Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    My fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez told our class in the early 1980s that we had to write our short stories over and over until they reached a pristine state in which we no longer had to apologize for anything in them. The stories had to stand on their own, beyond reproach.

    I thought of Gonzalez’s words when I came across a section of The Good Life Method in which the authors present a writing exercise: You have to write an apologia, or apology, for your own life. Apology in this context doesn’t mean saying you’re sorry. It means “speaking in one’s defense.” Your philosophical core, and the actions that grow from it, should be things you can defend on philosophical grounds.

    The authors provide several examples. I’ll mention three. Socrates defended his pursuit of the good life, a quest that embarrassed and antagonized the elite class. Augustine defended his religious conversion. Nietzsche defended his rejection of Christian morality and his vision of the Übermensch, or superman, a figure capable of overcoming inherited values and creating new ones rather than obediently accepting the old moral structure.

    Your personal apologia contains three building blocks. The first is a story that raises the question of what constitutes the good life and suggests a possible answer. The second is an argument for your goal, or higher purpose. The third is the method—the means by which you intend to achieve your goal of living the good life.

    The authors make it clear that having the correct conception of the good life isn’t enough. You have to act in accordance with your ideal. To make their case, they cite Aristotle, who warned about the chasm between belief and action. He compares people who philosophize without changing their lives to patients who listen attentively to their doctors and then ignore every instruction. The patients won’t become healthy, and neither will the philosophers. In religious terms, faith without works is dead.

    As I consider the personal apologia and its three building blocks, it occurs to me that this exercise is essentially a Life Syllabus complete with Enduring Understandings. You identify the good life, establish the philosophical basis for it, and create a plan of action for living it.

    That is your syllabus.

    It seems reasonable to me that a young person should have such a Life Syllabus. Having one is surely more profitable than not having one. Living every day as if you’re making everything up as you go along strikes me as both depressing and futile.

    I’m reminded of a friend who waited tables in Denver in the early 1980s. Eventually the job depressed him because, as he explained it, every day he was starting from scratch. The job gave him nothing to build upon. Every shift he constructed a tower of blocks, and by the next shift the tower had collapsed. He had to start all over again.

    A syllabus, with its building blocks, promises the opposite. It gives you a journey in which one action builds upon the previous one. You are making something of yourself. You are flourishing. You are moving closer to the good life and, presumably, becoming a good person along the way.

    For a young person, such a journey seems profitable. If you are in your mid-sixties, as I am, it isn’t too late. In fact, the matter has become considerably more urgent.

    So with this in mind, I return to the apologia and its first building block: a personal story that gave me some glimpse of an answer to the question of how to live a good life.

    The first story that comes to mind happened in 1981. I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder attending college in Northern California. Preparing for the late-summer Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School, I ate a high-protein, low-carb diet and tanned every day. In the weeks leading up to the contest, my clothes began hanging from my 180-pound, perfectly tanned physique like a bad costume. This necessitated an entirely new wardrobe, which brought me to a fitting room in a Pleasanton shopping mall.

    While I tried on pants behind gauzy curtains, two attractive young women standing outside began arguing over which one should ask me out. Their voices grew louder and louder, which I interpreted as compelling evidence that I was a highly valued commodity.

    This was my golden opportunity. My moment to shine.

    And what did I do?

    I froze.

    I threw up an aloof facade so potent that it was like scattering banana peels under their feet and sending them sliding away from my presence. I appeared stuck-up, full of myself, and out of reach when, in reality, I was a frightened imbecile hiding behind a fortress of muscle.

    In spite of my perfect tan and ripped physique, I was useless because I possessed the social skills of a wilted houseplant. All that bodybuilding had caused me to neglect more important matters: soul-building, social-skill building, mind-building. I was essentially a cipher. My chiseled body had done nothing to put me on the path toward the good life.

    Disillusioned with bodybuilding, I hit the books in college and tried to develop my mind with the same intensity I had applied to my body. I read Nabokov, Bellow, Kafka, and Dostoevsky. I learned to play piano works by Chopin, Schubert, and Brahms.

    And I became an annoying pseudo-intellectual snob.

    Intellectual pride, it turned out, didn’t put me on the path toward the good life either. My existence vacillated between the despair of believing I was a misfit while listening to The Smiths and the arrogance of believing I was superior to “the masses” while affecting the pomposity of Vladimir Nabokov. I had traded one costume for another. Instead of hiding behind muscles, I was hiding behind books, classical music, and intellectual affectation.

    I was a poseur, someone who didn’t know how to be real with himself or anyone else.

    So what was the good life?

    A life of authenticity, for starters. A life of humility in which I rejected both the hidden pride of despair and the more flamboyant pride of snobbery.

    But I can’t pretend the road toward authenticity was a straight line. There were starts and stops, loops and detours, concentric circles and occasional ascents. I did become more authentic over time, but not because I possessed a clear philosophy or followed a carefully constructed syllabus. Life challenges and conflicts with actual human beings forced me to surrender some of the facade and BS and learn to respect other people.

    Being respectful required being authentic.

    This was a long, gradual process. It didn’t happen because I read this philosopher or that one. No single book cracked open the heavens and handed me the operating manual.

    In the end, no philosopher was my teacher.

    Life was the teacher.

    And this brings me to a problem I have with The Good Life Method. I understand its impulse very clearly. Like these sharp, talented, well-intentioned Notre Dame professors, I love writing a course syllabus, which can easily double as a Life Syllabus. I love the idea of a plan, an outline, a sequence of building blocks, and a path toward the good life.

    But perhaps it is too pat. Too tidy. Too much like a pretty package with a ribbon tied neatly on top.

