Cinemorphosis

Category: religion

  • The Warm Bath and the Higher Forces

    The Warm Bath and the Higher Forces

    Therapist Phil Stutz, in Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You, identifies the most insidious adversity we face daily: the lure of immediate gratification. This dopamine-charged, compulsive, addictive pull consigns us, he says, to “the lower channel,” the “Warm Bath,” the comfort zone. Its source is the inner saboteur he calls Part X.

    In Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, the same force appears as “The Resistance,” the invisible enemy that diverts us from lives of creativity and meaning. Sometimes it takes the form of “unwholesome activities”—scouring the internet for smut or indulging in materialistic temptations that pull us away from hard work. Cal Newport warns that when we return from such addictive detours, our brains are still coated in “lower channel” residue—mental detritus that dulls our clarity and compromises our work.

    Confronting Part X—or the Resistance—is not a one-time victory. We never ascend to a nirvana where the demon vanishes; it is always nearby, waiting for an opening.

    Rejecting the endless circuit of traditional talk therapy, Stutz arms his patients with Tools—practical methods to counter the bad habits born of Part X. His patients are often “either trapped in a past that no longer existed or living in fantasy about a future that hadn’t arrived yet—and might never.” The Tools, he says, “open the door to the infinite wisdom of the present.”

    His therapy hinges on three elements:

    1. Homework—daily exercises outside of sessions.
    2. Forward Motion—steps away from the past and repetitive stagnation toward a new life.
    3. Connection to Higher Forces—a necessary change, not an optional one, to avoid the self-destruction that leads to death.

    “We are only a tiny part of an infinite universe,” he writes. “On our own we can do nothing. But, in a silent miracle, the universe puts its energies at the service of human evolution.” Higher Forces help us escape personal hell and learned helplessness. When his patients connect with them, they find hope and the power to change—here, in the present.

    Before going further, I have to pause and unpack this. First, I believe Stutz’s framework offers a real way out of the wide path to self-destruction and onto the narrow path of meaning. Second, I can’t help but think of Christianity, Judaism, and A.A.

    In Christianity, especially Pauline theology, we are compulsive creatures, helpless before our sinful drives. Only surrendering to Higher Powers—in this case, the cosmic Christ—can break our demonic impulses. Paul spells this out in the Epistle to the Romans.

    Judaism, at least as Rabbi Hyam Maccoby describes it in The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, rejects this helplessness. We do have self-agency. When we cry to God for rescue from our self-destruction and abasement, He meets us halfway—we move toward Him, and He moves toward us.

    In A.A., the principle is stripped to its core. Comedian Marc Maron has spoken about his recovery from substance abuse: every day, he got on his knees and told a Higher Power he could not free himself from addiction alone.

    Across these three traditions, I see more similarities than differences. I’m confident that anyone who sincerely applies these principles will improve.

    But here’s the sticking point: belief in a Higher Power without religious baggage is not the same as belief in a specific deity. The Jewish God—open to debate, vague about the afterlife—is quite different from the Christian God who, under Pauline influence, recasts Judaism into a universal religion for gentiles, condemns Jews as cut off from the vine, and adopts Augustine’s stark vision of eternal paradise or eternal damnation.

    Three notions of deity—each with profound implications.

    As an addict and an agnostic, I wonder: am I letting these theological questions distract me from the urgent need to connect with Higher Powers so I can face my own demons? This question burns in me. Will these Higher Powers help me navigate my dense jungle of doubts? Will they help me find clarity?

    Stutz notes that many of his patients backslide. Why? Because they stop using the Tools. Why stop? Complacency. Or disbelief in the stakes.

    Which brings me to the core of my own struggle: faith in a doctrinal God versus a personal God without doctrine. The doctrinal God comes with teachings—eternal perdition, the Virgin Birth, a literal resurrection—that can be difficult to swallow. For a fuller exploration of the problems with doctrine, see Elizabeth Anderson’s essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”

    The personal God without doctrine might be more palatable, but perhaps lacks the high-stakes edge that some people need to stay committed to their daily battle with Part X, the Resistance, or whatever name we give this destructive force.

    So what’s the path forward? Should I call life a nihilistic joke and live recklessly? Certainly not. Even with my doubts, I must press ahead, use the Tools, and seek communion with Higher Powers. I can only hope such a life will yield answers—and remind myself that giving in to immediate gratification only strengthens the lower channel, leading, inevitably, toward darkness, confusion, and death.

