Cinemorphosis

Category: philosophy

  • If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”—that haunting anthem of denial, repression, and the unbearable weight of vulnerability—he would recognize a soul attempting to cloak longing in irony, and failing beautifully. Pascal might scribble in his notebook, pen dipped in both skepticism and sorrow:

    1.
     Man denies love not because he is free from it, but because he is enslaved by it. The louder he insists he feels nothing, the more we hear the tremor of devotion in his voice. “I’m not in love” is merely a liturgy of protest against the heart’s verdict.

    2.
     He removes her picture—not to forget her, but to stop trembling at the sight of it. In doing so, he seeks mastery over his affections by performing indifference. But emotion, like God, does not vanish because man has ceased to name it.

    3.
     He insists: “It’s just a silly phase.” But only those who are drowning need to rename the water. The one who plays casual most often suffers the deepest cut, for pride clutches at dignity even as the soul dissolves in yearning.

    4.
     We would rather say, “I don’t care,” than risk the shame of caring too much. Man arms himself with detachment the way cowards wear armor—not to protect the heart, but to avoid ever using it.

    5.
     Every word he utters is a mask stitched by fear. He cannot love openly, for he believes vulnerability is weakness. And yet, in avoiding weakness, he becomes truly pathetic—a captive of what he dares not name.

    6.
     To say “don’t think you’ve won” is to reveal that one has already lost. The war is over. The heart surrendered in the second verse. Only the mind marches on, planting flags on a battlefield already buried in flowers.

    7.
     There is no cruelty greater than pretending not to feel. It is a lie told to oneself in the presence of truth. Love, when denied, becomes not less real—but more dangerous, like a flame hidden under dry cloth. It will burn eventually.

  • If Blaise Pascal Had Listened to “Deacon Blues”

    If Blaise Pascal Had Listened to “Deacon Blues”

    If Blaise Pascal had listened to “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan—a song about the seductive dignity of failure, self-invention, and the strange glory of obscurity—he might have jotted down a set of Pensées to dissect the Deacon Blues persona.

    1.
     Man prefers to be a broken genius than an obedient saint. The dream of ruin, if it is romantic enough, intoxicates him more than the dull clarity of success. He calls this rebellion, but it is merely another form of vanity—failure dressed in excessive self-regard.

    2.
     He who calls himself “Deacon Blues” chooses a name of ironic grandeur. He does not wish to be great, but to appear profound in his brokenness. This too is a form of ambition—narcissism inverted and dipped in bourbon.

    3.
     The world offers two false promises: the applause of others and the nobility of being misunderstood. Deacon Blues seeks the latter, not because it is better, but because it hurts less to fail on one’s own terms than to succeed on another’s.

    4.
     To live in the margins and call it freedom—this is man’s trick. He flees from the burden of excellence and cloaks his retreat in poetry. But exile, chosen for aesthetic reasons, is still a form of cowardice.

    5.
     He dreams of learning to work the saxophone, not to make music, but to be seen as one who has suffered for his art. In this, he is like those who wish to be martyrs, not for truth, but for drama.

    6.
     “Drink Scotch whisky all night long and die behind the wheel.” Thus he crowns his life not with virtue, but with stylized destruction. He does not want to be saved—only to be mourned beautifully.

    7.
     Deacon Blues wants a name, not a self. He believes identity is a lyric he can write into being. But names do not change the soul, only the soundtrack to its delusions.

  • The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    About ten years ago, I found myself standing on the sun-scorched lawn outside the campus library, chatting with a colleague who was edging into his sixties. I was freshly minted into my early fifties, just far enough along to start scanning the horizon for signs of irrelevance. Naturally, our conversation slid into that black hole topic older academics can’t resist: retirement—or, as my colleague eloquently rebranded it, “a form of extinction.” According to him, the day you stop teaching is the day your name starts sliding off the whiteboard of history. You don’t just stop working—you vanish. The world changes its locks, and your keycard stops scanning.

