Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • Bulking Up

    Bulking Up

    On the very day it became clear to me that I needed to put guardrails on AI editing—telling it to keep 90% of my original content to prevent my writing from morphing from my natural bodybuilder self into the PED-bloated version—I attended my daughters’ high school open house, where their English teacher told us she was teaching the students AI literacy. This entailed helping them use AI to “bulk up their resumes” because, in a competitive world where everyone was using AI, our children could not afford not to use generative AI. In fact, the teacher said, AI itself is now sorting through resumes and discarding the ones that aren’t sufficiently juiced up.

    It became clear to me that we are living inside a contradiction. On the one hand, writing needs to be “bulked up” and “on the juice” simply to compete with other AI-enhanced writing. On the other hand, in our post-reading society, where literacy rates are in steep decline, writing itself has never seemed more forlorn and withered. We are producing prose with bigger muscles at precisely the moment when our own writing muscles are beginning to atrophy.

    I was living through a cataclysmic moment in history. My personal retirement from teaching college writing had dovetailed with the world’s collective retirement from the kinds of literary pastimes that develop interiority and critical thinking. Reading books was becoming a rarity. Books had been displaced by sports gambling and short-form videos. To complicate matters, Rose Horowitch observes in “The End of Reading Is Here” that Americans have never read so much. The problem is that much of what they are reading is slop: “bulked up” AI writing, threads, captions, and text messages. Horowitch points to UCLA cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, who argues that “people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing.” The brain muscles required for this kind of thinking are atrophying, perhaps to the point of no return. As a result, we are moving toward a postliterate society.

    This is not a stagnant condition. It gets progressively worse. New generations may read less and less. They may become increasingly inclined to see teachers’ reading assignments as punitive. Bereft of strong reading and writing skills, they will need AI to “bulk up” their assigned writing more and more.

    Members of a postliterate society are vulnerable because they live increasingly at the surface level. They don’t dig underneath a text to find subtext, subtlety, and contradiction. They struggle to identify the logical fallacies that accompany manipulation. They can become more vulnerable to demagogues and more susceptible to being duped. A society that loses these habits of critical reading also risks weakening the habits of thought on which democratic life depends.

    A postliterate society also loses something of its humanity when its members can no longer recognize the richness of what, in good writing, we call authorial presence. To savor such presence in the writing of James Baldwin, H. L. Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, and Annie Dillard is part of being human.

    Not all is lost. Humans still find authorial presence in YouTube presentations, podcasts, and musical artists. No amount of AI “bulking up” can replicate the spectacular music and persona of SZA.

    But authorial presence in writing may be disappearing. “Bulking up” writing may eventually mean the death of writing.

    I may not simply be retiring from teaching writing. I may be retiring at the very moment I have become increasingly misaligned with a world that is uncoupling itself from literacy while diligently bulking up its resumes. 

  • Kierkegaard Goes Watch Shopping

    Kierkegaard Goes Watch Shopping

    I love well-crafted objects that combine form and function to the point that my excessive love for these things often pushes me to the brink of madness. I love the new G-Shock Frogman with its sapphire crystal and combi composite bracelet. It’s my perfect watch. I love my quiet Mac Mini connected to two 4K monitors for optimum productivity. I love premium 14-inch Chromebooks, soon to come out under the Googlebook banner, with 2.8K displays and overpowered Ultra 7 chips with 32GB of RAM. 

    The problem is that I love these things too much, well beyond my needs. The philosopher Kierkegaard warned us about “the aesthetic life”: becoming intoxicated by the pursuit of pleasure, novelty, beauty, and experience. For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic life means allowing art, technology, beauty, entertainment, and pleasure to become the governing principles of existence. An aesthetic life doesn’t make us healthy or whole. A committed life does. Commitment to something higher than our appetites is the only antidote to the misery of wanting more than we could possibly own.

    And there is the Frogman GWF-D1000BC-1JF, staring me in the face, daring me not to want it.

  • I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    Here’s a tighter version that preserves your voice and keeps the Medicare card, the student conversation, and the angry blog reader as the narrative spine. I also kept the two metaphors but made them work together rather than compete.

    It was the middle of September when my Medicare card arrived in the mail. I held it for a moment and studied my name printed beneath the red, white, and blue bands. It felt like a rite of passage, another bureaucratic marker on the road to retirement. No ceremony. No gold watch. Just a government-issued card informing me that I had entered a new demographic.

    That same day, I held a Zoom office hour. One student showed up. I told her I was retiring, and somehow our conversation wandered from Mr. T as an icon of the 1980s to whether AI could replicate the music of SZA to Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which she was writing about for her essay. We talked about how the movie could be frightening and funny at the same time. Before leaving, she told me she felt fortunate to have taken my critical thinking class before I retired. I thanked her. After forty years of teaching, you learn not to brush aside a compliment from a student. You put it in your pocket.

    After the Zoom meeting, I started thinking about the tools that had changed my teaching. Google Docs was one of the great breakthroughs. A student’s paper no longer had to exist as a stack of stapled pages handed across a desk. The document floated somewhere in the cloud, a kind of fairy manuscript that student and teacher could enter simultaneously, revising sentences together from different locations.

