Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • Can Philosophers Keep Their Souls in Silicon Valley?

    Can Philosophers Keep Their Souls in Silicon Valley?

    In “Someone Finally Wants to Hire Philosophers,” Lila Shroff reports what would have sounded like a punchline only a decade ago: philosophy majors may finally be getting the last laugh. For years, philosophy occupied an awkward place in the public imagination—a discipline associated with coffee-shop debates, existential handwringing, and the noble art of explaining to relatives why you were unemployed. At best, the philosopher was a thoughtful gadfly. At worst, a professional overthinker. But the rise of artificial intelligence has suddenly transformed philosophy from an intellectual curiosity into a marketable skill. Major technology companies are hiring philosophers. Universities are recruiting scholars who specialize in both AI and philosophy. The old joke about philosophy leading nowhere is beginning to age badly.

    As Shroff notes, this development should not surprise us. Philosophers have been wrestling with questions about intelligence, consciousness, morality, and the possibility of artificial minds for centuries. Long before Silicon Valley executives promised to change the world, philosophers were already asking whether a machine could think, reason, or possess something resembling a mind. Today, thinkers such as Nick Bostrom have become influential voices in the AI conversation. His book Superintelligence warned more than a decade ago that humanity might create machines whose capabilities outstrip our ability to control them. What once sounded like speculative science fiction now reads more like a boardroom agenda.

    The marriage between AI and philosophy arises from a practical concern. Technology companies want their products to appear ethical, trustworthy, and safe. A machine that accidentally promotes fraud, discrimination, or social chaos is difficult to market. Consumers are more likely to embrace AI systems that project wisdom, fairness, and restraint. In the increasingly crowded AI marketplace, virtue has become a product feature. Safety, ethics, and responsibility are not merely moral concerns; they are branding opportunities.

    Yet Shroff’s essay leaves several uncomfortable questions lingering in the air.

    First, philosophers disagree about nearly everything. That is practically the job description. If ethical questions routinely produce competing schools of thought, which philosophers do AI companies choose to hire? A utilitarian, a virtue ethicist, a libertarian, and a nihilist might evaluate the same problem and arrive at wildly different conclusions. When an AI company claims to be guided by philosophy, whose philosophy is it talking about?

    Second, corporations do not operate in a vacuum. They pursue growth, market share, influence, and profit. Given those incentives, it seems unlikely that technology companies will eagerly recruit philosophers whose views fundamentally conflict with corporate objectives. The philosopher who questions the legitimacy of the enterprise may not receive the same warm welcome as the philosopher who helps polish its public image.

    Third, what happens to philosophy itself when it becomes a lucrative career path? If technology firms reward certain ethical frameworks and ignore others, philosophers may gradually adapt their views to become more employable. Intellectual independence has always been easier to defend when no one is writing the check. Once prestige, influence, and six-figure salaries enter the picture, even the most principled thinkers may find themselves sanding off inconvenient beliefs.

    This is why I remain skeptical of any celebration of philosophy’s new status in the AI economy. There is no such thing as pure philosophy floating above human ambition. There are only human beings, complete with incentives, blind spots, loyalties, and self-interest. The partnership between AI and philosophy may produce genuinely useful ethical guidance. Or it may become an elaborate exercise in corporate virtue theater—a dazzling display of moral concern performed beneath bright lights while the machinery of profit hums steadily backstage. Whether philosophers become the conscience of artificial intelligence or merely its public relations department remains an open question.

  • The Sin of Outsourcing Humanity

    The Sin of Outsourcing Humanity

    For Tyler Austin Harper, there is only one word that captures the gravity of dehumanization: sin. And to be clear, dehumanization is rampant—in the form of robot companions, digital girlfriends, and AI therapists. To call these developments merely wrong is an understatement. He writes, “They feel to me like something deeper and darker.” In his essay “There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI: It’s Sin,” Harper argues that to understand the depths of what is happening to us, we need Christian guides because Christianity provides a framework for understanding dehumanization. You cannot understand dehumanization unless you first understand what it means to be fully human. Harper turns to Christian critics of AI to trace this trajectory from human to subhuman through the misuse of technology.

    These misuses emerge when people overemphasize the business, pragmatic, and utilitarian uses of AI at the expense of humanity, a Faustian bargain as old as sin itself. To champion technology and “outsource the most interesting aspects of our life and labor to machines” without considering the effects on the human soul is to threaten human dignity and meaning.

    Christianity frames us as fallen creatures who long to return to our Maker. The burden of being human is struggling with our fallen nature and seeking grace through God. When we look to machines for salvation, we outsource the burden of what it means to be human. In doing so, we forget that this burden entails suffering and that suffering itself can be a gift from God, pointing us toward humility and the true path. In Harper’s words, “Christianity has a clear ‘anthropological vision,’ asserting that the purpose of the human species is to exist in the image of its creator, to love God and one another, and to spread life on Earth and steward its creatures.” To move toward this purpose is to become fully human. We conform to God and fulfill our humanity. Conforming ourselves to machines, by contrast, becomes a desecration of what it means to be human.

    Harper argues that outside the Christian framework, we become confused about what it means to be human in the first place. He writes, “Many secular thinkers can struggle to articulate a clear definition of what humanity is.” He points to Christian writer Carl Trueman, who observes that the term dehumanization loses its force if the secular definition of humanization remains an “empty cipher.” Secularists and techno-believers have reduced humanization to a narrow set of superficial behaviors that fail to capture what it truly means to carry the burden of having a soul.

    Harper describes himself as “a not especially observant Presbyterian” and is not arguing that we must embrace religious orthodoxy to “fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI.” However, he insists that we “must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment.”

