Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

    When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

    Kafka called writing a form of prayer. Not as piety, but as precision. Prayer, properly understood, is the act of stepping out of ordinary time—the noisy, transactional churn—and entering a space where attention is no longer scattered but gathered. Writing does the same. It refuses the chaos of profane time and insists, however briefly, on the discipline of the sacred.

    The sacred is not mystical fog. It is clarity stripped of dopamine. It is the quiet room where you examine the state of your own soul without distraction or performance. It is where you test whether your words can survive contact with your actions. It demands humility because it exposes how often they don’t. And it offers a kind of nourishment the chronophage—the great time-eating machine—cannot provide, because it cannot be consumed passively. It must be earned.

    To live thoughtfully is to move between two worlds: the sacred and the profane. You cannot remain in either one. You must descend into the ordinary—work, errands, obligations—but carry with you the standards forged in that quieter space. Otherwise, the sacred becomes theater, and the profane becomes drift.

    So the question arrives, unwelcome but necessary: Do my actions align with my ideals? No. Not yet.

    If they did, my life would contract, not expand. I would eat with intention—three meals, no grazing—and call the absence of snacks what it is: a fast, not a deprivation. I would step away from the digital carnival that thrives on FOMO, because I know its rewards are counterfeit—brief spikes followed by longer, duller lows.

    I would stop buying watches. I already own more than I can meaningfully wear. Two G-Shocks tell perfect time. The rest sit like artifacts of former appetites. Rotation is not variety; it is indecision dressed as sophistication.

    And I would reconsider what I make. If my videos exist to chase attention, to measure my worth in clicks and spikes of approval, then they are extensions of the same problem. The medium is different; the mechanism is identical. But if a video can carry an idea forward—if it can clarify rather than agitate—then it earns its place.

    Writing, then, is not an escape. It is a reckoning. It is the act of bringing the sacred into contact with the profane and asking, without flinching, whether they agree. Most days, they don’t. The work is to narrow that distance.

  • Life Inside the Chronophage

    Life Inside the Chronophage

    You can still read, technically. The eyes move. The words register. But something essential has thinned out. Years inside the chronophage—the great time-eating machine—have rewired the circuitry. You no longer take in ideas; you absorb fragments. You skim life the way you skim a feed. You prefer voices at 1.25 speed, ideas pre-chewed, narratives delivered in twelve-minute installments with thumbnails that promise revelation and deliver stimulation.

    You know what it is. The Internet is not a library—it’s a galactic food court, a neon sprawl of drive-through kiosks serving intellectual fast food. Ninety-nine percent of it is forgettable at best, corrosive at worst. You try to manage your intake. You play the piano. You lift weights. You show up for your family. You perform the rituals of a grounded life. But the residue remains. The machine has had its way with you.

    And then comes the quieter poison: self-pity. No one reads anymore, you tell yourself. Everyone is grazing from the same algorithmic trough. You feel stranded, a refugee from a literate past. You invoke the phrase “post-literate society” not as analysis but as lament. And yet, the only reason you can even diagnose the condition is because you remember something else—an earlier version of attention, slower, deeper, less contaminated. You carry that memory like a fading photograph and call it protection.

    You came across a word last week: chronophage—a system that feeds on your time while convincing you it is nourishing you. It fits too well. The system is not broken; it is functioning perfectly. Its purpose is to consume time, and it does so with industrial efficiency. In the attention economy, attention is not honored—it is harvested. Your mind is not engaged; it is extracted from. There is no mercy in this design. The only consolation is a thin, uneasy solidarity: your mind is not uniquely damaged. It is simply part of a mass casualty you are lucid enough to witness.

  • Chosen by the Frogman

    Chosen by the Frogman

    More than a decade ago, a seasoned watch obsessive told me something I dismissed at the time: you don’t hunt a Holy Grail—you stumble into it. It doesn’t arrive with fireworks or a four-figure invoice. It slips onto your wrist quietly, and then, without asking permission, it takes over. Everything else starts to feel like a costume. You try to rotate, you try to be fair, you give the others their appointed wrist time—but you feel a faint resentment, like you’re cheating on something that actually fits. Eventually the charade collapses. You stop negotiating. You wear the same watch because it works, and because you no longer have the patience for anything that doesn’t.

    When that happens, the chronophage loses its grip. The endless scroll of “must-haves,” the dopamine carnival of releases and reviews, the debates over marginal gains—all of it begins to look like noise generated by people who haven’t found their watch yet. You close the tabs. You ignore the hype. You retire from the rotation economy. Let the others keep spinning the wheel. You’re done. You’ve chosen, or more accurately, you’ve been chosen.

