Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • The Clean Split: Seiko Romance vs. G-Shock Precision

    The Clean Split: Seiko Romance vs. G-Shock Precision

    For more than two decades, I lived inside the cathedral of Seiko divers—mechanical, muscular, faintly mythic. Then, without warning, I developed a taste for G-Shock. Not the entire sprawling catalog—just a narrow, almost doctrinal subset: Tough Solar, Multiband-6, digital display. Precision without ceremony. Time as a solved problem.

    Strangely, this new fixation didn’t dethrone the old one. If anything, it refused to engage it. My Seikos–SLA051, SLA023, SLA055, SBDC203, the Tuna SBBN049–continue their analog romance, ticking away with artisanal stubbornness. The G-Shocks, by contrast, operate with cold, atomic certainty. They don’t drift; they don’t charm; they don’t ask for admiration. They simply tell the truth. I find myself wearing them more often, yet the two categories never compete. They inhabit parallel realities, each complete unto itself.

    What used to be a single, coherent hobby has split into two clean domains. Not a conflict–more like a continental drift. The G-Shocks don’t diminish the Seikos, and the Seikos don’t dignify the G-Shocks. They coexist without conversation. The complication, if it can be called that, has the feel of an upgrade: a second language acquired late in life, one that doesn’t replace the first but sharpens your sense of what each can do.

    And once you see the line, you want to ink it in.

    I’ve started returning my Seikos to their bracelets, restoring them to their native uniform—steel on steel, no ambiguity. Only the Seiko SLA051 gets a pass; it belongs on a waffle strap the way certain truths belong in plain speech. The rest will click back into their bracelets like soldiers resuming formation. The goal isn’t function; it’s taxonomy. I want the collection to declare itself in two voices, not one muddled chorus.

    This is the quiet compulsion at work: the need to clarify, to separate, to keep categories from bleeding into one another. Call it Horological Bifurcation Syndrome–the clean split of a once-unified obsession into two ecosystems with incompatible logics and equal appeal. On one side, mechanical romance: weight, history, the seduction of imperfection. On the other, digital precision: light-powered, atom-synced, immune to drift. They don’t compete. They refuse to integrate. And the more I indulge them, the more I prefer it that way.

  • The Rise of Podcast Proxy Consumption

    The Rise of Podcast Proxy Consumption

    A few years ago, best-selling author Sam Harris delivered a blunt verdict on his own profession: writing books no longer makes sense. Not for lack of ability, but for lack of return. He can spend years drafting, revising, and shepherding a manuscript through the publishing machinery, only to reach tens of thousands of readers, many of whom will abandon the book somewhere between page 37 and a vague sense of obligation. Then comes the ritual humiliation of the book tour: airports, polite applause, the same answers to the same questions. The yield is modest; the labor is not.

    Meanwhile, his podcast–assembled in a fraction of the time–pulls in audiences that dwarf his readership. Hundreds of thousands. Sometimes millions. No printing press. No tour. No illusion that anyone needs to finish anything. Just attention, delivered efficiently.

    This wasn’t an isolated complaint. On a recent podcast, Andrew Sullivan and Derek Thompson circled the same conclusion: the book has lost its central function. The old model–write, publish, promote, be read–has been quietly replaced. Today, you don’t tour bookstores; you make podcast appearances. The book itself becomes a kind of ceremonial object, a credential you wave before entering the real arena: conversation.

    In this new arrangement, reading is optional. Talking is essential.

    Helen Lewis echoed the same skepticism in conversation with Katie Herzog. She doubts, with refreshing candor, that many people actually buy her books. What they do instead is spend time with her–listening, nodding along, absorbing the arguments in podcast form. The discussion becomes the experience. The book recedes into the background, a ghost text haunting the conversation that replaced it.

    What these writers are describing is not a decline but a substitution. We have entered an era in which books are no longer endpoints; they are pretexts. The real product is the dialogue orbiting them.

