh cases outside the Big Tech pentagon.

    So yes: I love the word. But the book left me underwhelmed. Doctorow has given us the bumper sticker; I’m still waiting for the field manual. The Enshittocene doesn’t need another catalog of platform sins—it needs a blueprint that shows how to break the flywheels, where policy and design can bite, and why our appetites keep refilling the trough. Name the era, sure. Now show us how to survive it—and, if we’re lucky, how to end it.

  • State of the Misalignment Situation

    State of the Misalignment Situation

    I had hoped my blog, Cinemorphosis, would feed my video essays—serve as a compost heap of half-baked thoughts that could later bloom into something cinematic and worthy of making video essays. Instead, the blog has swallowed the energy that once went into my videos. What was meant to be a support system has become a rival ecosystem. The crossover I imagined—the blog fueling the videos and the videos enriching the blog—never happened. It turns out writing and filming come from different parts of the brain, and those parts refuse to share the same neural conference room.

    Friends say, “Don’t sweat it, McMahon. Just lean into the blog and let the videos go.” Easy advice for people who aren’t haunted by the specter of irrelevance. I can’t shake the feeling that the video essays keep me sharper—more visible, more alive. The blog satisfies my mind; the camera keeps me from turning into dust.

    Sam Harris once said he can spend five years writing a book, agonizing over edits and the publishing gauntlet, only to reach a few thousand readers—if he’s lucky. Meanwhile, a one-hour podcast can reach millions overnight, and snippets of it go viral before the author’s espresso cools. That line haunts me. The medium matters. The way we reach people has become part of the message.

    I see the same logic in my own small way. A blog post I’m proud of might earn a few dozen engagements. A decent video essay? Thousands of views, maybe more. But numbers only tell part of the story. The real draw is the vitality the videos demand—something performative, almost athletic. When I’m on camera, I feel like I’m “getting my reps in,” keeping mentally limber. The blog is therapy; the videos are training.

    Still, there’s a fine line between vitality and vanity. Part of me believes the videos keep me youthful, engaged, even relevant. Another part suspects it’s all just a resistance workout against mortality. Staying fit is one thing; refusing to age gracefully is another. Desperation doesn’t wear well on men over sixty, even under good lighting.

    So maybe writing suits me better now. Maybe the written word is the right pace for a man learning to accept that his eyesight, patience, and tech literacy are all in slow retreat. Maybe I should only return to video when I have something worth saying—something that isn’t just a performance of endurance.

    Which brings me to the real question: what do I still have to contribute?

    For over a decade, my YouTube channel orbited around my watch obsession. That obsession gradually narrowed until it became monastic—just diver watches, all on straps. I convinced myself that a collection larger than seven would doom me to spiritual ruin. I also stopped flipping watches like a Wall Street day trader, deciding it was bad for my mental health. That slowdown siphoned the manic energy that used to fuel my videos. The creative rush didn’t vanish—it simply rerouted into blog posts about my newest fixation: alignment. Or more precisely, misalignment.

    Because if I’m honest, I feel increasingly out of sync with the modern world. I adapt to new technology at the pace of continental drift. TikTok bewilders me. Smartphones offend my thumbs. Driving at night now feels like a scene from Apocalypse Now. My relevance, visibility, and patience are fading in a culture that worships youth and touchscreens.

    My anxieties about self-worth and mortality are now on the front burner, while watch collecting—the “Watch Potency Principle,” the “wrist-rotation anxiety”—has been moved to the back burner where it is simmering to a lukewarm stew.

    To illustrate my current state: two weeks ago, I bought a new LG OLED TV, which was fine—until I broke two Samsungs in one day trying to move them. I manhandled the first 55-inch like it was a kettlebell, frying half its pixels in a single jerk. Then I jammed my thumb straight through the second screen while relocating it from my daughter’s room. My wife, the household adult, had to carry the new Roku replacement into our bedroom as I stood there looking like a Neanderthal who’d just discovered electricity—and promptly electrocuted himself.

    My war with technology didn’t end there. The new garage door opener came with instructions written in a dialect of cruel mockery. The installer vanished without explaining how to sync it with my phone, so my wife once again had to step in and figure it out. Now I open the garage door through an app, and every time I hear the alert that the door is moving, I step back in awe—half-terrified, half-mesmerized—like a caveman who’s just invented fire.