    From there, the conversation took its next logical step—death. And that’s when I said something that was equal parts earnest and glib:
    “Even at my lowest, most gut-punched moments, I’ve always had this strange, burning desire not only to live—but to never die.”
    Why? Because I am possessed by a compulsive need to know how it all turns out.

    On the grand scale:
    Was Martin Luther King Jr. right? Does the moral arc of the universe really bend toward justice—or is it more like a warped coat hanger, twisted in a fit of cosmic indifference?
    Will humanity eventually outgrow its primal stupidity and evolve into a species guided by reason?
    Or will we just become meat-bots—part flesh, part firmware—hunched under the cold glow of the Tech Lords who now sell us grief as a service?
    Will thinking, one day, come in capsule form—a sort of Philosophy 101 chewable tablet for those who can’t be bothered?

    But my curiosity isn’t all grandiloquent and philosophical. I want to know the dumb stuff, too.
    Who’s going to win the Super Bowl?
    What will dethrone the current Netflix darling?
    Who will succeed Salma Hayek as the reigning goddess of unattainable beauty?

    Like every other poor soul conscripted onto Planet Earth, I didn’t ask to be born. But now that I’m here, uninvited and overcommitted, I can’t help it—I want to see how this mess plays out.

    Still, I sometimes wonder: Am I just a naive late bloomer clinging to a plot twist that isn’t coming?
    Is there some ancient nihilist out there—smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and muttering aphorisms in a grim little café—who would look at me and sneer, “What’s the fuss, kid? It’s all the same. Same story, different soundtrack.”

    Maybe.
    But I think there’s a stubborn ember in me that keeps expecting irony to trump monotony, that believes the cynic’s spreadsheet of life’s futility has a few formula errors. Maybe my refusal to give up on surprise is what keeps my inner candle burning.

    And maybe, just maybe, that makes me an optimist in exile—still walking the fence between wonder and weary resignation, while the true cynics stand on the other side, arms crossed, whispering,
    “Don’t worry, you’ll be like us soon enough.”

  • I Am My Own Audiobook: A Washed-Up Reader’s Redemption Arc

    I Am My Own Audiobook: A Washed-Up Reader’s Redemption Arc

    After four decades of teaching college writing, I now find myself plagued by a humiliating truth: my reading habits have withered into something more decorative than devout. In my twenties, I devoured two books a week like a literary piranha. Now, I manage a limp 30-minute bedtime reading session before drooling onto the page like a narcoleptic bookworm. Call it aging, call it digital distraction, or—as I like to tell myself in moments of flattering delusion—call it undiagnosed ADHD. Whatever the cause, my reading stamina has become a cautionary tale.

    If I want to do anything resembling real, rigorous reading, I’ve learned to prop myself between two 27-inch screens like a cyborg monk: one monitor displaying the sacred text, the other open to Google Docs so I can take notes, argue with myself, and shame my inner skimmer into paying attention. This is not pleasure reading. This is performance reading—a controlled environment designed to bully my mind into staying in the room. If a book so much as looks at me funny, I’ll click over to email.

    But something strange has happened: I’ve become a better listener than reader. I now “read” through Audible with more duration and intensity than I’ve mustered with paper in years. Especially with nonfiction, the audiobook format feels less like cheating and more like a form of literary intravenous drip—direct, efficient, and oddly intimate. That’s why a recent blurb in The New Yorker caught my eye: Peter Szendy’s Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks isn’t just an academic tour through literary history—it’s a philosophical rebranding of the audiobook experience.

    Szendy resurrects a long-lost distinction between two roles: the reader (the person decoding text) and the readee (the listener, the audience of the reading). Since antiquity, he notes, most literature wasn’t read—it was heard. We were, for most of human history, listenees. Silent, solo reading is a relatively recent phenomenon, and yet we’ve somehow crowned it the gold standard of literary engagement. Szendy isn’t buying it. In fact, he argues for the emancipation of the readee—a manifesto that practically throws confetti over the return of orality via Audible.