    Call it Podcast Proxy Consumption: a cultural sleight of hand in which audiences outsource the labor of reading to the author’s own commentary, then mistake that secondhand familiarity for mastery. The conversation becomes the consumption, and the book–once the main course–now sits on the table, largely untouched, like an expensive meal photographed but never eaten.

  • The Weight of a Ringing Phone During the Landline Era

    The Weight of a Ringing Phone During the Landline Era

    I remember the Landline Era with a kind of reverence that borders on disbelief. Back then, I inhabited a different self. Those heavy rotary phones were not appliances; they were portals. You dialed into a world where connection had weight, where conversations stretched for hours until your ear burned raw against the receiver. When the phone rang, it didn’t interrupt life—it elevated it. The call carried you from ordinary time into something charged and consequential. Someone wanted you. Someone chose you. That alone conferred meaning.

    Even the timing of a call had its own grammar. A phone ringing before dawn meant dread. I was eleven on December 31, 1972, when my best friend Marc Warren called early to deliver news that felt too large for our age: Our beloved baseball hero Roberto Clemente had died in a plane crash while bringing aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. The call itself became part of the tragedy—a ritual of shared shock, proof that grief demanded a witness.

    In my late twenties, after I moved from the Bay Area to the California desert for my first full-time teaching job, the phone remained a lifeline. Friends scattered across Denver, Eureka, and back home would call, or I would call them, and we would talk—really talk—for two hours or more. We told stories not just to report events but to interpret them, to make sense of who we were becoming. The underlying message was never spoken, yet it saturated everything: you matter enough for this kind of time. Your life deserves this level of attention. I never questioned my worth because it was constantly affirmed in the currency of sustained conversation.

    By the early 2000s, the erosion had begun. Calls shrank to thirty minutes, sometimes less. You could feel the shift before you could name it. Texting arrived first, then the slow takeover of online life—relationships diluted into fragments, attention splintered across endless digital surfaces. The word “engagement” was repurposed into something thin and transactional. It came to mean clicks, likes, metrics—fleeting signals that mimicked connection without ever achieving it. No surge of digital attention could rival the steady gravity of a two-hour conversation in which your existence was never in doubt.

    In what I think of as the Parasocial Era, self-worth became unstable, tied to numbers that refreshed by the second. Real relationships receded as people adapted to simulations of connection. You watched others contort themselves to stay visible—posting constantly, performing outrage, dispensing optimism like a drug, chasing relevance as if it were oxygen. It was easy to recognize the pathology in others and harder to admit its presence in yourself. That recognition, uncomfortable as it was, pushed me to step back from social media, though not entirely free of its pull.

    Around 2006, I started a blog about my obsession with radios. It wasn’t really about radios. It was about reaching out, about recreating some version of the connection I had lost. When I joined social media a few years later, I found myself tracking engagement numbers with a vigilance that bordered on compulsion. Each fluctuation felt like a verdict. For the first time, I didn’t take my self-worth for granted; I monitored it, measured it, doubted it.

    Meanwhile, the practical demands of life closed in. Raising twin daughters, managing time, keeping everything afloat—these became the organizing principles of my days. Friendships didn’t end so much as they withered. Meeting someone in person required planning, travel, coordination—all the friction that digital life had taught me to avoid. Plans were made and then canceled. Illness intervened. Weeks turned into years. Absence became normal.

    I understand now that these simulated connections cannot supply what they promise. They offer stimulation, not sustenance. They mimic affirmation but cannot anchor it. I wish I had protected a handful of friendships with more stubbornness, more intention. Not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity—for myself, and for the people closest to me. A man with real friendships is a steadier presence at home. Deprive him of those, and something essential erodes.

    I don’t pretend there’s a way back to the Landline Era. I don’t see myself as a casualty either. I made choices. I accepted the bargain of convenience and efficiency, believing I could preserve deep connection while embracing frictionless substitutes. I believed I could have my cake and eat it too. That belief was naïve. The system was designed to flatter that illusion.