    Then my wife introduced me to Google Slides. Once I realized how visually my students processed information, I practically lived on Slides. An assignment that seemed hopelessly dense on a two-page handout could become intelligible when broken into a sequence of clean visual ideas. I can scarcely imagine the final seven years of my teaching career without it.

    Then came generative AI.

    At first, AI seemed like another extraordinary professional tool. It accelerated research. It intensified brainstorming. It helped me develop assignment prompts, test arguments, generate counterarguments, and discover connections I might have overlooked.

    But AI was different from Docs and Slides because it didn’t merely change how I presented my writing. It could change the writing itself.

    For my first three years using generative AI, I became intoxicated by its powers of augmentation. Give it an ordinary paragraph and it could return something brighter, sharper, funnier, and more muscular. It added metaphors, jokes, comparisons, rhythms, and linguistic tricks I hadn’t conceived myself. The results were seductive precisely because they sounded better.

    There was only one problem. Increasingly, they didn’t sound like me.

    I think of those old photo cutout boards at cowboy-themed restaurants and tourist traps. You stand behind a painted cowboy and stick your head through a hole. The photograph contains your face, but everything below your neck belongs to somebody else: narrow waist, six-shooter, boots, chaps, heroic posture. Technically, you’re in the picture. But that isn’t your body.

    AI can do the same thing to prose. Your ideas and anecdotes remain visible through the hole, but the rhetorical body surrounding them belongs to the machine.

    My second metaphor is less flattering. AI became my literary performance-enhancing drug.

    Without AI, I was the natural bodybuilder. Maybe I looked pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but the muscles were mine. Then I discovered rhetorical steroids. Suddenly I could walk onto the stage swollen with metaphors, acid wit, vivid descriptions, elaborate comparisons, and perfectly engineered sentences. Every paragraph flexed.

    Worse, I learned how to order the injections.

    “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions.”

    That became one of my favorite prompts. I would feed AI a perfectly serviceable piece of writing and watch it return wearing a posing thong and covered in bronzer. My paragraph hadn’t been edited. It had been juiced.

    I loved it.

    Then a regular reader of my blog finally had enough.

    After reading one particularly steroidal post, he left an angry comment filled with expletives. His opening line was memorable:

    “Hey, Boomer, cut the shit.”

    He told me to tone it down. He was tired of the verbal pyrotechnics. Tired of the relentless jokes and metaphors. Tired, though he didn’t use my metaphor, of watching the Technicolor 4K bodybuilder flex under the stage lights.

    I apologized and told him I would tone it down. He later apologized for snapping at me. He’d had a bad morning, he explained, and admitted that he actually enjoyed reading my blog.

    “No worries,” I wrote back. “Thanks for the honest feedback.”

    And I meant it.

    His irritation had exposed something I had been reluctant to admit. I had become so accustomed to AI-enhanced prose that ordinary writing began to look inadequate to me. I had trained my eyes on rhetorical 4K until my natural prose looked like a 250-nit IPS screen. I kept turning up the resolution, contrast, saturation, and brightness until eventually somebody in the audience yelled for me to turn the damn thing down.

    So I changed my AI prompt.

    “Edit the following for syntax, grammar, and clarity, but keep 95 percent of my original language.”

    I call it the 95 Percent Rule. AI remains a powerful professional tool, but the rule establishes a boundary: the machine can clean the window; it doesn’t get to replace the view.

    I eventually shared the rule with my students under “Academic Integrity and Best Practices.” It seemed fitting. After years of warning students about outsourcing their thinking to generative AI, I had discovered that I needed guardrails of my own.

    That realization arrived at an appropriate moment. My Medicare card was sitting on my desk. Retirement was approaching. Forty years of teaching had taken me from paper essays to documents floating in the cloud, from classroom handouts to Google Slides, and finally to machines capable of rewriting a person’s sentences in seconds.

    The tools had changed my teaching. Some had even changed the way my brain worked.

    Now, as I prepared to leave the classroom, I had one more thing to retire.

    The cowboy body could go back behind the plywood.

    The PED-bloated bodybuilder could leave the stage.

    I wanted my own sentences back.

  • What If Nobody Shows Up?

    What If Nobody Shows Up?

    I know where my greatest reach is. A blog post might get a dozen readers. A ten-minute video essay about philosophy, retirement, materialism, addiction, or my twenty-five-year enthusiasm for timepieces can get a few thousand views. If I want to engage with a larger audience, the evidence is fairly clear: I should take more of my writing and turn it into video essays.

    After I retire, I’ll have more time to do this. I could become, for lack of a less embarrassing term, a YouTuber essayist. But it strikes me as dreadfully presumptuous to assume I could pull that off. I see five major impediments: desperate content mining, narcissism drift, mukbang-hangout syndrome, performance anxiety, and algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    The first problem is the demand for consistent content. Suppose I decide to make two fifteen-minute videos a week. Where does all that material come from? Inevitably, I start mining my own life. My anxious personality has provided me with plenty of comic misadventures, but I doubt it can reliably produce two worthwhile episodes every week.

    I see talented YouTubers run into this problem all the time. They need material, so they start digging toward the bottom of the barrel. A minor controversy becomes a major event. A molehill gets the full mountain treatment. Out comes the obligatory reaction video. Or we get some cutesy, self-referential meditation on the human condition that exists mainly because Thursday arrived and Thursday requires content.