  • Trees Bent by the Wind

    Trees Bent by the Wind

    In An Abbreviated Life, Ariel Leve recounts the shadow her mother cast across her existence—a narcissistic, volatile presence who trailed her daughter across continents. Her mother blurred boundaries, confiding adult affairs, romantic escapades, and private fantasies to her child, then lacing those disclosures with guilt trips and psychological sabotage.

    At eleven, Ariel was told she was going blind—a lie without evidence, a mix of cruelty and madness. This was not an isolated cruelty but the common cadence of her mother’s speech. At six, Ariel’s caretaker, Kiki, died of a stroke mid-flight, with Ariel in the cabin. Ariel stopped speaking for six months; a psychiatrist prescribed Valium.

    Her mother, often wearing a nightgown even to school functions, could deliver barbed declarations without breaking her routine. “When I’m dead, you’ll be all alone because your father doesn’t want you,” she told her young daughter, pausing only to reapply makeup. “Just remember that and treat me nicely.”

    Her father, in Bangkok, refused to take her in. Ariel lived in grief that he wouldn’t rescue her from the chaos. Decades later, a therapist told her that growing up with such a mother caused neurological damage—her brain, shaped by constant stress, had developed like a tree twisted by relentless wind. Trauma was not a lightning strike; it was climate. The result: a life stripped of adventure, self-acceptance, and trust. Ariel’s default mode became hypervigilance and retreat.

    Her partner, Mario, an Italian with no literary ambitions, no awareness of New York publishing, and no taste for bagels, embodies the opposite—balanced, unselfconscious, open to life. He steadies her, if only temporarily.

    In one conversation, her father asked if she could let go of the past. Could she destroy her demons? Ariel was unsure. A novelist told her discipline could harden one’s “emotional arteries,” making childhood wounds less decisive. Ariel countered: some are “front-loaded with trauma,” not victims but soldiers—scarred, but still standing.

    Neuroscientist Martin Teicher affirmed her point: childhood abuse alters brain wiring. Adaptive coping mechanisms in childhood turn maladaptive in adulthood, creating an adult mismatched to their world. The traumatized blunt emotion not with a scalpel, but a sledgehammer—shielding themselves from joy as well as pain.

    For Ariel, this explains a life “within brackets.” She sees herself in the patterns Janet Woititz described in Adult Children of Alcoholics: mistrust, emotional volatility, self-loathing, and a skewed sense of normalcy.

    Her chosen remedy: EMDR therapy for PTSD. Nine months of “the light saber”—eyes tracking a green light, headphones delivering sound, memories replayed until they lose their grip. Sessions leave her exhausted. There is progress, measured in patience with Mario’s daughters, in small openings toward joy. But she does not present herself as cured—only as a permanent convalescent.

    Her memoir probes the ethics of trauma. How accountable are the wounded for maladaptive behavior? Can faith or philosophy save them, or does failure deepen self-blame? Are they sinners, soldiers, or something in between?

    Leve’s life raises a tension between two extremes: the nihilist’s surrender—“nothing can be done, so I’ll live recklessly”—and the motivational credo—“discipline and positivity conquer all.” The truth lies somewhere in the messy middle.

  • The French Toast Zone and Other Dangerous Places

    The French Toast Zone and Other Dangerous Places

    Recently, I watched the new King of the Hill, where the gang has aged into the gentle patina of later life. In one scene, Hank, Peggy, and Bobby are seated at the kitchen table, devouring what looked like French toast or chocolate chip pancakes—something golden, sweet, and unapologetically bad for you. It was an ordinary family breakfast, the kind you imagine smelling from three houses away. Watching it felt like slipping into a warm bath of contentment. These were normal people, enjoying themselves, at ease in the sacred space I call the French Toast Zone.

    The French Toast Zone is the place where life is easy, breakfast is decadent, and you’re at peace with your waistline, your arteries, and your eventual mortality. But step into the biomarker minefield—calories counted, protein ratios calibrated, insulin spikes plotted like military campaigns—and you’re in the Restriction Zone. The mood shifts. Every bite is an act of negotiation with your cholesterol, your bathroom scale, and the grim actuarial math of your lifespan.