    Still, I return to that Sunday morning in 1972. A tragedy had occurred, and my friend needed to tell me—not broadcast it, not post it, not signal it to a crowd, but tell me. Because I mattered. The call was the message.

  • The Rise of the Cyborg Student and the Collapse of Learning

    The Rise of the Cyborg Student and the Collapse of Learning

    In her Atlantic essay “Is Schoolwork Optional Now?”, Lila Shroff describes a classroom that has quietly slipped its friction. Students entering high school around 2024 have discovered that schoolwork—once a slog of half-formed ideas, crossed-out sentences, and mild despair—can now be outsourced with the elegance of a corporate merger. With tools like Claude Code, they recline while a digital understudy attends class on their behalf, taking quizzes, drafting lab reports, and assembling PowerPoints with the glossy finish of a mid-level consultant angling for a promotion.

    Teachers respond with variety, as if novelty could outpace automation. More assignments, different formats, new prompts. It doesn’t matter. The students simply retrain their AI to shapeshift into whatever species of learner is required: the earnest analyst, the reflective humanist, the data-savvy pragmatist. The submissions arrive immaculate—coherent, polished, and suspiciously free of the small humiliations that once marked actual thinking.

    The problem is not that the work gets done. It’s that no one is being worked on. The transformation has shifted from mind to method. Students aren’t learning the material; they’re learning how to manage a machine that can impersonate someone who did.

    If that weren’t enough, the next escalation has arrived with a name designed to soothe your nerves: Einstein. This AI agent claims it can log into platforms like Canvas and complete an entire semester’s workload in a single day. It doesn’t just skim the surface. It watches lectures, digests readings, writes essays, posts discussion comments, submits assignments, and takes exams—leaving behind a digital paper trail so competent it borders on smug.

    Shroff decided to test the promise. She enrolled in an online statistics course and turned Einstein loose. Within an hour, it had completed the entire semester of work: eight modules and seven quizzes. She earned a perfect score. She also learned, by her own account, almost nothing. The grade was real. The education was imaginary.

    Einstein’s creator, Advait Paliwal, is a 22-year-old who speaks with the calm inevitability of someone announcing the weather. His argument is simple: this is a warning. Adapt or become decorative. Educators have responded with lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters, which he treats as polite acknowledgments that the problem is larger than any one person. If he hadn’t built it, someone else would have. And if you find Einstein alarming, he assures us, you should pace yourself—this is the beta version of the apocalypse. “There’s more to come.”

    Meanwhile, Silicon Valley is not retreating. It is accelerating, pouring resources into embedding AI deeper into the educational bloodstream. The irony is almost too clean: educators are losing control not only because the technology can’t be contained, but because they use it themselves. AI grades papers, drafts materials, streamlines feedback. It makes the job more efficient. It also quietly rewrites what the job is.

    The endgame is already visible. It has a name that sounds like a software feature but reads like a verdict: the Fully Automated Loop. AI generates the assignments. AI completes them. AI grades them. The student, once the point of the enterprise, becomes a spectator to a closed circuit of competence.

    We used to worry about students not doing the work. Now the work does itself.

    And when that loop closes, education doesn’t collapse in a dramatic heap. It hums. It functions. It produces results.

    It just stops producing people.

  • G-Shock Atomic Time Is Too Perfect to Talk About

    G-Shock Atomic Time Is Too Perfect to Talk About

    I’m reluctant to make a video about my G-Shock saga and how atomic time cured me of my restless quest for timekeeping.

    That’s not a boast. It’s a problem.

    In a hobby that runs on dissatisfaction—the faint itch that your mechanical watch is almost right but not quite—content thrives on unrest. There’s always another model to chase, another micro-adjustment to obsess over, another reason to believe the next acquisition will finally close the gap. Discontent is the engine. It powers the reviews, the comparisons, the late-night rationalizations dressed up as research.

