Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • Four Things I Would Tell a New College Writing Instructor

    Four Things I Would Tell a New College Writing Instructor

    If I were giving four pieces of advice to a new college writing instructor, I would say this:

    1. Use popular movies to introduce writing themes because movies reflect shared obsessions, anxieties, and concerns that will resonate with your students.
    2. Since your course content and grading will be on Canvas, give your students feedback as quickly as possible. Don’t make them wait more than 24 hours. Prompt feedback shows students that they matter, especially when you see them only once a week in a hybrid class or not at all in an online course.
    3. Show students how AI can produce lame, overwrought writing that is mostly fluff. At the same time, demonstrate how AI can be a useful tool for improving grammar and sentence structure and for learning how to write sandwich paragraphs and follow MLA format.
    4. If you’re teaching in a classroom, encourage students to appreciate the rare opportunity to gather with people from different walks of life and engage in civil discussions about the controversies of the day. Such exchanges sharpen their critical thinking and social skills while creating an environment that stands in opposition to the toxic polarization infecting so much of society today.
  • The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    Because I’ve been absorbing television commercials since the 1960s, I’ve internalized the belief that suffering is a bad thing. To suffer means there’s a glitch in the system, if you will. Television has always told me: “You’re doing it all wrong. You can buy your way into enough pleasure, comfort, and convenience to iron away those ugly wrinkles of human suffering.”

    To internalize the idea that consumerism can overcome human suffering is to undergo a kind of infantilization. Here’s a case in point: I spent over twenty years obsessing over watches, creating a cozy ecosystem to buffer myself from the anxiety and restlessness arising from an existential vacuum. But creating that buffer only allowed those problems to grow and fester. I was in a strange state. I was hyper-focused on watches, but I wasn’t engaged with the real world or with myself. I was both engaged and disengaged at the same time. My life was full of intense mental activity without meaningful psychological engagement.

    This contradiction points to something we might call Disengaged Hyperfixation: a condition in which intense concentration on a narrow interest creates the illusion of meaningful engagement while the individual becomes increasingly disconnected from relationships, responsibilities, and self-examination. I was deeply engaged in the minutiae of watches but disengaged from the emotional problems that required my attention.

    Disengaged Hyperfixation seems to be central to the business model of the Attention Economy. Create undemanding videos in which you repeat the same thing over and over about how amazing this or that watch is. Tell car enthusiasts how superior their favorite brand is to the competition. Talk about a high-protein diet for the millionth time to high-protein disciples. The brutal fact about the Attention Economy and Disengaged Hyperfixation is that you can get lost in these dopamine farms and piss your life away, only to discover too late that you were never meaningfully engaged with the precious, short time you have here on Earth. That realization brings a despair and anguish no YouTube influencer can cure.

  • The United States of Memory Foam

    The United States of Memory Foam

    Last night I dreamed I was working out with kettlebells in my garage. Overcome by a sudden restlessness, I decided to venture away from home by doing a long Farmer’s Walk, an exercise in which you hold a heavy kettlebell in each hand and walk a significant distance as if carrying two suitcases. I decided to take a walk across the entire country.

    As I journeyed through America, I discovered that everyone was an aspiring influencer. The product everyone was advertising on social media was mattresses, the kind that arrive at your doorstep compressed into a box and then inflate before your eyes. Everywhere I went, people were pretending to sleep, wearing fake, blissful smiles while recording video selfies. Living rooms, bedrooms, and other areas of the house had been transformed into home studios. People were so absorbed in their influencer activities that they no longer spoke to one another. Conversation had died. People lived alongside one another but were psychologically worlds apart.

    I decided to walk a considerable distance to Influencer City, where a woman who presided over all the influencers lived at a luxurious resort. She was known as the Influencer Queen. When I arrived, she was having tea and biscuits with her associates beside a swimming pool.

    They regarded me with some curiosity, a man in his sixties carrying two kettlebells. I could see the Queen’s concern, so I assured her that the kettlebells weren’t weighing me down. Something else was crushing me, I explained. I was discouraged by the fragmentation of society. Everyone had devoted themselves to the futile mission of selling dubious mattresses.

    Surrounded by her entourage, the Influencer Queen listened intently, as though my words had affected her deeply. But just as I was reaching the heart of my criticism, someone whispered in her ear that the swimming pool needed renovations, and she immediately lost interest. She turned to her entourage and began discussing the renovations as though I were no longer standing there.

