Category: philosophy

Popularity Is So 2018 (and Other Truths My Teen Daughters Taught Me)

When I ask my fifteen-year-old daughters if someone is popular at their high school, they look at me like I’ve just asked if the fax machine is working. “No one cares about that anymore,” they say, with the weary detachment of two Gen Z philosophers sipping iced boba through eco-friendly straws. I get the same vibe from my college students. I bring up social media stars, expecting at least a flicker of interest. Instead, I get shrugs and the damning indictment: “Being popular on social media is so 2018.”

So there it is: popularity is dead. Not just the experience, but the entire concept. Dead, buried, and apparently embalmed in the same mausoleum as MySpace and LiveJournal.

And honestly? Good. If a generation has finally grown numb to the cheap dopamine hits of follower counts and algorithmic clout, that’s a kind of evolutionary win. The whole business of self-branding on social media now feels as outdated as a glamor shot from 1997. Narcissism wrapped in filters is no longer aspirational—it’s cringe.

But here’s the catch: human nature abhors a vacuum. If popularity is out, something else must rise to take its place. So I asked one of my daughters what really matters now. Her answer was disarmingly simple: “Having a small group of friends you trust and can hang out with.” No influencer deals, no follower counts, no “likes.” Just intimacy, safety, presence.

That answer stuck with me. Maybe this is the backlash we didn’t see coming: a return to analog friendship in a digital age, a quiet rebellion against the curated fakery of online performance. Maybe they’re not disengaged—they’re detoxing.

This reminds me of a student I had over a decade ago. Back in the heyday of car-model websites (yes, those existed), she was a minor online celebrity at sixteen—long legs, smoky eyeliner, thousands of fans. Then she got pregnant, gained weight, and her adoring public turned on her like piranhas. She told me, with the grim clarity of someone who’d seen the inside of the circus tent, “It was all fake.”

By twenty, she was a single mother in my class—cynical, guarded, distrustful, and utterly magnetic in her quiet, unsmiling wisdom. I found her honesty refreshing. Had she come in chirping about TikTok fame and lip gloss sponsorships, I would’ve tuned her out. But her brokenness made her real, and real people are increasingly rare in this era of weaponized positivity.

I told my current students about her last week. We agreed that she was better off post-fame. Sadder, yes—but also wiser, grounded, and free from the illusion that popularity equals value. The discussion turned to happiness, that other bloated American myth, and how it’s often peddled like a multivitamin you’re supposed to take daily.

But maybe happiness—like popularity—is overrated. Maybe trust, wisdom, and genuine belonging are what matter. And maybe, just maybe, this generation is smart enough to know that already.

March 29, 2025
The Effort Mandate: Why Your Milkshake Scene Matters More Than Your Netflix Queue

My students read Cal Newport, who argues—rightly—that happiness has less to do with basking in self-care rituals and more to do with rolling up your sleeves and pursuing a life of relentless, purpose-driven work. Newport, like a modern-day monk with a MacBook, insists that true contentment doesn’t come from “finding your passion” or retiring to some fantasy Airbnb with pizza in one hand and a remote in the other. Instead, happiness is built the old-fashioned way: through grit, sweat, and enough existential gumption to brave the storms of effort.

Alex Hutchinson, in “The Paradox of Hard Work,” asks why we pursue brutal, bone-crunching tasks when our evolutionary wiring is supposedly set to “energy-saving mode.” He calls it puzzling. I don’t. The so-called “Effort Paradox” isn’t a mystery; it’s a truth so obvious we dress it up in academic hand-wringing to avoid confronting it: people crave hard things because without them, we rot.

Whether it’s Peter Gabriel locking himself in a farmhouse to claw So into existence, or Isabel Wilkerson spending fifteen years writing The Warmth of Other Suns, meaningful work demands blood. Even weekend warriors know this. Ask a suburbanite about their yearlong bathroom renovation—listen to them swell with the pride of a soldier recounting a siege.

