Cinemorphosis

Category: religion

  • Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

    Waterbed Dreams (a short story)

    In the 1960s, while attending backyard pool parties as a child, I witnessed a ritual that today would likely end the gathering, the marriage, and perhaps someone’s standing in the neighborhood Facebook group.

    The scene always began the same way. The wives lay stretched across poolside loungers like contented seals basking on a warm rock. Their skin glistened with tanning oil. Some drifted in and out of sleep beneath oversized sunglasses. Others were absorbed in paperback novels such as Valley of the Dolls, lost in worlds more glamorous than the suburban tract homes surrounding them.

    Relaxation, however, was a dangerous condition. The husbands regarded it almost as an invitation.

    I would see them gathering in small clusters, exchanging mischievous glances and whispered instructions. Then, with all the stealth of burglars planning a jewel heist, two or three men would creep toward the unsuspecting target. One grabbed the arms. Another grabbed the ankles. Before the woman could register what was happening, she was airborne.

    Splash.

    The victim surfaced in a burst of profanity and shock, treading water while trying to understand why the people closest to her had just transformed her into the afternoon’s entertainment.

    The husbands, meanwhile, doubled over with laughter. They laughed with the self-congratulatory delight of men convinced they had just performed comedy worthy of prime-time television. What they had actually performed was a public reminder of who possessed the power and who was expected to absorb the indignity.

    Eventually the woman climbed from the pool, dripping and annoyed. She would shake her head, towel herself dry, and wait for the laughter to burn itself out. Then came the final act of the ritual: she was expected to be a good sport. Boys will be boys. No hard feelings. Back to the lounge chair. Back to the conversation. Back to the novel.

    And so the party continued.

    No sociology professor is required to decode what was happening. The message was delivered with all the subtlety of a brick through a window. The prank was never merely a prank. It was a small public demonstration of dominance disguised as horseplay. The husbands enjoyed a privilege that permitted them to humiliate; the wives were expected to absorb the humiliation gracefully.

    You rarely see such scenes today because the cultural lens has changed. What once passed for harmless male shenanigans is now recognized for what it often was: a form of casual cruelty. The laughter remains the same. What has changed is our willingness to mistake it for innocence.

    Whenever I think about those afternoons, I am reminded of Mad Men. One of the show’s great insights is that the madness of mid-century masculinity was not simply its sexism but its astonishing lack of boundaries. Entitlement flourished because it was rarely challenged. And entitlement is inherently abusive because it operates as a zero-sum arrangement. One person enjoys the privilege of acting on every impulse; another person is expected to accommodate those impulses without complaint.

    The tragedy of entitlement is that it does not merely diminish the subordinate. It corrodes the entitled as well. When a culture teaches people that every whim deserves immediate gratification, it quietly exempts them from the responsibilities of adulthood. Why develop self-command when the world conspires to indulge your impulses? Why grow up when you can remain a child and still be handed the privileges of a man?

    Looking back, what strikes me most about those thirty-something husbands was not their authority but their immaturity. They were not imposing patriarchs so much as oversized boys wandering through a civilization that mistook self-indulgence for masculinity.

    The culture celebrated this condition. It built monuments to it.

    Consider the bachelor pad, that sacred temple of male self-mythology. Magazine spreads presented it as a technological wonderland and erotic paradise. The walls were covered in rich wood paneling. A bear rug lounged dramatically on the floor. Intricate models of futuristic cities sat on shelves like trophies from an imagined age of progress. With the clap of a hand, a television descended from the ceiling. A hidden panel slid open to reveal a gleaming liquor cabinet stocked with enough bourbon to anesthetize an elephant.

    The bachelor pad promised that its owner was no ordinary man. He was sophisticated. Connected. Mysterious. He knew where the best restaurants were, which stocks to buy, and which jazz records proved his superior taste. He was always three steps ahead of everyone else and at least five steps ahead of the poor fools living in split-level homes.

    Yet all the razzle-dazzle could not conceal the obvious truth. Behind the secret compartments, imported scotch, and carefully groomed mustache often stood a man-child. The gadgets were sophisticated. The owner was not. The bachelor pad frequently resembled a twelve-year-old boy’s fantasy that had been granted an unlimited expense account.

    Even as a child, I sensed that something was off.

    The world of the 1960s projected confidence, prosperity, and order, but beneath the polished surface ran a current of instability. The adults were supposed to be creating safety and predictability. Too often, they generated turbulence instead. The atmosphere felt less like responsible adulthood than a perpetual fraternity party conducted by people with mortgages.

    Children notice these things.

    We notice who gets to laugh.

    We notice who becomes the punchline.

    We notice who is expected to absorb the humiliation and pretend it never happened.

    Most of all, we notice the gap between what adults claim to be and what they actually are. Long before we possess the vocabulary to describe entitlement, narcissism, or arrested development, we can feel their effects. We can sense when the people entrusted with maintaining order are, in fact, manufacturing chaos.

    And that was the contradiction at the heart of the era: a generation that possessed unprecedented authority often behaved as though authority itself exempted them from maturity.

    Perhaps that is why so many of us flocked to The Brady Bunch every Friday night. The show offered a fantasy of domestic civilization. Here was a blended family that somehow functioned as a cooperative unit. Problems were discussed instead of weaponized. Nobody humiliated anyone for sport. Lessons were learned. Conflicts were resolved. The adults behaved like adults.

    Compared to the poolside kingdoms of suburban entitlement, the Bradys looked less like a sitcom family than a utopian experiment.

    Longing for the Brady family’s utopian world seeped into my dreams and shaped my childhood. Let me take you back to the blistering summer of 1971, when I was nine. My family and four others staked their claim to a slice of rugged paradise on Mount Shasta. For two weeks, we fished, water-skied, dodged hornets, and lazed under the drone of a massive battery-operated radio pumping out The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night. It should have been idyllic. Should have been.

    One morning, as the other families fried pancakes and bacon and prepped their fishing gear, I was still in my tent, cocooned in the greatest dream of my life. I wasn’t just sleeping—I was transcending. In my dream, I had met The Brady Bunch in San Francisco, by a gleaming red cable car downtown. Their faces were radiant, practically angelic, and their smiles said it all: I had been chosen. I was going to be the newest Brady kid. Mike and Carol had already signed the adoption papers at some conveniently nearby government office. It was official.

    Questions swirled in my nine-year-old brain: Would I get my own room in their split-level utopia, or would I have to bunk with Greg? And most importantly, how soon would I appear on the show? But just as I was about to find out, reality crashed in like a rude kid on a trampoline. Mark and Tosh, my two so-called friends, yanked me out of my reverie, insisting it was time to go fishing. Fishing? Fishing?! I had just been adopted by The Brady Bunch, and now I had to slum it with worms and hooks?

    I sulked like the overgrown toddler I was. The rest of the day, I stomped around with the scowl of someone who’d been exiled from paradise, my unspoken dream stuck inside me like a splinter. I couldn’t tell anyone. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry, I can’t fish; I was about to move into a Technicolor utopia where no problem is bigger than a 30-minute episode”? Yeah, right.

    “Get with the program,” my dad bellowed, his military tone slicing through the air. “We’re living in the wild.” The wild? I didn’t want the wild. I wanted the Brady kitchen, with its avocado-green appliances and unending love. Instead, I got Mount Shasta, yellowjackets hovering over our food supplies, a fishing pole, and a crushing dose of reality. I was not a Brady, and the sting of it stuck with me longer than the mosquito bites.

    That sulky kid camping on Mount Shasta believed his Brady Bunch fantasy was a rare, precious portal out of his chaotic childhood. Turns out, it was about as unique as a Hallmark card on Valentine’s Day. Like millions of Americans, I grew up dreaming I’d be adopted by the Bradys—soaking up the avocado-colored bliss of choreographed family harmony. But here’s the cosmic joke: while we were glued to the screen, escaping into 30-minute morality plays, the actors’ personal lives were raging dumpster fires. Addiction, affairs, infighting—it was chaos so apocalyptic it made our own messy lives look like spa weekends.

    Should we really expect actors’ off-screen lives to match the squeaky-clean fantasy they sell us? Of course not. Hollywood isn’t built on truth; it’s built on glossy façades. The Brady Bunch is proof. They served us perfectly scripted family bliss, while behind the scenes, they were stuck in their own soap opera. The gap between their TV utopia and reality is as wide as the Grand Canyon—yet we still crave the fantasy. Once you’ve tasted Brady-level wholesomeness, it’s like emotional junk food: artificial but irresistibly comforting.