    And here’s the kicker: even when we read to ourselves, we’re still listenees. We are listening to our own interior narration. We are, in essence, narrating to ourselves. Szendy suggests that when we read, we play both roles: the voice and the ear, the actor and the audience. And when we listen to a book, we are doing something ancient, dignified, and sacred—not some degraded, dumbed-down version of real reading.

    So yes, maybe I’m a fallen reader, a man who used to crush Dostoevsky before breakfast but now requires high-tech scaffolding just to get through a paragraph. But thanks to Szendy, I can now see myself as a kind of restored readee—part monk, part machine, part audiobook in human form. Not a failure of attention, but a return to tradition. And if my bedtime ritual now sounds more like a podcast than a prayer, well… Plato probably would’ve approved.

  • Nostalgia Is a Liar and a Thief

    Nostalgia Is a Liar and a Thief

    Romanticizing the past isn’t just foolish—it’s morally bankrupt. To coddle nostalgia is to buy into the comforting lie that things were once better, purer, simpler. They weren’t. That “beautiful past” you’re pining for? Fiction. A curated highlight reel edited by your dopamine-addled memory. In clinging to it, you’re not just turning your back on the present—you’re scorning the real, imperfect people around you in favor of ghostly caricatures from a fantasy world.

    Worse, nostalgia doesn’t just lie—it sedates. It lulls you into a syrupy, maudlin stupor where forward motion feels sacrilegious. Why build something new when your mind’s already rented a timeshare in 1983? The more you indulge it, the more you stall out—emotionally, spiritually, and socially.

    And let’s not ignore the narcissism at its core. Nostalgia gives self-pity a golden frame. You’re not grieving a lost time; you’re grieving the version of yourself you imagined you were back then. The tragedy? That person never existed. You’ve built an altar to an illusion—and now you’re feeding it your present.

    In the end, nostalgia doesn’t connect you to anything. It isolates you. It invents a wound and then forces you to mourn it. Regret follows, not because you lost something real, but because you’ve convinced yourself you did. It’s time to stop romanticizing the fog and start walking through it.

  • Why Ritualized Combat Still Needs a Line You Don’t Cross

    Why Ritualized Combat Still Needs a Line You Don’t Cross

    In The Professor in the Cage, Jonathan Gottschall argues that sports like football aren’t just games—they’re stylized duels, ritualized combat wrapped in pads and broadcast rights, and they function on one essential currency: honor. Strip away the cleats and helmets, and you’re left with the same ancient male impulse—to fight, to dominate, and to prove you’re not the rabbit in a room full of wolves.

    But here’s the twist Gottschall doesn’t miss: even in the most violent games, there are rules—rituals that separate man from animal, performance from savagery. The football field, the octagon, the prison yard, the nightclub—they’re all arenas of testosterone-laced theater where men assert dominance, but with an agreed-upon script. Break that script, and you don’t just commit a foul—you commit a cultural sin.

    Trash Talk, But Make It Sacred

    We tend to think of trash talk as disrespectful—and, sure, it often is. But it’s also part of the ritual. Mind games, verbal jabs, icy stares, even the headbutt-in-slow-motion during a coin toss—it’s all within the monkey dance. The key is: you stay within the choreography. There’s a line you don’t cross.

    Bill Romanowski didn’t just cross the line—he nuked it. In 1998, the white Denver Broncos linebacker spit on Black 49ers receiver J.J. Stokes. Not trash talk. Not gamesmanship. Spit. A loaded gesture, freighted with the filth of American racial history—slavery, Jim Crow, the days when white men spat on Black men to reduce them to less than human.

    Romanowski’s act wasn’t just disgusting. It was ritual desecration. So offensive, his own teammates were furious. Shannon Sharpe, on national television, looked ready to turn in his mic for a helmet and hunt Romo down himself. Tom Jackson—veteran linebacker, no stranger to violence—said it plain: “If a white man had spit on me, I’d have told him, ‘Do it again and I’ll kill you.’”

    That’s the level of violation we’re talking about. Because saliva isn’t just gross—it’s symbolic. In the world of ritualized combat, putting your spit on someone is not communication—it’s provocation. It’s the opening move in a fight, not a play.