    Real life, of course, is not an all-inclusive stay in either zone. Most of us shuttle back and forth—half saint, half sinner—forever bargaining between the delights of German chocolate cake and the promise of three extra years of foggy-eyed longevity. Too much denial, and you die having lived as a monk in a bakery you never entered. Too much indulgence, and you’re trapped on the hedonic treadmill, sprinting after pleasures that get smaller the closer you get.

    Some people manage this dance effortlessly. They live in homeostasis, exercising moderation as naturally as breathing. I have never been one of these blessed creatures. As a teenage bodybuilder who saw biceps as salvation from low self-esteem, I learned early that moderation was for other people. My internal wiring is a one-way circuit from obsession to burnout and back again. I am, in short, Extreme Man.

    Extreme Man has his own archetype—a tragic, sweaty figure charging at his chosen folly until he mutates into something grotesque. Then comes the epiphany, the Damascus jolt that scrambles his molecules and sends him hurtling into a new life mission. It could be religion, music, bodybuilding, stamp collecting—doesn’t matter. Once the lightning strikes, moderation becomes an obscenity. He must convert the world.

    When I was a teenage Olympic weightlifter, I preached squats with the fervor of a street-corner prophet, convinced proper form could change lives. My audience—bewildered, politely nodding—failed to share my revelation. Some Extremes get written off as harmless cranks. Others, gifted with charisma, build religions followed by millions.

    The homeostatic types are often immune to these evangelists. They are already content. But for those of us who never knew balance, the siren call of radical change is intoxicating. We cling to the hope that the right transformation will lift us out of our malaise.

    Neither camp is wholly admirable. The balanced can model moderation—or smug mediocrity. The Extremes can inspire reinvention—or display unhinged egotism. The truth is in the messy middle, where both tendencies collide, and if you’re lucky, you learn from both without being consumed by either.

  • This Is the Life You Have Chosen

    This Is the Life You Have Chosen

    I’ve never forgotten a story one of my college students told me back in the fall of 1998. She was a re-entry student—a nurse in her early forties—juggling coursework at UCLA with overnight hospital shifts. The kind of woman who sticks in your memory: short, sturdy, glasses perched low on her nose, with the weary, perceptive eyes of someone who’d seen too much and lips that knew how to pace a punchline.

    Most afternoons, after class let out, she’d linger by my desk and recount episodes from her Louisiana backwoods childhood or from the fluorescent netherworld of her hospital’s VIP wing. Her stories ricocheted between absurdity and horror—tales told with the calm authority of someone who could handle arterial spray with one hand and chart notes with the other.

    But one story gripped me by the spine and never let go. It wasn’t about dying celebrities or ER gore. It was about something far worse. A visitation. A monster.

    She and her cousin Carmen were feral children, raised in the lawless heat of rural Louisiana, where school attendance was optional and adult supervision was more myth than fact. Left to their own devices, the two girls invented what she called “mean games”—they tortured frogs, pulled wings off insects, and hinted at darker cruelties she refused to name. Lord of the Flies in sundresses.

    And then one afternoon, the visitor arrived.

    They were holed up in a decaying house, conspiring over their next cruelty, when the porch door creaked open and something stepped inside. It looked like a man. But it wasn’t. It had a tail—thick, muscled, and disturbingly animate. It moved with a will of its own, curling and flicking behind him like a fleshy metronome. His body was bristled with wiry hair. His voice? Low, hoarse, and calm in the most terrifying way. He didn’t threaten. He simply listed.

    Sitting in a rocking chair, the creature described, in brutal detail, everything the girls had done—every frog mutilated, every insect dissected. Nothing vague. He named the acts like he had them on file. And then he made his offer: Keep going, he said, and I’ll recruit you.

    He stayed for three hours. Just sat there. Breathing. Flicking that tail. Describing their path toward damnation with the steady tone of a bureaucrat explaining retirement benefits. When he finally left, dissolving into the heat shimmer of the Louisiana dusk, the girls were too stunned to move. Carmen whispered, “Did you see that?” My student just nodded.

    They never spoke of it again. But they changed. Overnight. Sunday school. Prayer. Kindness, enforced not by conscience but by fear. The kind that settles in your bones and never leaves. Whatever that thing was, it did its job.