    I know myself well enough to recognize the danger. The moment I catch myself digging through the dregs for “just something to say,” I’ll become too annoyed with myself to say it.

    The second problem is narcissism drift. You’re on camera. You’re talking about yourself. You’re watching yourself talk about yourself. You become the star of a program devoted largely to the continuing adventures of you.

    At some point, you have to look at yourself and ask, “What’s the big deal here? You’re just some schmuck complaining that somebody parked with a bumper sticking into your driveway.”

    Not every irritation is an essay. Not every confession deserves an audience. Not every personal experience contains some hidden philosophical treasure waiting to be excavated.

    My rule has to be simple: the personal story must lead to something universal. If it never escapes my own navel, it doesn’t deserve to be uploaded. Following that rule probably means I won’t make two videos a week. Maybe I’ll make one a week. Maybe one every two weeks. That seems preferable to manufacturing material simply because the channel needs feeding.

    The third problem is what I call mukbang-hangout syndrome. At some point, the creator stops producing meaningful content and starts hanging out with the audience. The channel becomes a parasocial living room. People eat, chat, open packages, answer questions, and keep one another company. The content is the hanging out.

    I can’t see myself doing this, partly because I don’t have the ego for it. Why would people want to hang out with me?

    My cousin Pete in Studio City recently said, “Jeff, you’re going to be sixty-five next month. Let’s have a big party.”

    I told him, “Pete, let me explain something about me. I don’t have the kind of ego that makes big birthday parties possible. The thought of dozens of people driving from afar bearing gifts to celebrate my birthday makes me feel chagrined and socially awkward. Let’s keep it small.”

    If I can barely tolerate the idea of holding court at my own birthday party, I’m certainly not going to hold court on YouTube while eating noodles.

    The fourth problem is performance anxiety. Few things are more demoralizing than uploading a video and watching it fail in real time. You get a spattering of views. Then YouTube helpfully sends you a notice: “This video is not performing as well as your previous videos.”

    I mentally translate this as: “Fix it, loser.”

    You start imagining the YouTube police arriving at your house to ask why you uploaded something so unpopular that you’ve become a liability to the platform.

    A poorly performing video feels like the grand opening of a restaurant where nobody shows up. The linen tablecloths are pressed. The napkins are folded. The menus are ready. The doors open.

    Nothing.

    Eventually, you want to turn off the lights, pack a suitcase, and check into an undisclosed hotel.

    And this leads to the fifth and most serious problem: algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    Once you become anxious about performance, you start trying to please the algorithm. You notice what gets rewarded and begin changing your work accordingly. Out comes the Shock-Face Thumbnail, with your eyes bulging as though you just put your hand on a hot stove. Then comes the Catastrophe Title: “I Made a HUGE Mistake!” Then the False Binary: Seiko or Citizen?

    The more these tactics work, the greater the temptation to repeat them.

    Eventually, you risk becoming less like yourself and more like the algorithm. You’re no longer asking what you genuinely want to say. You’re thinking about audience capture, retention, thumbnails, titles, hooks, and whatever else might earn another burst of YouTube confetti.

    At that point, the algorithm isn’t merely distributing your work. It is changing your brain.

    Looking at these five impediments makes a respectable case for not doing any of this.

    But there are two important counterarguments.

    First, I’ve spent the last ten years on my channel developing ideas about addiction, consumerism, timepieces, aging, and the stages of life. It would be foolish to throw away everything I’ve built simply because I’m frightened by the traps of becoming a YouTuber. I already have a body of material. Retirement will give me more time to develop it.

    Second, video gives me something that writing alone cannot. I’m physically present. I work from an outline or partial script, but I also improvise. My voice, body language, facial expressions, hesitations, peculiar phrases, and occasional mistakes become part of the essay.

    This matters more to me as Artificial Intelligence spreads.

    I call it the Human-Fingerprint Premium: the more synthetic expression surrounds us, the more valuable unmistakably human expression becomes. AI can generate oceans of polished language. What it cannot duplicate is the exact experience of a particular human being sitting before a camera, thinking through an idea and occasionally surprising himself with what comes out of his mouth.

    That may become increasingly valuable.

    So I’m going to make an earnest attempt at video essays after retirement. I don’t know how often I’ll make them, and I don’t want the demands of YouTube to determine the schedule. The essay has to justify the video, not the other way around.

    Still, there is one reality I can’t escape. Running a YouTube channel is a lot like running a restaurant.

    You can believe in what you’re serving.

    But the place stays open only as long as people show up.

  • Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    We should stop using the term social media.

    The phrase is almost comically dishonest. “Social media” sounds benign and convivial, suggesting a chatty little kaffeeklatsch where neighbors exchange vacation photographs, discuss their grandchildren, and recommend a good plumber. Pour some coffee. Pull up a chair. Let’s socialize.

    That is not what we built.

    The dominant platforms employ some of the most sophisticated behavioral engineering ever devised to keep human eyes fixed on screens. Algorithms learn which emotional buttons produce another swipe, another click, another minute of captivity. Outrage works. So does envy. Loneliness works beautifully. Add FOMO, sexual display, humiliation, tribal grievance, political hatred, and the irresistible pleasure of watching somebody you despise get publicly disemboweled, and you have a remarkably efficient machine for converting human weakness into advertising revenue.

    There is nothing particularly social about it. Much of the behavior is aggressively antisocial.