    In my prepubescence, I not only dreamed I was a member of the Brady family; I dreamed  that my face was in one of the squares on the show’s opening theme song. I’m looking around at my family members, my cheeks bright and cherubic, an eternal youth pumped with a sense of joy and belonging, blind to the off-screen train wrecks that contradicted the Brady’s Edenic wonderland.

    Adolescence put an end to my Brady Bunch fantasies. By then, the Brady family seemed so wholesome, so relentlessly well-adjusted, that they bordered on the monastic. Nobody lusted after anybody. Nobody drank too much. Nobody made catastrophically bad decisions. Every problem was solved in twenty-two minutes and accompanied by a moral lesson. It was a civilization without appetite.

    What I wanted instead was sensuality.

    That is where the Boone’s Farm Apple Wine commercials entered my life. These advertisements took impossibly attractive young women, dressed them in gingham dresses, deposited them in sun-dappled meadows, and surrounded them with rugged, guitar-strumming men who looked as if they had wandered out of a folk album cover. Everyone smiled. Everyone flirted. Everyone appeared to be one sip away from achieving perfect harmony with nature, romance, and themselves.

    Who needed the Brady Bunch when a bottle of apple wine could transport you directly to Eden?

    The commercials were selling more than wine. They were marketing an emerging vision of life that was spreading across America in the early 1970s—a curious blend of sexual liberation, political consciousness, environmentalism, health food evangelism, and openness to alternative realities. This counterculture promised liberation from the buttoned-down conventions embodied by shows like The Brady Bunch. Why settle for suburban order when you could pursue cosmic enlightenment, organic nutrition, and attractive people frolicking through fields?

    The fullest expression of this worldview existed in my hometown at a grocery store called Co-Op.

    Calling Co-Op a supermarket would be like calling Woodstock a music festival. Technically accurate, perhaps, but hopelessly incomplete.

    This was a store “owned by the people.” The employees were unfailingly friendly. The men often sported beards substantial enough to shelter migratory birds and wore survival gear purchased from Co-Op’s adjoining Wilderness Supply Store. Every employee seemed to occupy a different point on the Hippy Spectrum, ranging from mildly eccentric nature enthusiast to someone who appeared capable of receiving stock tips from houseplants.

    Co-Op pioneered innovations that now seem ordinary. It had the town’s first daycare center for shoppers’ children and its first recycling center. Long before environmentalism became corporate branding, Co-Op treated recycling as a sacred civic duty.

    The store’s modest book section served as a literary roadmap to alternative consciousness. There sat Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Peter Tompkins’ The Secret Life of Plants, Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Principle, and, towering above them all like scripture atop an altar, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet, the vegetarian bible of the movement.

    The food selection was equally revelatory. Customers could purchase carob honey ice cream, wheat germ, granola, tofu, brown rice, Japanese yams, and alfalfa sprout-growing kits complete with mason jars. For many Americans, Co-Op served as their first introduction to foods that were not beige.

    With its wilderness store, organic produce, alternative literature, and health-food evangelism, Co-Op was more than a place to buy groceries. It was a sanctuary for those rebelling against The Man. Every purchase carried ideological significance. A bowl of granola sweetened with organic honey was not merely breakfast. It was a declaration of independence.

    Unfortunately, every revolution contains its contradictions.

    The counterculture replaced the Bachelor Pad with the Co-Op Halo: the cognitive illusion in which any food purchased at a cooperative grocery store is presumed incapable of causing weight gain, metabolic dysfunction, or excessive calorie consumption. Under the protective glow of the Co-Op Halo, honey ceases to be sugar, granola ceases to be dessert, and a thousand calories of nuts become an act of political resistance. 

    As a child shopping alongside my parents, I observed these earnest Co-Op revolutionaries lumbering through the aisles. They battled corporate food tyranny one overflowing bowl of granola at a time, their expanding waistlines advancing steadily alongside their moral certainty. They looked like freedom fighters who had accidentally launched an insurgency against their own belt buckles.

    What fascinated me was not their hypocrisy but their humanity. The very people striving hardest to improve themselves remained vulnerable to the same blind spots that afflict everyone else. Their intentions were admirable. Their convictions were sincere. Yet their growing girth served as a reminder that even the noblest movements can become intoxicated by their own righteousness.

    It is no surprise that during the Co-Op Revolution, many of its adherents abandoned conventional beds for waterbeds. The traditional spring mattress belonged to the Mad Men era in the same way the gray flannel suit, the martini cart, and the executive desk belonged to it. It was firm, structured, predictable, and unapologetically patriarchal. You slept on top of it, not with it. It reflected a culture organized around hierarchy, discipline, and the assumption that somewhere in the house a father figure knew what he was doing.

    The waterbed represented an entirely different cosmology.

    The spring mattress was Father.

    The waterbed was Mother.

    More specifically, it was Mother Earth, Mother Ocean, Mother Nature, and Mother Womb rolled into a giant vinyl sack filled with heated water.

    The waterbed arrived as part of the Co-Op Halo revolution. It rejected rigidity in favor of flow, conformity in favor of experimentation, and straight lines in favor of psychedelic undulation. If the spring mattress said, “Get a job, mow the lawn, and report to work on Monday,” the waterbed said, “Relax, brother. Time is a capitalist construct.”

    One belonged in Don Draper’s paneled den beside a hidden liquor cabinet and a collection of imported scotch. The other belonged in a room scented with patchouli, illuminated by a lava lamp, and stocked with dog-eared copies of Diet for a Small Planet and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The spring mattress supported the patriarchy. The waterbed floated a rebellion against it.

    At around thirteen years old, I was fully indoctrinated into waterbed ideology.

    After trying the waterbeds owned by friends and neighbors, I became a true believer. The warm vinyl surface felt exotic and futuristic. The gentle waves suggested depths of wisdom unavailable to those unfortunate souls sleeping on ordinary mattresses. I became convinced that immersion in the Great Aquatic Womb was essential to human fulfillment. Sleeping on a conventional mattress suddenly seemed as spiritually primitive as cooking over a campfire.

    Eventually my parents surrendered to the pressure.

    For a brief moment, I believed paradise had arrived.

    Then reality arrived.

    The first warning sign was the algae.

    The water inside the mattress developed its own ecosystem. Before long my bedroom smelled less like a sanctuary of cosmic consciousness and more like a stagnant swamp in which an alligator might reasonably be expected to surface.

    Then there was the simple act of turning over in bed.

    Waterbed enthusiasts described this as floating.

    In practice it felt more like wrestling a small ocean.

    Every movement encountered resistance. Rolling from one side to the other required planning, momentum, and perhaps a permit from the Coast Guard. A careless shift of position could generate enough counterforce to threaten a shoulder, strain a back, or create waves capable of disturbing neighboring counties.

    The temperature was another ongoing adventure.

    The bed was either too cold or too hot.

    One night I was sleeping in what felt like the North Atlantic. The next night I appeared to be poaching myself. I became a full-time regulator of aquatic climate conditions, endlessly adjusting the temperature dial in pursuit of a mythical state known as comfort.

    But the unforgivable sin was the leaking.

    Waterbeds leaked with the determination of a Greek tragedy fulfilling its prophecy.

    Water leaked onto the floor. Water seeped into places water was never intended to go. The flooring suffered. Mildew flourished. Black mold appeared like an invading army. The very object that had promised harmony with nature was now actively introducing nature into my bedroom.

    My dreams of aquatic enlightenment collapsed.

    My rebellion against The Man had become a battle against a giant bag of malfunctioning water.

    The waterbed was not Mother Ocean.

    It was not the Womb.

    It was not a portal to higher consciousness.

    It was a sea monster.

    A damp, bloated, vinyl sea monster that occupied my bedroom, consumed my patience, and robbed me of sleep. The Co-Op Revolution had promised liberation. Instead, I found myself trapped in an endless maritime disaster unfolding six inches above the floor.

    The waterbed craze of the 1970s eventually collapsed for the same reason most utopian experiments collapse: reality refused to cooperate. The waterbed promised liberation from the stiff, joyless conventions of the Mad Men era. Why sleep on a rigid mattress when you could drift upon a warm, undulating sea of consciousness? Why settle for furniture when you could experience a lifestyle? The problem, of course, was that consumers eventually discovered that sleeping on a giant sack of water came with certain drawbacks, including leaks, mold, algae, temperature fluctuations, and the unsettling sensation of spending every night inside an aquarium.