    And this is the part that haunts me: she wasn’t a kook. She wasn’t mystical, manic, or given to exaggeration. She was a nurse—clear-eyed, grounded, more familiar with death than most people are with taxes. She wasn’t telling a ghost story. She was giving a deposition.

    To this day, I see those two girls, wide-eyed and paralyzed, staring down a thing that knew them intimately and promised them a future in hell’s apprenticeship program. Whether it was a demon, a shared psychotic break, or some mythological construct formed by childhood guilt and Southern humidity, I don’t know. But I do know what it meant.

    The creature’s message was brutal in its simplicity: Keep practicing cruelty, and you’ll lose the ability to stop. You’ll become it.

    That’s not just folklore. That’s biblical. The idea that if you repeat your wickedness long enough, God—or whatever you believe in—stops interrupting you. He doesn’t smite you. He simply steps aside and says, Go ahead. This is the life you’ve chosen.

    No wonder Kierkegaard was obsessed with working out your salvation with fear and trembling. There’s nothing more terrifying than the idea that damnation is self-inflicted, not by a thunderbolt, but by repetition. That the road to hell is paved with muscle memory.

  • Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym Tank Top

    Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym Tank Top

    During my junior year of high school, I spent a weeknight cruising East Fourteenth—the gritty artery that runs through San Leandro and Hayward—until one in the morning. I was in the passenger seat of Martino’s tomato red Ranchero, the two of us flexing imaginary muscles and real teenage bravado. Martino was my bodybuilding partner, my brother-in-biceps, and together we patrolled the boulevard like suburban centurions on a mission to kill time. And we succeeded.

    When I finally crept back into my house under the cover of darkness, I wasn’t met by a parent’s scolding. No raised voices. No lectures. Just a deafening moral hangover. A private throb of guilt that came from inside—the inner thermostat dialed to “waste detected.”

    That night, the dissonance hit me hard: I had thrown away hours of my finite life, not with rebellion or passion, but with asphalt apathy. 

    Some people never feel that throb. For them, life is a sandbox without rules. Morality is performative, calculated just enough to avoid arrest or awkward silences. These are the functional nihilists—those for whom nothing is sacred, so nothing is squandered. There are no stakes, no salvation, no damnation. No trembling because there’s nothing to tremble about.

    But Kierkegaard wouldn’t have cruised East Fourteenth. He’d have stayed home, in existential dread, kneeling before the void, trying to work out his salvation with fear and trembling. Not a metaphor. A mandate. A gun-to-the-temple kind of urgency.

    And that gun? I’ve felt it every morning. Not the literal kind, but a cold steel thought pressing behind the eyes: Work or be worthless. Create or decay. Hustle or rot. I didn’t coast through college because I loved knowledge. I ground through it because I feared poverty, failure, and the humiliation of becoming a soft tomato with four toothpicks sticking out—Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym tank top.

    Fear built my body. But can fear build a soul?

    That’s the hard part, isn’t it? Muscles are visible. Measurable. The soul, by contrast, is a ghost that flinches from mirrors. What makes a good soul? Is it, as philosopher Elizabeth Anderson suggests, acts of reciprocal kindness—a kind of moral evolution, godless but decent? Or do we still need to shake in our boots, to feel that Kierkegaardian quake that says tend to the soul or become monstrous?

    Then there’s modern self-care, the secular sacrament of our time. Meditation, hydration, positive affirmations—pampering routines dressed up as spiritual growth. But is self-care just aromatherapy for the abyss? What if the soul needs something harder than scented candles?

    And what of the artist, the compulsive maker? Is the act of creating a form of salvation—or just another idol, a beautiful golden calf carved in your own image?

    Forgive me. I’m in my sixties now. The questions don’t resolve; they just echo louder. I know indulgence makes me miserable and discipline brings fleeting peace. But that’s not the kind of salvation Kierkegaard meant. That’s just emotional maintenance.

    So I remain agnostic, trembling not from conviction, but from having more questions than answers. 

  • Memoirs of a Tanned Narcissist

    Memoirs of a Tanned Narcissist

    The summer of 1977: I was fifteen, half-boy, half-bicep, bronzing my delusions at the Don Castro Swim Lagoon. I lay stretched across the sand like a sacrificial offering to the gods of narcissism, a dog-eared paperback of The Happy Hooker tucked inside my gym bag like contraband scripture. My nose, my skin, my hormonal soul were all baptized in the collective perfume of that era—banana-scented cocoa butter and coconut oil sizzling on sunbaked flesh.