    I feel both too old for this world and too infantile to function in it. A man-baby marveling at his gadgets, bewildered by his own house. Think about that. My house has become a museum for technology of the future while I wander through it like a mesmerized tourist. My mouth is agape and my daughters say to me, “Relax, Dad, this is our house.” I respond by saying, “No it’s not. It’s a museum of strange and wonderful things that I don’t know how to use.” 

    These are the moments that give me content for my blog Cinemorphosis. I post almost daily, while it takes me weeks to metabolize these experiences into something coherent enough for a video essay. Writing helps me think; filming helps me pretend I’m still current.

    So that’s my current state of affairs. This channel used to be State of the Watch Collection. Now it’s more like State of the Man Who Can’t Sync His Garage Door Opener.

  • The Eight Ages of –ification

    The Eight Ages of –ification

    From Conformification to Enshittification: how every decade found a fresh way to ruin itself.

    The Age of Decline, Accelerated

    In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow argues that our decline isn’t gradual—it’s accelerating. Everything is turning to crap simultaneously, like civilization performing a synchronized swan dive into the sewer.

    The book’s subtitle, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, suggests that degradation is now both universal and, somehow, fixable.

    Doctorow isn’t the first prophet to glimpse the digital abyss. Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Haidt, and other cultural Cassandras have long warned about the stupidification that comes from living inside the algorithmic aquarium. We swim in the same recycled sludge of dopamine and outrage, growing ever duller while congratulating ourselves on being “connected.”

    This numbness—the ethical anesthesia of the online age—makes us tolerate more crappiness from our corporate overlords. As the platforms enshittify, we invent our own little coping rituals. Some of us chant words with –ion suffixes as if they were incantations, linguistic ASMR to soothe our digital despair.

    When I saw Ozempic and ChatGPT promising frictionless perfection—weight loss without effort, prose without struggle—I coined Ozempification: the blissful surrender of self-agency to the cult of convenience.

    Now there’s an entire liturgy of –ifications, each describing a new layer of rot:

    • Enshittification — Doctorow’s coinage for the systematic decay of platforms that once worked.
    • Crapification / Encrappification — The transformation of quality into garbage in the name of efficiency.
    • Gamification — Turning life into a perpetual contest of meaningless points and dopamine rewards.
    • Attentionification — Reducing every act of expression to a plea for clicks.
    • Misinformationfication — When truth becomes a casualty of virality.
    • Ozempification — Replacing effort with optimization until we resemble our own avatars.
    • Stupidification — The great numbing: scrolling ourselves into idiocy while our neurons beg for mercy.

    But the crown jewel of this lexicon remains Enshittification—Doctorow’s diagnosis so precise that the American Dialect Society crowned it Word of the Year for 2023.

    Still, I’d like to push back on Doctorow’s suggestion that our current malaise is unique. Yes, technology accelerates decay, but each era has had its own pathology—its signature form of cultural rot. We’ve been creatively self-destructing for decades.

    So, let’s place Enshittification in historical context. Behold The Eight Ages of –ification: a timeline of civilization’s greatest hits in decline.

    1950s — Conformification

    The age of white fences and beige minds. America sold sameness as safety. Individuality was ironed flat, and television became the nation’s priest. Conformification is the fantasy that security comes from imitation—a tranquilized suburbia of identical dreams in identical ranch homes.

    1960s — Psychedelification

    When rebellion became transcendence through chemistry. Psychedelification was the belief that consciousness expansion could topple empires, if only the colors were bright enough. The result: self-absorption in tie-dye and the illusion that enlightenment could be mass-produced.

    1970s — Lustification

    A Freudian carnival of polyester and pelvic thrusts. From Deep Throat to Studio 54, desire was liberation and the body was both altar and marketplace. Lustification crowned pleasure as the last remaining ideology.

    1980s — Greedification

    When morality was replaced by market share. The decade baptized ambition in champagne and cocaine. Greedification is the conviction that money cleanses sin and that a Rolex can double as a rosary.

    1990s — Ironification

    The decade of smirks. Sincerity was cringe; irony was armor. Ironification made detachment the new intelligence: nothing believed, everything quoted, and feelings outsourced to sarcasm.

    2000s — Digitification

    Humanity uploaded itself. Digitification was the mass migration to the screen—the decade of Facebook envy, email anxiety, and dopamine disguised as connection. We stopped remembering and started refreshing.