    Realizing that she had no interest in my concerns, I walked away. Forlorn, I tried to make my way home, but I had no idea where I was. I spotted a neighborhood in the distant sunset and decided to try my luck in that direction. The kettlebells remained surprisingly light, but my heart was heavy. In the distance, I heard an aspiring influencer discussing coil count and gel-infused memory foam.

    I sighed in despair. Americans knew everything about memory foam but had forgotten how to talk to one another.

  • One Flew Over the Cozy Nest

    One Flew Over the Cozy Nest

    I was approaching sixty-five when the idea of something being cozy or not became the operating principle through which I viewed the world. The mildly entertaining, sentimental TV show Best Medicine was cozy because the small coastal fishing village of Port Wenn, Maine, was built on community connection and trust, qualities increasingly scarce in a country becoming paranoid, isolated, and unhinged by weaponized misinformation and cultural and political polarization.

    The LG TV interface I had to use was bonkers, with flashing lights and a runaway cursor that produced chaos rather than efficient navigation. Replacing this frustrating operating system with a Roku device would make the TV cozy. Having a lightning-fast Chromebook with premium hardware and guaranteed security updates was cozy, but its buggy replacement, the supposedly more premium Googlebook with half-baked software, was not cozy.

    Having nostalgic Folgers coffee in the morning was cozy. Shaving with my vintage Gillette razors, which evoked childhood memories of admiring my father during his morning shaves, was cozy. Using a bar of soap for all my shampoo and body wash needs instead of relying on liquid soap in plastic bottles was cozy. Wearing a solar Multiband-6 G-Shock Frogman, with its reliability and atomic accuracy, was cozy. Wearing a tank top emblazoned with Maui or Kona and gray nylon gym shorts, which served as my uniform for sleeping, working out, and running errands, was cozy. Watching true crime and animal documentaries, which sometimes lulled me into a blissful state of half-sleep, was cozy. Learning that the 2.0-liter turbo engine in my 2018 Honda Accord might be susceptible to a blown head gasket, contradicting Honda’s reputation for long-term reliability, was definitely not cozy.

    I had gone overboard with cozy. It had become an operating principle governing all my thoughts. This cozy craze exposed my obsessive personality, which was always searching for an absolute system that explained everything. I knew it was crazy, sometimes laughable, and often annoying, but I couldn’t stop it. Against my will, I had become a terminal patient in a movie titled One Flew Over the Cozy Nest.

    I had to do something. I had to cure myself of my cozy obsession before it was too late. I had to interrogate the flaws of the cozy quest. I began with the foremost principle for combating my pathological desire to cocoon myself in a warm, cozy state. I called it the Universal Law of Diminishing Comfort: The pursuit of comfort can become a source of discomfort. What begins as a sensible effort to eliminate unnecessary aggravation gradually becomes an obsession with eliminating uncertainty itself. In other words, the cure becomes worse than the disease.

    The astute Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified my folly long ago when he warned about the dangers of trying to secure ourselves against life’s uncertainties. We attempt to manage our lives to create an illusion of security while hollowing ourselves out from within. As the cozy lifestyle becomes more cultivated, the soul atrophies.

    Life is chaotic to the point of being terrifying. I turn on my LG TV, try to scroll to Netflix, and inexplicably the cursor exits the Home screen. Suddenly, I’m lost inside a hostile green screen that reads webOS. I need my Roku Ultra 4K so I can find my way back home.

  • The Case for Boring Technology

    The Case for Boring Technology

    As I got older, I began to see consumer products as portals to a world I can describe only as cozy. By cozy, I mean products that give me functionality, tactile pleasure, familiarity, reliability, and control. I increasingly prefer them to products that may be more spectacular and alluring but are prone to falter or persist in feeling alien.

    In the living room, I have a $1,500 4K LG television. Despite its spectacular picture and rich sound, I despise using it. The interface is schizophrenic. One second I’m scrolling through tiles; the next, the television inexplicably switches to an annoying “magic pointer.” It’s not magic. It’s crappy. No one asked for it. It shows up like a smelly uncle at your doorstep. It adds nothing but confusion. The interface also jumps rows without prompting and sometimes kicks me out of the home screen altogether. The LG is decidedly not cozy. It’s so aggravating that I’m buying a Roku device simply to override the interface.

    Speaking of Roku, I own a budget $200 Roku TV in the bedroom. Its picture can’t compete with the LG’s, but using it is effortless. It is direct, simple, and reliable. It does what I ask it to do and then leaves me alone. That is cozy.