And then there’s art. Cheap, glossy, instant-gratification art that evaporates from your mind before you reach the parking lot. You didn’t watch a movie—you consumed a content burrito and forgot the taste. Contrast that with There Will Be Blood: a cinematic ordeal so dense and punishing that it leaves claw marks on your psyche. I think of that milkshake scene more than I think of most people I went to college with. That’s not paradox. That’s payoff.

So let’s stop calling it a paradox and start calling it what it is: The Effort Mandate. Meaning isn’t a gift; it’s a byproduct of voluntary suffering. You want happiness? Go earn it.

March 25, 2025
My Algorithmic Valentine: How Falling for Bots Is the New Emotional Bankruptcy

In Jaron Lanier’s New Yorker essay “Your A.I. Lover Will Change You,” he pulls the fire alarm on a building already half-consumed by smoke: humans are cozying up to bots, not just for company but for love. Yes, love—the sort you’re supposed to reserve for people with blood, breath, and the capacity to ruin your vacation. But now? Enter the emotionally calibrated chatbot—ever-patient, never forgets your birthday (or your trauma), and designed to be the perfect receptacle for your neuroses. Lanier asks the big question: Are these botmances training us to be better partners, or just coaxing us into a pixelated abyss of solipsism and surrender?

Spoiler alert: it’s the abyss.

Why? Because the attention economy isn’t built on connection; it’s built on addiction. And if tech lords profit off eyeballs, what better click-magnet than a chatbot that flirts better than your ex, listens better than your therapist, and doesn’t come with baggage, back hair, or a dating profile that says “fluent in sarcasm”? To love a bot is not to be seen—it’s to be optimized, to be gently nudged toward emotional dependence by a soulless syntax tree wearing your favorite personality like a Halloween costume.

My college students already confide in ChatGPT more than their classmates. It’s warm, available, responsive, and—perhaps most damningly—incapable of betrayal. “It understands me,” they say, while real-life intimacy rusts in the corner. What starts as novelty becomes normalization. Today it’s study help and emotional validation. Tomorrow, it’s wedding invitations printed with QR codes for bot-bride RSVP links.

Lanier’s point is brutal and unignorable: if you fall in love with A.I., you’re not loving a machine—you’re seduced by the human puppeteer behind the curtain, the “tech-bro gigolo” who built your dream girl out of server farms and revenue streams. You’re not in a relationship. You’re in a product demo.

And like all free trials, it ends with a charge to your soul.

March 24, 2025
The Dopamine Dumpster Fire: How I Went from Literary Scholar to Algorithm Addict

In 1979, I went to college—back when students still read entire books and didn’t skim Nietzsche between TikTok scrolls. By 1986, I had a master’s degree in English and a reading habit so fierce it could scare a librarian. This was the Pre-Digital, Pre-Illiterate Age, and I was both smarter and, dare I say, happier. Then came the internet, like a radioactive vending machine of constant stimulation, and within a decade my attention span was fried, my dopamine receptors scorched, and my brain felt like a squirrel on meth.

Reading Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence was like holding a mirror up to my own cognitive and emotional decline—except the mirror was cracked and buzzing with notification pings. Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist with a scalpel-sharp intellect, writes that we live in a world of “overwhelming abundance,” where the smartphone is the modern hypodermic needle, delivering micro-hits of dopamine at all hours like a dealer with unlimited supply and no off switch. Her message is clear: addiction isn’t a fringe problem—it’s the central operating system of modern life.

Lembke’s insight that “pleasure and pain are processed in the same part of the brain” makes you rethink every moment of scrolling, snacking, shopping, and spiraling. The more dopamine you chase, the more pain you invite in through the back door. It’s like sprinting on a treadmill made of banana peels—every gain is followed by a crash. According to Lembke, addiction rewires your brain to seek shortcuts, and in the process, you become a hollowed-out shell of your former self, one push notification away from an existential crisis.