    It wasn’t just a swim lagoon; it was a sensory bacchanal. My eyes devoured the parades of bikini-clad girls, but it was the scent—the olfactory gospel of the ’70s—that tattooed itself onto my brainstem. The decade fused with my adolescence to form a perfect cocktail of lust, leisure, and delusion. That was Me Time before “me time” became a self-help cliché. This was Me Time as a birthright. An ecstatic creed. A half-naked mission statement.

    I hoarded that fragment of the 70s like a holy relic, a sweaty teenage talisman that whispered, You are entitled to this pleasure. And for decades, I believed it. I ritualized it. I salted it into the marrow of my daily habits. Self-indulgence wasn’t a guilty pleasure; it was as essential as cod liver oil and calf raises.

    But now, older, less tanned, and with only traces of Adonis left in my rearview mirror, I wonder if that Me Time ethos has become a prison disguised as a spa. What began as a teenage philosophy of sacred sensuality now feels like a rerun of Fantasy Island with worse lighting. The coconut oil that once anointed me has turned rancid with nostalgia.

    Am I frozen like Lot’s wife, looking back too long at the sun-glazed glory of the past and turning to salt—one of the many malformed, glittering relics trapped in the Salt Mines of my own mythology? Have I confused my emotional scrapbook for a roadmap?

    I don’t want to kill the boy inside me. I just don’t want him running the show.

    I’m not aiming to become some dried-out stoic spouting bromides about detachment and virtue while chewing flaxseed in silence. I still want pleasure. Complexity. Shadow. Laughter. Sweat. But I want to carry my memories like a man, not drag them around like a stunted boy still snorting the ghost of Hawaiian Tropic in the Rite Aid aisle.

    So I ask—how do you love the Me Time Era less? How do you put the suntan oil back in the bottle?

  • Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère recounts the strange, fevered period of his life when he became a practicing Catholic—a conversion that lasted three years and hovered somewhere between epiphany and breakdown. During that time, he rose each morning to take meticulous notes on the Gospel of John, scribbling like a man possessed. He now looks back at that period in the early 1990s with bewilderment, even embarrassment. What surprises him most isn’t that he converted—it’s that, years later, while immersed in researching the origins of Christianity, he failed at first to connect that research to his own religious episode. When he finally does, the realization is so jarring he feels compelled to dig out the old notebooks. And yet the thought of reading them fills him with dread.

    The last time he looked at them, in 2005, he was deep in depression and under the care of a psychiatrist. At the height of his religious zeal, Carrère had been suicidal. He was prescribed antidepressants—ones whose warning labels included the possibility of “erroneous beliefs,” a caveat that made him laugh darkly at his own conversion. He’s careful not to reduce religious yearning to a single cause, but it’s hard to miss the pattern: a man desperate to avoid self-destruction turning toward a story of rebirth, redemption, and divine rescue. Perhaps, instead of ending his life, he baptized it into another.

    As he flips through the old pages, he’s confronted by a younger self who no longer believed in free will or personal resolve as meaningful paths to goodness. He saw human beings as hopelessly frail and himself as incapable of rescuing his own life. At the time, he clung to God and marriage with equal desperation, hoping both would serve as anchors to prevent him from drifting into the abyss. But the notebooks also reveal a darker truth: his marriage to Helene was deeply unhappy. They loved each other, but they drank too much, blamed each other for their suffering, and fed each other’s neuroses. His writing—once the purpose of his life—had stalled completely. He hadn’t written anything in three years. He was a man sinking.

    Carrère eventually crawled out of that pit, but not through faith. What saved him wasn’t a god, but a set of daily disciplines: yoga, martial arts.

    A spiritual system that promised absolutes had failed him. A life that combined a focus on mind and body resulting in relaxation and clarity of thoughts, helped empty his anxieties and depression. With a strong mind and body, he was able to be productive as a writer. He eventually made lots of money from his craft, and he became the least likely to become religious: He became the rich man for who is about as ripe for salvation as the camel walking through the eye of a needle. 