    For radios, I use the Tecsun PL-660 in the kitchen because I can play it while it’s plugged into the wall without electrical interference. When my hands are wet from washing dishes, I don’t want to disconnect and reconnect a power cord every time I turn on the radio. For a while, I used the richer-sounding Tecsun PL-880 and PL-990. Their speakers were superior, but using them wasn’t cozy. I was constantly worried about getting the USB plug wet and shorting the radio. Worry is the enemy of cozy. So I returned to the thinner-sounding PL-660. On balance, its dependable performance makes it the cozy choice.

    For shopping, I prefer Trader Joe’s. It is small. Walking from one end to the other isn’t an expedition; it feels like walking from my kitchen to my bedroom. I know the employees. When I’m finished shopping, I walk to the checkout aisle and interact with an actual human being. That is cozy.

    What isn’t cozy is walking into a giant chain supermarket or, worse, Costco, where the building is the size of a football stadium and almost as loud. Often there is no human to check you out. Instead, a scanner admonishes you for failing to place your groceries in the designated area. Sometimes six-foot beeping robots cruise the aisles scanning shelves and managing inventory. This isn’t cozy. It is literally alienating.

    I would never buy a refrigerator with a built-in ice maker because those things are notorious sources of breakdowns and headaches. There is nothing cozy about wondering which complicated mechanism inside your refrigerator will fail next. Give me the basic Whirlpool top-freezer refrigerator recommended by an appliance mechanic. In many cases, the more basic the machine, the cozier it becomes.

    I could continue through the entire house and garage: cars, watches, computers, fans, vacuum cleaners, toaster ovens, microwaves, tabletop ice makers, electric toothbrushes, double-edged razors. Again and again, I choose reliability over flash. Predictable functionality creates a cozy feeling that expensive, nerve-wracking gadgets often destroy with their hiccups, fussy fits, unnecessary features, and breakdowns.

    As I consider this obsession with coziness, however, I have to remind myself that life’s default setting is the opposite of cozy. Life is uncertainty and conflict. The cozy environments I construct with consumer products are, at best, small consolations against a world that can overwhelm me with its unpredictability. Coziness is the exception, not the rule.

    Sociologist Anthony Giddens would give my quest another name: ontological security, a fundamental sense of continuity, order, and trust in one’s world. Familiar routines and dependable objects help sustain that feeling. My cozy products create miniature islands of ontological security within a life whose default condition remains uncertainty and conflict.

    Let me be clear, however. I am not a Cozy Purist. I know this because perhaps the coziest appliance ever made is one I no longer use: the vintage swan-neck coffee percolator. You can still find them on eBay. The old models with American-made heating elements seem capable of surviving several human generations. Perhaps the most beloved is the GE Immersible, though Farberware, Universal, and Sunbeam made wonderful ones as well. Few appliances are cozier. A percolator makes a soft, rhythmic burbling as heated water rises through the stem and splashes against the glass dome. The sound is mechanical but gentle, as reassuring as rain tapping against a window.

    I enjoyed the percolator’s cozy ritual for several years until I committed the fatal mistake of conducting a taste test. I compared percolated coffee with slow-drip coffee. The slow-drip coffee was far better: richer, more complex, less bitter. It wasn’t close.

    So now I use a modern slow-drip coffee maker. It may last six years. It may last six months. In that respect, it isn’t cozy at all. But the coffee tastes better. I may be a creature who craves cozy comforts, but I have my limits.

  • Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    When you retire, you may imagine the trajectory of your final chapters in Hollywood terms because Hollywood has spent your entire life telling you what life is supposed to look like, regardless of how little its stories resemble reality. You may picture yourself as one of the endearing geriatrics in Cocoon, blissfully swimming with friends in a pool that functions less as a swimming pool than as the Fountain of Youth. Hollywood has been selling you fantasies all your life. Eventually, those fantasies seep inside you and become your own.

    It is therefore imperative to understand the kinds of stories Hollywood tells. Hollywood essentially gives us two: the Centripetal Story and the Centrifugal Story. When I explain these narratives to my students, I draw two diagrams on the board.

    The centripetal diagram consists of circles moving inward, becoming progressively smaller. One arrow points toward the center. I call this Circle A. The centrifugal diagram consists of circles moving outward, becoming progressively larger. One arrow points away from the center. I call this Circle B.