    Its demise symbolized the fading of a larger countercultural fantasy. The waterbed embodied the belief that freedom could be achieved by rejecting structure in favor of flow, spontaneity, experimentation, and vibes. But markets teach lessons with merciless efficiency. Most people did not want to sleep inside a social movement. They wanted a good night’s sleep. The waterbed had promised transcendence and delivered plumbing problems.

    Ironically, while the culture around me chased one New Age revelation after another, I was becoming increasingly indifferent to all of it. That same year I was competing in Junior Olympic weightlifting meets. I was training hard, taking protein supplements, eating aggressively, and building a life around discipline. By the end of the day I was so exhausted that I could have slept comfortably on a sheet of plywood. The waterbed’s promises of cosmic fulfillment meant nothing to me. Just give me a gym, two hundred grams of protein a day, and leave me alone. I had little patience for the endless parade of theories, lifestyles, and consciousness-expanding schemes emerging from the great 1970s Fever Dream. Every month seemed to produce a new revelation that would supposedly transform humanity. I was far more interested in perfecting my squat.

    Then, in 1978, my muscular future was threatened by something far more alarming than a leaking waterbed.

    One morning, while eating a bowl of Wheaties fortified with a scoop of protein powder and a cup of milk, I opened The San Francisco Chronicle and was seized by a profound sense of dread. The article described the predictions of futurists who believed that Earth’s growing population and dwindling resources would eventually force humanity into space. According to the piece, future generations might abandon the planet altogether, traveling by lunar shuttle to enormous solar-powered colonies orbiting the Earth.

    The article highlighted the work of Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, who would later publish these ideas in The High Frontier. Humanity, it explained, might someday live in “artificial, closed-ecology habitats in free orbit,” deriving energy from massive solar arrays.

    The accompanying illustrations by artist Don Davis were breathtaking. They depicted lush green hills, cozy cottages, sparkling fountains, rolling meadows, and smiling citizens living in apparent harmony. It looked like a cross between Disneyland, a nature preserve, and Heaven.

    Yet one detail disturbed me.

    Everyone looked skinny.

    Not healthy skinny. Fragile skinny.

    The men looked as though they had never touched a barbell in their lives.

    Suddenly a terrifying possibility entered my mind.

    What if there were no gyms in space?

    What if the absence of gravity eliminated weight resistance altogether?

    What if there were protein shortages?

    What if the future consisted of floating through a giant space cylinder with the physique of an underfed accountant?

    I imagined my hard-earned muscles slowly dissolving until I resembled what bodybuilders of the era called “a tomato with toothpicks sticking out of it.”

    For a sixteen-year-old weightlifter, this was not merely a concern. It was an existential crisis.

    Around that same time, a high-school sophomore named Mary Claybourne developed a crush on me. One afternoon she approached my locker and handed me a birthday card. On the front it read:

    “If It Feels Good, Do It!”

    Inside she had written a sweet note inviting me to ask her out.

    Mary was adorable. She deserved my attention. She deserved my affection.

    Unfortunately, I was preoccupied with the possibility that civilization might soon abandon Earth and relocate to a giant orbiting habitat where progressive overload would be impossible.

    How could I focus on romance when the future of resistance training itself hung in the balance?

    How could I build a physique I could be proud of if humanity was destined to become a race of floating string beans?

    This was my problem with life. Nothing stayed put.

    One fad arrived promising salvation, only to collapse under its own absurdity. Then another emerged wearing different clothes but making the same promises. Every certainty seemed temporary. Every revelation carried an expiration date.

    I longed for permanence.

    Years later in college, I encountered Alfred North Whitehead’s Religion in the Making. Whitehead suggested that religion arises from humanity’s search for permanence in a world defined by impermanence.

    The idea haunted me because it perfectly described what I had been seeking all along.

    I kept thinking about that waterbed.

    For a brief, glorious moment, I believed I had discovered paradise. I floated in the warm womb, suspended in perfect comfort, convinced I had found a superior way of living. Then the vinyl ruptured. Suddenly I was tangled in torn plastic, immersed in a lukewarm swamp, watching paradise drain onto the carpet.

    I abandoned the waterbed and embraced the self-reliance of weight training. Iron never leaked. Barbells never developed algae. A squat rack did not require water treatment tablets.

    Yet even weightlifting failed to provide the permanence I sought.

    According to the futurists, the planet itself might become uninhabitable. Earth could implode under the weight of its own success, forcing me into exile aboard some gigantic orbiting satellite. There I would drift through the heavens as a refugee from gravity itself, searching for a place to perform deadlifts.

    The waterbed had taught me that comfort could disappear overnight. The space-colony article taught me that even the ground beneath my feet might not be permanent.

    And so the search for permanence continued.

    While other boys pursued girls, I pursued certainty. Unfortunately, certainty proved harder to find than girls.

    By sixteen, I had already sacrificed one potential romance because I was busy calculating how to maintain my biceps after humanity evacuated Earth.

  • Gollumification: How False Paradise Deforms the Soul

    Gollumification: How False Paradise Deforms the Soul

    I remain haunted by three men I attended high school with. More than four decades later, they are still gnashing their teeth over a missed romantic opportunity so catastrophic in their minds that it has become the organizing principle of their existence.

    The event occurred during the summer after their senior year, that magical season when testosterone, optimism, and stupidity join forces to create lifelong consequences.

    The three friends were driving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to attend a Dodgers game when they found themselves winding through the Grapevine. There, on the side of the highway, destiny appeared: four young women wearing tie-dye bikinis.

    An aging Volkswagen van, baked by the California sun into a shade best described as “burnt pumpkin regret,” had overheated and died. Standing beside it were four beautiful Grateful Dead devotees fresh from a concert and still drifting through the atmosphere on a cloud of music, freedom, and whatever else had been circulating at Dead shows in those years.

    These were not merely attractive women. In the mythology my friends later constructed, they became supernatural beings. They were road-worn muses, desert sirens, barefoot priestesses of possibility. They smelled of patchouli, sunscreen, and poor judgment. Their laughter floated through the air like wind chimes. Their sun-bronzed shoulders glistened beneath the California light. They waved their bikini tops and spaghetti-strap shirts overhead like flags announcing the arrival of a new religion.

    My friends, mechanically gifted but cosmically clueless, leaped into action.

    With grease-stained heroism, they diagnosed the problem, coaxed the van back to life, and restored order to the universe. The women were grateful. Very grateful.

    Then came the invitation.

    Forget the Dodgers game, they said. Come with us to the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival.

    To appreciate the magnitude of this offer, imagine being handed a winning lottery ticket, a backstage pass, and the keys to paradise simultaneously.

    My friends declined.

    They were committed to the Dodgers game.

    Even now, recounting the story causes physical pain.

    Armed with baseball tickets and the situational awareness of ornamental shrubbery, they thanked the women, climbed back into their car, and drove away. Behind them, the hippies disappeared into the California horizon, presumably continuing their lives completely unaware that they had become the central tragedy in three future divorces.

    My friends remember almost nothing about the baseball game.

    Not a single play.

    Not a single pitch.

    Not a single inning.

    But they can describe, with forensic precision, the exact moment they drove away from those women. They remember the sunlight, the smell of the road, the angle of the van, the sound of the laughter, and the fluttering of tie-dye fabric in the wind.

    Mention the incident today and they transform.

    Reason departs.

    Perspective evaporates.

    They begin snapping at one another like feral animals fighting over a scrap of meat. Each insists the others were responsible. Each argues that his entire life would have unfolded differently had they accepted the invitation.

    Their present lives barely register. Their former wives, their careers, their accomplishments, and their friendships all fade into the background. Spiritually speaking, they remain stranded on that highway, staring at those women as if they represented the entrance to a lost kingdom.

    The story would be funny if it were not so sad.

    The obsession has consumed them.

    They are bitter. They are divorced. They are trapped.

    They have spent decades worshipping a fantasy.

    What they believe they lost was not a romantic encounter. It was transcendence itself. They have convinced themselves that heaven briefly opened a window on a sunny California afternoon and that they foolishly chose baseball instead.

    This is what I call Gollumification: the process by which a person becomes spiritually deformed through obsessive attachment to a lost opportunity, fantasy, or object of desire, sacrificing present reality in worship of an imagined transcendence.

    The tragedy is not that they missed an opportunity.

    The tragedy is that they never stopped missing it.

    Their humanity has slowly curdled around a single idea: that fulfillment existed on the other side of that decision. Like Gollum clutching the Ring, they have spent decades staring at a false treasure while life continued to unfold around them.

    The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson warned that human beings frequently seek false transcendence through sex, alcohol, drugs, crowds, and ecstatic experiences. These pursuits promise elevation but often produce degradation. We imagine we are ascending toward something divine when in fact we are becoming diminished versions of ourselves.

