Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • Escape from Seikotraz: Starring Jeff McMahon

    Escape from Seikotraz: Starring Jeff McMahon

    This morning I woke up with a small, undeserved victory. My second shingles shot had not flattened me into a feverish heap of aches and regret. No vaccine hangover. No sack-of-muscle soreness. Just a functioning body and a clear head. I glanced down at my Casio G-Shock GW-7900 before swinging my legs out of bed, and as I reached for the coffee ritual, a thought crept in—quiet at first, then strangely intoxicating:

    What if I owned only G-Shocks?

    What if I were free of my Seiko divers?

    Free from what, exactly? That part remains stubbornly undefined.

    Three years ago, the fracture began. I developed an aversion to bracelets—not a mild preference, but a full-blown irritation, as if every metal link were conspiring against my wrist. I moved my Seiko divers onto straps, experimenting like a man searching for ergonomic salvation, until I discovered Divecore FKM. Suddenly, everything clicked. The watches felt right—balanced, secure, almost inevitable. For a brief moment, I thought I had solved the problem.

    Then came the contamination.

    August 2025. A message. A study. PFAS—“forever chemicals”—lurking in FKM. The phrase alone sounded like a villain in a low-budget sci-fi film. Dutifully, almost piously, I removed the straps. The watches went back onto inferior substitutes, and with that small act, something essential drained out of them. They were no longer “just right.” They were tolerable.

    Divecore, to their credit, pivoted—hydrogenated rubber, safer materials, a new Waffle strap on the way. I’m waiting for it now, like a man waiting for a repaired marriage.

    But in that interim, I did something careless. Or revealing.

    On a lark, I bought a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    And I didn’t just like it. I fell for it immediately.

    Its design wasn’t elegant—it was aggressively industrial, almost defiant. Its timekeeping wasn’t approximate—it was absolute. Atomic. Unquestionable. It didn’t ask for attention; it delivered certainty. One watch became three. The Rescue. The incoming Casio G-Shock GW-9500 Mudman. A quiet shift became a migration.

    This morning, still basking in my vaccine survival, I entertained a more radical thought: eliminate the Seikos entirely. Replace them with two final pieces—the sapphire Frogman D1000 and the GW-5000U Square, my so-called “dress watch,” a term that feels almost satirical in this context.

    At what point does a preference become a slide?

    Was it the PFAS scare that loosened the foundation? Or something deeper? Do the Seiko divers now carry the residue of an older obsession—one tied to acquisition, to the promise that the next watch would finally complete the picture? And if so, what exactly is this new G-Shock phase? Liberation? Or simply addiction in a more utilitarian costume?

    There are a few things I can say with certainty. I prefer atomic time to mechanical approximation. I prefer digital clarity to analog interpretation. Yes, the digital display demands a slight tilt of the wrist, a negotiation with the light, but I’ve made peace with that. It’s a small concession in exchange for precision.

    Maybe there is no grand psychological drama here. Maybe I’ve grown lazy in the most practical sense. I like convenience. I like certainty. I like not having to set the time like a monk tending to a ceremonial clock. Perhaps this is not a crisis of identity but a simple shift toward ease.

    But then I hear from others.

    Men who made this transition years ago. Men who, after watching my videos, bought a G-Shock out of curiosity and quietly abandoned their mechanical collections. No fanfare. No farewell. Just a gradual, almost polite disappearance.

    It suggests something larger. A quiet exodus.

    You could make a documentary about it: aging watch obsessives laying down their expensive mechanical relics and walking into the sunset wearing Squares and Mudmans, relieved, unburdened, and slightly confused about how it happened.

    Meanwhile, my own collection sits in a kind of purgatory. The Seiko divers wait, their fate undecided. Two have already been sold—the Captain Willard Ice Diver and the 62MAS—and their absence has not registered as loss. That’s the unsettling part. Watches that once felt essential have vanished without leaving a dent.

    And here I was, thinking of myself as a careful curator, a man assembling a coherent, meaningful collection.

    The truth is less flattering.

    My hobby is governed not by principle, but by impulse. By shifting preferences, passing anxieties, and the occasional well-timed scare about “forever chemicals.” I would prefer to believe in a deeper logic, a narrative of refinement and evolution.

    But honesty requires a different conclusion.

    I am not curating.

    I am drifting.

    I look into the mirror. “Oh my God,” I scream. “I am a capricious watch collector.”

    Meanwhile, my YouTube subscribers are making cogent remarks in the comment section. A gentleman who goes by the name of MDchaz recently wrote: “Coming to a theater near you “Escape from Seikotraz” starring Jeff McMahon.” I wrote back, “I’ll have to steal your idea for my next YouTube video.”

    And this blog post. 

  • Two Hours in a Hotel Room: My Mechanical Watch Purgatory

    Two Hours in a Hotel Room: My Mechanical Watch Purgatory

    At night, I go to bed wearing one of my Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shocks. When I wake up, it’s still there—quietly correct, indifferent to my dreams. I make coffee. I eat porridge fortified with protein powder, as if I’m feeding a machine that happens to have a pulse. I write. I take my daughters to school. I return home, sit at the piano, and tap out something halfway between discipline and distraction before changing into workout clothes.