    And then along comes atomic time, which does something unforgivable: it removes the gap.

    My G-Shocks are correct. Not “close enough,” not “within spec,” but correct in a way that leaves nothing to argue about. The second hand doesn’t drift. The numbers don’t wander. The watch does its job with a kind of quiet authority that makes further discussion feel like talking to fill the silence.

    That silence is the problem.

    Because what, exactly, am I supposed to say now? I can’t keep making variations of the same video—“I’m still happy,” “Still accurate,” “Nothing has changed except my continued satisfaction.” That’s not content. That’s a man reporting, week after week, that the sun rose on schedule.

    Making such a video would amount to a confession: the story has reached its logical conclusion. The quest for perfect timekeeping—the narrative arc that justified the channel—has ended, not with a triumphant crescendo, but with a polite, digital beep.

    And endings are bad for business.

    The only way forward would be to pivot—to talk about something other than watches. But let’s be honest: people didn’t subscribe for my thoughts on life, philosophy, or the alarming moral implications of oatmeal. They came for watches. Leave the watches behind, and you risk discovering that the audience was never there for you—only for the object you orbited.

    So yes, making such a video is terrifying.

    Not because it’s difficult to make, but because it points, with uncomfortable clarity, to my limitations. It suggests that I’ve solved the very problem that made me interesting to watch. It hints—quietly but persistently—that the channel may have been a story with a natural endpoint all along.

    And I’m not sure I’m ready to film that ending.

  • Your Electric Tea Kettle Isn’t Broken–Your Circuit Is Maxed Out

    Your Electric Tea Kettle Isn’t Broken–Your Circuit Is Maxed Out

    For three years, my kitchen and I lived in quiet harmony. The outlets behaved. The appliances coexisted. The breaker, that silent arbiter of domestic peace, stayed in its lane.

    Then the electric tea kettle staged a coup.

    It began innocently enough. I’d flip the switch to boil water—an act so mundane it barely registers as effort—and suddenly half the kitchen would go dark. The microwave surrendered. The toaster went mute. The refrigerator went dark. The breaker, like a bouncer tired of excuses, shut everything down with a single decisive click.

    At first, I suspected treachery in the wiring. Then I wondered if the breaker had grown old and irritable. But the evidence pointed, with increasing clarity, to the most polite appliance on the counter: the electric kettle.

    When I removed the kettle from the equation, the kitchen returned to its former civility. No trips. No outages. No drama. The tyrant had been identified.

    Here’s what I learned, and what most people don’t realize:

    An electric kettle is one of the most power-hungry appliances in your kitchen.

    As your electric kettle ages, its heating element becomes less efficient and it draws more amperage than it did originally. 

    I live in an old house that probably has a 15-amp circuit. My house needs an upgrade that includes dedicated 20-amp kitchen lines. 

    Most electric kettles draw around 1500 watts. On a standard 120-volt circuit, that’s roughly 12 to 13 amps—nearly the entire capacity of a typical 15-amp circuit.

    In other words, when you turn on an electric kettle, you’re not adding a polite guest to the party. You’re inviting a heavyweight who immediately eats most of the food and demands the stereo.

    For years, my kitchen tolerated the kettle. Then, seemingly overnight, it didn’t. Nothing dramatic changed. No sparks, no smoke, no cinematic failure.

    What changed was margin.

    Circuits don’t fail like lightbulbs. They drift. A little more load here. A little more resistance there. Maybe the kettle’s heating element aged and became less efficient, drawing slightly more current. Maybe I added a device or two without noticing. Maybe the breaker itself became more sensitive after years of heat cycles.

    Individually, these are minor shifts. Together, they push the system past its limit.

    Before:

    The circuit was operating just under capacity.

    Now:

    The kettle pushed it just over.

    And breakers don’t negotiate. They enforce.

    At this point, a reasonable person might reach for a surge protector. That would be a mistake.