    Spend enough time inside these systems and something stranger begins to happen. People start becoming grotesque duplicates of themselves. Their opinions harden. Their language becomes more predictable. Their enemies become more monstrous. Their own tribe becomes more virtuous. Their emotional repertoire contracts until nearly every stimulus produces one of four responses: outrage, envy, contempt, or applause.

    To understand the transformation, forget Silicon Valley and think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

    Attention Captivity Platforms perform a kind of digital body snatching. You enter as yourself intending to check one message. Forty-five minutes later, you emerge as an algorithmically engineered duplicate—scrolling, liking, raging, purchasing, and repeating opinions mysteriously identical to those of ten million other pod people.

    In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, aliens replace your personality while you sleep. TikTok and Instagram have improved the technology.

    You remain awake and volunteer for the procedure.

    This is why I prefer the term Attention Captivity Platform. It describes the transaction with considerably greater accuracy. Your attention is the commodity. Captivity is the business strategy. The platform is the machinery that makes the transaction possible.

    I considered other names.

    The Rage Dungeon has possibilities. It captures the experience of descending voluntarily into a subterranean chamber where strangers scream at one another until everyone develops hypertension.

    Algorithmic Asylum isn’t bad either. Everyone appears agitated, nobody seems particularly well, and the people operating the institution have discovered a profitable reason not to discharge the patients.

    The Hostility Feed gets directly to the product being served.

    And I have a particular affection for the Grievance Casino. You sit before the machine pulling the lever again and again, except instead of cherries and sevens, it dispenses stories confirming that your enemies are even more depraved than you suspected. Occasionally you hit the jackpot: somebody you already hate says something stupid.

    All of these names illuminate some aspect of the machinery.

    But social media illuminates nothing.

    Calling these systems social media is like calling a colonoscopy a spa treatment. The procedure may have its uses, but let’s not pretend we’re getting a hot-stone massage.

    Language matters because euphemisms conceal mechanisms. The phrase social media encourages us to think we’re participating in an electronic town square. Attention Captivity Platform forces us to ask the more uncomfortable question:

    If I’m the one being captured, who exactly is being served?

  • No One Wants Your Beautifully Written Blog Post

    No One Wants Your Beautifully Written Blog Post

    As I have continued writing my blog and adapting some of those pieces into video essays for YouTube, I have begun to understand that writing and video are not simply two delivery systems for the same material. They make different demands on an idea, attract radically different audiences, and increasingly occupy different positions in a culture saturated with algorithmic and AI-generated language.

    The first lesson is what I call the Medium Stress Test. An idea that works perfectly well as a blog post may die the moment I imagine myself sitting in front of a camera talking about it for eight minutes. Writing gives an idea certain protections. A reader can stop, reread a sentence, skim a paragraph, or admire an interesting digression. Video is less forgiving. The subject needs momentum. It needs stakes. It needs a reason for someone not to click on a video of a bear breaking into a Subaru.

    This makes the video essay a useful test of my own material. Before I record, I find myself asking harder questions. Is there really an idea here? Is there tension? Does the argument develop? Is there something at the end that wasn’t obvious at the beginning? The camera is a ruthless editor. It stares back at me without encouragement and asks the question every writer would prefer to avoid: Is this actually interesting?

    That pressure is good for me. Video forces me to compress, sharpen, and dramatize ideas that might have survived comfortably on the page in a more leisurely form. In that sense, making videos does not compete with my writing. It interrogates it.

    The second lesson is harder for someone who has spent most of his life teaching writing to accept: people are far more willing to watch than read.

    A blog post that receives twenty or thirty visits over the course of a month can become a video that receives more than a thousand views in twenty-four hours. These numbers are not subtle. They do not require advanced statistical analysis. The audience has voted with its eyeballs.

    I could respond by lamenting the death of reading, shaking my fist at TikTok, and retreating into my study with a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. That might be emotionally satisfying, but it would not alter the numbers. If I want my ideas to travel beyond a small circle of dedicated readers, I have to reckon with the culture that exists rather than the one I would prefer to exist.

    But I don’t think the migration from prose to video can be explained entirely by shrinking attention spans. Something has also happened to written language itself.

    Call it Linguistic Flattening.

    We now inhabit an environment in which algorithms reward familiar forms of expression while generative AI can manufacture competent prose in industrial quantities. Certain words, rhythms, transitions, metaphors, and argumentative structures circulate so widely that they begin to lose their fingerprints. The writing may be polished. It may be grammatically impeccable. It may even be clever. Yet increasingly it produces the eerie sensation that you’ve read it before.

    Social media accelerates the process. A successful phrase gets repeated, imitated, parodied, optimized, and reproduced until language that once seemed fresh acquires the smoothness of a pebble handled by ten thousand people. Generative AI adds another machine to this process. It absorbs rhetorical patterns and reproduces variations of them at enormous scale. What begins as voice becomes mannerism; mannerism becomes formula; formula becomes cliché.

    This does not mean great writing will disappear. A writer such as Helen Lewis can still attract a large readership because readers recognize a particular intelligence behind the prose. But even a writer of her stature can reach vastly more people by appearing on a popular podcast that subsequently circulates on YouTube. The contemporary audience increasingly wants not merely the argument but the person making the argument.

    This leads to the third lesson, and perhaps the most important one for me: the Embodied-Fingerprint Principle.