    Without explaining what the circles mean, I ask my students to raise their hands if they want their lives to resemble Circle A or Circle B. The overwhelming majority choose Circle B.

    Hollywood has taught them well.

    The Centrifugal Story dominates Hollywood because it offers what audiences want: transformation, expansion, heroism, and redemption. With notable exceptions, Hollywood has little appetite for the Centripetal Story.

    To explain the difference, I begin with a movie Hollywood rarely makes anymore: Citizen Kane. It is not a traditional Hollywood movie because the protagonist is rotten at the beginning and proceeds to rot more thoroughly. My college fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez called this process centripetal development. The character does not fundamentally change; he becomes an increasingly concentrated version of what he already is. Charles Foster Kane begins as an egotistical, controlling man hungry for love and recognition. Wealth and power magnify these qualities until they consume his relationships and leave him isolated. Kane does not become someone else. He becomes more completely Kane.

    American moviegoers generally don’t want to watch a character rot. They want transformation and redemption. They want the Centrifugal Story. Casablanca provides the classic example. Rick Blaine begins emotionally closed, cynical, and committed to self-protection: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Unlike Kane, whose defects become increasingly concentrated, Rick moves outward from the imprisoned self toward other people, moral responsibility, and sacrifice. His love for Ilsa initially tempts him to retreat further into private desire, but in the end he relinquishes her so she can leave with Victor Laszlo and contribute to something larger than any of them. Rick becomes less enclosed by the ego.

    Rick has undergone the classic Hollywood character arc. His old life is finished, and he enters a new world as a new man. Hollywood did not invent this narrative. It inherited it from the conversion story, most famously Augustine’s Confessions. Meghan O’Gieblyn calls this narrative structure the Autobiography: thoughtful reflection on a former life followed by a new life vastly superior to the old one. The structure is seductively tidy. You were lost. Then you were found. The movement is linear. There is no returning because you are dead to the person you once were. Revelation has compelled you to let go of your wastrel existence.

    The problem, O’Gieblyn observes, is that “You cannot understand the meaning of your life while you are still living it.” The conversion narrative solves this problem by allowing you to die without actually dying. Once dead to the old life, you can stand outside it, interrogate it, and contrast that decrepit existence with the person you have become. As O’Gieblyn writes, “Augustine is the father of the genre because he is the one who discovered the crucial loophole: die, then go on living.” Renounce the old life, be born again, and you acquire a second life from which to narrate the first.

    The conversion narrative is also the Hollywood narrative, and if you’re retiring, as I am, you want your final chapters to resemble that unmistakable Hollywood circle: centrifugal, with the arrow pointing outward.

    But after struggling with addiction, recovery, and relapse, O’Gieblyn finds this narrative as hollow as it is seductive. She fought like hell to beat her addictions and make her life “a perfect dovetail of conversion and deconversion narratives.” She wanted a trajectory as tidy as Augustine’s. Life refused to cooperate. She fears that instead of moving confidently outward, she may be traveling in circles. “My life has lost its arc,” she writes, “and I fear that it’s become less a narrative than one of those demented children’s songs that goes around in circles.”

    Yet O’Gieblyn is no nihilist. She still burns for understanding. She still feels compelled to write autobiography as a way of making sense of her failures and triumphs. She still hopes to find some form of wholeness within her contradictions.

    Perhaps those contradictions should not discourage her. Perhaps Augustine’s narrative is simply too neatly ordered to be true. Perhaps children crave cozy narratives while adults learn to tolerate the real stuff, even when the real stuff refuses to provide a feel-good ending.

    Dara Horn explores this problem in her provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Jewish literature couldn’t care less about my centripetal and centrifugal circles. Life is too unruly for either trajectory. It is a mishmash of paths. Horn considers our hunger for satisfying endings after a reader complained that her novel The World to Come, centered on the survivor of a pogrom, wasn’t “uplifting” enough. The complaint revealed something curious. Even sophisticated readers want stories to gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We want endings that reassure us that the universe is fundamentally coherent, that every life can finally be rendered as Circle A or Circle B.

    Horn is suspicious of this craving.

    Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolution owes much to Christianity. Christian history moves toward fulfillment. Its central drama is redemption. The scattered fragments of existence are ultimately gathered into a meaningful whole. Jewish storytelling, by contrast, is often more willing to refuse closure. The Hebrew Bible ends not with final resolution but with an unfinished journey. Questions remain unanswered. Promises remain unfulfilled. The story continues beyond the final page.