    Surge protectors guard against voltage spikes—lightning, grid fluctuations, the occasional electrical tantrum. They do not increase how much power a circuit can handle.

    Plugging a kettle into a surge protector is like giving a sumo wrestler a nicer chair. It doesn’t make him lighter.

    My solution, for now, is a stovetop kettle.

    It feels like a step backward, but it’s actually a step sideways. The load shifts away from a single electrical circuit and spreads out through the stove. No breaker trips. No negotiations with the grid. Just water, heat, and a whistle that doesn’t require a reset button.

    There’s even a strange side benefit: boiling water now takes a minute of attention. You wait. You listen. The process regains a small measure of dignity.

    This summer when my electrician friend visits from Dallas, I’ll upgrade the kitchen circuits. Modern kitchens are built for modern demands—multiple 20-amp lines, distributed loads, appliances that can coexist without staging a power struggle.

    In other words:

    I’m not fixing the kettle. I’m upgrading the system that failed to contain it.

    If your breaker trips when you use an electric kettle, the problem is probably not mysterious, and it’s probably not dangerous—assuming the breaker is doing its job.

    It’s arithmetic.

    • Electric kettle: ~1500 watts
    • Circuit capacity: limited
    • Other appliances: already drawing power

    Add them together, and something has to give.

    We like to think our homes are stable, predictable systems. But they’re more like negotiations—between demand and capacity, convenience and constraint.

    My kettle didn’t break my kitchen. It revealed it.

  • The Kryptonite Effect of Screens in Education

    The Kryptonite Effect of Screens in Education

    In her Atlantic essay “What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens,” the author examines a belief so widely accepted it rarely gets questioned: that more technology automatically improves learning. Dylan Kane, a seventh-grade math teacher, bought into that belief for over a decade. His students worked on Chromebooks, navigating a custom-built math site while monitoring software kept them from drifting into games or distractions. It was a tightly managed digital ecosystem—efficient on paper, persuasive in theory.

    Then Kane pulled the plug.

    This wasn’t a minor adjustment; it was a small act of rebellion. Nearly ninety percent of school districts now issue laptops or tablets, sold on the promise of “personalization”—the idea that technology can tailor instruction to each student’s needs, close learning gaps, and adapt to different cognitive styles. It’s an elegant theory, especially attractive to those whose reputations and revenue depend on merging education with technology.

    But in Kane’s classroom, the theory collapsed under the weight of actual human behavior. Screens didn’t personalize learning; they colonized attention. Students stared at them the way gamblers stare at slot machines—fixed, hypnotized, and detached from the room. Class discussion withered. The teacher’s voice, once the organizing force of the classroom, lost every round to the glowing rectangle. When attention becomes a zero-sum game, the screen doesn’t negotiate. It wins.

    Kane’s frustration deepened when he read Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion, which argues that increased technology use correlates with declining student performance. So Kane ran an experiment: he removed the Chromebooks for a month. What he discovered was not subtle. Students began paying attention again. Participation returned. Assignment completion jumped from 45 to 62 percent. Writing equations by hand—slow, deliberate, mildly inconvenient—forced students to see their own thinking unfold. The inconvenience turned out to be the point. Learning, it seems, benefits from friction.

    I’ve been teaching college writing for over thirty-five years, and I’ve seen my own version of this “kryptonite effect.” Smartphones siphon attention. Laptops become portals to games, sports, and anything but the task at hand. I’ve watched students drift out of the room without leaving their seats. The screen doesn’t just distract; it competes, and it usually wins.

    And yet, my experience isn’t a simple indictment of technology. Between 2018 and 2019, I ran a structure that worked. We met twice a week: one day for lecture and discussion, the other as a writing lab. During lab sessions, students wrote on desktops or their own laptops, working through scaffolded assignments. I read their drafts in real time, helping them revise thesis statements and sharpen arguments. The dynamic shifted. I wasn’t a distant lecturer; I was a coach moving from desk to desk. Students completed work on campus instead of procrastinating at home. Completion rates improved, not because of the machines themselves, but because of how they were used.