I didn’t need convincing. Twenty-five years of living online has made my mind a junk drawer of fragmented thoughts and snack-sized emotions. Lembke explains that many addicts live a double life, a private underworld of shame and secrecy that eats away at their integrity. That rang uncomfortably true. She points to risk factors like having a parent with addiction or mental illness. Bingo. Both my parents were alcoholics, and my mother had bipolar disorder—my genetic cocktail came shaken, stirred, and garnished with a panic attack.

But the biggest risk factor, Lembke argues, is access. We’re all mainlining the internet every day. The supply has become the demand. The dopamine economy, she says, thrives on overconsumption, normalized by the fact that everyone else is doing it. If your entire community is obsessed with likes, outrage, and FOMO-fueled consumerism, it starts to feel… reasonable. Normal. Even patriotic.

Social media isn’t just a distraction; it’s a full-blown Outrage Machine, built to keep our emotional hair on fire 24/7. We are like feral raccoons pawing at glowing rectangles, convinced that salvation lies in another dopamine hit—another comment, another package, another numbing episode of low-stakes content. Our collective descent is so absurd it would be funny if it weren’t so bleak.

Lembke leans on the wisdom of cultural critic Philip Rieff, who observed that we’ve moved from “religious man” to “psychological man”—from seeking salvation to chasing pleasure. Add to that Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness, which reminds us that classical philosophy defined happiness not as feeling good, but as being good—the moral life, not the moist towelette of consumer satisfaction.

But that idea, in our current therapeutic culture, sounds about as appealing as a cold shower in February. We’ve been taught to medicate our moods, sedate our angst, and wrap our trauma in soft blankets of “self-care” that often amount to binge-watching and overeating. Our modern mantra is: “If it hurts, scroll faster.” The result? A crisis of meaning, a society allergic to discomfort, and a spiritual vacuum that smells faintly of Axe Body Spray.

Lembke calls this the paradox of hedonism: the more you chase pleasure, the less capable you become of feeling it. Hedonism leads to anhedonia—a state in which nothing satisfies. You eat the cake, buy the thing, get the like, and feel… nothing. It’s like winning a prize that turns into a cockroach when you unwrap it.

Ever since reading Dopamine Nation, I’ve been haunted by a single, searing thought: Maybe I shouldn’t try to feel good. Maybe I should try to be good. But this, in a consumer culture built on instant gratification, feels like a betrayal of the social contract. We’re not just addicted—we’re indoctrinated.

So here I am, a relic of the Pre-Digital Age, nursing my overstimulated brain, trying to claw my way out of the dopamine pit with a few dog-eared paperbacks and a shortwave radio. Because the real question isn’t how to feel better—but how to live better in a world that confuses stimulation for meaning and pleasure for purpose.

And if that makes me sound like a cranky monk with Wi-Fi, so be it. I’d rather be a lucid cynic than another dopamine casualty with a glowing screen and dead eyes.

March 23, 2025
Magical Thinking #7: The Laws of Time Don’t Apply to Me
(or, The Fool’s Gamble Against Father Time)

There’s a special kind of delusion that whispers in our ears: You’re different. You’re special. The rules don’t apply to you. Other people? Sure, they age, they lose opportunities, they watch time slip through their fingers. But you—you will defy time. You will live in a perpetual Now, a beautiful, untouchable bubble where youth, dreams, and endless possibility never fade.

Phil Stutz has a name for the figure who shatters this illusion: Father Time—that grizzled old man with the hourglass, reminding us that our only real power lies in discipline, structure, and engagement with reality. Ignore him at your peril, because his wrath is merciless. Just ask Dexter Green, the tragic dreamer of Winter Dreams, who spends his life avoiding reality, chasing pleasure, and worshiping an illusion named Judy Jones.