    That difference fascinates me. Christianity often invites us to see history as one enormous redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it asks us to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it teaches us to inhabit ambiguity with patience and humility. These stories do not pretend that chaos can always be conquered. They suggest that wisdom may consist in remaining faithful while chaos refuses to yield. I wonder whether remaining faithful amid the madness resembles the kind of attention Simone Weil asks us to cultivate as we approach our problems with calm, patience, and perhaps even faith.

    Perhaps that is the more mature vision. Perhaps the Augustinian character arc can infantilize us when we mistake it for a description of how life actually works. Hero stories easily become propaganda because they give us the emotional resolution we crave, whether or not reality warrants it.

    Hollywood has little incentive to tell us otherwise. It traffics in grand mythologies designed to activate our deepest cravings. Consider the 1985 movie Cocoon. It offers a saccharine myth of centrifugal time in which old age becomes an opportunity for expansion rather than contraction. Its elderly characters escape physical decline, rediscover vitality, romance, friendship, and adventure, and ultimately transcend mortality itself by leaving Earth with aliens. Instead of time narrowing their lives toward death, time opens outward toward limitless possibility. Hollywood takes aging, one of life’s great experiences of diminishment, and transforms it into liberation.

    The Centrifugal Story is alive and well.

    The trouble is that it may be more myth than life.

  • A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    Like many of my fellow Boomers, I’ve gone down a commonly trodden and forlorn path in the realm of dwindling friendships. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I took friendship for granted. It came as naturally as going to the gym, shopping for clothes, going to clubs, and eating lunch at a cafe. These endeavors were often accompanied by friends. In the 80s and 90s, long conversations on landline phones were also part of the fabric of my social life. That I merited a two-hour phone conversation was no big deal. People found me engaging. My self-worth wasn’t something I questioned. It was simply a matter of fact that I was worthy of a two-hour conversation on random topics.

    Spending time with friends diminished in my late thirties and forties. I would go to a restaurant once every other month or so with colleagues. As I grew apart from some of them and others retired, I did not notice that their disappearance was not accompanied by replacements. My friendship count went down. Meanwhile, I acclimated to life in the cave, my expression for retreating into a suburban enclave and learning to entertain and distract yourself as you disconnect from the beehive of life.

    As engagement farms sprouted up around 2010 and offered frictionless, half-baked social interaction, my habits of isolation worsened because superficial parasocial interactions substituted for in-depth, messy, real ones. These digital engagements proved unsatisfactory. Engagement on these platforms was not authentic friendship. It was a brief burst of dopamine. When the dopamine died, you were left hungry for real social interaction. These engagement farms, in other words, were the equivalent of junk food. You could overconsume the processed stuff while remaining emotionally malnourished.

    Fifteen years of this social deprivation, combined with the chaos and false euphoria of attention-capture platforms, lulled Boomers like me into a state of social isolation that became our new normal.

    There could be a gender factor here. My wife maintains real friendships, and she notices my deprivation in that department. She wants me to put time and energy into my “social health,” as she calls it. I agree that engaging in real friendships would be good for my social health and, in turn, put less pressure on her. The problem is that I don’t have a magic wand. I can’t say abracadabra and have a friend materialize like a genie from a bottle.

    Social entropy is a real and insidious thing that can’t be reversed overnight. I worry that you reach an age and become so entrenched in routines and habits that you cross the Isolation Rubicon, making a return to a normal and healthy social world extremely difficult.

    In this new landscape, where landline phones and two-hour conversations have become extinct and we spend much of our time in parasocial engagements, I can appreciate some of these mediated communications. By and large, people are friendly on my YouTube channel and Instagram page. I don’t diminish these interactions. I simply see them for what they are. They are limited because they exist in the digital sphere. They cannot substitute for real interaction.

    I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with two Trader Joe’s clerks, both in their late twenties. One was scanning my food items. The other was bagging them. I told them that 99% of the time I shop at Trader Joe’s at eight a.m., and I want to be out of the store by 8:45 because I notice that each passing hour brings more people, stress, and anxiety. I told them that one time I had to come in at three p.m. for emergency provisions when my wife’s friends from out of town showed up. I walked into a crowded Trader Joe’s and didn’t even recognize the place. Nor did I recognize the customers.

    “These aren’t my people,” I said.