    Life may be too messy for the course outline. It may be too messy for resolution and absolute answers. As someone who struggles with my Jewish and Catholic background and remains agnostic about several enormous religious questions, I’m reminded of something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville’s inability to achieve religious clarity: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

    I know that territory.

    I remain sympathetic to the goals of The Good Life Method. I want the Life Syllabus. I want the Enduring Understandings. I want the building blocks, the method, the telos, and the reassuring sense that one assignment leads logically to the next.

    I’m just not convinced that life has read the syllabus.

    And I have serious doubts that this method, or any method, provides a surefire path to the promised land.

  • Give Me Chaos and I Will Make You a Syllabus

    Give Me Chaos and I Will Make You a Syllabus

    If you are a good college instructor, you provide a haven for your students. By haven, I mean that you give them structure and order in a world of chaos and nonsense. There is a world outside the classroom, and it is a tempest of confusion, trickery, deception, wild-goose chases, chimeras, and misguided Holy Grails. Inside a young person’s mind, the world can resemble a jumble of blurry lines, flashing lights, and static on a 1960s television with a faulty UHF antenna. As an instructor, you have to pull your students out of that blinding, cacophonous television set.

    Your first job is to understand that they are rather comfortable living there. Just as a fish doesn’t know it’s wet after spending its entire life in water, students don’t necessarily know they live in confusion because confusion is their default environment. You have to make them see the disorder of their living space, persuade them that it is not normal, and convince them to look for an exit.

    This part of your class does not feel like a haven because it is disruptive. You must, as Kafka writes of good literature, be the axe that breaks their frozen ocean. You must create tumult. Students should occasionally feel as if the ground has been removed from beneath their feet. They should feel disoriented, even vertiginous.

    But this is where the haven enters. It is your course syllabus.

    The syllabus contains your purpose—not merely the official student learning outcomes but what educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe call Enduring Understandings. These are the large ideas students should carry with them long after the class is over. If you’re teaching a unit on the life of Frederick Douglass, for example, you don’t merely teach the courage of an adolescent who defied laws forbidding him to read and write. You teach that the interiority produced by advanced literacy allows a person to understand and crave freedom in ways that would otherwise be unavailable.

    But your syllabus contains more than course purpose, student learning outcomes, and Enduring Understandings. It contains the manual for implementing those goals. You give students a purpose, a structure, a timeline, and a method.

    That is the haven.

    There is something very American about the course syllabus. By American, I mean that our culture is embedded in the optimistic belief that we can fix things. The world is broken because, in part, people are broken, but give us the right how-to manual and we will get to work. Because we grow up with this belief, we tend to take free will and self-agency for granted. We can improve particular forms of intelligence, critical thinking, communication skills, marital intimacy, leadership, and financial stewardship. We can learn to write screenplays, become comedians, actors, yoga instructors, computer programmers, and whatever else the instructional manual promises.

    We recognize few bounds. We can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We can transcend economic and social class and ascend to the highest altitudes of American finance and status, where presumably everyone has a personal chef and a diversified portfolio.

    College instructors participate in this national faith. Depending on what course we teach, we provide a syllabus that is more than a schedule of due dates. It is more than a manual. It is an affirmation of self-agency and the hope of self-reinvention. It provides a haven of order and structure in a world of chaos.

    So being an instructor is a big deal. In fact, the word instructor doesn’t capture the gravitas of our calling. Perhaps another term is required. Perhaps we should be called priestocrats. Our very existence and role in society constitute an argument for self-improvement, self-agency, and order in a chaotic world.

    As someone who has taught college and written syllabi for forty years, do I really believe all this?

    I honestly don’t know.

    But I do know this: Writing a syllabus is enormously comforting because it makes me feel ordered and structured in a world of chaos. A syllabus gives me the sensation of control. I love writing them so much that I can imagine retiring from teaching less than a year from now and continuing to write syllabi “just for fun.” I will scour essays from various authors, discover some thematic through-line connecting them, and create an imaginary sixteen-week course complete with reading and writing assignments. There will be an Enduring Understanding, of course. There will be a telos, a higher purpose. There will probably be due dates even though no students exist.

    I will never stop writing syllabi because I have the Syllabus Gene.

    The gene revealed itself early. When I was thirteen, I became an Olympic weightlifter and, shortly afterward, a bodybuilder. I spent hours in my father’s office, where he had a beautiful blue IBM Selectric typewriter. I would type workouts, read them over, revise them, throw away the paper, and begin again. Each new version seemed to bring me closer to the haven of the Perfect Workout, the program that would optimize my fitness and provide the order I craved.

    The world was chaotic. The average man looked like a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of him, and by God, I was going to create a manual that would spare me that indignity.

    Looking back, the connection seems obvious. The thirteen-year-old typing workout schedules on an IBM Selectric and the college instructor constructing sixteen-week composition courses are essentially the same person. Give me chaos and I will make categories. Give me confusion and I will create a sequence. Give me sixteen weeks and I will assign due dates.

    Perhaps that is what I have been doing for forty years. I thought I was creating a haven for my students. Maybe I was creating one for myself as well.

    So I am retiring from teaching college writing.

    But I will always write a syllabus.

    My sanity depends on it.

  • The Good Life Is Making Me Anxious

    The Good Life Is Making Me Anxious

    Of course, retirement is not about retiring. It’s about learning to live differently after you’ve been loosed from your professional obligations. The same goes for aging. It’s not about preparing to die. It’s about preparing to live appropriately in the face of death.