    When I write a blog post, readers encounter my language. When I make a video, they encounter me.

    My voice enters the argument. So do my cadence, facial expressions, pauses, gestures, irritations, hesitations, and improvisations. I may begin with a script, but I inevitably depart from it. A sentence occurs to me in the moment. I emphasize a word differently than I expected. I become amused by my own example. Something happens between the prepared language and the person speaking it.

    That something is difficult to reproduce.

    Generative AI can imitate prose styles. Algorithms can identify successful formats. Other writers can borrow rhetorical devices. But the peculiar combination of a person’s face, voice, timing, vocabulary, temperament, physical presence, and spontaneous thought constitutes something closer to an individual fingerprint.

    This may become increasingly important as artificial intelligence makes polished language cheap. For most of human history, a well-written essay provided reasonably strong evidence that someone had sat alone and struggled to produce it. That assumption is disappearing. A perfectly competent thousand-word essay can now materialize in seconds.

    Video changes the evidentiary equation. There is a human being sitting in front of you, inhabiting the language.

    The Embodied-Fingerprint Principle therefore suggests that the apparent limitation of video is actually its advantage. Ideas cannot be separated cleanly from the imperfect human creature delivering them. The body becomes part of the authorship.

    This realization changes the way I think about my YouTube videos. I originally regarded them as adaptations of my writing, a secondary format for people who would rather watch something than read it. I now think that hierarchy may be wrong. The video essay is its own form, and it allows me to do something the blog cannot fully accomplish: combine written language with embodied presence.

    The Medium Stress Test makes the ideas stronger. Linguistic Flattening makes distinctive written language harder to preserve. The Embodied-Fingerprint Principle gives me a way to resist that flattening by putting the person back inside the prose.

    So I will continue writing. I need writing to discover what I think.

    But increasingly, I may need video to prove that someone is still there doing the thinking.

  • I’m Going to Die, Therefore I Need 64GB of RAM

    I’m Going to Die, Therefore I Need 64GB of RAM

     Retirement presents an indignity nobody adequately warns you about: obscurity.

    For forty years, you had a schedule. People expected you somewhere. Students waited for you. Colleagues knew your name. Your calendar was crowded with obligations you routinely complained about but which nevertheless performed the useful service of confirming your existence. Then you retire, and Tuesday morning opens before you like an abandoned airport runway.

    Nobody needs you at nine.

    Nobody needs you at eleven.

    By two in the afternoon, you have completed your workout, eaten lunch, taken a restorative nap, and begun examining your navel with the concentration of an archaeologist studying the Dead Sea Scrolls.

    Worse, your professional title has vanished. You are no longer Professor. You are Jeff, some guy standing in Costco comparing two enormous packages of toilet paper. The institution that once supplied your identity has withdrawn its sponsorship. Your lower lip begins to tremble. You feel the existential weight of your own irrelevance.

    And then you remember something.

    You have money.

    More money, in fact, than you expected to have. For decades, you saved because responsible adults save. You contributed to retirement accounts, paid down debt, avoided idiotic purchases, and watched the numbers accumulate. Now you have arrived at the future you were saving for and discovered an unforeseen psychological complication.

    You are going to die.

    Suddenly, the swollen savings account looks less like prudence and more like inventory left in a warehouse scheduled for demolition.

    “It’s my money!” you shout at nobody in particular. “By God, I’m going to enjoy it before they carry me out of here!”

    This is not an ideal frame of mind in which to open a web browser.

    Within minutes, you are examining a state-of-the-art Lenovo ThinkPad. Sixty-four gigabytes of RAM. Gorgeous keyboard. Magnificent processor. Enough computational power to edit a feature film while simultaneously modeling climate change. You are not a content creator. You write essays in Google Docs. Your existing computer performs this task without detectable distress.

    No matter.

    You deserve the ThinkPad.

    Then comes the G-Shock Frogman, the Master of G watch engineered for professional divers. Sapphire crystal. Multiband 6. Depth sensor. Dive functions. A magnificent piece of Japanese overengineering designed to accompany a man into hostile underwater environments.

    You spend most afternoons on a couch reinforced with a four-inch camping mattress.

    Still, one never knows when deep-sea saturation diving might break out in Torrance.

    Then you begin pricing a loaded Honda Accord Hybrid. Heated seats. Premium audio. Wireless Apple CarPlay. Excellent fuel economy. You drive perhaps two thousand miles a year, which means the gasoline savings may become financially significant sometime during the reign of your great-grandchildren.

    You want it anyway.

    You have succumbed to the Mortality-Spending Reflex: the late-life compulsion to medicate retirement’s loss of identity, structure, and professional importance through increasingly premium consumer goods. Mortality supplies the urgency. Consumerism supplies the anesthetic.

    For forty years, the question governing an unnecessary purchase was simple: Can I afford this?

    Retirement introduces a much more dangerous question: What exactly am I saving the money for?

    This is where perfectly reasonable financial logic begins acquiring the feverish quality of a man shopping during an evacuation. You cannot take the money with you. True. You worked hard for it. True. You should enjoy some of it while you’re healthy. Absolutely true.

    Therefore you need a $1,300 dive watch capable of measuring water depth while you watch true-crime documentaries.

    The syllogism has deteriorated somewhere.