    The Gum on the Ashtray: A Nightclub Parable

    Gottschall’s theory doesn’t just live on the field. I’ve seen it firsthand—in 1989, at a nightclub in Bakersfield. I was a new writing instructor, sitting with some Nigerian colleagues, when a crew of men—hardened, street-weathered, violent-looking—decided they didn’t like our presence. One of them walked over, pulled the gum from his mouth, smashed it into our ashtray with theatrical contempt, and walked off.

    Let me decode that for you: he spit on our table without actually spitting. He made a saliva-based gesture designed to start something. And the unspoken law was clear: respond, or leave and accept that you’ve been punked.

    I left. Because I wasn’t ready to fight five guys who looked like they’d fought their way out of worse places than any writing conference I’d ever attended.

    But the principle was unmistakable: once the ritual starts, you have to define yourself. Are you food, or are you the one eating?

    The Prison Equation: No Bananas, No Mercy

    Gottschall brings it full circle with prison—the pressure cooker of male hierarchy. There, the rules are stripped to the bone. If you don’t retaliate, you don’t just lose a banana—you lose your humanity. You become “the rabbit.” The food. The one they take from, laugh at, exploit.

    He writes, “If you fail the heart test, the other inmates will take your food, exploit your commissary privileges, extort your relatives, and make you a slave.” In other words: show weakness once, and you’re done.

    Football, Violence, and the Unspoken Law

    Now take that mindset to football. When a linebacker stares down a quarterback after a sack, or a cornerback jaw-jacks a wideout after a deflection, they’re not just showing off—they’re broadcasting: “I am not the rabbit. I am not food.”

    That’s why we watch. Beneath the helmets, we’re witnessing status battles in real time, under stadium lights. It’s ritualized war with a rulebook and highlight reels. And we love it. Because something ancient inside us recognizes the stakes, even if we don’t name them.

    But even here, in the modern Coliseum, the honor code must hold. Break it—spit on your opponent, stomp a head, ignore the script—and you’re not just a dirty player. You’re a violator of the sacred order. You’re chaos in a world that depends on containment.

    Conclusion: Spit Happens, But It Shouldn’t

    So yes, ritualized combat is part of our DNA. We can’t scrub it out any more than we can stop blinking. But it only works when the rules of engagement are followed. Trash talk is theater. Respect is the scaffolding. And spit—literal or symbolic—is a bridge too far.

    Because when men fight, they must fight with rules.
    And if they don’t?
    It’s not sport anymore.
    It’s just violence.

  • The Gorilla Pecs of Glory: Why We Watch Men Smash Each Other and Call It Civilization

    The Gorilla Pecs of Glory: Why We Watch Men Smash Each Other and Call It Civilization

    According to Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch, football isn’t just sport—it’s ritualized combat. A tamed brawl. A socially sanctioned way to indulge our primal appetite for domination without devolving into street warfare. He calls it the monkey dance, a primitive ballet with rules, referees, and halftime shows. I prefer a less polite term: the gorilla pec slap—because that’s what it is. Chest-thumping, ego-flexing theater that feels a lot less like play and a lot more like primal pageantry.

    Gottschall’s thesis is blunt and unapologetic: we are wired for battle. From schoolyard scuffles to rap battles to cage fights, we seek structured conflict to test status, establish pecking orders, and avoid descending into outright anarchy. Whether it’s verbal warfare on stage or two linemen colliding at full speed, it’s all the same story: controlled aggression keeping the real chaos at bay.

    And the stakes, bizarrely, are moral. Gottschall suggests that these “battles with a code” serve a civilizing function: they allow men—yes, mostly men—to hash out dominance hierarchies without burning down the village. Ritualized violence, he argues, is less toxic than the alternative: unpredictable, unsanctioned brutality.

    This raises an uncomfortable truth about the function of sports: men need to know where they stand. The pecking order isn’t just some caveman relic—it’s a form of psychological infrastructure. Everyone knowing their “lane” may sound medieval, but Gottschall insists it’s what prevents society from devolving into a Mad Max sequel. And frankly, he might be right.