    My dismay at feeling like an alien during my afternoon shopping spree made the clerk, a short woman whose arms were generously covered with tattoos, stop scanning my groceries. She let out a loud belly laugh. I could see the self-abandoned joy in her face. Making her laugh in that moment was more gratifying than a decade of social-media engagements. You cannot substitute real engagement with parasocial interplay.

    But real engagement is increasingly rare. If I shop at Target, there is no clerk. I scan the items myself while a robot admonishes me if I don’t place them in the designated bagging area.

    A lot of my social deprivation is of my own making. I am lazy, sullen, egotistical, and introverted. While I can be entertaining, I am usually tolerated in low doses. Regardless of what I think about myself, the world does not owe me a bevy of friends waiting on my doorstep to join them in some madcap adventure or other.

    I feel dumb that back in 2010 I was enticed by the so-called social-media corporations. Relying on engagement farms for a morsel of social interaction while curating some energetic persona full of moxie and frisson was pure chicanery. The fact that I substituted this curated nonsense for real life was my fault. I played myself. I let the engagement-farm companies play me as well.

    I don’t have an easy solution to my social health, but I can see the landscape clearly. I am sobered enough after decades of curating a dazzling persona to end that folly. Wherever life takes me from this point on, I’m going there without the fakery.

  • The Great Honda Uncoupling

    The Great Honda Uncoupling

    A car crisis has entered my life and sent me down a rabbit hole of angst and distress. Honda has a major engine problem affecting many of its models. The problem involves the cylinder-head gasket losing its seal. This can result in coolant loss, overheating, engine misfires, and coolant entering the combustion chambers. The affected engines include Honda’s 1.5-liter turbos, 2.0-liter turbos, naturally aspirated 2.0-liters, and naturally aspirated hybrid models. Eight models are affected from 2017 through 2026. Honda has extended the warranty on these models to ten years or 150,000 miles.

    My 2018 Accord with the 2.0 turbo is not on the list. While I’m relieved, I’m not exactly brimming with confidence either. It is more than eight years old with only 29,200 miles on the odometer as I write this twenty days before my sixty-fifth birthday, October 28. I no longer look at my Accord with confidence. I look at it with mistrust.

    And this leads to a painful fact: I am afraid that Honda and I may be uncoupling.

    I take this breach of trust personally. Having a car divorce after forty years is heartbreaking. Honda was always my cozy companion. Honda was my trusty sherpa, taking me to work, medical appointments, Trader Joe’s, and Target. The Honda service center is within walking distance of my home. I know the staff. I joke with them. I tell them how much I love Honda. They smile back at me tenderly. Like me, they own Hondas. They are part of my extended family.

    But the breach of trust resulting from faulty engines has forced me to look elsewhere. Honda’s only competition for me is Toyota because, like Honda, it has a reputation for reliability. However, while the Honda service center is only one and a half miles away, the Toyota service center is an intimidating four miles away. Yet a little research offers some consolation: Toyota offers a pickup and drop-off service, which Honda does not. More importantly, Toyota has a clean bill of health on its engines, which Honda does not.

    In my risk-averse mind, I’m uncoupling from Honda and moving toward Toyota. For me, this is far more than a rational consumer decision. The change has emotional weight. It’s like getting divorced and remarried. It’s like selling your house and moving across the country. It’s like making a career change. Imagine working as an engineer for twenty years and then opening a yoga studio. I am entering foreign territory.

    But Honda has left me little choice. For years, its engineers had a massive engine problem growing right under their noses. This degree of negligence and incompetence feels like the automotive equivalent of marital infidelity. A massive breach of trust has occurred.

    And this points to yet another problem: If and when Honda fixes its defective engines, regaining my trust could take at least a decade. I would need long-term data to be convinced that Honda reliability is up to spec again. I don’t want to be the car buyer who provides the data. I want to be the car buyer who studies the data after the fact and then makes his decision.

    Buying a car is like choosing a bride. I don’t want some thirty-six-month dalliance with a car lease. I want to commit for the long term. Till death do us part.

    The holy sacrament between Honda and me has dissolved. Unless Honda does something as dramatic as moving a few mountains and parting the Pacific Ocean to win back my trust, I am afraid the uncoupling is upon us.

    I am looking over the horizon.

    I see a beaming light.

    It reads Toyota Camry.

    Preferably in Dark Cosmos.

  • Writing After the Death of Reading

    Writing After the Death of Reading

    When the deep reading of long and complex writing is no longer the fabric of our culture, there will be a vacuum. It will be filled, of course. What fills the vacuum is not pretty. It is chaos, unbridled passions, dopamine, outrage, and a nightmarish phantasmagoria from which there may be no return.