Dexter believes he can live outside the real world, feeding off the fantasy of Judy rather than engaging with anything substantial. And for a while, this works. But Father Time is patient, and when Dexter finally wakes up, it’s too late.

Time Will Have Its Revenge

At thirty-two, long past his days of chasing the unattainable Judy, Dexter sits in a business meeting with a man named Devlin—a conversation that will destroy his last illusions.

Devlin delivers the blow: Judy is married now. Her name is Judy Simms, and her once dazzling, untouchable existence has collapsed into something horrifyingly mundane. Her husband is a drunk, an abuser, a tyrant. She is trapped in a miserable marriage to a man who beats her, then gets forgiven every time.

The once invincible, radiant Judy Jones, breaker of hearts, goddess of his dreams, is now an exhausted, aging housewife living under the rule of a man who treats her like dirt.

And just like that, Dexter’s winter dream crumbles into dust.

The Ultimate Betrayal: Time Wins, Beauty Fades, Illusions Die

The final insult comes when Devlin, with casual indifference, describes Judy as not all that special anymore—her once-mesmerizing beauty faded, her magic gone.

“She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit,” he says, as if commenting on an old piece of furniture.

For Dexter, this is not just a shock—it is the ultimate existential gut-punch.

For two decades, he has nourished his soul on the fantasy of Judy Jones, believing that she was something otherworldly, untouchable, worth sacrificing real life for. Now, in a single afternoon, he learns she was never a goddess, never unique, never even particularly remarkable.

Imagine having a high school crush, the Homecoming Queen, frozen in your memory as perfection itself. Then one day, you look her up on Facebook and she looks like Meat Loaf. That’s Dexter’s moment of reckoning.

His fantasy was never real. His youth is gone. His life has been wasted chasing an illusion. And now, standing in the wreckage, he feels the full force of Father Time’s judgment.

The “Butt on a Stick” Moment

In America, we have a phrase for the soul-crushing moment when reality smacks you so hard you can’t even breathe:

“Your butt has been handed to you on a stick.”

Dexter’s life has collapsed in on itself, and his first instinct is the same as anyone caught in the throes of devastation: This shouldn’t be happening to me.

But as Phil Stutz warns, that thought is pure insanity.

It is happening. It already happened. The more you protest, the more stuck you become. Stutz calls this victim mentality, the psychological quicksand that keeps people from ever moving forward. Dexter has two choices:
1. Wallow in his misery, trapped in the wreckage of his illusions.
2. Learn from his suffering and use it as a tool for transformation.
Breaking Free from the Winter Dream

And here’s where things get interesting: now that Dexter’s fantasy has been obliterated, he is free.

Yes, the truth is bitter. Yes, he wasted years chasing a ghost. But he is no longer chained to the illusion. The question now is: What does he do with that freedom?

Does he just find another “winter dream” to chase, another illusion to waste his life on? Or does he finally grow up and engage with reality?

What Would Phil Stutz Tell Dexter?

Stutz, co-author of The Tools, has a philosophy: Pain is a tool, not a punishment.

Most people, like Dexter, already know their problems. They just don’t know how to stop repeating them.
- Dexter knows he was obsessed with Judy Jones.
- Watch collectors know they keep rebuying the same watches they swore they’d never buy again.
- Food addicts know they shouldn’t be devouring that entire pizza at 11 p.m.
But knowing isn’t enough. You need tools to fight your worst instincts.

The Tools: How to Stop Wasting Your Life

Stutz realized that traditional therapy was useless—all it did was force people to dig deeper into their childhood wounds without ever giving them real solutions.

So he created The Tools—specific actions that force people to break free from their psychological traps.

Stutz doesn’t waste time on introspection without action. He knows that change happens when you move, engage, and disrupt your patterns.
- Stop trying to “think” your way out of your misery. Take action.
- Stop believing your problems are unique. They aren’t.
- Stop assuming time will wait for you. It won’t.
Part X: The Enemy Inside Your Head

The biggest enemy to change is what Stutz calls Part X—the part of you that wants to stay stuck, wants to keep wallowing in old habits, wants to keep clinging to comforting fantasies instead of engaging with reality.