    Ritualized battle—be it on the field, the mat, or the mic—feeds something deeper than bloodlust. It gives us narrative. Stories of courage, humiliation, redemption, and collapse. We see ourselves in those stories. We crave them not just for the carnage but for what they reveal: who we are when the pressure spikes and the lights come on.

    Still, some social critics aren’t buying it. They see football and its violent cousins as nothing more than toxic masculinity wrapped in billion-dollar branding. To them, it’s hero cosplay for emotionally stunted men. But Gottschall flips that argument: suppressing these instincts doesn’t make us enlightened—it just makes us dishonest.

    That said, even if we accept that ritualized combat is hardwired and necessary, we’re still left with a lingering question: at what cost? The bodies pile up. The brains deteriorate. Athletes become avatars for our fantasies—and casualties of them, too. Their injuries are real, their careers often short, and their pain long. And yet the spectacle rolls on.

    Meanwhile, the sports industry—like any good dealer—knows how to keep us hooked. Betting apps ping our dopamine receptors, endless content fills our social feeds, and we’re suddenly refreshing stats at 2 a.m. like Wall Street analysts chasing fantasy league glory. What started as play becomes compulsion. Hero worship mutates into dependency. Sports betting morphs into moral rot.

    So where does that leave the thinking sports fan? Are we doomed to either overanalyze the game into oblivion or become wide-eyed addicts to its spectacle? Can we still enjoy a bone-rattling hit without silently calculating the CTE risk?

    There are no easy answers. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: sports are too good at what they do. They hijack our lizard brains, feed our tribal instincts, and offer us drama cleaner than politics, safer than war, and more thrilling than any sermon.

    And like those mythical gorillas slapping their chests in the mist, we’ll keep watching. Because beneath the helmets and highlight reels, we’re not just watching games—we’re watching ourselves. And that, more than anything, is the real addiction.

  • An Argument for Healthy Denial: A Self-Help Sermon for the Self-Indulgent

    An Argument for Healthy Denial: A Self-Help Sermon for the Self-Indulgent

    Let’s be honest. You’ve tried the soft-glow Instagram mantras and the overpriced journaling apps. You’ve danced with dopamine like a lab rat in a Vegas casino, chasing every ping, snack, scroll, and retail hit like it was divine revelation. And where has it gotten you? Nowhere worth photographing.

    So here’s your wake-up call, preacher-style, minus the tambourine: take care of your damn self. Not in that syrupy “self-care” way that means binge-watching prestige TV while mainlining DoorDash and calling it therapy. No, I mean the kind of care that involves discipline, boundaries, and strategic discomfort—also known as healthy denial.

    Phil Stutz is right: your relationship with your body, your soul, and the people around you depends on your ability to say “no” like your life depends on it—because it does. Not “no” out of self-loathing or ascetic performance art, but “no” because you actually give a damn about the human being you’re becoming.

    You don’t skip the donut because you hate yourself. You skip it because you respect yourself enough not to let your biology, your boredom, or your bastardized idea of “treat culture” run your life. You are not a French bulldog in a baby stroller. You are a fully grown adult with responsibilities and, presumably, a spine.

    And no, this isn’t some narcissistic glow-up project. You’re not chiseling your abs to become a thirst trap or launching your “healing journey” vlog. This is not a TED Talk in the making. This is about getting better because the people who count on you deserve more than your bloated, distracted, half-baked self. Society doesn’t need another dopamine junkie sucking on algorithmic pacifiers while pretending to be “living their truth.”

    Yes, some will tell you denial is toxic, puritanical, even abusive. These are the same people who believe “treating yourself” five times a day is a human right. But let’s get something straight: healthy denial is not self-hatred—it’s self-respect with a steel backbone. You deny yourself garbage because you’re aiming for gold. You crave meaning, not just muffins. You want to die with fewer regrets, not a legacy of half-eaten potato chips and unread terms of service.

    So here’s what you’re going to do.
    You will stop snacking. Period.
    You will stop scrolling like a brainless peasant begging for dopamine crumbs from tech oligarchs.
    You will stop curating materialistic trinkets—yes, even the “limited edition” timepieces—and broadcasting your conspicuous consumption like a status-starved magpie.