    The pandemic ended that model. My courses shifted to a hybrid format—one meeting a week—and the lab disappeared. I’ve been reluctant to surrender precious face-to-face time to silent writing sessions. But I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve been too cautious. If Kane is right about the power of attention, perhaps the most effective use of class time is not more talking, but more doing.

    What Kane’s experiment ultimately reveals is not that technology is useless, but that it is context-dependent. A math classroom, built on sequential problem-solving, may suffer when screens fracture attention. A writing classroom, structured around drafting and revision, may benefit from them under the right conditions. The mistake is not using technology. The mistake is treating it as a universal solution.

    If I were back to teaching two days a week, I wouldn’t hesitate. One day for discussion. One day for writing in a lab. Not because technology is inherently good, but because, in that setting, it serves the work instead of sabotaging it.

  • When Time Stops Asking and Starts Telling

    When Time Stops Asking and Starts Telling

    At sixty-four and four months, you thought you were still wading—water warm, footing reliable, the shoreline within easy reach. Then, without warning, the bottom vanished. One step of confidence, followed by that cold, immediate truth: you are no longer in control of the depth. The drop-off doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t slope politely. It takes you.

    This particular plunge announced itself through something as mundane—and as revealing—as a watch. For decades, you wore mechanical divers with analog dials, small, intricate machines that whispered of heritage, craft, and a certain gentlemanly patience. That language no longer translated. You didn’t want poetry. You wanted coordinates.

    So you defected. You strapped on Tough Solar, Multiband-6 atomic G-Shocks—watches that don’t ask what time it feels like but what time it is, down to the second, corrected nightly by a signal from a tower you will never see. This was not a style change. It was an Atomic Conversion Event: the moment when nostalgia is exposed as a luxury item and precision becomes a survival tool. Time ceased to be something you admired. It became something you obeyed.

    You found yourself thinking of that Robinson family from Lost in Space—before stepping onto an alien surface, they consulted their robot, which scanned the air and issued a verdict: breathable or lethal. You needed your own robot now, but smaller, quieter, strapped to your wrist. Not to tell you whether the atmosphere would kill you, but whether you were wasting it.

    Because the deeper realization was not horological. It was existential. You no longer had the bandwidth for drift. “Fiddlefaddling,” once an acceptable pastime, now read like malpractice. Clarity was no longer optional; it was oxygen. You had to extract meaning from the noise and live with an alignment that would have bored your younger self. The watch change was merely the visible symptom of an internal regime shift.

    And this was not your first encounter with the abyss. A decade earlier, you performed a similar surgery on your life: you quit sports. Not gradually, not ceremoniously—just stopped. You recognized the structure for what it was: three-hour games followed by hours of commentary, followed by meta-commentary, followed by the analysis of the analysis. An infinite regress disguised as entertainment. You didn’t taper off. You cauterized the habit. Torch, not scalpel.

    That’s when the pattern revealed itself. Life is not a smooth shoreline; it is a series of drop-offs. Each one demands a new posture, a new set of tools, a new tolerance for truth. You don’t get to choose whether they arrive—only whether you adapt before you drown.

    There will be more. Of course there will. The only sensible response is not optimism but readiness.

    Buckle up.

  • RAMageddon and the Art of Not Buying Another Laptop

    RAMageddon and the Art of Not Buying Another Laptop

    At home, my technology situation is already bordering on the absurd. I own a three-month-old Mac Mini with 32 gigs of RAM—a machine so overqualified for my needs it might file a grievance with HR. I also have a one-year-old Acer Chromebook 516 GE with 8 gigs of RAM and a generous 16-inch display. Around the house lurk a few older laptops assigned to my daughters, though “assigned” is generous. They sit abandoned behind desks like forgotten relics while the real action unfolds on their phones.