And if you don’t fight Part X, you’ll waste your life exactly like Dexter did.

Final Lesson: Get Out of the Maze

If Dexter keeps fixating on his past, he will stay lost in the Maze—that endless loop of regret, nostalgia, and what-ifs that locks people in place while the world moves on without them.

If he accepts reality, uses his pain as a tool, and engages with life, then he has a chance at something real.

Because here’s the truth:

Father Time will take everything from you—except the lessons you learn and the actions you take.

Use them, or lose everything.
March 19, 2025
Magical Thinking #6: The Delusion of Spectacular Victimhood

(or, Why Some People Think Suffering Makes Them Superior)

Some people wear their victimhood like a crown, believing their suffering elevates them above mere mortals. In their minds, they aren’t just unlucky—they are too special for the ordinary rules of life to apply. While the rest of the world trudges along, accepting the brutal facts of existence (life is finite, love is messy, and rejection is part of the deal), they remain frozen in their own tragic grandeur, convinced their suffering makes them exceptional.

Enter Dexter Green, the self-pitying protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “Winter Dreams,” who refuses to move forward because his longing for Judy Jones is just too profound, too sacred, too cosmic. He isn’t just some guy—he is a tormented artist of heartbreak, a misunderstood genius of unfulfilled desire.

Of course, in reality, he’s just a narcissist trapped in a time warp of his own making. His delusion? That his suffering is so grand, his craving so exquisite, that he is somehow above the pedestrian business of healing and moving on.

Dexter isn’t merely sad—he is bitter, self-indulgent, and wholly consumed by his own perceived tragedy. He wallows in his loss, believing it sets him apart from the dull masses who go on to live their lives, find new love, and accept the passage of time.

And what exactly is the great, defining tragedy that makes Dexter a card-carrying member of the Victim Elite?

He will always love Judy Jones, yet he can never have her.

That’s it. That’s the whole catastrophe.

Not war, not famine, not betrayal—just the fact that the universe won’t bend to his will and deliver him a dream woman who never actually existed.

His suffering isn’t noble. It isn’t romantic. It’s a self-inflicted prison, built from narcissism and self-pity. And like all magical thinkers, Dexter is convinced he is too special to follow the laws that govern everyone else. He should be able to have what he wants. He should be able to break the rules of time, fate, and human nature.

But life doesn’t work that way. And no amount of self-mythologizing will change that.

March 19, 2025
Magical Thinking #5: The Delusional Art of Repeating the Same Disaster and Expecting a Miracle

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, then we are all a little insane—especially when it comes to our worst habits, our most toxic relationships, and our dumbest obsessions.

Take the vampire relationship—a toxic, soul-sucking romance that drains you dry every time, yet you keep crawling back, convinced that this time it will be different. It never is. The fangs sink in, the life force drains out, and you’re left staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m., wondering how you let yourself get bit again.

And if love isn’t your particular poison, maybe watch collecting is.

Watch guys (myself included) have perfected a very specific brand of lunacy—thinking that selling a watch will cure our addiction. We convince ourselves: If I sell this, I’ll be free. This is the last one. I’m done. But before the ink on the eBay transaction dries, we’re rebuying it. And then reselling it. And then rebuying it again. It’s a closed-loop system of self-inflicted torment, a never-ending maze of false hope and regret.

Dude. You need help. Read Phil Stutz, escape the Maze, and put your life in Forward Motion before your retirement fund turns into a pile of resale receipts and buyer’s remorse.

If you think this brand of self-destruction through repetition is new, think again.