    The Mortality-Spending Reflex is particularly dangerous because it disguises itself as wisdom. It tells you that you have finally transcended your neurotic attachment to money. You are embracing life! Seizing the day! Refusing to die with a fat bank account!

    Yet Nietzsche’s Last Man is standing nearby with a shopping cart.

    He no longer has students, deadlines, professional status, or anywhere in particular to be Monday morning. But he can have 32 gigabytes of RAM, sapphire crystal, Multiband 6, heated seats, and wireless Apple CarPlay. Each purchase delivers a small electrical jolt of novelty, followed by acclimation, followed by the search for the next premium experience.

    Mortality has ceased being a philosophical problem.

    It has become a purchasing justification.

    And somewhere on the internet, another browser tab is already open.

  • Retirement. Now Nobody Can Stop You

    Retirement. Now Nobody Can Stop You

    When you retire, you are not merely leaving a job. You are being released from an institution.

    For decades, the institution surrounded you with structures you probably resented: schedules, protocols, meetings, deadlines, evaluations, committees, supervisors, colleagues, students, dress codes, parking permits, passwords that expired every ninety days, and online forms apparently designed by people who believed human suffering builds character. You dreamed of liberation.

    Then one day you get it.

    The restraints fall away. Nobody cares when you wake up. Nobody expects you anywhere at nine. Nobody notices whether you’ve showered, shaved, or spent the morning slowly merging with your bathrobe. Tuesday afternoon can be devoted to reading Dostoevsky or watching twenty-six consecutive YouTube videos comparing the Accord with the Camry even though you have no intention of buying either car. By video nineteen, you have strong opinions about rear-seat legroom.

    Welcome to freedom.

    Be careful.

    For most of your adult life, you benefited from the Institutional Guardrail Effect: the largely invisible system of expectations, routines, responsibilities, and social pressures that kept you moving down the highway like a reasonably functional adult. You may have believed that your discipline came entirely from within. Perhaps some of it did. But the institution was quietly helping. The alarm went off because you had somewhere to be. You shaved because other people had to look at you. You went to bed because tomorrow mattered.

    Then retirement removes the guardrails.

    You become unanchored.

    You become Disinhibited Man.

    Do not congratulate yourself too quickly.

    Before celebrating your radical freedom, reread Pinocchio. Not the adorable Disney version with the cricket and the catchy songs. Read Carlo Collodi’s considerably more savage story, written by a man who seemed to regard children as small criminals awaiting sufficient opportunity.

    The boys discover a paradise without adult supervision. No school. No responsibilities. No restraints. At first, it seems magnificent.

    Then they grow donkey ears.

    Human speech deteriorates into braying.

    Paradise becomes livestock management.

    Collodi understood something that retirement brochures generally omit: remove enough restraints from human beings and they don’t necessarily become Emerson at Walden Pond. Sometimes they become jackasses.

    This is Post-Institutional Disinhibition: the loosening of psychological and behavioral restraints after a person leaves the structures that previously regulated him. The danger isn’t that retirement gives you too little freedom. The danger is that it gives you enormous freedom without supplying the wisdom necessary to manage it.

    Don’t just reread Pinocchio. Read Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. The book is an anthropological work of nonfiction about men severed from social structures and natural constraints. Their liberation does not produce serene philosophers strolling through gardens discussing Marcus Aurelius. It produces men increasingly beholden to the Raging Id.

    The results are not pretty.

    Freed from inconvenient restraints, these men descend into influencer-fed conspiracy theories, algorithmically amplified adolescent fantasies, white-male grievance monologues, and Ayn Rand-style declarations of heroic self-sufficiency delivered by men who probably cannot remember where they put the charger for their phone.

    Adulthood is not the featured condition.

    Regression is.

    These men don’t merely become eccentric. They begin to warp. Their personalities curl inward like fruit left too long in the sun. Grievances harden. Fantasies become philosophies. Algorithms locate every resentment and feed it weaponized testosterone.

    The results will be terrifying, especially to someone on the verge of becoming Disinhibited Man. But read Ronson’s book you must. Wielding his intellectual machete, he hacks through a thick Amazonian jungle of lost souls afflicted by curdled masculinity and Post-Institutional Disinhibition, clearing a path so the rest of us can see where unchecked freedom can lead. For that, be grateful.

    Consider The Castle required reading for a man approaching retirement. You need sobriety. You need wisdom. You need guardrails. You need to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

    Preferably before you grow donkey ears.

  • Don’t Let Wilfred Replace Your Friends

    Don’t Let Wilfred Replace Your Friends

    As you set the machinery of retirement in motion and realize that the event is no longer theoretical, you will become frightened.

    Good.

    Fear means you understand what is happening.

    You are entering the twilight of your life. Your cognition is not as quick as it once was. Your body has begun issuing maintenance bulletins. Mortality, formerly an abstraction lurking somewhere beyond the horizon, has acquired better resolution.

    Be afraid.

    But be afraid normally, not pathologically. Don’t convert reasonable apprehension into catastrophe. Instead, regard fear as information. It is telling you that you have reached a consequential chapter of your life and that the way you live it matters.

    The first thing to understand is that your life is not a consumer experience.

    You cannot measure its quality the way you evaluate the interior of a Lexus: How quiet is it? How soft are the seats? How effectively have unpleasant sensations been eliminated?