    So after hearing Notre Dame professor Meghan Sullivan discuss these issues on a podcast with David Brooks, I picked up The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. Written by Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, the book’s ten chapters begin with action verbs: desire, live, take, work, love, wonder, take, struggle, contemplate, and prepare. I saw this as a promising start because my current action verbs are worry, fret, stew, and agonize. This book could represent an improvement in my approach.

    The Introduction immediately caught me. The authors observe that we are goal-oriented creatures. We see ourselves on a ladder, constantly climbing in the realms of health, fitness, social status, and material success. We devote enormous amounts of time and energy to achieving these goals, and the labor itself reassures us that we are headed somewhere worthwhile.

    As I read, I envisioned all of us standing over the parts of our lives as if they were machine pieces moving along a conveyor belt. We are assembly-line workers connecting some of the pieces, but we don’t know what the finished product is supposed to look like. We have our station on the line. We work earnestly. We tighten our bolts. But we’ve lost sight of the machine.

    The authors argue that there is an answer to this myopia. It’s called philosophy. Aristotle understood its purpose. Interrogating your life and the lives around you should help you develop a philosophy aimed at making you a good person. Good people have something in common: they lead “a good life.” Defining the good life, and then embodying it, becomes the purpose of philosophy.

    What strikes me about this lesson is that it applies to people of all ages and employment conditions. We have found the rare universal shoe that fits everyone’s feet.

    Aspiring to the good life puts everything else into context. If I want ten thousand people to watch one of my YouTube videos in three days and become grouchy with my family because only three thousand people have bothered to admire me, I’ve lost my way. I’ve lost what the authors call telos, the aim that gives life meaning and direction. We have a target. Our actions are arrows. The arrows should hit the target.

    Road rage, social-media disappointment, food hoarding, slothful TV bingeing, and compulsive internet shopping are arrows lying uselessly in the grass. Giving ourselves over to unruly passions becomes a recipe for misery. Happiness, by contrast, means hitting the target by living the good life. Aristotle called this goal eudaimonia.

    Because I am Ashkenazi Jewish on my mother’s side and Roman Catholic on my father’s, I am familiar with versions of this framework. In Judaism, we aspire to a good life while wrestling with the evil inclination. God has given us enough reason and strength to move toward him. We meet God halfway, and God reciprocates.

    Christianity tells a more severe story. We don’t merely fail to pursue the good life. We run from it. We love darkness and self-indulgence. We enjoy our little kingdoms of complacent narcissism, where the rest of humanity can suffer somewhere safely beyond the property line. But God is the Hound of Heaven. He hunts us down and drags us toward the fold while we scream and kick our legs. As Paul and John explain it, we are sinners in need of a divine rescue mission before we can turn around and walk the true path.

    So reading The Good Life Method makes me anxious.

    I agree with the general framework. Our lives should not be rooted in materialism, social status, and self-indulgence. We should seek to become good people. My anxiety begins with that old warning: the devil is in the details.

    Can we reach the good life and find atonement and redemption through Aristotle’s philosophy? Through the similar structure of Judaism? Through Christianity? There are similarities, certainly, but there are also enormous differences. Take eschatology, a frightening word for “last things.” What exactly are the last things? Does death bring annihilation, the complete extinction of consciousness? Do we enter some larval underworld imagined by ancient Greek religion? Do we haunt Hades, Sheol, or Gehenna, neither happy nor tortured, but half-conscious, like someone slowly waking from a codeine dream?

    Or is there a Judgment Day, a Lake of Fire, and a heavenly mansion where, as Aquinas notoriously suggested, part of the pleasure enjoyed by the blessed comes from witnessing the punishment of the damned? They mocked you on earth for your pious ways. Now look who’s laughing.

    The devil is in the details.

    So I am anxious.

    But I read on.

    I know the book ahead of me is not some saccharine self-help manual stuffed with fortune-cookie platitudes. Nor is it a New Age sales pitch assuring me that I can be spiritual and selfish at the same time because having my cake and eating it is apparently my God-given entitlement. Like any worthwhile book, The Good Life Method intends to challenge me. It will throw down a gauntlet. It will force me to examine my values and priorities.

    Because Sullivan and Blaschko teach at Notre Dame and are practicing Roman Catholics, however, I don’t yet know whether their goal is to convert me in the specifically religious sense or in the more universal philosophical sense. Nor do I know whether universal moral improvement is sufficient once eschatology enters the room.

    If I practiced a particular religious faith, I’m not sure I would be satisfied if people adopted my moral philosophy and stopped there. That would be like repainting an old car. You cleaned and stripped the surface. You repaired the body. You spread the Bondo, sanded it smooth, applied the primer, and congratulated yourself on the progress.

    But you stopped.

    No sealer. No base coat. No clear coat. No curing.

    You understood Aristotle. You understood the arrows and the target. You may even have become a nicer person. But you failed to conform those principles to the required orthodoxy. You are an unfinished automobile sitting under fluorescent shop lights with enormous patches of Bondo across the doors.

    You are an eyesore.

    I am overcome with these thoughts, and I haven’t even finished the Introduction.

    Apparently one thing that did not retire when I did was my compulsion to worry, fret, obsess, and make myself increasingly miserable while reading books designed to teach me how to be happy.

  • I Lived in the Before Times

    I Lived in the Before Times

    The Boomer shaking his fist at the television while denouncing the stupidity of the world—or standing on his lawn, arms akimbo, broadcasting his bitter displeasure with the neighborhood’s rapid decline—is an archetype of a particular kind of pathetic old-timer. He cannot accept his growing misalignment with the world. His rage is fundamentally rooted in fear: he is living in a world he no longer understands and increasingly lacks the ability to navigate. Unable to adapt, he acts out. He is a man sinking in quicksand with no rope within reach.