    My friends illustrate this principle perfectly. They mistook a fleeting moment of possibility for ultimate meaning. They sought transcendence in the wrong place and became enslaved to the memory.

    To be human is not merely to desire transcendence. It is to recognize when that desire has attached itself to the wrong object. It is to notice the onset of Gollumification, slam on the brakes, and reverse the process before obsession calcifies into identity.

    Few people accomplish this.

    Most continue worshipping the lost opportunity, the former lover, the abandoned dream, the imagined paradise. Year after year, they become less flexible, less grateful, less alive. They harden around their regrets until they resemble pillars of salt, forever staring backward at the kingdom they believe should have been theirs.

    The missed opportunity did not ruin their lives.

    Their refusal to stop worshipping it did.

  • The Greatness Trap

    The Greatness Trap

    At fourteen, after watching Pumping Iron, I stared at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique with the reverence medieval peasants reserved for cathedral stained glass. His muscles seemed less like anatomy than a supernatural event. I concluded, with the confidence available only to teenage boys, that all men should look like Arnold. Failure to do so was a form of degradation. You were not a man so much as a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of it, wobbling through life in a state of preventable mediocrity.

    The disease did not stop with bodybuilding.

    In college, I encountered Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov. Their prose represented another form of muscularity. Their sentences flexed. Their imaginations performed feats of strength. Later, listening to Sviatoslav Richter play Sergei Rachmaninoff, I experienced the same sensation. Arnold had built impossible muscles. Kafka built impossible stories. Richter built impossible beauty. All of them seemed to occupy a realm beyond the ordinary, and they inspired me to believe that I must do the same.

    Thus I spent much of my life trapped in what I call The Greatness Trap: the belief that happiness, self-respect, and fulfillment can only be earned through exceptional achievement. Under its spell, ordinary life appears not merely insufficient but vaguely shameful. A quiet existence becomes a form of failure. Every accomplishment must lead to a larger accomplishment. Every summit reveals another mountain. Every victory quickly curdles into dissatisfaction.

    Like Arnold, who once spoke of wanting to be remembered thousands of years after his death, I wanted to leave a mark. I wanted my existence to strike the world with such force that its impact could be called Clout Fist: the invisible power exerted by a person, institution, or cultural force that shapes the thoughts and behaviors of others. Without such influence, I feared my life would dissolve into obscurity. If I was not spectacular, what was I?

    This anxiety lies at the heart of Joshua Rothman’s essay, “Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?” Rothman observes that excellence and ordinariness coexist uneasily because modern society relentlessly pressures us toward optimization. We are told to maximize everything: our careers, our bodies, our relationships, our finances, our hobbies, our personal brands. Existence itself becomes a self-improvement project. Unless we leave a mark, we fear we do not count.

    The result is a culture of hype. Everything must be bigger, faster, richer, more influential, more disruptive, and more unforgettable. We become trapped in an endless escalator of status. Climb one rung and another immediately appears above it. Achievement ceases to satisfy because satisfaction would end the game.

    Rothman points to philosopher Avram Alpert, who describes this condition as greatness thinking—the belief that greatness can somehow cure the disappointments and imperfections of life. Yet greatness, by definition, is rare. If everyone could be extraordinary, the word would lose its meaning. The pursuit therefore condemns most people to a perpetual feeling of insufficiency. We become disappointed not because our lives are inadequate but because our expectations are delusional.

    What, then, is the exit sign?

    Alpert’s answer is to abandon the obsession with being spectacular and embrace Aristotle’s concept of arete—the fulfillment of one’s potential. Under this view, the goal is not to transform yourself into someone else. It is to become the best version of the person you already are. You cultivate your moral and rational faculties. You seek integrity rather than applause. You pursue excellence not because you crave admiration but because you wish to live well.

    These ideas animate Alpert’s book The Good-Enough Life, though his argument collides with a long tradition of thinkers who demand more. Immanuel Kant viewed human beings as obligated to develop their capacities as fully as possible. Friedrich Nietzsche urged us to stretch ourselves toward the Übermensch, a higher form of human existence. Compared to these visions, Alpert’s philosophy can sound almost suspiciously modest.

    Yet Rothman points out that the greatness-oriented philosophies of Kant and Nietzsche often collide with our intuition that ordinary life possesses genuine value. What if greatness is not required? What if a life marked by decency, moderation, friendship, competence, and love is enough?

    I suspect the answer lies somewhere between these extremes. We should not surrender our aspirations. Human beings are built to grow, create, test themselves, and pursue excellence. Yet neither should we allow a culture saturated with dopamine, hype, vanity, and status anxiety to convince us that greatness and fame are synonymous. Alpert is correct that being “good enough” is often a worthy goal. But I am not convinced that the choice is binary.

    Perhaps the real challenge is to cherish ordinary life while still striving toward extraordinary achievement. Perhaps we can enjoy a family dinner and write a great novel. Perhaps we can appreciate a quiet walk and pursue ambitious goals. Perhaps we can cultivate arete without becoming addicted to applause.

    In that case, the true enemy is not greatness. The true enemy is the delusion that greatness alone can save us.

  • Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every day it feels as though I wake up to an arm-wrestling match with sin. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m an addict. What am I addicted to? That’s a stupid question. The better question is what am I not addicted to? In any event, that’s not the point of the story just yet. The point is that there are tens of millions of us. I know I’m not special. My life is defined by the constant challenge to overcome vice, corruption, and the habits that make it nearly impossible for me to forgive myself for being the wretched and loathsome individual that I am. 

    But forgive myself I must. Forgiveness is the only way I can mend my broken self. Forgiveness is a commitment to become someone different from the recalcitrant sinner that fills my life with regret. 

    Some say I am too hard on myself, but they are mistaken because once I understood that life is a continual test of character, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

    To be honest, however, there is something discouraging about viewing life as a daily battle against temptation. I cannot always defeat sin in an arm-wrestling match. Even on my best days, victory is incomplete. If I overcome temptation half the time, I still fail the other half. The prospect can feel exhausting. How can I forgive myself if I remain locked in a struggle I never fully win? How can I live with peace if temptation is always waiting and I never know whether I will emerge victorious?

    The answer may be that the object of forgiveness is not perfection but perseverance. The purpose of self-forgiveness is not to transform me into a flawless person. It is to transform me into a person who continues striving toward the good despite repeated failures. The measure of my character is not whether temptation disappears, but whether I continue returning to the fight. Forgiveness allows me to rise after every fall rather than define myself by the fall itself. The truly unforgivable life is not the life marked by failure. It is the life that abandons the struggle altogether.

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily efficient at encouraging surrender.

    You can retreat into a climate-controlled cocoon furnished with streaming services, snack foods, delivery apps, and algorithmically engineered distractions. You can spend years drifting from one dopamine hit to the next while the world applauds your consumption and politely asks if you would like another. Temptation no longer lurks in dark alleys. It arrives in bright packaging and offers free shipping.

    The world will not object if you quit the struggle. On the contrary, it will happily assist you. Fresh temptations will appear on your phone, your television, your computer, and eventually your doorstep. At some point, however, a terrible realization emerges. You are no longer directing your life. Your cravings are directing it for you.

    At that moment, you cease to be the protagonist of your own story. You become a supporting character in a drama written by your appetites, a bit player taking orders from every craving that wanders onto the stage. Perhaps you will grow numb to this reality and drift into a comfortable spiritual death, cushioned by convenience, entertained into submission, and surrounded by enough snacks and streaming content to dull any remaining sense of alarm. Or perhaps the discomfort will refuse to leave. Perhaps it will linger like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps it will haunt you until the life you have built begins to resemble a horror movie disguised as a luxury resort.

    That haunting may prove to be a gift. It may force you to confront the fact that you have been living in your own version of the Sunken Place, sinking ever deeper into passivity while your impulses seize control of the steering wheel. The tragedy is not that temptation exists. The tragedy is that you have mistaken indulgence for freedom and captivity for comfort. At some point, if you are fortunate, a voice will break through the fog. It will not whisper. It will not negotiate. It will issue a command as urgent as any ever spoken in a Jordan Peele horror film:

    Get out.

  • Can Philosophers Keep Their Souls in Silicon Valley?

    Can Philosophers Keep Their Souls in Silicon Valley?