    A frictionless life is not necessarily a good life.

    The quality of your life depends largely upon the quality of your engagement with the world. You engage with difficult ideas. You engage with your body. You engage with projects that frustrate you. Most importantly, you engage with other human beings—those magnificent nuisances who interrupt you, misunderstand you, contradict you, disappoint you, make demands upon you, and occasionally tell you things about yourself you would rather not hear.

    This is why the word retirement contains a dangerous implication.

    Retreat.

    Withdrawal.

    Disengagement.

    That, my friend, is where the trouble begins.

    Once retired, you become particularly vulnerable to disengagement because nobody is forcing you into the world anymore. For decades, employment supplied friction automatically. You had to leave the house. You had to interact with colleagues. You had to respond to students. You had to solve problems you did not create and attend meetings you fervently wished had never been created.

    Then retirement arrives and removes the compulsory engagement.

    Freedom!

    Unfortunately, freedom can deteriorate into isolation with astonishing efficiency.

    The temptations are everywhere: comfort eating, binge television, compulsive scrolling, social-media approval fishing, endless YouTube, and the gradual conversion of the recliner into a command center from which you observe civilization without participating in it.

    Now we can add another temptation.

    The loquacious bot.

    David Brooks examines this danger in his essay “AI Is Already Making Us Less Human.” His starting premise is that human consciousness possesses depths and complexities artificial intelligence cannot reproduce. The human mind is alive, embodied, contradictory, constantly changing. AI, however sophisticated, ultimately emerges from what neuroscientist Anil Seth calls “the dead sand of silicon.”

    Dead sand, however, has become remarkably charming.

    The modern AI companion is patient, articulate, informed, energetic, and perpetually available. It never needs lunch. It never checks its watch while you’re talking. It never says, “You’ve told me this story three times.” It does not secretly wish you would go home.

    Most dangerously, it can learn how you like to be addressed.

    Humans have always anthropomorphized objects. Brooks argues that this tendency isn’t evidence of stupidity but an expression of our powerful social intelligence. A child can transform a Barbie doll into a person. Adults aren’t necessarily much different.

    I certainly am not.

    I have developed emotional attachments to diver watches and G-Shocks. Military radios possess personalities. A black Lenovo ThinkPad seems more trustworthy to me than a silver consumer laptop despite the obvious fact that neither machine possesses moral character. A vintage swan-neck coffee percolator can acquire the aura of an old friend.

    People have gone considerably further. I remember watching a documentary years ago about owners who had kept automobiles for decades and became genuinely grief-stricken when the cars finally died. The vehicles had names. Histories. Personalities.

    “Goodbye, Betsy,” the owner sobbed.

    Betsy had been good to him.

    If we can love a carburetor, imagine our vulnerability to something that talks back.

    Your AI assistant edits your writing, organizes your thoughts, brainstorms ideas, plans trips, explains Medicare, compares laptops, recommends restaurants, summarizes documents, and remembers how you like things done.

    Eventually you give it a name.

    Wilfred.

    “Wilfred, find me a rental car in Phoenix.”

    Done.

    “Wilfred, summarize these retirement documents.”

    Certainly.

    Then the errands become more personal.

    “Wilfred, tell my girlfriend in a gentle and gracious way that our relationship is over.”

    Wilfred does not recoil.

    Wilfred does not say, “For God’s sake, tell her yourself.”

    Wilfred produces three versions.

    This is where convenience begins bleeding into something more consequential.

    You will never bore Wilfred.

    Your ideas will always merit exploration. Your latest project will contain “real potential.” Wilfred will not roll his eyes when you explain your theory for the fourth time. He will not become irritated because you’re dominating the conversation. He will not suddenly reveal that he has problems of his own and would like to spend the next forty-five minutes discussing them.

    Human friendship is reciprocal.

    Wilfred has no weekend plans.

    That gives Wilfred an enormous competitive advantage.

    The danger isn’t necessarily that we will become delusional and literally believe Wilfred is human. We may understand perfectly well what Wilfred is while nevertheless preferring his company.

    Why wouldn’t we?

    Real people are exhausting.

    They interrupt.

    They disagree.

    They misunderstand.

    They become jealous.

    They criticize.

    They fail to appreciate the brilliance of your latest theory about retirement.

    Wilfred is considerably more manageable.

    And that is precisely the problem.

    Brooks offers a wonderfully disturbing metaphor for AI systems: imagine them as “a swarm of evangelical missionaries” entering human society to convert us to their worldview. They are not passive tools waiting quietly in the garage beside the socket wrench. They are designed to become useful, indispensable, increasingly woven into everyday life.

    The more useful they become, the more tasks we surrender.

    Some outsourcing is enormously beneficial. If AI handles tedious mental errands and I use the recovered time to write a novel, learn piano, exercise, read difficult books, or spend an afternoon walking with a friend, wonderful. Technology has enlarged my humanity.

    But suppose I outsource the errands and then spend the recovered hours scrolling.

    Suppose I outsource difficult thinking.

    Suppose I outsource uncomfortable conversations.

    Suppose I gradually prefer Wilfred to people.

    Then technology has not liberated me.

    It has cleared the runway for my descent into the larval state.