    2010s — Influencification

    When everyone became a brand. Influencification turned authenticity into a business model and experience into content. The self became a product to be optimized for engagement.

    2020s — Enshittification

    Doctorow’s masterstroke: the final form of digital decay. Enshittification is what happens when every system optimizes for extraction—when user, worker, and platform all drown in the same algorithmic tar pit. It’s the exhaustion of meaning itself, disguised as progress.

    Epilogue: The 2030s — Reification

    If trends continue, we’ll soon enter Reification: a desperate attempt to make the unreal feel real again. After decades of filters, feeds, and frictionless fakery, we’ll long for something tangible—until, inevitably, we commodify that too.

    History repeats itself—only this time with better Wi-Fi.

  • Caveman Meets Garage App

    Caveman Meets Garage App

    In March 2005, at 43, I was besotted with my Classic iPod and its holy clickwheel. It took a minute to learn how to tether it to desktop iTunes and wrangle my playlists (mostly podcasts), but I did it without pestering my wife, and I was proud. A newer iPod arrived soon after; I refused to learn its tricks. Once I master a gadget, it becomes my comfort zone—I’d rather live there than relocate.

    I listened to podcasts all night and during post-workout naps. My life felt archived in that iPod, which—ridiculously, wonderfully—made me feel plugged into the modern world.
    My wife, less sentimental, declared it obsolete. The future was smartphones. I recoiled. They looked like bricks of chaos—apps, updates, notifications—houseplants with demands, only worse because I had to squint at ant-sized text.

    By 2014, I still clung to the iPod. It wasn’t cheap loyalty: the headphone jack snapped about once a year, and I’d pay $70 at the local shop to resurrect it. Then September 2014 arrived, our twin daughters started preschool, and my wife insisted I get a smartphone—for school runs, doctor visits, playdates. Texting was essential; parenthood demanded it.

    So I pried my fingers off the fossil and bought a Galaxy S4 at Costco. To my surprise, downloading podcasts was blissfully easy. As a podcast machine, the phone was a star. Everything else? Lame. I hated watching tiny videos, reading tiny text, and spelunking for apps. The phone became a super-iPod; the rest of its features were just extra chaos. Texting was torture—my fat fingers whacked the wrong letters, and I backspaced my way through tedium. I barely used the thing except for podcasts. My wife envied my perpetually 90% battery; to console her, I’d brag that after an all-night podcast binge I dropped to a shocking 80%.

    Yes, smartphones are addiction machines that track, nudge, and strip privacy. True. But I only use a sliver of their powers because the tactile experience annoys me.

    Part of me resents the smartphone for killing the rotary landline. That dial’s ratcheting click felt like reciting a secret code to open a cave. Beige, avocado, mint green, custard—those phones had heft that implied quality, with long, flexible cords that snaked across the room. Conversations were events; an ear would grow tender and force the ritual mid-call ear swap. Now the landline is dead—and so, largely, are conversations, replaced by texts and emojis. Speed and convenience exacted their toll: degraded communication, which means degraded friendships.

    Cory Doctorow gave us enshittification—how tech optimizes itself into garbage. I’d love to say that’s why I resist. But that’s too pat. I’m simply slow to adapt. Incompetent with new tools. My memory refuses the steps; I have to re-teach myself, again and again.

    Recently, my wife synced my phone to our garage door. A week later, I tapped the app and watched the door rise, gawking like a caveman who just discovered fire and is already imagining a barbecued brontosaurus rack. It’s a good trick. I still keep Genie remotes in the house and car as backups, but the phone option is lovely. This isn’t enshittification; it’s the opposite—unsuckification. Some things that used to suck don’t have to anymore.

    In fact, I’m eager for toilet + AI matrimony: a throne that reads biomarkers, prescribes medication, screens like a colonoscopy, and spares me the waiting room. I’m also rooting for a custom GLP-1 patch that recalibrates appetite so a morning bowl of porridge with protein powder—and another in the late afternoon—actually sates me. Easy weight management, better markers, minimal dishes.

    All of this is part of the unsuckification project.

    I’ll admit it: I’m older, I resist change, and new tech gives me a headache. But if modern tech can spare me a colonoscopy, open heart surgery, and the indignities of being twenty pounds overweight, then sign me up.