    If you had told me a year ago that a black resin digital watch would be the one to do this, I would have laughed you out of the room. My tastes, I thought, were too refined, too anchored in steel and mechanical romance to be hijacked by a plastic instrument. And yet, a month ago, the G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000 landed on my wrist and quietly began rewriting my habits. It doesn’t leave. The only thing that occasionally displaces it is another G-Shock—the GW-7900—which, if I didn’t have the Frogman, would be my undisputed daily driver. 

    Of course, I know the trap. The honeymoon phase has seduced better men than me. Give it six months, I tell myself. Let time do its work. If the Frogman is still there—if the others still feel like substitutes—then this isn’t infatuation. It’s alignment.

    The grail, it turns out, is not the watch you chase. It’s the one that makes you stop.

  • You Are No Longer Shopping. You Are Being Stimulated

    You Are No Longer Shopping. You Are Being Stimulated

    As a “well-informed consumer,” you may discover—too late, of course—that you’ve built your own cage and furnished it with glowing screens. The hours of scrolling, the endless debates over “the best,” the obsessive rituals designed to avoid buyer’s remorse, the chorus of disembodied voices instructing you what to purchase and what to shun—all of it has rewired your attention. Each swipe delivers a small electric thrill, followed by a quieter, more persistent anxiety. What you call “research” is, in practice, a carefully engineered agitation. You are no longer shopping. You are being stimulated.

    And so the identity of the “well-informed consumer” begins to collapse under scrutiny. You are not informed; you are saturated. You resemble less a discerning buyer and more a laboratory animal, dutifully pressing the lever in hopes that the next pellet will finally satisfy. It never does. The cycle resets. The wheel spins.

    This is Consumer Epistemic Fog: a condition in which the sheer volume of opinions, reviews, rankings, and “definitive guides” does not sharpen judgment but dissolves it. Clarity is replaced by static. Confidence erodes into hesitation. The more you know, the less you trust yourself to act. In the end, the tragedy is not that you might make the wrong purchase—it is that you can no longer make a decision at all.

  • My 57-Minute Relationship with the G-Shock GW-6900

    My 57-Minute Relationship with the G-Shock GW-6900

    I got home at 5:00 p.m. to find my Amazon package waiting for me like a promise I didn’t remember making. Inside: the G-Shock GW-6900, the much-celebrated Three-Eyed Monster. I unboxed it, performed the usual initiation rituals—set it to LAX, marched through the modes, customized everything like a man preparing a command center—and then attempted the simplest task imaginable: return to Timekeeping.

    Impossible.

    No matter what I pressed, held, or pleaded with, the watch snapped back to UTC like a bureaucrat rejecting incomplete paperwork. I consulted the manual. I consulted YouTube. I even consulted AI, that modern oracle of last resort. Nothing. The watch refused to cooperate, as if it had been programmed with a small but firm sense of contempt.

    Meanwhile, the physical object itself began to lose its charm under scrutiny. Next to the Frogman and the 7900, the 6900 felt… cheap and underfed. Lighter, cheaper, less resolved. The strap clung to my wrist like it had second thoughts about the relationship—barely long enough, noticeably less comfortable. This wasn’t a heroic tool watch. This was a compromise wearing a reputation.

    The decision arrived with unusual clarity: return it.

    By 5:57 p.m., I had already processed its return on Amazon, dropped it off at the nearby UPS, and said good riddance. It is now on its way back to wherever failed expectations are processed. I had made the round trip—anticipation, confusion, disappointment, rejection—in under an hour. A full consumer arc compressed into a sitcom episode.

    Now the house is quiet again. Seven watches remain. The cognitive clutter has thinned. No more scrolling through modes like a man trapped in a digital maze. No more negotiating with a watch that refuses to tell time on command.

    The 6900 is gone.

    And for the first time today, everything is exactly where it should be, and I can now move forward with my life. 

    Update:

    Two friends messaged me to explain that with the 6900 you don’t press the upper left button to exit UTC and get into Timekeeping. You press the upper right button, so the watch was probably not defective. But it was so inferior to the 7900 in terms of build quality and strap length that I’m glad I returned it.