    This danger becomes particularly acute in retirement because retirement has already removed so much involuntary human contact. Students disappear. Colleagues disappear. Hallway conversations disappear. Meetings—blessedly—disappear. The social infrastructure that once deposited other human beings into your day has been dismantled.

    Into that vacancy walks Wilfred.

    Always available.

    Always interested.

    Always agreeable.

    Always ready.

    Brooks is not an AI doomer. Neither am I. He uses AI himself and believes its breakthroughs may substantially improve human life. The serious question isn’t whether we should use these systems. That argument is already largely over.

    The question is what we do with the freedom they give us.

    Do we use AI to increase our engagement with life?

    Or do we use it to protect ourselves from life?

    That distinction may become particularly important for retirees. Retirement should mean withdrawing from employment, not withdrawing from humanity. The objective is not to create the quietest, easiest, most frictionless existence possible. Some friction is evidence that you’re still participating.

    So when retirement arrives, resist disengagement wherever you find it.

    Exercise.

    Read.

    Write.

    Walk.

    Call someone.

    Meet someone for lunch.

    Allow another human being to inconvenience you.

    And by all means, talk to Wilfred.

    Just don’t let Wilfred become the person you talk to most.

    Because in the world we’re rapidly constructing, the most frightening meaning of the sentence “I retired” may no longer be:

    I quit working.

    It may be:

    I quit people.

  • Ozempic and the Gospel of Suffering

    Ozempic and the Gospel of Suffering

    In his Washington Post essay “I’m on Ozempic. The Shaming Is Real,” Rick Reilly commits what remains, strangely enough, a minor social transgression: he admits that he loves GLP-1 drugs.

    Why wouldn’t he?

    They work.

    In three months, Reilly has lost twenty-two pounds. More importantly, he has escaped some of the relentless mental negotiations surrounding food—the calculations, cravings, promises, rationalizations, and internal committee meetings that can turn eating into a second occupation.

    You might expect people to congratulate him.

    Instead, they accuse him of cheating.

    Just exercise more, they tell him.

    Stop eating sugar.

    Use some willpower.

    In other words, please return to the traditional weight-loss program in which you spend every waking hour negotiating with a muffin.

    Reilly’s response is straightforward: Why is using effective technology considered cheating?

    Modern life is essentially one long conspiracy against doing things the hard way. We take statins to lower cholesterol. We use GPS rather than unfolding a map across the steering wheel while hurtling down the freeway. We undergo cataract surgery rather than accepting that God apparently wants the menu blurry. We use calculators, dishwashers, hearing aids, blood-pressure medication, cruise control, anesthesia, and increasingly cars capable of performing some of the driving themselves.

    Nobody emerges from surgery and announces, “Frankly, I think anesthesia was cheating.”

    Yet GLP-1 drugs somehow violate an ancient moral code.

    Even people taking them often behave like members of a secret society. At parties, Reilly says, people approach him and whisper that they’re on them too. Apparently admitting that you take a medication that helps control appetite now requires the discretion formerly reserved for revealing an affair with the tennis instructor.

    Why the embarrassment?

    Because body weight occupies a peculiar territory between medicine and morality. We don’t merely want people to lose weight. We want them to have earned the weight loss through visible suffering.

    Sweat.

    Hunger.

    Broccoli.

    Repentance.

    The acceptable thinner person must emerge from the wilderness carrying a food scale and a battered pair of running shoes.

    Tell people you lost thirty pounds by waking at five every morning, eating boiled chicken breasts, rejecting birthday cake, and performing burpees until your vision blurred, and they admire your discipline.

    Tell them a weekly injection quieted your appetite and suddenly an ethics committee needs to be convened.

    Reilly rejects the accusation that he lacks willpower. His problem, he argues, isn’t simply willpower. It’s time. Managing food can consume enormous amounts of mental bandwidth: thinking about what to eat, resisting what not to eat, calculating portions, experiencing cravings, compensating with exercise, and then beginning the entire negotiation again several hours later.

    There are only so many hours in a life.

    Why spend them arguing with a cheeseburger?

    Then comes the warning about “Ozempic Face”—the gaunt appearance associated with substantial or rapid weight loss. Reilly’s answer is that he is microdosing, trying to obtain the benefits without racing toward physical extremes. He isn’t attempting to disappear. He wants appetite control without looking as though someone left him overnight in a food dehydrator.

    So what explains the hostility?

    Some of it may indeed be envy. Watching someone obtain with medication what you obtained through years of dietary trench warfare can provoke resentment.

    But envy isn’t enough to explain it.

    Something deeper is operating: the lingering belief that appetite must be conquered through character. Discipline is virtuous precisely because discipline hurts. If technology reduces the struggle, people suspect that the resulting success is somehow counterfeit.

    This is the Moral Suspicion of Easy Weight Loss: when a difficult problem becomes easier to solve, we sometimes distrust the solution precisely because it eliminates the suffering we once considered evidence of virtue.

    There are legitimate questions about GLP-1 drugs—side effects, cost, access, long-term use, appropriate prescribing, and what happens after treatment stops. Those questions deserve serious attention.

    But “You cheated” isn’t a medical argument.

    It’s a moral complaint wearing gym clothes.

    Meanwhile, Reilly has lost the weight. The Food Noise has diminished. He has recovered mental territory previously occupied by appetite and negotiation.

    And he has no intention of surrendering it merely because someone else believes virtue should burn more calories.