    Understood this way, retirement and old age are partly about misalignment and the primal terror of becoming isolated by it.

    It is tempting to dismiss the Boomer accordingly. He is simply curdling in old age and knows there is nothing he can do about it. Like the Wicked Witch screaming, “I’m melting!” he is slowly disappearing from the world.

    But we oversimplify the Boomer’s demise at our own peril. Two seemingly contradictory things can be true. On one hand, the Boomer really is misaligned with the world and may lack some of the adaptive skills necessary to flourish in it. On the other hand, some of his roots in the past point toward a superior way of being.

    I’m talking about reading.

    I’m talking about reading a paragraph containing complex ideas and understanding it.

    Not just a paragraph, either. A long essay. Even a book.

    The Boomer has lived in the Before and After Times. In the Before Times, his brain was trained for sustained reading. He processed the world through text, made sense of his place in it, and constructed a worldview by reading enormous amounts of material. Through reading, he learned to identify patterns, cycles, sophistry, trickery, deception, charlatanism, and occasionally authenticity.

    He was literate.

    The After Times are considerably less hospitable to literacy. We now spend large portions of our lives inside engagement farms, euphemistically called “social media platforms,” where fragmented attention is not a design flaw but the business model. The platforms compete to keep us clicking, swiping, gawking, raging, desiring, and returning. Sustained thought must compete against an industrial apparatus designed to interrupt it.

    The Boomer terrified by his misalignment therefore confronts an uncomfortable paradox. He legitimately fears his own growing ineptitude while also witnessing a different kind of ineptitude spreading around him: people losing their tolerance for sustained attention.

    Living in a post-reading society and knowing the difference because you lived in the Before Times is a peculiar privilege of age. I have students who were in sixth grade when the pandemic denied them anything resembling normal schooling for nearly two years. They spent much of their adolescence with TikTok, Instagram Reels, Snapchat, YouTube, and Roblox. Reading rarely occupied the center of this world. When assigned, it could feel less like intellectual discovery than community service for toilet-papering somebody’s house.

    Short video clips engineered to deliver immediate stimulation became the staple product of the engagement farms young people carried everywhere in their slender glass bricks. Childish Gambino captured something about this condition in “This Is America.” Violence and social breakdown erupt throughout the video while dancing, spectacle, and entertainment continually hijack our attention. The catastrophe is happening right in front of us, but something more stimulating keeps wandering into the foreground.

    If someone as young and culturally fluent as Childish Gambino can suggest that we are losing ourselves inside spectacle and distraction, the old Boomer ranting on his lawn suddenly deserves another hearing.

    There really was a Before Times when sustained literacy occupied a larger place in ordinary intellectual life, and its erosion has consequences. This is the subject of James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. As part of his research, Marriott contacted senior academics who told him that it was becoming increasingly difficult to assign a novel and expect students to read it within a week.

    I can attest to the larger problem. Assign long books and many students won’t read them. Some will drop the class. Eventually word spreads that you assign books, and students may avoid your section unless circumstances force them into it. You can assign one short book and give students the entire semester to read it. Even that is no longer a surefire proposition.

    I saw the accelerated decline of books in my own classrooms around 2012, almost exactly when smartphones reached critical mass and became mandatory accessories. Around that time, the lavish visits from textbook representatives began disappearing. No more kiosks and catered food. No more giant boxes of composition readers, essay collections, and grammar books arriving at our offices for inspection. The hundred-dollar composition textbook began its long march toward extinction. Even the used-book buyers vanished—the cheerful scavengers who once wandered into our offices and handed us cash for unwanted textbooks gathering dust on our shelves.

    College is a business. The business model had changed.

    Students were finding cheaper alternatives to outrageously priced textbooks, which was often a welcome development. But something larger was changing at the same time. We were increasingly creating classroom content for students living inside an information environment that competed directly against sustained reading.

    To my credit, I have adapted. I now break reading and writing assignments into shorter visual components using Google Slides. I make the concepts visible. I map arguments. I isolate terms. I provide examples.

    But sometimes I wonder whether adaptation has quietly become accommodation.

    I find myself hand-feeding information more than I did in the past. Instead of asking students to wrestle with a difficult text until they extract its argument, I increasingly extract the argument, put it on a slide, define the terms, provide the mapping components, and lead them through the analysis. The very skills I want reading to develop are sometimes the skills students need before they can tolerate the reading.

    There is the trap.

    So yes, I am misaligned.

    I am the aging man standing on the lawn wondering what happened to the neighborhood. I lived in the Before Times, and part of me will always remain there.

    But misalignment does not necessarily mean error.

    Sometimes the old man yelling from the lawn really is yelling at a fire.

  • The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    Dementia and cognitive decline are real concerns in old age. Think of them as the hurricane forming somewhere offshore. You don’t know if it will hit you, but you prepare anyway. Stock up on water and canned beans. Nail plywood over the windows. Make sure you have quick access to the potato cellar.

    Old age requires its own hurricane preparations. Don’t carry excess body weight. Maintain normal blood pressure. Go easy on sugar. Exercise. Avoid alcohol. Don’t smoke. If your hearing deteriorates to the point that you withdraw from conversation and retreat into your own head, get a hearing aid. Keep your mind active. Build what researchers call cognitive reserve—the brain’s capacity to withstand some of the damage associated with aging and disease while continuing to function.

    You can challenge yourself by playing a musical instrument, doing crossword puzzles, starting a podcast, learning something difficult, or writing a multigenerational novel. Think of these pursuits as mental exercise, potentially as important to your aging brain as going to the gym five days a week is to your aging body.