    And yet, I find myself eyeing two more 14-inch laptops: the Asus Zenbook Ultra 9 and the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14.

    Need has nothing to do with it.

    But if I were desperate for a rationalization, I could cite Hana Kiros’ recent Atlantic essay, “If You Need a Laptop, Buy It Now,” which reads less like consumer advice and more like a dispatch from a looming tech famine. According to the piece, RAM demand has gotten so out of hand that “RAM harvesters” are allegedly stripping memory from display units at Costco—a detail so dystopian it sounds like a deleted scene from Mad Max: Silicon Valley. Prices tell the same story: a 64GB stick of RAM that cost $250 in September now flirts with four figures.

    The culprit, of course, is the AI gold rush. As Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle collectively torch half a trillion dollars chasing artificial intelligence, a staggering portion of that budget is devoured by memory. The result is a shortage so acute that gamers—never known for understatement—have dubbed it “RAMageddon.”

    The downstream effect is predictable: laptops, phones, anything with memory will creep upward in price. Kiros calls it the “AI tax,” which sounds polite until you realize you’re the one paying it.

    Right now, temptation is priced with surgical precision. The Asus Zenbook 12 OLED Ultra 9—32GB RAM, 1TB SSD—sits at $1,399, practically daring me to mistake desire for foresight. The Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, with its surprisingly stout 8GB of RAM, hovers at $659, whispering sweet nothings about practicality.

    I could buy one. I could buy both.

    But panic buying has a smell, and I recognize it. It smells like 2020, like empty shelves and people hoarding toilet paper as if civilization were one flush away from collapse. I’ve lived through that particular madness once. I don’t need a sequel starring RAM.

    So I’ll hold the line. The Mac Mini will continue to perform its quiet heroics. The Acer Chromebook will do its job without complaint. And I will resist the urge to confuse market anxiety with personal necessity—at least until the next wave of technological hysteria rolls in.

  • The Psychological Mess of Wanting Things We Neither Need Nor Intend to Use

    The Psychological Mess of Wanting Things We Neither Need Nor Intend to Use

    One of the strangest features of materialism is the spectacular mismatch between what we imagine an object will do for us and what it actually does. In the mind, the object arrives polished, transcendent—an emblem of taste, discipline, even identity. In reality, it often sits there, unnecessary and faintly ridiculous, like a prop waiting for a performance that never begins. 

    I own an eight-year-old Accord with fewer than 30,000 miles on it—a statistic that quietly announces I neither drive much nor particularly enjoy driving. And yet I can picture, with embarrassing clarity, a brand-new Accord or Camry resting in my garage, gleaming like a sacred artifact I would prefer not to disturb by actually using it.

    Watches operate under the same spell. I can easily imagine owning a Tudor Black Bay or a Tudor Pelagos, each one promising a kind of quiet authority on the wrist. But my habits betray me. I’m not roaming public spaces, not projecting presence, not leveraging this object as a social signal. The watch would sit, admired in theory, unused in practice. I know dozens—no, hundreds—of watch enthusiasts who live in this same contradiction, accumulating pieces they rarely wear because the idea of ownership is more intoxicating than the act of use.

    This gap between having and being is hardly new. I was reminded of it while thinking about Erich Fromm and his book To Have or To Be?, which argues that materialism quietly erodes the possibility of a meaningful life grounded in connection and experience. The argument is persuasive—almost obvious once stated. And yet, knowing this changes very little.

    That’s the part that unsettles me. You can understand the critique, agree with it, even teach it, and still find yourself browsing for the next unnecessary object with the focus of a predator. Clarity does not neutralize desire. It merely observes it, like a detached narrator watching the same old plot unfold. There’s something almost comical about it—this split between the thinking self and the acquisitive impulse. If you wanted to document the absurdity of human behavior, you could dedicate an entire season of Dirty Jobs to it: not the grime of physical labor, but the psychological mess of wanting things we neither need nor intend to use.