    I keep coming back to Childish Gambino and his music video “This Is America,” in which cars are aflame, people are dancing amid the violence, chaos, and rubble, and the young generation is perched above the hellscape, distracted by their smartphones. The singer refers to the phones as “tools.” These tools can capture the chaos but cannot make sense of it. They can also serve another function: hijacking the brain. As the fires rage and the chaos intensifies, the mind is soothed by a new dance or cat video. Or one becomes engaged with a conspiracy and feels special for having the mindfulness to give credence to something the dumb masses have dismissed. Meanwhile, the hellscape gets worse as ordered reality recedes into the distance.

    Becoming untethered from reality, losing civic order, becoming addicted to screen-fueled dopamine, and living in ever-growing chaos is not the hellscape of the future. It is now. James Marriott sees this hellscape as the direct result of our loss of reading. In his book The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, his central argument is that literacy is essential to maintaining civilization. As he writes in his introduction: “I believe much of the disorder and unreason of the twenty-first century is a direct consequence of the fading of the written word and colonisation of our culture by addictive screens. As reading declines, the result, evident all around us, is the intellectual hollowing out of our society. Without reading, the world is going to become less rational and more disordered.” His book argues that we have not yet “fully grasped the consequences of this transformation” from reading books to gazing at content on screens.

    The way we absorb information as a result of technology presents a moral dilemma in the way I communicate with others. Do I stop writing and make “content” that is accessible to people acclimated to a world in which reading has been replaced by digital content? To be more specific, do I abandon the project of my blog and replace it with video essays meant for publication on YouTube? If I do so, am I part of the problem, kowtowing to a digital world of frictionless rewards, or am I simply being reasonable by communicating with people in the way they are most likely to receive ideas?

    I do have a blog. I enjoy keeping it active and posting almost every day, but if I write an essay on the blog and don’t post the link to my YouTube channel, only about five people will read it. If I post the link, I might get thirty visitors. On the other hand, if I take the same content, sit in front of a video camera for twelve minutes, and post the video essay on YouTube, I can get a few thousand views over the course of a few days. There is no contest. The evidence has made it clear. People don’t want to read my content. They would rather watch me sit with my ebony Yamaha piano behind me and talk about a subject for ten to fifteen minutes.

    So I have to make a choice. I can post something on my blog and be the tree that falls in the forest and makes no noise, or I can deliver a video presentation in which I try to make my personal challenges relevant to others and have a voice that actually gets heard.

    To clarify the situation even further, I have a hundred subscribers to my blog. I have over eleven thousand subscribers to my YouTube channel. I can see the communication landscape clearly. You go to work where the job is. There isn’t much opportunity to spread my ideas in the blog market. There are more opportunities on YouTube.

    I don’t take YouTube for granted either. I tell my viewers that, as a middling presence on YouTube, I view my channel like a restaurant. It stays open as long as the customers show up. It took a long time to get a substantial audience. For a decade, I talked about my watch obsession, did “State of the Watch Collection” videos, and interrogated my watch-related madness. Fellow watch enthusiasts could relate. We took solace in knowing we weren’t alone. We understood each other.

    But eventually, this path presented some challenges. I could only talk about my watch addiction for so long before I began repeating myself. As other YouTubers created more and more polished and highly edited watch videos, I found myself feeling redundant and technologically backward in that world. I had to make a lane change.

    My subject matter broadened to include my personal life challenges, such as living in my sixties and preparing financially and emotionally for retirement. Sometimes I’d throw in some watch talk, most noticeably my pivot from expensive mechanical diver watches to more affordable G-Shocks. The older I got, the less I wanted to deal with owning and servicing mechanical watches and the more I was comforted by the atomic accuracy and solar power of my G-Shocks.

    To my surprise, a sit-down video essay can perform better than a video featuring a watch close-up. I think I know why. YouTube viewers have become sophisticated enough to know that I don’t have anything special to offer in delivering watch eye candy. My strength is the video essay. I will lean into it and keep it going. I retire the channel when the customers stop showing up.

    Of course, I lament our post-reading world, the one James Marriott has described with such sharp insight and clarity. Of course, I am disappointed that I am not a published writer with a significant following. But I’m reminded of when I play Yahtzee. My daughter and I use a common expression when we’re aiming for a high score, such as getting a large straight, and end up having to settle for a small straight. Instead of complaining about the lot given to us, we say, “I’ll take what I can get.”