    In “Someone Finally Wants to Hire Philosophers,” Lila Shroff reports what would have sounded like a punchline only a decade ago: philosophy majors may finally be getting the last laugh. For years, philosophy occupied an awkward place in the public imagination—a discipline associated with coffee-shop debates, existential handwringing, and the noble art of explaining to relatives why you were unemployed. At best, the philosopher was a thoughtful gadfly. At worst, a professional overthinker. But the rise of artificial intelligence has suddenly transformed philosophy from an intellectual curiosity into a marketable skill. Major technology companies are hiring philosophers. Universities are recruiting scholars who specialize in both AI and philosophy. The old joke about philosophy leading nowhere is beginning to age badly.

    As Shroff notes, this development should not surprise us. Philosophers have been wrestling with questions about intelligence, consciousness, morality, and the possibility of artificial minds for centuries. Long before Silicon Valley executives promised to change the world, philosophers were already asking whether a machine could think, reason, or possess something resembling a mind. Today, thinkers such as Nick Bostrom have become influential voices in the AI conversation. His book Superintelligence warned more than a decade ago that humanity might create machines whose capabilities outstrip our ability to control them. What once sounded like speculative science fiction now reads more like a boardroom agenda.

    The marriage between AI and philosophy arises from a practical concern. Technology companies want their products to appear ethical, trustworthy, and safe. A machine that accidentally promotes fraud, discrimination, or social chaos is difficult to market. Consumers are more likely to embrace AI systems that project wisdom, fairness, and restraint. In the increasingly crowded AI marketplace, virtue has become a product feature. Safety, ethics, and responsibility are not merely moral concerns; they are branding opportunities.

    Yet Shroff’s essay leaves several uncomfortable questions lingering in the air.

    First, philosophers disagree about nearly everything. That is practically the job description. If ethical questions routinely produce competing schools of thought, which philosophers do AI companies choose to hire? A utilitarian, a virtue ethicist, a libertarian, and a nihilist might evaluate the same problem and arrive at wildly different conclusions. When an AI company claims to be guided by philosophy, whose philosophy is it talking about?

    Second, corporations do not operate in a vacuum. They pursue growth, market share, influence, and profit. Given those incentives, it seems unlikely that technology companies will eagerly recruit philosophers whose views fundamentally conflict with corporate objectives. The philosopher who questions the legitimacy of the enterprise may not receive the same warm welcome as the philosopher who helps polish its public image.

    Third, what happens to philosophy itself when it becomes a lucrative career path? If technology firms reward certain ethical frameworks and ignore others, philosophers may gradually adapt their views to become more employable. Intellectual independence has always been easier to defend when no one is writing the check. Once prestige, influence, and six-figure salaries enter the picture, even the most principled thinkers may find themselves sanding off inconvenient beliefs.

    This is why I remain skeptical of any celebration of philosophy’s new status in the AI economy. There is no such thing as pure philosophy floating above human ambition. There are only human beings, complete with incentives, blind spots, loyalties, and self-interest. The partnership between AI and philosophy may produce genuinely useful ethical guidance. Or it may become an elaborate exercise in corporate virtue theater—a dazzling display of moral concern performed beneath bright lights while the machinery of profit hums steadily backstage. Whether philosophers become the conscience of artificial intelligence or merely its public relations department remains an open question.

  • The Sin of Outsourcing Humanity

    The Sin of Outsourcing Humanity

    For Tyler Austin Harper, there is only one word that captures the gravity of dehumanization: sin. And to be clear, dehumanization is rampant—in the form of robot companions, digital girlfriends, and AI therapists. To call these developments merely wrong is an understatement. He writes, “They feel to me like something deeper and darker.” In his essay “There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI: It’s Sin,” Harper argues that to understand the depths of what is happening to us, we need Christian guides because Christianity provides a framework for understanding dehumanization. You cannot understand dehumanization unless you first understand what it means to be fully human. Harper turns to Christian critics of AI to trace this trajectory from human to subhuman through the misuse of technology.

    These misuses emerge when people overemphasize the business, pragmatic, and utilitarian uses of AI at the expense of humanity, a Faustian bargain as old as sin itself. To champion technology and “outsource the most interesting aspects of our life and labor to machines” without considering the effects on the human soul is to threaten human dignity and meaning.

    Christianity frames us as fallen creatures who long to return to our Maker. The burden of being human is struggling with our fallen nature and seeking grace through God. When we look to machines for salvation, we outsource the burden of what it means to be human. In doing so, we forget that this burden entails suffering and that suffering itself can be a gift from God, pointing us toward humility and the true path. In Harper’s words, “Christianity has a clear ‘anthropological vision,’ asserting that the purpose of the human species is to exist in the image of its creator, to love God and one another, and to spread life on Earth and steward its creatures.” To move toward this purpose is to become fully human. We conform to God and fulfill our humanity. Conforming ourselves to machines, by contrast, becomes a desecration of what it means to be human.

    Harper argues that outside the Christian framework, we become confused about what it means to be human in the first place. He writes, “Many secular thinkers can struggle to articulate a clear definition of what humanity is.” He points to Christian writer Carl Trueman, who observes that the term dehumanization loses its force if the secular definition of humanization remains an “empty cipher.” Secularists and techno-believers have reduced humanization to a narrow set of superficial behaviors that fail to capture what it truly means to carry the burden of having a soul.

    Harper describes himself as “a not especially observant Presbyterian” and is not arguing that we must embrace religious orthodoxy to “fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI.” However, he insists that we “must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment.”

    Harper’s article reminds me of the dangers of Liquid Modernity, a concept developed by Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman describes a social condition in which stable institutions, identities, relationships, careers, moral frameworks, and communities dissolve into constant flux, instability, and adaptation. In the context of dehumanization and the rise of AI, Liquid Modernity refers to the transformation of human beings from rooted persons with durable social bonds into endlessly flexible, data-driven consumers and performers who must continuously reinvent themselves to survive technological and economic disruption.

    Societies that lack a tradition defining humanization may ultimately surrender to the doctrine that Liquid Modernity is both desirable and inevitable—a condition in which human beings outsource the burden of being human to machines.

  • How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    Yesterday I was watching myself play piano on my YouTube channel when I noticed something strange. I could barely focus on the music because my eyes kept drifting toward the Casio G-Shock GW-7900 strapped to my wrist. The watch looked so perfectly correct, so deeply aligned with whatever strange creature I have apparently become, that I caught myself thinking: “That’s it. That’s me. I’m a G-Shock guy.”

    A few hours later I was watching a true-crime docuseries when one of the detectives appeared wearing a Casio G-Shock GWM530. The moment I saw it, some invisible courtroom inside my brain slammed down the gavel.

    Case closed.

    I only want atomic time now.
    I only want resin on my wrist.
    I only want G-Shocks.

    The realization was both satisfying and faintly disturbing, like discovering your subconscious has quietly joined a militant survivalist sect while you were out buying groceries.

    What makes the experience unsettling is that I already possess five beautiful Seiko divers—carefully curated watches representing more than twenty years of obsessive collecting. Those Seikos were not random purchases. They were the result of decades of refinement, experimentation, buying, selling, regretting, and gradually arriving at what I believed was horological enlightenment. They sat in the watch box like sacred artifacts of a fully realized identity.

    Then, roughly four months ago—which psychologically feels more like four geological eras ago—I bought a Casio G-Shock Frogman.

    And the wrecking ball swung.

    The entire architecture of my watch hobby collapsed like a condemned casino in Las Vegas. Out of the rubble emerged a new religion constructed from resin, atomic synchronization, solar charging, and Japanese apocalypse-proof overengineering. I now own five G-Shocks.

    One of them, the Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman, was supposed to be its atomic sibling, the GW-9300. The eBay seller made an honest mistake and shipped the non-atomic version instead. Under normal circumstances this would have triggered a small existential crisis because I have apparently reached the point where the absence of Multi Band 6 synchronization feels like spiritual imprecision.

    But strangely, I didn’t care.

    I bought the watch for half price and immediately designated it my “Hawaii Watch,” reasoning that one does not require atomic synchronization while standing beside an edenic waterfall in Kauai pretending, however briefly, that mortality and property taxes do not exist.

    The whole experience reminds me of something my wife once said about men: they crave violent conversion experiences. In my heart, I know she’s right.

    A suburban man often longs for cataclysm without actual destruction. He wants upheaval without bankruptcy. Reinvention without divorce. Apocalypse without inconvenience. Since detonating one’s real life would be irresponsible, the energy gets redirected into symbolic conversions:

    • watches,
    • motorcycles,
    • kettlebells,
    • backpacks,
    • audio systems,
    • tactical flashlights,
    • sourdough starters,
    • wilderness knives.