  • Acid-Washed Jeans and Artificial Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of Instant Cool

    Acid-Washed Jeans and Artificial Intelligence: The Rise and Fall of Instant Cool

    I have a confession that belongs in the Museum of Bad Decisions: I wore acid-washed jeans in the 80s. Not casually. Not ironically. I wore them to teach college writing at twenty-four, convinced I was the cool professor—the kind of man who could annotate a thesis statement and headline a Duran Duran video without changing outfits.

    The problem, of course, is that everyone thought they were that guy. Acid-washed jeans thrived because they delivered instant mythology. You looked like you had lived—hard, fast, dangerously—when in reality you had simply survived a trip to the mall. They were rebellion by chemical treatment, authenticity by rinse cycle. For a brief, glittering moment, that illusion worked. But illusions collapse under mass adoption. When everyone looks distressed, no one looks interesting. The jeans had nowhere to go; they began at maximum volume and stayed there, screaming. Eventually, the culture regained its hearing, glanced downward, and realized it had dressed itself like survivors of a denim-related explosion. Acid wash didn’t fade—it was exiled.

    I think about that rise and fall when I look at my students’ shifting attitude toward AI. In 2022, AI arrived like those jeans: a miracle fabric promising salvation from drudgery, writer’s block, and the existential dread of the blank page. It offered pre-fabricated brilliance—the intellectual version of showing up to the gym already sweating. Students embraced it with the same breathless certainty that this time, finally, the shortcut would make them exceptional.

    Now? They roll their eyes. They call it cringey.

    What changed is not the technology but the perception of authenticity. Factory-installed insight, like factory-installed distress, has become suspect. My students are not naïve; they have finely tuned detectors for fraud. They live in a world saturated with performance—the influencer selling a life they don’t live, the hollow expert recycling borrowed ideas, the unprepared instructor filling class time by sharing his dreams and domestic dramas while they politely tune him out and read Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the entire oeuvre of J.K. Rowling. 

    AI, at its worst, slots neatly into that ecosystem. It produces language that sounds like thinking without the inconvenience of actually thinking. And my students can hear the hollowness.

    This does not mean AI is useless. At its best, it belongs alongside Word, Google Docs, and Grammarly—a tool, not a personality. But tools do not build a self. They do not generate voice, conviction, or the slow accumulation of insight that makes writing worth reading. Lean on them too heavily, and the result isn’t mastery—it’s dependency dressed up as efficiency.

    My students understand this. That’s why the fever has broken. The early hype—the belief that AI would function as a kind of intellectual superpower—has lost its grip. The spell didn’t shatter because AI failed. It shattered because people learned to recognize the difference between something that helps you think and something that pretends to think for you.

    Acid-washed jeans didn’t disappear because denim stopped working. They disappeared because people grew embarrassed of the shortcut.

    AI isn’t going anywhere.

    But the illusion that it can make you interesting just by wearing it?

    That’s already out of style.

  • Why I’m Not Fully G-Shockified (Yet)

    Why I’m Not Fully G-Shockified (Yet)

    A month ago, I fell—hard—for the G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000. Not a mild infatuation. Not a passing curiosity. A full conversion experience. Within days, I recruited two accomplices—the GW-7900 Rescue and the GW-6900 Three-Eyed Monster—and suddenly my mechanical divers, once the crown jewels of my collection, were sitting in the watch box like retired prizefighters telling stories no one asked to hear.

    Let me be clear: I have not renounced them. I still admire the Seiko SLA055. I still regard the quartz Tuna SBBN049 with something close to reverence. But admiration is not the same as use. Once you’ve tasted atomic time—precise, indifferent, quietly superior—it’s difficult to return to the charming imprecision of mechanical watches. You don’t switch back from filtered water to a garden hose unless nostalgia is doing the driving.

    And I’m not alone. Since confessing my condition, I’ve received a steady stream of testimonials. Men who bought a GW-M5610 or a GW-5000U and quietly stopped wearing everything else. Not because they planned to. Not because they declared war on their collections. But because the G-Shock—comfortable, accurate, frictionless—refused to leave their wrist. Their curiosity still wandered, their addiction still whispered, but the watch stayed put. Anchored. Unmoved.

    This phenomenon deserves a name: G-Shockification.

    It is the moment when a watch enthusiast, steeped in the romance of mechanical horology, is overtaken by the brute efficiency of atomic precision. At first, there is resistance. Then rationalization. Finally, surrender. Variety collapses. The rotation dies. The watch box becomes a museum, and the G-Shock becomes the only living artifact. What began as a hobby turns into a single, dominant habit—quiet, practical, and oddly liberating.