    If there is an audience out there that hungers for authentic ideas in a ten-minute video, then I will use that hunger as a toehold, stick my foot into it, and try to leverage myself up the mountain. I’ll keep ascending that world of ideas until I can no longer find footing and the unforgiving landscape demands that I stop climbing.

  •  I Never Want to See the Caffeinated Squirrel Again

     I Never Want to See the Caffeinated Squirrel Again

    What does an essay about the death of performative AI-enhanced writing have to do with a book about retirement, aging, and death? It has everything to do with it because the death of performative AI-enhanced writing means I get to live. By live, I mean my voice, my authenticity, and my creativity.

    My experiments with AI writing tools over the last four years took me down a dark road in which, for a long stretch, I used AI the way a bodybuilder uses steroids. AI boosted my prose, made it more muscular, and gave it a more dramatic flex. I’d write my original content and give AI this prompt: “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions.” With this one prompt, my content was no longer 100% mine. It was closer to 80%. The extra 20% belonged to my co-author. And that 20% made my sentences, similes, metaphors, and witticisms exist in a kind of AI-infused alchemy. AI wasn’t just providing spice and accent to my ingredients. It was adding additional ingredients to the recipe.

    My prose was eye-catching at first. It made me feel like the bodybuilder who no longer competed onstage with respectable 18-inch biceps. Now when I strutted across the stage, my biceps had a peak on top of a peak on top of yet another peak and bulged to over 22 inches.

    This kind of writerly muscle-flex became addicting at first, but over time, I had to abandon it. Not only did the additional muscle call my authorial authenticity into question, but it became a form of overwriting, even purple prose. It became mind-numbing. Worse, it became exposed as imitative when I saw the same muscular prose in other people’s online essays, my students’ essays, and even Amazon reviews.

    AI was recycling the same arsenal of stock linguistic tricks for all buyers. Someone wasn’t frenzied anymore. They had the energy of a “caffeinated squirrel.” AI would present the caffeinated-squirrel image over and over without shame. When recalling a long stretch of time that harkened back to the past, AI was fond of writing, “Not since the Nixon Administration had I forgotten my breakfast.” It would use this Nixonian reference even if you were referring to 1981, when the hackneyed reference to the Reagan Administration would at least be accurate.

    Whenever I wanted to write about a misguided quest or the purchase of a disappointing consumer product, AI’s stock joke was that my instant coffee or microwave oatmeal made me regret my life choices. For reasons I don’t understand, AI also gravitated toward certain verbs and nouns. It overused anchor or anchoring, as in fixing something firmly to something else. Everything was getting anchored. AI also overused architecture as a substitute for structure. Everything had an architecture. A philosophical treatise had an underlying architecture. So did Baskin-Robbins.

    Throwing around words you never used before in these new contexts—anchor, architecture—made you feel smarter until it didn’t. It stopped making you feel smarter when you saw your students using the same bag of tricks.

    Another danger of using AI as a co-author is the slippery slope. Infusing your writing with growth hormones can lull you into laziness so that, little by little, you outsource your thought and effort to the machine.

    Eventually, you reach the point where AI has kicked your butt. You look at your AI writing assistant and say, “All right, you won. I’m a ghost of my former self.” You reach the point where you have to reclaim your authorship and your humanity.

    If you’re going to use AI at all, you need to set boundaries. Get rid of the prompt “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions,” which can add a good 20% of synthetic muscle to your original content. Replace it with this one: “Rewrite the following by preserving its original content while editing to improve clarity, concision, and polish for meaning and sentence structure. The edit should preserve 95% of the original content.”

    This is the Authentic Content Prompt.

    It should be applied as a universal rule in a world of ideas where authenticity and integrity need some kind of imprimatur amid the digital morass of AI slop. Just as the Good Housekeeping Seal became a trusted symbol that a product had been tested and met the Good Housekeeping Institute’s standards, perhaps we need a Good Writing Integrity-Keeping Seal of approval. Readers could go online and see this recognizable seal on a webpage, assuring them that what they are reading contains original content without the synthetic muscle.

    Whether or not such a seal of approval ever materializes, my AI experiments have led me to my own personal Authentic Content Prompt.

    My ACP, as I call it, keeps AI as an editor and prevents it from becoming a co-author. As the latter, it becomes dangerous and should be known as the Toxic Purple Prose Machine. Use it at your own risk.