    The external change may seem trivial, but psychologically it lands like a thunderclap because obsessive men experience identity through systems of allegiance.

    Objectively speaking, shifting from Seiko divers to G-Shocks is not an event of civilizational importance. No treaties were signed. No governments fell. The stock market did not tremble. Yet inside the mind of an obsessive enthusiast, the transition feels spiritually seismic.

    It genuinely reminds me of Losing My Religion.

    The old religion was:

    • mechanical divers,
    • steel bracelets,
    • sweeping seconds hands,
    • vintage romance,
    • and maritime mythology.

    The new religion is:

    • Tough Solar,
    • Multi Band 6,
    • atomic precision,
    • resin cases,
    • and watches designed to survive tectonic activity.

    The funniest part is that I fully recognize the absurdity of all this. I understand perfectly well that I am a grown man psychologically reorganizing himself around timekeeping devices like a monk discovering a new denomination of Protestantism.

    Which is precisely why I can’t help laughing at myself.

  • The Professor and the Nihilist

    The Professor and the Nihilist

    I had been teaching Man’s Search for Meaning for more than twenty years, and over time I became increasingly haunted by a contradiction I could no longer ignore.

    As an intellectual exercise, teaching Frankl came easily to me. In the classroom, I could lecture confidently about suffering, moral courage, existential responsibility, and the human capacity to create meaning under catastrophic conditions. I knew the book so thoroughly that the lessons practically assembled themselves. I could guide students through Frankl’s arguments with the polished assurance of a veteran preacher delivering a favorite sermon.

    But outside the classroom, matters became considerably murkier.

    The older I grew, the more I suspected I lacked the moral authority to teach the book at all.

    Frankl’s memoir is not merely literature. It is a rebuke. It quietly interrogates the reader’s vanity, self-pity, cowardice, and spiritual laziness. The book demands that human beings rise above grievance and become worthy of their suffering. And whenever I compared Frankl’s moral heroism to my own personality defects—my vanity, self-absorption, resentment, melodrama, and appetite for comfort—I found myself thinking:

    Talk is cheap.

    Very cheap.

    It is easy to discuss transcendence while standing safely before a whiteboard in air-conditioned suburban America. It is another matter entirely to embody the principles one teaches.

    Yet despite my growing sense of fraudulence, I remained deeply invested in the book. I enjoyed the subtle glow that came from being perceived as a devoted disciple of Viktor Frankl. Teaching the text allowed me to borrow, however temporarily, some reflected aura of moral seriousness.

    Then came Conner Patrick.

    And the entire arrangement began to collapse.

    What made Conner’s disdain for Man’s Search for Meaning so devastating was that in nearly thirty years of teaching, he was by far the finest writer I had ever encountered.

    Not the most promising.
    Not the most talented “for his age.”

    The best.

    He was only eighteen years old, an English major with no discernible career ambitions, yet his prose possessed an effortless authority that made nearly every other student writer seem linguistically undernourished by comparison.

    Most young writers who wish to appear intelligent assault the reader with thesaurus vocabulary and bloated academic jargon. Conner did the opposite. His writing flowed with such ease and precision that reading his essays felt like watching someone stroll through a vast orchard of Language Trees casually plucking the exact perfect word at precisely the right moment.

    No strain.
    No showing off.
    No sweat visible on the machinery.

    The words simply arrived naturally in his hands.

    His prose was vastly superior to mine, and I knew it.

    At one point I told him:

    “I’ve got a V-6 engine under my hood. Reliable enough. But you—you’ve got a V-12. I can’t compete with that.”

    I also confessed I would be genuinely shocked if he did not eventually become a published writer.

    Conner himself looked less like an aspiring literary prodigy than a mountain man accidentally stranded on a community-college campus. He stood about six-foot-four and weighed well over 280 pounds. He wore faded jeans, hiking boots, and flannel shirts that made him appear permanently prepared either to split firewood or disappear into the Pacific Northwest wilderness for several years.

    A scraggly beard partially concealed the freckles on his cherubic cheeks, while a wool herringbone golfer’s cap sat low over his curly reddish-brown hair. Most days he carried a guitar into class as though wandering accidentally between folk concert and existential crisis.

    Socially, he was pleasant enough. He chatted easily with classmates and generally projected the relaxed friendliness of a gifted person not yet fully aware of the intimidation he inspired.

    But every so often I would catch his blue eyes narrowing slightly while observing other people, and in those moments I glimpsed something colder beneath the surface—an exhaustion with humanity itself, a private contempt that flickered across his face before disappearing again.

    It was the look of someone already disappointed by the species at eighteen.

    Conner would often linger after class long after the other students had drifted out into the hallway, and we would sit talking about his essays, literature, or his older sister Jennifer, who had taken my class the previous year and apparently decided I was competent enough to recommend to her younger brother.

    One of Conner’s essays featured a bald high-school football coach drinking with old friends inside a bar, and it became immediately obvious to me that the character was a lightly fictionalized version of my younger self. Conner had scavenged fragments from personal anecdotes I had casually shared in class and stitched them together into a kind of alternate-universe doppelgänger—one far more reckless, abrasive, and dangerous than I had ever possessed the courage to become.

    The other students loved the essay.

    I did too, though reading it gave me the uncanny sensation of watching someone steal my reflection and improve upon it.

    The important thing was this: Conner knew I respected his intelligence, and because of that respect he felt completely comfortable mocking me.

    More significantly, he felt comfortable disagreeing with me.

    This became painfully evident shortly after my first lecture on Man’s Search for Meaning, during which I explained the semester’s final capstone essay assignment. Students would argue either that Viktor Frankl made a convincing case for meaning as the antidote to existential despair, or that his argument ultimately failed to persuade them.

    After class, Conner remained seated at his desk while the others filed out.

    Then he looked at me and said:

    “You don’t really believe in this shit, do you?”

    The bluntness of the question startled me.

    “What?” I replied stupidly.

    He sighed impatiently, as though disappointed I was forcing him to state the obvious.

    “Come on, man. You know you don’t believe in this shit.”

    What unnerved me most was that part of me immediately recognized he might be right.

    Still, out of instinctive self-defense, I answered:

    “Well actually, I tend to be more agnostic when it comes to the subject of meaning.”

    “Seriously?”

    He was flipping through Frankl’s book in his enormous hands while staring at the pages with open contempt.

    “Take away the impressive Holocaust narrative and what are you left with?” he said. “Just a bunch of homilies about positive thinking. It’s basically Chicken Soup for the Soul for intellectuals.”

    Ordinarily, disagreement never bothered me. I encouraged students to challenge texts. But Conner’s criticism struck differently because he was not merely attacking Frankl.

    He was questioning my judgment.

    According to Conner, I had assigned sentimental tripe disguised as philosophy. Worse, I had emotionally manipulated students into treating cliché as wisdom because I personally needed the book to be true.

    I suddenly felt defensive in a way I hated.

    “I’m not going to lie to you, Conner,” I admitted. “When I first read Frankl at eighteen, the section where he’s marching with the prisoners at dawn and thinking about the spirit of his wife—I cried for like five hours.”

    Conner winced sympathetically, though not respectfully.

    “I’m glad you got something out of it,” he said. “And Frankl seems like a great guy. But all this stuff about meaning is bullshit. You know as well as I do there is no meaning.”

    “Is that what I’m supposed to tell my daughters?”

    “You can tell them the truth or you can tell them lies. It’s your choice.”

    “I want my daughters to grow up, get educated, fall in love, build meaningful lives. That gives me meaning. Does that make me stupid?”

    “You’re confusing meaning with survival,” he replied instantly. “Your love for your daughters is biological. Instinctive. I understand that. But that’s not meaning in the grand Frankl sense.”

    “So Frankl’s delusional?”

    “Of course he’s delusional,” Conner said calmly. “That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with him. Look, the guy went through unimaginable horror. He had to convince himself the suffering meant something or he would’ve psychologically collapsed. Most people do that. Meaning is basically an emotional survival mechanism people invent so they don’t lose their minds.”

    But it wasn’t merely his argument that destabilized me.

    It was the way he looked at me while making it.

    Conner spoke as though he regarded us as secret ideological allies—as if beneath my classroom performance, my lectures, my carefully curated professor persona, there existed another version of me fully aware that life was fundamentally meaningless.

    And the horrifying thing was that part of me felt seen.

    As instructors, especially after decades in the classroom, we like to imagine ourselves as stable intellectual authorities. We tell ourselves we are people of conviction who can withstand disagreement without wavering.

    Usually I could.

    But in Conner’s presence, I often felt like a man trying to lecture confidently while standing atop loose sand during an earthquake.