    Some resist the change. Some embrace it. Some preach it like a new religion. But they all share one outcome: the mechanical watch, once a daily companion, becomes an occasional guest.

    Which brings me to the uncomfortable question: Have I been G-Shockified?

    The honest answer is: not quite.

    I have my objections. With a G-Shock, I cannot simply glance at the time. I must present the watch to my face like an offering, or press a button and summon light—an act that triggers a faint but persistent anxiety about draining the solar charge. In a dark movie theater, the problem becomes almost philosophical. Do I illuminate my wrist and disrupt the room? Or do I behave like a civilized adult and wear something else?

    This is where the quartz Tuna reenters the story.

    Since my G-Shock conversion began, the Tuna has enjoyed a quiet renaissance. It is as if atomic time granted me permission to appreciate quartz accuracy without guilt. At night, it is flawless—constant lume, instant readability, no negotiation required. It does not ask for a button press. It does not demand a ritual. It simply tells the time, like a professional.

    And so I arrive at a compromise.

    I am not fully G-Shockified because I am not willing to tolerate certain frictions: the angle-sensitive readability, the dependence on backlight, the small social calculations about when it is appropriate to illuminate my wrist. These are minor issues, but they are enough to prevent total surrender.

    What I have instead is something more complicated: Hybridification.

    My collection is now split down the middle—four analog watches, four G-Shocks. This is not harmony. It is a negotiated settlement. The G-Shocks govern precision, durability, and daily utility. The analog watches—especially the Tuna—reclaim territory where immediate readability and luminous clarity matter.

    The result is a managed tension between two philosophies:

    • the digital world of accuracy, convenience, and indifference
    • the analog world of presence, legibility, and quiet satisfaction

    It is not a perfect system. But it is stable.

    For now.

  • The Multi-Headed Dopamine Monster

    The Multi-Headed Dopamine Monster

    Any halfway attentive observer eventually stumbles upon a depressing but unmistakable truth: modern life is a carnival of pleasures engineered to be irresistible and endlessly repeatable. Physical indulgence, consumer toys, and the shimmering applause of social media metrics arrive every day like trays of free samples at a supermarket. The problem is not their existence. The problem is their limitless availability. When gratification can be summoned instantly—one click, one swipe, one purchase—the temptation to pursue it with manic dedication becomes nearly impossible to resist.

    The results are rarely noble. Self-discipline dissolves. Organization frays. Focus collapses like a folding chair under a heavy guest. In their place arrives a nervous state of agitation accompanied by a dull, persistent suspicion: You are wasting your life on trinkets. The realization is humiliating because it is so obvious. Hedonism, convenience, consumerism, and the intoxicating glow of digital approval are not spiritual achievements. They are simply the brain chasing dopamine like a lab rat pounding a reward lever.

    At first the dopamine feels marvelous. A new gadget, a flattering comment, a few hundred views, the pleasing geometry of a purchase confirmation page. But like all stimulants, the effect fades. The rewards grow thinner. The hits arrive faster but satisfy less. Eventually a quiet despair creeps in. You feel oddly disconnected—from other people, from yourself, from the adult you imagined becoming. You begin asking dangerous questions. Is there anything meaningful enough to lift you out of this quicksand of micro-pleasures? Is there any pursuit capable of competing with the relentless ease of cheap gratification?

    You remember that you possess other faculties—creativity, curiosity, philosophical struggle, the ability to tell a story that might illuminate something about the human condition. These pursuits possess real dignity. Yet they struggle to survive in the same ecosystem as frictionless entertainment and effortless affirmation. The brain, like a spoiled monarch, prefers velvet pillows to hard chairs.

    Eventually the interrogation becomes more specific. The real engine of this predicament is not merely pleasure but technology. Your phone and computer function as a many-headed dopamine creature sitting permanently on your desk. Slaying the monster would be satisfying—but impossible. Unlike alcohol, which the addict can abandon entirely, the digital world is inseparable from modern survival. You need the machine to work, communicate, pay bills, manage life, create things, and occasionally attempt to think.

    So you continue to live beside the creature.

    You read the tidy aphorisms offered by productivity gurus: Be mindful. Stay disciplined. Follow your North Star. But these slogans feel faintly ridiculous when the dopamine cauldron sits inches away—one browser tab from ignition. The advice begins to sound less like wisdom and more like a variety of motivational wallpaper.

    And so you arrive at a strange emotional position.