    Then the ritual begins.

    Before I train, I remove the G-Shock and place it—carefully, almost ceremonially—into an open ceramic butter dish. Inside are two watch pillows, like small upholstered altars. I set the dish by the living room window, perched on actual pillows, and let the watches drink sunlight. I don’t charge them. I feed them. They sit there absorbing photons like obedient livestock while I sweat through my penance.

    After the workout, after the shower, after lunch, I leave the G-Shocks at the window, basking in their solar feast, and I reach for a mechanical Seiko diver. This is where things get strange.

    I wear the mechanical for my nap.

    Not because I prefer it. Not because I need it. But because I feel I owe it something.

    For two hours, I strap on a relic of my former life—polished steel, automatic movement, the old romance of gears and springs. I rotate through four of them, day after day, as if fulfilling a contractual obligation. They sit on my wrist like ghosts with good machining.

    And then I take them off.

    I return to my G-Shock the way a traveler returns home after a brief, awkward stay in a hotel. The mechanical watch is the Holiday Inn—clean, respectable, vaguely unsettling in its impermanence. I check out after two hours, hand in the key to a staff member in the hotel lobby, and fly back to where I actually live: atomic time, solar power, numbers that tell the truth without flourish.

    Something happened to me. I can feel it, but I can’t fully explain it yet.

    For twenty years, I was immersed in mechanical dive watches. Not casually—devotionally. They were objects of study, desire, identity. And now, when I look at them, I don’t feel longing. I feel… residue. A faint aftertaste of something that once promised more than it could deliver.

    Pain might be too strong a word. But it’s in the neighborhood.

    I find myself wondering if addiction—because let’s stop pretending it wasn’t that—is less about pleasure and more about escape. About trying to solve something internal with something external. A watch becomes a talisman, a small, gleaming object that whispers: This will fix it. This will complete you.

    It never does, of course. It just resets the hunger.

    Maybe that’s what I’m processing now. Not just the watches, but what they stood in for. The idea that acquiring the right object could quiet something restless inside me. The belief that completion was one purchase away.

    Now I’m in a strange in-between state. Not fully attached to the old world, not entirely settled into the new one. The two-hour mechanical watch session feels like a concession—an obligation to a former self I haven’t fully buried. It’s polite. It’s controlled. It’s also faintly absurd.

    The G-Shocks, by contrast, feel like clarity. They don’t seduce. They don’t promise transcendence. They just tell the time—accurately, relentlessly, without commentary. And for now, that’s enough.

    But I don’t fully understand what’s happened to me yet.

    Give me a year.

    I suspect I’ll have a better answer—or at least a more honest question.

  • Stop Chasing the Perfect Watch–It Doesn’t Exist

    Stop Chasing the Perfect Watch–It Doesn’t Exist

    I love the digital displays on my Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000 and Casio G-Shock GW-7900. They tell me the time with blunt authority. No interpretation. No ceremony. Just numbers that land in the brain like a verdict.

    And yet, apparently, that isn’t enough.

    Somewhere along the way I developed a new appetite—no, let’s call it what it is, greed. I don’t just want clear numerals anymore. I want absurdly large numerals. I want wrist-mounted billboards. I want a wall clock strapped to my arm so I can read the time from across the room like a man who refuses to participate in subtlety.

    Naturally, the good people of G-Shock Nation pointed me toward the Casio G-Shock GW-9500 Mudman. The Mudman, they said, has the numbers. Big, bold, unapologetic digits that look like they were designed for someone who has lost patience with squinting.

    And they’re right—mostly.

    Mudman owners speak about their watch with a curious mix of affection and confession. They praise the size of the numerals, the rugged build, the sheer presence of the thing. Then, almost sheepishly, they admit that the display can blur at certain angles, that the duplex layering introduces a faint haze, that it’s not quite as clean as they’d like. They dock it a star. Four out of five.

    Then they shrug and say they love it anyway.

    That’s the part that matters.

    Because it raises a question most of us spend years avoiding: is there such a thing as a five-star watch?

    I’ve finally accepted the answer. There isn’t. There are only trade-offs you can tolerate without resentment.

    I’ve been chasing a very specific fantasy: huge numerals, high contrast, perfect viewing angles, and zero cognitive load. A watch that doesn’t need to be read so much as absorbed. A watch that behaves like a wall clock—instant, effortless, undeniable. What I’ve discovered is that watches can deliver three of those qualities with confidence. They just can’t deliver all four at once.

    My GW-7900 comes closest to frictionless clarity. Its display is stable, legible, and immediate. But the digits, while excellent, don’t quite scratch that billboard itch. The Mudman 9500 pushes in the opposite direction. It gives me the numbers—big, thick, impossible to ignore—but introduces a new problem: at certain angles, the display hesitates. Instead of receiving the time, I have to negotiate with it.

    Then there are the Pro Trek models, with their crisp, high-contrast STN displays. Technically superior. Visually disciplined. And yet, in their refinement, they lose that blunt, wall-clock immediacy. They are precise, but not emphatic.