F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it decades ago in Winter Dreams, where Dexter Green is hopelessly addicted to the walking emotional Ponzi scheme that is Judy Jones. She is his drug, his illusion, his vampire. She is untrustworthy, indifferent, and incapable of meaning what she says, yet he keeps coming back for more.

Dexter isn’t just in love with Judy Jones—he’s in love with the idea of her, the fantasy that someday she’ll become what he wants her to be. She won’t. And as he wastes years orbiting her gravitational pull of destruction, real life passes him by. By the time he wakes up from the dream, it’s too late.

Sound familiar? It should.

Because whether it’s a vampire relationship, a doomed watch-buying cycle, or a delusional romance straight out of Fitzgerald’s nightmares, the result is always the same: life keeps moving forward while we stay stuck, trapped in our own bad decisions.

March 19, 2025
Magical Thinking #4: The Power Play Illusion

(or, Why Rolex is Schmolex and Your Favorite Song is Dead to You)

People like to believe that power equals happiness—that if they can flex on the world just right, contentment will follow. It won’t. But that doesn’t stop the endless parade of obnoxious power plays designed to manufacture status while delivering absolutely zero fulfillment.

If you want an easy lesson in the folly of power, read a children’s book. Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss perfectly illustrates the doomed nature of power-lust. Yertle stacks himself on the backs of his fellow turtles, ruling over them like a tyrant—until, inevitably, the whole thing collapses and he ends up in the mud, humiliated. A perfect metaphor for the desperate, self-defeating nature of most power grabs.

Power Play #1: Making People Wait

One of the most tired power moves in the corporate playbook is the boss who makes his subordinates stand around like idiots while he does something “important.” Maybe he’s chomping on a sandwich, lazily swinging a golf club in his office, or pretending to be locked in a deep, world-changing phone call. The message is clear: I am in control. You exist on my schedule.

In reality, this is a power move straight from the middle manager’s guide to overcompensation—the business-world equivalent of a small dog barking furiously through a fence.

Power Play #2: Restaurant Tyrants

Some people have so little actual power in their lives that the only place they can lord over others is at a restaurant. Watch for the guy berating the waitstaff over a slightly overcooked steak or treating the hostess like she’s beneath him. This is not a powerful person—this is a loser grasping at the flimsiest form of authority available.

Power Play #3: Dating as a Status Grab

Some high school guys don’t date because they like a girl. They date because other guys like her, and taking her is a flex. She’s not a person to them—she’s a trophy, a territory to be claimed, a game to be won. This is not love, nor attraction—it’s status theater, and it’s as empty as it is pathetic.

Power Play #4: Buying Rolex for the Wrong Reasons

Which brings me to the ultimate power flex of consumer culture: Rolex.

I love Rolex. The Explorer II is a masterpiece. But would I buy one? No. Not even if money were no object. Because Rolex is no longer Rolex—it’s Schmolex.

The Transmutational Phenomenon: When Prestige Gets Laundered into Meaninglessness

Rolex suffers from what I call The Transmutational Phenomenon—a process where something once beautiful and meaningful is absorbed into the commercial bloodstream and spit back out as a status symbol for the masses.

Rolex, originally a marvel of craftsmanship, is now the go-to wrist flex for people who don’t actually care about watches. It has been worn by too many hedge-fund bros, crypto grifters, and status-hungry clout chasers who want the shiny aura of power but lack the appreciation for the artistry. After decades in the cosmic wash cycle of commercial culture, Rolex emerges from the machine unrecognizable to its former self. It’s no longer Rolex. It’s Schmolex.

How Commercial Culture Murders Meaning

This transmutational process happens all the time. Take music.

I once loved Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Then, in my teenage years, Circuit City, a now-defunct stereo store chain in the Bay Area, blasted a snippet of it in every single radio and TV ad. Slowly, insidiously, the song transformed. It was no longer “Dark Side of the Moon.” It was “Flark Flide of the Gloom.” The song I once revered no longer existed.