  • The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère draws a sly, subversive line between Les Revenants—a moody French zombie drama—and the early days of Christianity, when Paul’s disciples waited breathlessly for the world to end and the dead to rise. They were the original doomsday cult: spiritual outcasts and apocalyptic misfits, not unlike the “true believers” Eric Hoffer famously described in The True Believer. What bound them together wasn’t political ideology or economic despair—it was a single cosmic rupture: the Resurrection. One dead man, allegedly not dead anymore, changed the course of Western civilization. It’s not hard to see the resemblance to Les Revenants—a town full of dead people quietly returning, not as ghouls, but as eerily normal people who nonetheless shatter reality.

    Carrère, never content with simple metaphors, brings this comparison to a dinner conversation with his urbane, rationalist friends. One of them, Patrick, accidentally blurts out something true and uncomfortably sharp: millions of otherwise intelligent, educated, and mentally stable people believe in something as outlandish as Christian theology—and no one bats an eye. If someone today claimed Zeus turned into a swan to seduce their cousin, or said they kissed a frog that turned into a prince, we’d laugh or lock them up. But tell a roomful of professionals that a crucified Jewish preacher, born of a virgin, rose from the dead and will someday return to judge the living and the dead—and you’ll be offered wine and a seat at the gala. As Patrick notes, “It’s kind of strange, isn’t it?”

    Carrère is not the first to dwell on this strangeness. Nietzsche, he reminds us, was equally dumbfounded that people who believed in rationality, science, and history could also believe in what is essentially a fairy tale with incense and stained glass. And yet, the tale persists. Presidents still bow to bishops. Cathedrals still echo with sacred music. Maybe it’s not belief that sustains Christianity, but aesthetic inertia—what Carrère calls “pious sentiment.” It’s not that people believe Jesus walked on water. It’s that the stories—and the cultural power they evoke—feel too grand to abandon. You may not believe in Santa Claus, but you still get misty-eyed when the lights go up and the music swells.

    So Carrère offers us a taxonomy of belief: There are the literalists, who treat doctrine as GPS coordinates for their soul. And then there are the sentimentalists—the lukewarm faithful—who love the rituals, the candles, the elevated language, but leave the miracles in quotation marks. For them, religion has become spiritual décor. They still crave spiritual ritual but instead of going to church, they attend yoga classes. The creative power that once summoned cathedrals and crusades now hums gently in the background, just another playlist in the cultural mix. Belief, in this world, doesn’t have to be true—it just has to be beautiful enough to preserve.

  • Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère’s sly, genre-mutating novel, the narrator—an aging screenwriter with a history in French television and a grudge against his own irrelevance—ponders the cultural staying power of zombie stories. Zombies, after all, are the walking dead: viral, contagious, unsettlingly lifelike in their mindless hunger. While consulting on a TV show saturated with post-apocalyptic gore, Carrère’s narrator growls at younger writers, quits in a fog of midlife disdain, and watches from the sidelines as the series becomes a global phenomenon. Bitter and brooding, he studies the success with the sulky fascination of someone who just broke up with their ex and can’t stop checking their Instagram. “I stopped writing fiction long ago,” he mutters, “but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it.”

    Carrère then executes a narrative judo move, flipping from zombie melodrama to the Apostle Paul in 50 A.D., an itinerant zealot-turned-mutation vector. Paul, in Carrère’s retelling, doesn’t just preach the resurrection of a crucified prophet—he unleashes a viral narrative that spreads through Corinth like spiritual malware. Paul doesn’t need a production team or a streaming platform. He has a loom, a message, and an uncanny ability to hijack human consciousness. As Carrère writes, belief in the resurrection becomes “the portent of something enormous, a mutation of humanity, both radical and invisible.” Early Christians, in this telling, are infected—mutants hidden in plain sight, walking among neighbors with a secret that rewires their sense of reality.

    Carrère’s language—mutation, contagion, infection—is no accident. He draws a direct line from Paul’s religious storytelling to the psychological mechanics behind marketing, ideology, and modern myth-making. Yuval Noah Harari makes a similar argument in Sapiens: civilization is held together not by laws or gods, but by collective fictions powerful enough to convince strangers to cooperate. Religion, like branding, spreads through the bloodstream of the culture until it feels like fact. Carrère takes this one step further: religion doesn’t just organize civilization—it haunts it, like a beautiful, persistent hallucination that refuses to die.