    Instead, you will create.

    You will write.
    You will make music.
    You will work out with the devotion of a monk in a burning temple.
    You will show up for your family like it matters—because it does.
    And you will treat your time on this spinning sphere not as an entitlement but as the limited-edition miracle it is.

    This is not about being better than others. This is about being better for others. And if that sounds corny to you, maybe you’ve been swimming in irony so long you’ve forgotten what sincerity feels like.

    Here’s your new gospel: eat clean, think clearly, serve humbly, and waste nothing—not even time.

    Now get to it. The clock is ticking, and you’re not getting any younger.

  • Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? Elaine Pagels and the Search for a Transformative Truth

    Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? Elaine Pagels and the Search for a Transformative Truth

    In Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, Elaine Pagels—now in her eighties—recounts her lifelong obsession with the figure of Jesus, not as a doctrine, but as a presence: a message of love and transformation in a world saturated with darkness. From a young age, she noticed a glaring contradiction. The Jesus of her local Methodist church was soft-edged and suburban, tailored to soothe middle-class anxieties. Meanwhile, the Catholic church she visited with a friend introduced her to a far more shadowy vision—one where sin reigned, and a priest, cloaked in mystery, handed out judgment like grades on a cosmic report card.

    Hungry for something real, she threw herself into faith. She attended a Billy Graham “Crusade for Christ” at Candlestick Park and, in a moment of tearful surrender, accepted Jesus as her savior and joined an evangelical church. But the honeymoon didn’t last. When her Jewish friend died in a car accident, she turned to her church community in anguish—only to be met with a chilling theological shrug. Was he saved? they asked. When she answered no, they calmly consigned him to hell. That moment of smug certainty shattered something in her. She walked away from the church—and never looked back.

    But the ache didn’t go away. Instead, it deepened into a lifelong question: Why did the story of Jesus strike me so deeply? Was it about Jesus himself? Or was it something broader—something in the architecture of religious experience that opened people up to realities they couldn’t explain?

    That question led her to Harvard’s Study of Religion, where she discovered a Christianity far more fractured, contested, and diverse than the one she’d been taught. The four canonical gospels were only a sliver of the story. Written decades after Jesus’ death, by authors who retrofitted their names to evoke apostolic authority, these texts were shaped by literary tropes and cultural myths of the Greco-Roman world. Beyond them were the apocryphal books and the Gnostic gospels, each offering competing visions of who Jesus was. Even after Constantine made Christianity the state religion and tried to enforce orthodoxy, believers couldn’t agree on what “true” Christianity actually meant.

    Still, Pagels returns to the core question: What kind of person was Jesus? Why did he endure when gods like Zeus faded into mythology? Why are there so many versions of him—prophet, rebel, savior, mystic, divine son?

    As she peels back the layers of history and doctrine, Pagels isn’t looking for the “correct” Jesus. She’s looking for the one that moved her, the one that cracked open the world with possibility. And in this, her search feels less like an academic pursuit and more like a human longing—to believe that, in spite of the noise and contradiction, there is still something true at the heart of the story.

    Like the old game show To Tell the Truth, we’re all watching the contestants declare, “I am Jesus.” And the question still echoes: Will the real Jesus please stand up?

    ***

    As usual, Pagels’ book is engaging. As I read about Matthew and Luke’s different accounts of the virgin birth and church people blithely telling Pagels that her Jewish friend is in hell, it occurs to me that I despise piety; but moral debauchery and smug nihilism are just as odious. 

  • The Maudlin Man: On Watches, Social Media, and the Narcissism of Meaningless Eagerness

    The Maudlin Man: On Watches, Social Media, and the Narcissism of Meaningless Eagerness

    There is no sound more pathetic than the cry of the maudlin man—the self-appointed tragic hero of his own YouTube channel, sobbing between cuts of B-roll footage of his watch collection, mistaking emotional leakage for authenticity. He clutches his diver watches like talismans, convinced that the right lume or bezel action will finally make him whole. But his affliction is deeper than poor taste or consumer excess. He is in love with his own sorrow. And worse, he films it.