    But not all mental exercise is equal.

    Consider journaling, that beloved sacrament of wellness culture. Journaling requires a physical notebook, your favorite pen or mechanical pencil, perhaps a steaming mug of tea positioned nearby for atmosphere. For this one noble endeavor, you have gone off the grid. You are the intellectual equivalent of outdoorsman Euell Gibbons, wandering through the wilderness and surviving on the edible portions of pinecones.

    Writer and professor Katie Roiphe challenges our assumptions about this supposedly healthy practice in her essay “Is Journaling Bad for You?” Her objections are formidable. For one thing, your journal is never as private as you imagine. Eventually some nosy relative will root through your belongings like a truffle sow and unearth thoughts never intended for public consumption.

    Worse, those thoughts may be misunderstood. They may even repel people who once loved you. The disparity between the person they thought they knew and the creature muttering from the pages of your private notebook may be too great to reconcile.

    You may not particularly enjoy meeting your former selves, either.

    Reading your journals twenty years later can become an archaeological excavation of every insecurity, obsession, grievance, humiliation, and catastrophically stupid opinion you once possessed. Instead of illuminating the present, your journal can lure you backward. Like Lot’s wife, you become fixated on what lies behind you and eventually turn into a pillar of salt—though perhaps one with very good handwriting.

    Then there is the problem of introspection cosplay.

    You may believe you’re plumbing the depths of your psyche when you’re really performing the role of Thoughtful Person. Instead of being brutally honest with yourself, you curate your introspection. Journaling becomes an exercise in self-regard, another platform for presenting yourself to an audience—even if the audience consists entirely of you.

    You become like the gym novice who spends two hours at the fitness center every day talking to people, listening to music, watching television, drinking smoothies, checking his phone, and occasionally wandering onto a treadmill. Six months later, he stands before the mirror bewildered that he has somehow failed to transform into an Olympic decathlete.

    But the fact that journaling can be done badly—and occasionally with disastrous consequences—is not an argument against journaling. It is an argument against performative journaling.

    If you can be unflinchingly honest with yourself, by all means journal. If you understand, in accordance with Sturgeon’s Law, that 90 percent of everything you write will be crap, by all means journal. If you approach your inner life with the same rigor that someone brings to a serious circuit-training session—working rather than posing, examining rather than admiring—then by all means journal.

    Roiphe’s argument, as I understand it, isn’t really against journaling. It is against confusing the performance of introspection with introspection itself. Beneath her skepticism lies an argument for authenticity.

    And perhaps that brings us back to cognitive decline.

    We worry about forgetting names, losing words, walking into rooms without remembering why we went there. These are frightening possibilities, and we should do what we reasonably can to protect ourselves.

    But there may be another kind of cognitive failure worth fearing: losing the ability to distinguish between examining your life and performing an examination of your life.

    You can fill a thousand notebooks and never confront yourself.

    The handwriting may remain perfectly legible while the mind behind it disappears.

  • Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Convenience is the mother of bad fashion. Think Velcro shoe straps that look less like footwear than medical devices designed for elephantine feet. Think elastic waistbands engineered to accommodate the vicissitudes of your waistline after an unfortunate buffet event. Think synthetic-blend loungewear that is as wrinkle-free as it is odor-harboring.

    But convenience becomes something darker when it promises escape from the natural friction of existence, when the goal is to inhabit a womb-like environment where effort has vanished completely. Think of the Snuggie, that fleece abomination that combines clothing and blanket while announcing to the world that you have become unapologetically dysfunctional. Congratulations. You have reached the apotheosis of bad fashion. You are now wearing your pathology on your sleeve, quite literally.

    If you’re approaching retirement age, you’ll discover an entire industry built around convenience and the premise that after sixty-five your need for it grows exponentially. Follow this road far enough and eventually your life becomes as frictionless as wrinkle-free loungewear, Netflix autoplay, instant oatmeal, and vanilla Ensure.

    You could argue that this is merely another humiliation of old age, another example of one generation falling out of alignment with those behind it. Perhaps that was once true. No longer. We now live in an age when younger generations aspire to much of the same frictionless existence traditionally marketed to the elderly. The generations have finally found common ground: nobody wants to get off the couch.

    This is a problem, according to Gabe Bullard’s Against Convenience, which argues that the mindless pursuit of convenience and frictionlessness can leave us isolated, dehumanized, and infantilized.

    The crank inside me immediately shouts, “Thank you, Captain Obvious, for writing a three-hundred-page padded essay explaining that modern technology has made us lazy.”

    But Bullard has, in fact, written an important, timely, and persuasive book, a much-needed rebuttal to a society mindlessly seduced by the conveniences of modern technology. My crankiness reveals less about the book than it does about my own guilty recognition that I am precisely the kind of person Bullard is writing about. I am, after all, a man who embraces a respectable amount of sloth and convenience. Consider my wardrobe: tank tops, gym shorts, and flip-flops. This ensemble serves as loungewear, sleepwear, errand wear, and exercise wear. Four wardrobes in one. I consider this a triumph of efficiency worthy of self-congratulation.

    Comfort over fashion makes me profoundly happy. When we returned to campus after our pandemic hibernation, my colleagues and I, ranging in age from thirty to sixty-five, seemed to have received the same memo. We wore T-shirts bearing the college logo, dark-wash denim jeans, and extravagantly cushioned walking shoes with names like Brooks Ghost Max 3 and Hoka Bondi 9. These sounded less like orthopedic footwear than race cars capable of reaching two hundred miles per hour at Le Mans.