    You do not yet possess a solution. But you possess something useful: anger. Anger at the machinery of distraction. Anger at the cheapness of digital applause. Anger at your own willingness to accept the bargain.

    It is not a cure, but it is a beginning.

    You can see the problem clearly now.

    The only remaining question is what you intend to do about it.

  • Late to the G-Shock Party

    Late to the G-Shock Party

    Even though I’ve been obsessed with watches for over twenty years, I arrived embarrassingly late to the G-Shock party. I didn’t plan the arrival. It felt more like this: I’m riding in the back seat of an Uber when the driver suddenly pulls up in front of a strange mansion glowing with neon light. The doors swing open. Inside are thousands of loud, jubilant G-Shock devotees who greet me like a long-lost cousin. Champagne appears. Confetti rains down. Someone hands me a microphone and asks for a testimonial.

    I have no prepared remarks. But I can tell the truth.

    For two decades I was perfectly happy collecting Seiko mechanical divers. They were my tribe. Yet somewhere in the back of my mind a particular watch kept whispering to me: the G-Shock Frogman. I had admired it on and off for over a decade. Amazingly, the same model was still available, so I finally ordered one from Japan. A watch that once would have cost me $400 now demanded $550, which is the sort of price inflation that causes a small twitch in the eyelid.

    When the Frogman arrived, something strange happened.

    I couldn’t take it off.

    The watch felt uncannily right, as if some committee of Japanese engineers had secretly studied my personality and designed a wrist instrument to match it. It was heroic, absurdly tough, and far more accurate than my mechanical divers. Within weeks I stopped wearing the mechanicals altogether. Three of them quietly left the collection. Whether I’m taking a mechanical hiatus or attending their funeral remains unclear.

    What I do know is that G-Shock has given my watch hobby a strange second life.

    At the moment I own two of them: the Frogman and the GW-7900. Viewers on my YouTube channel insisted the 7900 deserved a proper name. A subscriber named Dave solved the problem immediately. “Call it the Tidemaster,” he said, since the watch tracks tides.

    Perfect.

    So now I have the Frogman and the Tidemaster. One cost me $550. The other cost $110.

    Here’s the truth no luxury marketing department wants to hear: from a purely practical standpoint, the $110 Tidemaster is the better watch. Its numerals are larger, thicker, and darker. The contrast is superior. At night the backlight illuminates big bold digits that practically shout the time. The Frogman, by comparison, requires a small squint and a mild prayer.

    In other words, the cheap watch wins the legibility contest.

    A third watch is arriving next week: the G-Shock GW-6900. Like the 7900, it currently lacks a proper nickname. The watch has three round indicators above the display, which makes it look like a mildly deranged insect. I considered several possibilities. “Triple Graph” sounds like a geometry exam. “Militaire” sounds like a fragrance sold in an airport duty-free shop. So I’m going with the obvious choice:

    The 3-Eyed Monster.

    My goal is simple: settle into a stable Three-Watch G-Shock Trifecta. All three watches share the same genetic code—big heroic cases, atomic timekeeping, solar charging, digital displays, and rubber straps. That combination is my personal sweet spot.

    Now we arrive at the temptation.

    Many of you have suggested I should upgrade to the sapphire-crystal Frogman, a watch that lurks around the $1,000 mark. And believe me, that watch is occupying prime real estate in my brain. But I’d like to present a few rebuttals before I surrender to the credit card.

    First, price. The Tidemaster and the 3-Eyed Monster cost about $110 each. Even the Frogman stayed under $600. Part of the joy of G-Shock is that it delivers durability, accuracy, and ridiculous hero aesthetics without the emotional trauma of a four-figure purchase. Once you push a G-Shock toward a thousand dollars, you start undermining the very spirit that makes the watch fun.

    Second, technical overkill. The sapphire Frogman is loaded with features I will never use. Yes, the display is slightly more legible than my existing Frogman, but that problem is already solved by the Tidemaster and the 3-Eyed Monster.

    Third, rotational anxiety. Two Frogmans would cancel each other out. I doubt I could sell my current Frogman—it has already fused itself to my identity like a stubborn barnacle.

    Fourth, and perhaps most decisive, is age. If I were in my thirties or forties, building a large G-Shock collection might make sense. But I’ll be turning sixty-five this year. I don’t need a museum of watches. Between four Seiko mechanical divers, a quartz Seiko Tuna, and my three G-Shocks, I already have more watches than any reasonable human requires.

    In fact, I could easily imagine a future where I own nothing but the three G-Shocks and feel perfectly content.