    Then he leaned back in his chair and delivered the coup de grâce.

    “Why are you teaching this crap?” he asked. “Does it make you feel better stuffing meaning down your students’ throats? Are you having some kind of midlife crisis and trying to lecture yourself out of despair?”

    “This is a critical thinking class,” I protested weakly. “I want students thinking for themselves.”

    “But you’re a hypocrite,” he replied immediately. “You tell us to think critically and detach emotionally from arguments. But you can’t do that with Frankl because you worship him. You’re emotionally compromised.”

    Then he held up the book dismissively.

    “Take away your admiration for his heroism and your sentimental memory of crying over his wife, and what do you have left? A bunch of clichés about finding meaning. And you know as well as I do that suffering doesn’t mean anything. Most of life is random pain that people desperately try to decorate with philosophy afterward.”

    Then, as if determined to drive the knife deeper, Conner began explaining why he found Frankl’s philosophy emotionally manipulative and intellectually fraudulent.

    His mother, he said, was deeply religious and believed God had called her to become a foster parent for infants damaged by drugs and alcohol.

    “Ever since I was a little kid,” he told me, “there have been crack babies in my house.”

    He said the phrase without sentimentality or self-pity. Just exhaustion.

    “They don’t recover,” he continued. “They’re permanently damaged. Some of them sleep all night with their eyes open. Some make these awful squawking noises like prehistoric birds. A lot of them can barely function. It’s a nightmare.”

    Then his tone hardened.

    “And what has my mother gained from this so-called higher purpose? Jennifer and I basically lost our childhoods. My mom neglected us because she was so obsessed with saving these babies for God. Half the time she expected us to help raise them.”

    He leaned back in his chair and laughed bitterly.

    “That’s what meaning looks like in real life. Endless stress, resentment, dysfunction, and guilt wrapped in religious self-congratulation.”

    According to Conner, his mother’s “calling” was either pathological altruism, spiritual narcissism, or some toxic combination of both.

    “Honestly,” he said, “Frankl shouldn’t be proud of this kind of shit. I grew up surrounded by people justifying misery in the name of meaning.”

    As had become the custom lately, the class ended on Conner’s terms, not mine. His words hung in the room long after the students gathered their backpacks and shuffled toward the door. I stood there disarmed, mute, and inwardly collapsing beneath the awful suspicion that he had exposed me for what I truly was: a middle-aged professor borrowing moral authority from books whose standards he himself could not meet. I felt less like a teacher than a theological used-car salesman trying to unload existential optimism with bald tires and a cracked transmission.

    I drove home that evening emotionally flattened.

    What disturbed me most was not merely Conner’s argument but my inability to answer it convincingly.

    For days afterward, I replayed our exchanges obsessively in my head the way a defeated boxer rewatches footage of a championship loss searching for the precise moment his legs gave out beneath him. Somewhere, I kept telling myself, there had to exist a devastating rebuttal capable of puncturing Conner’s nihilism once and for all. Surely Frankl’s philosophy could not be dismantled so easily by an eighteen-year-old English major dressed like a depressed lumberjack.

    By the next class meeting, however, I had concluded that the only intellectually honest response was to drag Conner’s objections directly into the open and let the entire class watch the philosophical knife fight unfold publicly.

    I asked his permission beforehand.

    He approved immediately and with almost indecent enthusiasm.

    The little bastard was delighted by the prospect of becoming the classroom heretic.

    So during the following lecture I summarized his objections for everyone.

    “Conner wants us,” I began carefully, “to temporarily set aside Frankl’s heroism and focus strictly on the argument itself. He makes two claims. First, much suffering appears entirely senseless. Second, what people call meaning may simply be a coping mechanism human beings invent to survive psychologically.”

    I paused and glanced toward Conner.

    He sat in the back row smiling broadly with the self-satisfaction of an arsonist admiring his own fire.

    “Now let’s concede something important right away,” I continued. “Massive amounts of suffering do appear meaningless. Consider something like the Indian Ocean tsunami. Hundreds of thousands dead. Entire families erased in minutes. There is no obvious moral lesson embedded in catastrophe on that scale.”

    The room remained quiet.

    “But,” I continued, “perhaps meaning exists on a spectrum. Perhaps human beings occupy what we might call a Meaning Scale.”

    The students leaned forward.

    “At one end,” I explained, “there is spiritual decrepitude. Imagine a severe addict whose entire existence collapses into appetite and self-destruction. He burns bridges with friends and family. He isolates himself. He loses all connection to higher aspirations. His life contracts inward toward emptiness.”

    The students nodded.

    “At the other end,” I continued, “are people who devote themselves to craft, service, discipline, love, or meaningful work. Through sacrifice and commitment they cultivate a higher version of themselves. That movement toward flourishing—that movement toward transcendence—is what I would call meaning.”

    Then I made the tactical error of looking directly at Conner.

    His lips curled upward immediately.

    “It’s great when people flourish,” he said, “but don’t confuse flourishing with meaning.”

    He folded his enormous arms across his chest like a Viking philosopher preparing to sack a monastery.

    “I know a sixteen-year-old evangelist who’s amazing at converting people to his faith. He’s disciplined, charismatic, passionate—everything you’re describing.”

    Then Conner paused theatrically.

    “But his older brother used to be an evangelist too. Now he tours around giving lectures about why religion is nonsense. He helps believers become atheists. He’s flourishing too. They can’t both possess some objective thing called meaning.”

    He shrugged.

    “They’re just pursuing narratives that energize them emotionally.”

    Then came the kill shot.

    “Meaning isn’t objective reality,” he said. “It’s emotional fuel. Complete bullshit.”

    The room fell silent.

    But Conner was only warming up.

    “There’s another problem with your argument,” he continued. “You’re committing the exact kind of either-or fallacy you’ve warned us about all semester.”

    Now he was openly enjoying himself.

    “You’ve created this cartoon universe where people are either spiritually disintegrating addicts or enlightened flourishing saints. But real people are contradictory. Plenty of great writers produced brilliant art while simultaneously destroying themselves with alcoholism. Human beings can flourish and decay at the same time.”

    Then he lowered his voice slightly.

    “You already know this. You’re just too emotionally attached to Frankl to admit it.”

    That sentence struck me with horrifying accuracy because part of me feared he was right.

    Then Conner leaned forward and delivered the existential haymaker.

    “Who wants to believe we’ve been dumped into a meaningless universe?” he asked quietly. “Who wants to admit we’re basically distracting ourselves with careers, hobbies, entertainment, and relationships until we die?”

    Again I felt that awful sensation of standing on shifting sand.

    I could feel myself sliding toward his worldview against my will.

    Panicking internally, I reached desperately for one of my emergency pedagogical flotation devices: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

    In a DVD interview, Gene Wilder had explained that the movie was fundamentally about boundaries and self-restraint, so I lunged at this idea like a drowning man grabbing driftwood.

    “Boundaries give us meaning,” I blurted out. “Boundaries teach discipline. They protect us from excess and chaos. Children raised with healthy boundaries are happier than children without them. Boundaries point us toward meaning.”

    Conner shook his head slowly.

    “Boundaries matter,” he conceded. “But they’re survival mechanisms. Not meaning.”

    Still flailing for life support, I snapped: “Take away meaning and what’s left? A nihilistic free-for-all? A Darwinian nightmare where the strong brutalize the weak?”

    Conner smiled lazily.

    “Relax, McMahon. Civilization isn’t going to collapse because people stop reading Viktor Frankl. We cooperate because cooperation benefits survival. Morality is adaptive behavior. That still isn’t meaning.”

    “So we’re just products of evolution?”

    “Pretty much. Can’t handle it?”

    “If what you’re saying is true,” I said, “most people would collapse into despair.”

    “Not at all,” he replied calmly. “Most people are perfectly happy believing comforting delusions. Religion. Cosmic purpose. Destiny. Frankl just packages existential anesthesia for intellectuals.”

    Then he grinned.

    “If grown adults want to believe in Santa Claus forever, more power to them.”

    At this point I decided to change strategy.

    “Can I ask you something personal, Mr. Patrick?”

    “Go for it.”

    “Why are you even in college?”

    He shrugged.

    “Something to do.”

    “You have no plan?”

    “Not really.”

    “Wouldn’t having a plan be better than not having one?”

    “Not necessarily,” he replied instantly. “I know plenty of students who followed ‘the plan’ only to realize they hate their major and hate their future. A lot of plans are disasters. Sometimes not having a plan is healthier.”