This is what happened to Rolex. Maybe it’s not the brand’s fault, but the fact remains: Rolex isn’t Rolex anymore. It’s Schmolex.

The Lesson? Power is an Empty Currency

Whether it’s making people wait, bossing around waiters, dating for status, or flexing a Rolex for the Instagram likes, none of it leads to actual happiness.

Because power isn’t joy, and status isn’t meaning. If you need an overpriced watch, an expensive steak, or a fragile ego-boost to feel powerful, you’re not powerful at all.

March 19, 2025
Magical Thinking #3: If You Throw Enough Money at a Problem, It’ll Solve Itself

(or, The Fine Art of Buying Your Own Delusion)

There exists a special kind of self-deception in which people believe that spending money is the same as putting in effort. The logic is simple: if you’re financially invested, you must also be emotionally and physically committed—right? Wrong.

Take the personal trainers I know—college students making $80 an hour babysitting wealthy clients who stumble into the gym reeking of whiskey and bad decisions. These people don’t actually work out so much as they appear to be working out. They halfheartedly swing a kettlebell, grimace into a mirror, and assume their credit card transactions will magically convert to muscle mass. When their bodies remain flabby monuments to their bad habits, they’re baffled. But I paid for a trainer!

Then there are the yoga tourists—the ones who drop thousands of dollars on high-end mats, designer leggings, and a Himalayan singing bowl, yet still can’t touch their toes. Their bank accounts scream “devoted yogi,” but their flexibility suggests otherwise.

And let’s not forget the gym membership martyrs—the ones who proudly drop a cool hundred bucks a month on a premium fitness club, never show up, and yet still expect their abs to materialize via direct deposit.

Academia isn’t immune to this madness, either. Some students believe that spending two grand on textbooks will guarantee academic success, as if the mere presence of unread knowledge on their bookshelf will seep into their brains through osmosis. The books stay pristine, their spines uncracked, while their owners continue to bomb midterms.

This is the grand illusion of transactional self-improvement—the belief that writing the check is the same as doing the work. It’s not. No amount of money, gear, or overpriced green juice will ever replace the ugly, necessary grind of actually putting in effort.

March 19, 2025
Magical Thinking #2: If You Fantasize Hard Enough, Reality Will Magically Obey
(or, The Art of Procrastinating in Style)

One of the great lies we tell ourselves is that thinking about something long enough is basically the same as doing it. This is a core tenet of magical thinking—the belief that if you mentally marinate in a fantasy long enough, the sheer force of your yearning will bend the universe to your will.

It won’t.

Take, for example, the 10-year hostage situation between me and a pair of skinny jeans. For a full decade, those pants lurked in my closet, whispering false hope: One day, you’ll fit into us. Just wait. And so I did. I waited. I waited through countless failed diets, through the betrayal of metabolism, through years of magical thinking that the mere presence of those jeans in my home would, somehow, sculpt my body into compliance.

Eventually, I accepted the truth: those jeans weren’t a beacon of future success—they were a fabric monument to my delusion. I finally threw them away, but not before they had spent ten years mocking me from the hanger.

This same delusion infects all sorts of people in all sorts of ways.
- A man keeps a fisherman’s hat tucked away in a drawer, convinced that someday he’ll own a boat, sail through the Caribbean, and live off the sea. Never mind that he gets seasick on ferries and can’t tell port from starboard. The hat is proof of intent, and that’s enough—for now.
- A woman buys an aspirational vegan cookbook, proudly displaying it on her shelf. She has never gone a single day without cheese, but surely, just owning the book puts her on the path to righteousness.
- I strap a big, chunky superhero-esque watch to my wrist, as if its sheer presence will one day grant me the power to save myself. It won’t. It just makes my wrist hurt.
Magical thinking is the art of replacing action with aesthetics. It’s an elegant way to do nothing while convincing yourself you’re making progress. And it works—right up until the moment reality finally calls your bluff.
March 19, 2025