    Before contemplating the pathologies of frictionless existence in Bullard’s persuasive critique, I made myself a delicious cup of coffee with my Ninja slow-drip coffee maker. It took ten minutes. Then I prepared a bowl of rolled oats with protein powder and berries. Thanks to the microwave, that took fewer than four.

    I am now typing this essay on an aluminum mechanical keyboard while sitting before two 27-inch 4K monitors connected to a Mac Mini smaller than my hand. Its M4 chip runs cool and moves through Google Chrome with frictionless ease.

    I do embrace struggle where I can. I like tackling big ideas, exploring subtexts, locating semiotic signs and symbols in popular culture, considering Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of liquid modernity, and interrogating my consumer longings through René Girard’s notion of mimetic desire.

    But here is the problem for anyone mounting a principled defense of friction: convenience can be delicious.

    This morning’s coffee and oatmeal were predictably stupendous. I’m sitting before two enormous monitors with twelve browser tabs open. Telemann is playing through YouTube Premium, with Boccherini and Rossini waiting obediently in the queue. My computer is cool and silent. My coffee is hot. My oatmeal required almost no labor.

    Perhaps Bullard is right that we need friction.

    I’m just not sure I want it before breakfast.

  • Fran Lebowitz Never Retired

    Fran Lebowitz Never Retired

    You can’t really understand the depths of retirement and all its complications without considering the life of New York personality Fran Lebowitz. She published two celebrated collections of essays more than forty years ago, and that more or less sums up her career as a productive writer.

    You could say she retired from writing, but that is too simple. You could say writer’s block ended her writing career, and that would be closer. But Lebowitz calls it a “writer’s blockade” and has compared her extended writing hiatus to the Vietnam War. She doesn’t know exactly how it started, and she never figured out how to end it. It just dragged on for decades, apparently without a viable exit strategy.

    Ordinarily, an artist who stops producing art enters a strange posthumous existence while still alive. The old work remains, but the artist begins haunting it.

    This does not apply to Fran Lebowitz.

    Deprived of her writing, the public got something better: Fran Lebowitz.

    She began showing up at colleges and auditoriums, answering questions with the same intelligence, irritation, precision, and wit that once appeared on the page. In this regard, Lebowitz became a professional personality. There is no blockage when she speaks. Nothing can stop her extemporaneous verbal wit.

    She is the consummate example of what I call Personality Migration: the transfer of one’s professional value from the original craft into the personality developed through decades of practicing it. Lebowitz’s wit migrated from the written page to spontaneous speech. The writer stopped writing; the writing voice survived.

    You would like to think that retirement might offer some variation of Personality Migration—that after leaving your profession, you could transfer your accumulated skills into another endeavor that highlights the best parts of your personality.

    This is easier said than done.

    It might even be dangerous to hold up Fran Lebowitz as a retirement guide. For one thing, she is a delightfully cranky genius, the epitome of the New York elite in the best sense. “Coastal elite” is usually a pejorative suggesting pretentiousness, trendiness, and pseudo-intellectualism. Lebowitz is something rarer: an authentic intellectual, so intelligent and culturally self-contained that she sometimes seems to exist outside ordinary space and time.

    Paradoxically, she is also more present in physical space than the rest of us.

    Fran Lebowitz lives without smartphones, computers, social media, and microwave ovens. She has observed that people staring at their phones are not actually where they are standing. Their bodies are present, but their minds have been abducted. They are displaced, distracted, and disoriented. The machine has hijacked the brain while the owner continues walking down the sidewalk.

    Lebowitz anchors us to reality. She also appears remarkably uninterested in vanity or delusions of grandeur. She has a delicious disregard for “her legacy,” what people think of her now, or what they might think of her after she dies. Not surprisingly, she has developed a following among younger people who find her analog, vanity-free existence strangely liberating. She has become fashionable largely by refusing to participate in fashion.

    When I think about Lebowitz’s migration from writer to traveling personality and try to identify her appeal as she speaks before sold-out auditoriums, I am reminded of Harry G. Frankfurt’s slender philosophical book On Bullshit.

    We live in a world saturated with bullshit. Advertising bullshit. Corporate bullshit. Political bullshit. Social-media bullshit. Self-help bullshit. Personal-brand bullshit. We swim through so much of it that we eventually lose the ability to smell it.

    Fran Lebowitz is a beloved exterminator of bullshit.

    She identifies it, exposes it, and kills it on contact. Better yet, she does this without presenting herself as courageous. There is no heroic pose. She simply appears constitutionally incapable of pretending that nonsense makes sense.

    When you listen to Fran Lebowitz speak, your entire body can quiver with the pleasure of recognition. Someone has finally said the thing without wrapping it in bubble wrap. You experience a kind of catharsis. Your illusions loosen their grip. For a few minutes, the fog clears.

    Who needs therapy when Fran Lebowitz is talking?

  • Latitudinal Man

    Latitudinal Man

     

    An “active-living community” is more than a place. It’s a philosophy. Throw in a dash of Hawaiian shirts, parrot pool floats, and Jimmy Buffett music, and you may be beyond philosophy. You may be in the realm of religion. To get a closer look at this religion, check out Latitude Margaritaville, a retirement community in Daytona Beach. Nearby is the Bar & Chill, where margaritas flow endlessly. Forget the Land of Milk and Honey. You’re in the Land of Tequila and Triple Sec.

    Latitude Margaritaville is a defiant rebuttal to philosophical writers such as Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks, who have built a thriving cottage industry mansplaining to people of retirement age that the secret to happiness is to abandon the pursuit of happiness and replace it with a life of meaning. Decline is humiliating. Preserve your dignity with a moral compass composed of Tolstoy, Augustine, and Kierkegaard. Reading the books and essays of the Brooks Establishment is an invigorating skin bracer. Slap some of their tonic on your face. It’s a bracing way to wake up in the morning, stare into the mirror, and not despair over the fact that you’ll be seventy soon.