    At that moment the discussion no longer resembled a classroom debate. It felt like an arm-wrestling contest between a steroid-bloated carnival strongman and a tuberculosis patient fresh from convalescence. Conner’s arguments kept slamming my hand closer and closer toward the table while I strained uselessly beneath the fluorescent lights pretending I still had a fighting chance.

    I instinctively touched the front of my damp shirt expecting blood.

    It was only sweat.

    “But goals matter,” I insisted weakly. “Goals help us live more fully. As Nietzsche says—and Frankl quotes him constantly—‘He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.’”

    Conner smirked.

    “Yes, but the Why may itself be delusional. Fascists have Whys. Cult leaders have Whys. Having motivation doesn’t magically create objective meaning.”

    Then he delivered the final insult with almost affectionate cruelty.

    “Honestly, McMahon, you assigned us a book full of platitudes and clichés. Your brain’s gone soft in your old age, bro. You may want to start looking at retirement.”

    By now I could sense the emotional tide of the classroom shifting toward him. Students were smiling at Conner with the admiration usually reserved for charismatic revolutionaries moments before mutiny.

    Conner sensed it too.

    Then, astonishingly, he stood up and addressed the class.

    “Okay, everybody,” he announced. “Show’s over. McMahon and I planned this whole thing beforehand. Rehearsed script. We wanted to demonstrate Socratic dialogue.”

    The students erupted.

    Several called it one of the greatest classes they had ever witnessed. One student said he regretted not recording the exchange and uploading it to YouTube. Another compared us to one of those buddy-comedy duos where two men spend the entire film insulting each other but secretly cannot function apart.

    The giant wall clock showed that the class was over.

    Students slowly shuffled out of the classroom buzzing with excitement.

    Conner remained seated.

    “What the hell was that?” I demanded once we were alone. “You were tearing me apart argument by argument. Then suddenly you rescue me?”

    He shrugged casually.

    “Well, first of all, I like you.”

    “What the hell do you do to professors you don’t like?”

    He laughed. Then he said, “To your credit, you tried to do something ambitious and failed. But at least you tried. Most professors just hide behind the same fossilized lecture notes for thirty years. You fought me. That takes guts. No one beats me in an argument–ever. You’ve got balls, McMahon.”

    “So you spared me because I’ve got balls?”

    “That’s part of it,” he admitted. “But also, I didn’t know anything before I took your class. You taught me some new ways to think critically. I wasn’t going to use the weapons you gave me to publicly humiliate you.”

    Then he smiled.

    “I don’t like many people, but I like you.”

    I shook my head.

    “Thirty years teaching, and I’ve never lost an argument like that. You handed me my bloody head on a stake.”

    “Which means,” he replied triumphantly, “it’s finally time for you to admit I’m right and Frankl’s wrong.”

    “I can’t do that.”

    “Come on, man. I saved you.”

    “You make compelling points,” I admitted. “But I still have some stubborn kernel of faith that meaning exists. If I denied that completely, I’d be lying.”

    Conner nodded thoughtfully.

    “Fair enough,” he said. “But next time, watch yourself in class.”

    Then he grinned.

    “Because next time I’m still going to kick your ass.”

  • The Frogman and the Music of Atlantis

    The Frogman and the Music of Atlantis

    My junior year of high school was my “Deacon Blues” year. I wore it like a religious creed. The song played, and I nodded along as if I’d been admitted to some nocturnal order of the misunderstood. Only decades later did I realize the joke was on me. The narrator isn’t a tragic hero; he’s a suburban man with a good stereo and a better imagination, building a flattering alternate reality to anesthetize his boredom. What I mistook for transcendence was mood lighting. I wasn’t ascending; I was dimming the room.

    Satire thrives on mockery because it exposes the soft spots we’d rather not touch. But self-mockery can metastasize. It can turn your life into a punchline so comprehensive that nothing is left standing—not even the truth that your choices matter. High stakes persist whether you acknowledge them or not. We are, to put it plainly, creatures who want more than a clever story about ourselves. We want something that holds when the music stops.

    For that, I have to go back a year. I was a sophomore who encountered “Zoom,” written by Lionel Richie and Ronald LaPread of The Commodores. The song arrived like a quiet command. You can hear the Gospel in its bones—the upward pull, the refusal to collapse into self. The voice in “Zoom” isn’t asking for a better seat at the table; it’s asking for the table to be remade so everyone can eat. It’s not self-improvement. It’s a prayer for shared elevation.

    I remember where I was when it came on—KSFX, KSOL—the speakers on my Realistic Radio Shack clock radio doing their best, the world suddenly holding its breath. I stopped. Not figuratively. I stopped. The song spoke to my heart: Be better. Not for your reputation, not for your résumé—for people. That’s a different order of demand.

    That same year, “Voyage to Atlantis” by The Isley Brothers performed a similar operation. It promised return—home not as geography but as fidelity, as a place you carry and keep. Between those two songs was a paradox I could feel even if I couldn’t name it: you root yourself in a clean intention, and from that grounding you rise. No theatrics required. No persona. Just alignment.

    Listening to them felt like church without the building. Something gathered. Something clarified. You left with less noise and more direction.

    What is music, after all, if not the part of life that refuses translation and still manages to tell the truth?

    Which brings me to an embarrassment I’ll risk anyway: in watch circles, we talk about a “grail” watch that will “sing” on the wrist. It’s a ridiculous phrase—until it isn’t. Because this hulking slab of resin I’m wearing—the G-Shock Frogman—does something adjacent to that metaphor. It doesn’t produce music. It points to it. It behaves like a reference, a small, stubborn reminder that there is a cleaner version of me available if I’d like to stop auditioning and start choosing.

    The Frogman is not an upgrade. It’s an accusation shaped like a tool. It suggests a man with a steadier pulse, a man less interested in narrating his life and more interested in living it. A man who could hear “Zoom” and “Voyage to Atlantis” and respond the way that sophomore did—by stopping, by listening, by letting the moment ask something of him.

    I don’t need to recover youth. I need to recover that pause—the willingness to be addressed by something better and not immediately turn it into a story about myself.

    The songs didn’t change. I did.

    The question is whether I can change back.

  • The Yahtzee Test of a Meaningful Life

    The Yahtzee Test of a Meaningful Life

    People like to ask, “Does your life have meaning?” as if the answer can be retrieved from a drawer and presented with confidence. Most of us reach for an answer polished and forgettable: family, work, the usual suspects. But these answers have the texture of wallpaper—present everywhere, saying nothing.

    You can refine the answer and still miss the mark. You might say, “Playing the piano gives me more meaning than bingeing on confectionary pleasures online.” True enough. There is a difference between sitting at a piano and sitting in a stupor. One engages discipline, attention, and a relationship with beauty; the other numbs you into a soft, glazed anonymity. But even this comparison mistakes elevation for meaning. Music may lift you above the gutter, but altitude alone is not purpose.

    The real question is not what you do, but who you are while doing it. Do you become the man who scrolls at expensive watch listings while his daughter waits with a box of Yahtzee and you dismiss her because you’re “too busy”? Or do you close the laptop and recognize, in that moment, that time with her is not an interruption but the point? Meaning reveals itself not in our hobbies but in our reflexes.

    This is where Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, enters the conversation with uncomfortable authority. Writing out of the concentration camps, he did not theorize meaning from a leather chair. He embodied it under conditions designed to strip it away. His account carries weight because of his moral posture—his insistence that even in degradation, one could orient oneself toward service, toward others, toward something beyond the self. Meaning, for Frankl, was not a feeling or a hobby. It was an orientation.

    By contrast, selfishness corrodes everything it touches. A man may possess a thriving career and a loving family, but if he approaches both as instruments for his own gratification, he drains them of significance. Push that far enough and you arrive at nihilism—the quiet conviction that nothing matters, not because nothing exists, but because nothing is allowed to matter. Nihilism is not a philosophy so much as a habit of disregard.

    Stories, whether drawn from sacred texts or fairy tales, understand this intuitively. They pit the nihilistic malcontent against the purpose-driven hero. But they do not deliver meaning as a reward, neatly wrapped and handed over. Meaning is not an external prize; it is the byproduct of character—of attention, sacrifice, and the refusal to treat other people as disposable.

    The traditions diverge on how that character is formed. In Judaism, one cultivates it through action, with God’s help, through law and discipline. In Christianity, the diagnosis is harsher: we are too compromised by original sin to generate virtue on our own and must throw ourselves on divine mercy, hoping for transformation. Which account is closer to the truth remains an open question. What is not in doubt is this: meaning is not something you acquire. It is something you become.