    What fascinates me is how quickly Mudman owners make peace with imperfection. They acknowledge the flaws, subtract a star, and keep wearing the watch. That’s not compromise in the defeated sense. It’s acceptance. They’ve decided which imperfection they can live with, and they’ve moved on.

    That realization forced me to confront what I’m actually chasing. It isn’t a watch. It’s a state of mind—frictionless time perception. I want to glance at my wrist and have the time imposed on me without effort, hesitation, or ambiguity. But a wristwatch isn’t built for that ideal. It’s constrained by size, power, durability, and the stubborn limits of display technology. Something always gives.

    There is, to be fair, a strong case for the Mudman. Bigger numerals do make the time easier to read most of the time. Its toughness invites confidence. Its design has a certain muscular charisma. For many people, that combination outweighs the occasional moment of haze or glare.

    But I’ve had to admit something about myself: I value consistency over peak performance. A watch that is occasionally perfect but intermittently irritating will wear me down. I don’t want to negotiate with my watch. I want to glance and know.

    So the conclusion is both obvious and oddly liberating. There is no perfect watch. Once you accept that, the chase loses its urgency. You stop looking for the mythical five-star object and start making deliberate choices.

    The real question isn’t, “Which watch gets me closest to perfection?”

    It’s this: Which imperfection can I live with—and still enjoy checking the time a hundred times a day?

  • I Can’t Count on Casio to Keep Making the Kind of Watch That I Want

    I Can’t Count on Casio to Keep Making the Kind of Watch That I Want

    My G-Shock GW-7900 is the best watch I’ve ever owned. Objectively speaking, it works better than my Frogman because its slightly smaller size makes it a better daily driver and its bigger, bolder digits are easy to read. I have thought of getting another 7900 (soon to be discontinued?) as a backup. I could wait and see if G-Shock makes another Tough Solar Multiband-6 with legible digital readout, but my wait might be in vain because I’ve come to accept something I didn’t want to admit at first: I can’t count on Casio to keep making the kind of watch I want. The combination I’ve zeroed in on—Tough Solar, Multiband 6, large, high-contrast digits, and a strap that comfortably fits my eight-inch wrist—isn’t just uncommon; it’s quietly disappearing. Watches like the GW-7900 didn’t fail. If anything, they solved the problem too well. They delivered time with such blunt clarity that there was nowhere obvious to go next—at least not if readability was the priority. But Casio doesn’t build its future around my priorities. It builds forward, and forward now means more sensors, more layers, more data, and more visual complexity.

    I can see the shift in the newer models. The GW-9500 Mudman looks like progress on paper: bigger digits, more information, more sophistication. But the duplex display muddies the water. The gray-on-gray layering introduces a subtle interference that makes the time less immediately legible, even as the numbers themselves get larger. The Pro Trek PRW-3500 goes the opposite route—clean, crisp, and highly readable—but with smaller digits and a more restrained, instrument-like feel. The Frogman GWF-D1000 adds size and presence, but also adds visual density. I can read it, but I have to look. I have to engage. The effortless glance is gone. In each case, something is gained. And in each case, something essential—immediacy—is diluted.

    This isn’t a fluke. It’s a direction. Casio is moving toward watches that look more technical, more advanced, more information-rich. The design language has shifted from blunt clarity to layered capability. In that world, a watch that simply tells me the time instantly starts to look almost primitive. But that so-called primitiveness is exactly what I value. The GW-7900 doesn’t ask me to process anything. It tells me the time with authority. I glance, and I know. No interpretation. No delay.

    I keep thinking maybe Casio will circle back. Maybe they’ll rediscover the appeal of simplicity and release something that restores that kind of clarity. It’s possible. But it’s not how they’ve operated. Casio doesn’t rewind; it iterates forward. And when a design philosophy gets left behind, it tends to stay there. The GW-9500 is probably as close as we’re going to get to a modern successor, and its compromises tell me everything I need to know.

    So I’m left with a realization that feels both obvious and unsettling: peak usability might already be behind me—not in some nostalgic sense, but in the simple fact that the problem I care about was already solved. The GW-7900 isn’t outdated. It’s optimized for a value the market is drifting away from. And that puts me in a different position than I expected. I’m not waiting for something better. I’m deciding whether I’m smart enough to recognize what I already have.

    Because the real risk isn’t missing out on the next great watch. The real risk is waiting. Waiting for a future model that aligns with my preferences while the present quietly disappears. I can easily imagine the moment: I decide I want another GW-7900, I go looking for one, and I realize the window has closed. The model is gone, or overpriced, or reduced to whatever scraps are left in the aftermarket.

    That’s the part that changes the equation for me. I’m not chasing something new. I’m securing something that already works.

  • When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

    When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Life Inside the Chronophage

    Life Inside the Chronophage

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

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

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

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

  • Chosen by the Frogman

    Chosen by the Frogman

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

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

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

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

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

  • You Are No Longer Shopping. You Are Being Stimulated

    You Are No Longer Shopping. You Are Being Stimulated

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Impossible.

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

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

    The decision arrived with unusual clarity: return it.

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

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

    The 6900 is gone.

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

    Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    AI isn’t going anywhere.

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

    That’s already out of style.