    Or maybe it’s not.

    Maybe Latitude Margaritaville is the true path. No pretentious mansplaining here. This is paradise on Earth, starting at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a Beach Collection tract home.

    New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten explores this paradise and its inhabitants in his essay “Retirement the Margaritaville Way.” The people who live amid the cabanas and tiki huts don’t seem lost and lonely. They seem genuinely happy. They seem connected to one another. The place exudes “community” and “active living.” Light classic rock plays all day. You can order cheeseburgers, beer, and margaritas whenever you please. Never leaving high school may be the secret to eternal youth.

    Paumgarten seems taken aback by the sheer amount of happiness he finds in this retirement community. He writes, “The citizens of Latitude Margaritaville testify so consistently to a life of gratification that one suspects, but finds no evidence for, a regimen of happy pills or talking points.” Disgruntlement and curmudgeonliness must exist, he observes, but somehow they remain out of sight.

    What is the secret of a place that can turn even a cranky old bastard into an upbeat senior citizen animated by optimism and joy? In search of the answer, Paumgarten finds “cheerleading pooh-bah” and head of residential community relations Stuart Schultz, who delivers the happiness formula that has eluded Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks: Latitude Margaritaville is “like being in college, but with money and without having to study.” You have a great dorm room, no classes, and there’s always a party.

    Take that, Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks.

    Paumgarten’s exploration of late-life living uncovers a happiness formula that seems to have eluded some of our most celebrated authors. You need to live in the tropics, where it’s balmy all year round. You need a cabana theme with lots of aquatic activities. You need to recreate the high-school burger-joint life. Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. Create a community of financially solvent boomers with the same nostalgic longings. And forbid political conversations, which are anathema to paradise.

    If you adhere to this formula, you can become the happiest person on Earth. Forget Kierkegaard’s Aesthete, forever searching for novel experiences to quell his inner restlessness. Forget Nietzsche’s Last Man, forever seeking consumer comforts and a mindless return to the womb.

    In Daytona Beach, you can become Latitudinal Man.

    Latitudinal Man defies the laws of aging. He unapologetically embraces the nostalgia of his adolescence, cocoons himself from the toxic unpleasantries of political life, and walks around year-round shirtless in bathing trunks and flip-flops, his body smeared with SPF 50 sunscreen while he carries a platter of nachos and wings. If someone asked Latitudinal Man whether he had ever read Arthur C. Brooks or David Brooks, his response would be roughly the same as if someone had asked baseball legend Pete Rose what he thought of the novels of Marguerite Duras and her exploration of emotional disequilibrium and transgressive love.

    What we learn from Latitudinal Man is that perhaps the intellectual elite have led us astray. All this talk of “interiority” and cultivating “an inner life” may not bear fruit. It may even be downright dangerous. Too much interiority could leave you sitting alone in a room reading Kierkegaard when happy hour started twenty minutes ago.

    What is needed is a down payment on Phase Three at Latitude Margaritaville. The villas are selling out fast.

    The boomer hive mind of the Latitudeners awaits you.

  • Bulking Up

    Bulking Up

    On the very day it became clear to me that I needed to put guardrails on AI editing—telling it to keep 90% of my original content to prevent my writing from morphing from my natural bodybuilder self into the PED-bloated version—I attended my daughters’ high school open house, where their English teacher told us she was teaching the students AI literacy. This entailed helping them use AI to “bulk up their resumes” because, in a competitive world where everyone was using AI, our children could not afford not to use generative AI. In fact, the teacher said, AI itself is now sorting through resumes and discarding the ones that aren’t sufficiently juiced up.

    It became clear to me that we are living inside a contradiction. On the one hand, writing needs to be “bulked up” and “on the juice” simply to compete with other AI-enhanced writing. On the other hand, in our post-reading society, where literacy rates are in steep decline, writing itself has never seemed more forlorn and withered. We are producing prose with bigger muscles at precisely the moment when our own writing muscles are beginning to atrophy.

    I was living through a cataclysmic moment in history. My personal retirement from teaching college writing had dovetailed with the world’s collective retirement from the kinds of literary pastimes that develop interiority and critical thinking. Reading books was becoming a rarity. Books had been displaced by sports gambling and short-form videos. To complicate matters, Rose Horowitch observes in “The End of Reading Is Here” that Americans have never read so much. The problem is that much of what they are reading is slop: “bulked up” AI writing, threads, captions, and text messages. Horowitch points to UCLA cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, who argues that “people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing.” The brain muscles required for this kind of thinking are atrophying, perhaps to the point of no return. As a result, we are moving toward a postliterate society.

    This is not a stagnant condition. It gets progressively worse. New generations may read less and less. They may become increasingly inclined to see teachers’ reading assignments as punitive. Bereft of strong reading and writing skills, they will need AI to “bulk up” their assigned writing more and more.

    Members of a postliterate society are vulnerable because they live increasingly at the surface level. They don’t dig underneath a text to find subtext, subtlety, and contradiction. They struggle to identify the logical fallacies that accompany manipulation. They can become more vulnerable to demagogues and more susceptible to being duped. A society that loses these habits of critical reading also risks weakening the habits of thought on which democratic life depends.

    A postliterate society also loses something of its humanity when its members can no longer recognize the richness of what, in good writing, we call authorial presence. To savor such presence in the writing of James Baldwin, H. L. Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, and Annie Dillard is part of being human.