    Cicero had a word for this spectacle: maudlin. It was not meant kindly. The maudlin man is drunk on his own emotional silliness, addicted to contrived drama, and tragically proud of his displays of overstated sorrow and giddy exuberance. In his pursuit of happiness, he has mistaken cheap feeling for moral virtue, dopamine for character, sentiment for wisdom. He is not mature. He is a teenager with a $5,000 Tudor.

    The watch hobby, for all its mechanical beauty and aesthetic value, has become a theater of narcissistic self-performance. The YouTube wrist-roll has replaced the confessional. The thumbnail becomes the new sacred icon: face frozen mid-epiphany, a timepiece held up like a religious relic. Each upload, each gushing review, is a digital Rolex—plucked, examined, and consumed with trembling fingers and tears in the eyes. The tragedy is not that the watch community is ridiculous (though it often is), but that it has devolved into a factory of performative adolescence.

    It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the pursuit of happiness, as Jeffrey Rosen in The Pursuit of Happiness reminds us, meant the cultivation of moral character. Rosen draws from Franklin, Jefferson, and ultimately Cicero, who taught that happiness came not from pleasure but from the tranquil soul: one unbothered by fear, ambition, or maudlin eagerness. The watch obsessive is none of these things. His soul is rattled, consumed by longing, shaken by regret. He mistakes every new acquisition for a cure, every unboxing for a rebirth. But he is not reborn. He is merely re-dramatizing the same pathology.

    Enter the maudlin man, the inner saboteur. He mocks, he sneers, and he tells the truth: that the maudlin man has no real restraint. That his self-recrimination is as performative as his self-praise. The maudlin man is cruel. He exaggerates the regret that comes from flipping watches like penny stocks; the hollow boast of self-control while our eBay watchlist grows longer by the hour; the dopamine crashes masked by overproduced videos and fake enthusiasm. We are not collectors. We are addicts with ring lights.

    To be addicted to the watch hobby is to be afflicted with a thousand tiny regrets. We regret what we bought, what we sold, what we didn’t buy fast enough. We suffer from wrist rotation anxiety, Holy Grail delusions, false panic, and the creeping horror that we are just men who talk too much about case diameter. Our collections become mausoleums of past mistakes. We are haunted, not healed.

    The only cure—if one exists—is a form of philosophical sobriety. Cicero called it temperance. Franklin called it moral perfection. Phil Stutz calls it staying out of the lower channel. It is the refusal to feed the drama. It is the decision not to narrate your regret as if it were wisdom. It is stepping back, stepping away, and recognizing that sometimes, the most radical act of self-possession is to stop filming.

    This maudlin sickness isn’t limited to the horological hellscape. Social media itself is a dopamine machine engineered to keep us emotionally drunk. We live in a world of curated personas, algorithmic affirmation, and the self-cannibalizing loop of outrage and euphoria. As Kara Swisher notes in Burn Book, the tech elite have weaponized this environment for profit, fueling sociopathy with likes and retweets. They are not gods. They are billionaires who behave like wounded teenagers in private jets.

    It is not a coincidence that the watch obsessive and the tech mogul share the same pathology: a hunger for affirmation masquerading as taste. They are the same creature, only one wears a G-Shock and the other a Richard Mille. Both are drunk on maudlin emotion. Both mistake attention for meaning.

    What, then, is the alternative? It is to shut off the camera. To read. To walk. To live a life not curated but inhabited. To pursue virtue, not validation. To wear one watch and be content. To see, finally, that maudlin self-display is not depth, but decadence.

    So here is the diagnosis, bitter but true: The maudlin man must die. Not literally, but spiritually. He must be silenced so the adult may speak. He must be buried so the man of character can rise. He must be mocked, dissected, exposed, and ultimately exorcised.

    Only then, perhaps, will we stop crying over something as silly as the regret of sold watches we can never get back.

    And maybe—just maybe—stop filming them.