    Consider Madison Avenue’s version of salvation. I recall a 1990s Mercedes-Benz commercial where a man, lost and panicked in a shadowy forest, emerges onto a mountaintop. Above him, the stars align into the Mercedes logo. Transcendence is achieved. No need for Damascus Road—just a lease and decent credit. The brand has become a kind of secular gospel. No one cares that Mercedes flunks reliability scores; the emblem still gleams like a divine seal. In this light, Carrère’s Paul isn’t just a religious visionary—he’s the original brand strategist. His resurrection story had better legs than the competition. It caught on. It mutated. It endured. And Carrère, the self-professed unbeliever, is too entranced—and too honest—to dismiss it. Carrere’s novel The Kingdom is the story of a narrator marveling at how the world got infected by a story so powerful, it continues to raise the dead.

  • The Phantom in the Mirror: On Becoming an NPC

    The Phantom in the Mirror: On Becoming an NPC

    The Non-Player Character—or NPC—was born in the pixelated void of video games. It is a placeholder. A background hum. A digital ghost whose job is to stand in a market, repeat a scripted line, or walk in endless circles without complaint. The NPC has no hunger for freedom, no dreams of becoming more. It exists in the half-life of interactivity—a cardboard cutout propped up by code. It’s “there,” but not there. You see it. Then you forget it. And that, in essence, is the horror.

    Somewhere along the way, the term slipped out of the screen and into real life. “NPC” became shorthand for a human who seems hollowed out—emotionally neutralized, culturally sedated, and spiritually declawed. Not stupid. Not evil. Just disengaged. The light behind the eyes? Gone dim. What was once an ironic jab at background characters is now a chilling metaphor for people who’ve surrendered to the most generic, algorithm-approved version of themselves.

    What’s grimly poetic is that NPCs in video games are often controlled by artificial intelligence. And so, too, are many modern humans—nudged by dopamine, entranced by endless scrolls, soothed by the hypnotic rhythms of consumption. The Roman formula of bread and circuses has merely been rebranded. Netflix. DoorDash. TikTok. It’s all the same anesthetic. As therapist Phil Stutz would say, we’re stuck in the “lower channel”—an emotional basement filled with numbing comforts and artificial highs.

    And yet, here’s the twist: even the brilliant can become NPCs. The anxious. The depressed. The overworked. The soul-sick. Sometimes the smartest people are the most vulnerable to emotional collapse and digital retreat. They don’t become NPCs because they’re shallow. They become NPCs because they’re hurting.

    There are, perhaps, two species of NPCs. One is blissfully unaware—sleepwalking through life without a second thought. The other is terrifying: self-aware, but immobilized. The mind remains active, but the body slouches in the chair, feeding on stale memories and reruns of past selves. Think of Lot’s Wife, gazing back at a past she couldn’t let go. She wasn’t punished arbitrarily; she was frozen in time—literally—a statue of salt and sorrow. The original NPC.

    Middle age is particularly fertile ground for NPC-ism. Nostalgia becomes narcotic. We mythologize our former selves—thinner, bolder, brighter—and shrink in the shadow of our own legend. Why live in the present, when the past is easier to romanticize and the future is too much work? Just ask Neddy Merrill from John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” paddling from pool to pool in a daze, believing in a youth long gone, burning every real connection he had on the altar of delusion. An NPC in swim trunks.

    Today, we’re incentivized to become NPCs. Social media trains us like lab rats, handing out dopamine pellets in the form of likes, follows, and artificial intimacy. The real world—messy, unfiltered, full of awkward silences and genuine risk—is rejected for the smoother contours of algorithmic approval. Our souls are curated, our emotions trimmed to fit the timeline.

    The NPC, then, is not a throwaway gag. It’s a portrait of the modern condition. A spirit trapped in a basement, scrolling for meaning, addicted to memory, afraid of action. A being slowly turning into vapor, still breathing but no longer alive.

    And the true terror? Sometimes I feel it in myself. That quiet moment when I trade meaning for ease, purpose for distraction, vitality for sedation. That’s when I hear the whisper: You’re becoming one of them. That’s when I feel the NPC, not on my screen, but inside my skin.