    So there you have it.

    Will temptation vanish completely? Of course not. Tonight I may dream about the sapphire Frogman. In a moment of midnight weakness I might even sleep-walk to my computer and hover over the Buy Now button.

    But I like to believe that the reasonable part of my brain will prevail over the dopamine addict who lives next door.

    At least that’s the story I’m telling myself.

  • Life Is Uncertain. Porridge Is Not

    Life Is Uncertain. Porridge Is Not

    For the past week my appetite has surged like a rogue wave. That could mean several things, none of them particularly flattering. Perhaps I’m medicating stress with food. Perhaps there are subterranean stress triggers rumbling beneath the surface that I haven’t identified yet. Life, after all, provides a constant background hum of anxiety, and it’s difficult to distinguish ordinary daily strain from something more corrosive.

    Retirement is hovering in the distance like a financial fog bank. I’ve been emailing HR about the price of keeping my Kaiser coverage after I retire versus moving to my wife’s more modest plan. Her school pays less than mine, which means we’re staring at something in the neighborhood of $1,500 a month once dental and vision enter the scene. Retirement, which is supposed to represent liberation, suddenly looks like a complicated negotiation with spreadsheets, identity, and self-worth. And apparently my body’s response to this existential accounting exercise is simple: eat more chicken.

    There is, at present, a dangerous quantity of takeout chicken in this house. Fried chicken. Roasted chicken. Greasy, seductive chicken lounging in the refrigerator like a gang of edible hoodlums. I open the fridge intending to take a small, respectable bite. Five minutes later I’m standing there gnawing through a drumstick like a raccoon that has discovered civilization. The aftermath is predictable: gluttony followed immediately by anxiety.

    The anxiety, unfortunately, does not arrive alone. It brings a surveillance drone. I watch myself overeating as if my consciousness has sprouted a third eye hovering above the scene like a judgmental security camera. I am both the criminal and the detective. The more I watch myself eat, the more anxious I become. The more anxious I become, the more I eat. I have achieved what behavioral psychologists might politely call a closed loop of misery.

    Action is required.

    My proposed solution is radical in its simplicity: three meals a day, no snacking. Breakfast will be steel-cut oatmeal or buckwheat groats fortified with protein powder. Lunch will be rolled oats with yogurt and more protein powder. Dinner will consist of a sensible portion of protein, vegetables, and an apple. It is not glamorous, but glamour is precisely the problem.

    Oatmeal comforts me. It possesses the mild, reassuring neutrality of something that has no ambitions beyond keeping you alive. Perhaps it is a kind of surrogate baby food. Perhaps the approach of retirement has triggered a mild regression in which my brain seeks the emotional equivalent of warm porridge and a quiet afternoon nap. As I drift deeper into my mid-sixties, it is entirely possible that my culinary philosophy is reverting to something suitable for a kindly monastery.

    Life is uncertain. Porridge is not.

    I like the predictability of three meals a day involving some form of oatmeal. I like the idea of owning a Lenovo ThinkPad, which is the oatmeal of computers. I like the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, which are the oatmeal of the automobile world. And I like my solar atomic G-Shocks, which are the oatmeal of timepieces—durable, accurate, incapable of drama.

    If possible, I would like to swim inside a large industrial vat of oatmeal, floating peacefully while the chaos of the modern world clangs harmlessly against the outside of the tank.

    Unfortunately, hostile forces surround the vat.

    My daughters campaign relentlessly for takeout: Dave’s Hot Chicken, Wingstop, Panda Express. Holiday gatherings appear with enough pies and brownies to launch a regional bakery franchise. A man can only resist these temptations for so long before the walls of discipline begin to buckle.

    Meanwhile, medical costs continue their relentless ascent, and retirement funds tremble nervously as global markets perform their daily interpretive dance of geopolitical uncertainty.

    Under such circumstances I find myself clinging to a personal doctrine I’ve begun to call The Porridge Principle: the instinct to confront anxiety by retreating into humble, reliable technologies and routines that promise frictionless predictability. Oatmeal breakfasts. ThinkPad laptops. Honda sedans. Solar atomic watches. These objects do not thrill, but they do not betray.

    When the world becomes chaotic, the mind begins searching for tools and rituals that behave exactly the same way every day.

    So that is the plan.

    Trader Joe’s opens in an hour. I will buy groceries for my family and a heroic supply of oatmeal. The campaign against uncertainty has begun.

    Pray for me.