    Not all is lost. Humans still find authorial presence in YouTube presentations, podcasts, and musical artists. No amount of AI “bulking up” can replicate the spectacular music and persona of SZA.

    But authorial presence in writing may be disappearing. “Bulking up” writing may eventually mean the death of writing.

    I may not simply be retiring from teaching writing. I may be retiring at the very moment I have become increasingly misaligned with a world that is uncoupling itself from literacy while diligently bulking up its resumes. 

  • I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    It was the middle of September when my Medicare card arrived in the mail. I held it for a moment and studied my name printed beneath the red, white, and blue bands. It felt like a rite of passage, another bureaucratic marker on the road to retirement. No ceremony. No gold watch. Just a government-issued card informing me that I had entered a new demographic.

    That same day, I held a Zoom office hour. One student showed up. I told her I was retiring, and somehow our conversation wandered from Mr. T as an icon of the 1980s to whether AI could replicate the music of SZA to Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which she was writing about for her essay. We talked about how the movie could be frightening and funny at the same time. Before leaving, she told me she felt fortunate to have taken my critical thinking class before I retired. I thanked her. After forty years of teaching, you learn not to brush aside a compliment from a student. You put it in your pocket.

    After the Zoom meeting, I started thinking about the tools that had changed my teaching. Google Docs was one of the great breakthroughs. A student’s paper no longer had to exist as a stack of stapled pages handed across a desk. The document floated somewhere in the cloud, a kind of fairy manuscript that student and teacher could enter simultaneously, revising sentences together from different locations.

    Then my wife introduced me to Google Slides. Once I realized how visually my students processed information, I practically lived on Slides. An assignment that seemed hopelessly dense on a two-page handout could become intelligible when broken into a sequence of clean visual ideas. I can scarcely imagine the final seven years of my teaching career without it.

    Then came generative AI.

    At first, AI seemed like another extraordinary professional tool. It accelerated research. It intensified brainstorming. It helped me develop assignment prompts, test arguments, generate counterarguments, and discover connections I might have overlooked.

    But AI was different from Docs and Slides because it didn’t merely change how I presented my writing. It could change the writing itself.

    For my first three years using generative AI, I became intoxicated by its powers of augmentation. Give it an ordinary paragraph and it could return something brighter, sharper, funnier, and more muscular. It added metaphors, jokes, comparisons, rhythms, and linguistic tricks I hadn’t conceived myself. The results were seductive precisely because they sounded better.

    There was only one problem. Increasingly, they didn’t sound like me.

    I think of those old photo cutout boards at cowboy-themed restaurants and tourist traps. You stand behind a painted cowboy and stick your head through a hole. The photograph contains your face, but everything below your neck belongs to somebody else: narrow waist, six-shooter, boots, chaps, heroic posture. Technically, you’re in the picture. But that isn’t your body.

    AI can do the same thing to prose. Your ideas and anecdotes remain visible through the hole, but the rhetorical body surrounding them belongs to the machine.

    My second metaphor is less flattering. AI became my literary performance-enhancing drug.

    Without AI, I was the natural bodybuilder. Maybe I looked pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but the muscles were mine. Then I discovered rhetorical steroids. Suddenly I could walk onto the stage swollen with metaphors, acid wit, vivid descriptions, elaborate comparisons, and perfectly engineered sentences. Every paragraph flexed.

    Worse, I learned how to order the injections.

    “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions.”

    That became one of my favorite prompts. I would feed AI a perfectly serviceable piece of writing and watch it return wearing a posing thong and covered in bronzer. My paragraph hadn’t been edited. It had been juiced.

    I loved it.

    Then a regular reader of my blog finally had enough.

    After reading one particularly steroidal post, he left an angry comment filled with expletives. His opening line was memorable:

    “Hey, Boomer, cut the shit.”

    He told me to tone it down. He was tired of the verbal pyrotechnics. Tired of the relentless jokes and metaphors. Tired, though he didn’t use my metaphor, of watching the Technicolor 4K bodybuilder flex under the stage lights.

    I apologized and told him I would tone it down. He later apologized for snapping at me. He’d had a bad morning, he explained, and admitted that he actually enjoyed reading my blog.

    “No worries,” I wrote back. “Thanks for the honest feedback.”

    And I meant it.

    His irritation had exposed something I had been reluctant to admit. I had become so accustomed to AI-enhanced prose that ordinary writing began to look inadequate to me. I had trained my eyes on rhetorical 4K until my natural prose looked like a 250-nit IPS screen. I kept turning up the resolution, contrast, saturation, and brightness until eventually somebody in the audience yelled for me to turn the damn thing down.

    So I changed my AI prompt.

    “Edit the following for syntax, grammar, and clarity, but keep 95 percent of my original language.”

    I call it the 95 Percent Rule. AI remains a powerful professional tool, but the rule establishes a boundary: the machine can clean the window; it doesn’t get to replace the view.

    I eventually shared the rule with my students under “Academic Integrity and Best Practices.” It seemed fitting. After years of warning students about outsourcing their thinking to generative AI, I had discovered that I needed guardrails of my own.

    That realization arrived at an appropriate moment. My Medicare card was sitting on my desk. Retirement was approaching. Forty years of teaching had taken me from paper essays to documents floating in the cloud, from classroom handouts to Google Slides, and finally to machines capable of rewriting a person’s sentences in seconds.

    The tools had changed my teaching. Some had even changed the way my brain worked.

    Now, as I prepared to leave the classroom, I had one more thing to retire.

    The cowboy body could go back behind the plywood.

    The PED-bloated bodybuilder could leave the stage.

    I wanted my own sentences back.