    Harper’s article reminds me of the dangers of Liquid Modernity, a concept developed by Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman describes a social condition in which stable institutions, identities, relationships, careers, moral frameworks, and communities dissolve into constant flux, instability, and adaptation. In the context of dehumanization and the rise of AI, Liquid Modernity refers to the transformation of human beings from rooted persons with durable social bonds into endlessly flexible, data-driven consumers and performers who must continuously reinvent themselves to survive technological and economic disruption.

    Societies that lack a tradition defining humanization may ultimately surrender to the doctrine that Liquid Modernity is both desirable and inevitable—a condition in which human beings outsource the burden of being human to machines.

  • How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    Yesterday I was watching myself play piano on my YouTube channel when I noticed something strange. I could barely focus on the music because my eyes kept drifting toward the Casio G-Shock GW-7900 strapped to my wrist. The watch looked so perfectly correct, so deeply aligned with whatever strange creature I have apparently become, that I caught myself thinking: “That’s it. That’s me. I’m a G-Shock guy.”

    A few hours later I was watching a true-crime docuseries when one of the detectives appeared wearing a Casio G-Shock GWM530. The moment I saw it, some invisible courtroom inside my brain slammed down the gavel.

    Case closed.

    I only want atomic time now.
    I only want resin on my wrist.
    I only want G-Shocks.

    The realization was both satisfying and faintly disturbing, like discovering your subconscious has quietly joined a militant survivalist sect while you were out buying groceries.

    What makes the experience unsettling is that I already possess five beautiful Seiko divers—carefully curated watches representing more than twenty years of obsessive collecting. Those Seikos were not random purchases. They were the result of decades of refinement, experimentation, buying, selling, regretting, and gradually arriving at what I believed was horological enlightenment. They sat in the watch box like sacred artifacts of a fully realized identity.

    Then, roughly four months ago—which psychologically feels more like four geological eras ago—I bought a Casio G-Shock Frogman.

    And the wrecking ball swung.

    The entire architecture of my watch hobby collapsed like a condemned casino in Las Vegas. Out of the rubble emerged a new religion constructed from resin, atomic synchronization, solar charging, and Japanese apocalypse-proof overengineering. I now own five G-Shocks.

    One of them, the Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman, was supposed to be its atomic sibling, the GW-9300. The eBay seller made an honest mistake and shipped the non-atomic version instead. Under normal circumstances this would have triggered a small existential crisis because I have apparently reached the point where the absence of Multi Band 6 synchronization feels like spiritual imprecision.

    But strangely, I didn’t care.

    I bought the watch for half price and immediately designated it my “Hawaii Watch,” reasoning that one does not require atomic synchronization while standing beside an edenic waterfall in Kauai pretending, however briefly, that mortality and property taxes do not exist.

    The whole experience reminds me of something my wife once said about men: they crave violent conversion experiences. In my heart, I know she’s right.

    A suburban man often longs for cataclysm without actual destruction. He wants upheaval without bankruptcy. Reinvention without divorce. Apocalypse without inconvenience. Since detonating one’s real life would be irresponsible, the energy gets redirected into symbolic conversions:

    • watches,
    • motorcycles,
    • kettlebells,
    • backpacks,
    • audio systems,
    • tactical flashlights,
    • sourdough starters,
    • wilderness knives.

    The external change may seem trivial, but psychologically it lands like a thunderclap because obsessive men experience identity through systems of allegiance.

    Objectively speaking, shifting from Seiko divers to G-Shocks is not an event of civilizational importance. No treaties were signed. No governments fell. The stock market did not tremble. Yet inside the mind of an obsessive enthusiast, the transition feels spiritually seismic.

    It genuinely reminds me of Losing My Religion.

    The old religion was:

    • mechanical divers,
    • steel bracelets,
    • sweeping seconds hands,
    • vintage romance,
    • and maritime mythology.

    The new religion is:

    • Tough Solar,
    • Multi Band 6,
    • atomic precision,
    • resin cases,
    • and watches designed to survive tectonic activity.

    The funniest part is that I fully recognize the absurdity of all this. I understand perfectly well that I am a grown man psychologically reorganizing himself around timekeeping devices like a monk discovering a new denomination of Protestantism.

    Which is precisely why I can’t help laughing at myself.

  • The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    There is something faintly dystopian about solitary people spending hours online watching other solitary people perform the microscopic rituals of daily life: tying shoelaces, cracking open cans of diet soda, pouring kibble into a cat’s bowl, unloading groceries with monk-like precision, folding laundry beneath soft lighting while melancholy piano music drifts through the background like emotional Febreze.

    At some point loneliness ceased being merely a condition to endure and became a genre of entertainment.

    You are not simply alone anymore. You are curating aloneness, aestheticizing it, monetizing it, and binge-watching it as though isolation itself were a luxury lifestyle brand. The modern internet increasingly resembles a vast digital aquarium filled with emotionally sedated people observing one another through glass while reassuring themselves that this counts as connection.

    I sometimes wonder if this phenomenon functions as a form of emotional jiu-jitsu. Instead of confronting the pain of alienation directly, people transform it into a consumer product. The loneliness does not disappear; it merely changes costume. By packaging solitude into soothing, carefully curated content, the sharp edge of disconnection becomes dulled. The ache remains, but now it arrives with ambient lighting, artisanal tea preparation, and a Scandinavian throw blanket.

    We now inhabit a condition I would call Consumptive Solitude: the state in which loneliness evolves from a painful human experience into a consumable form of entertainment. Isolated individuals compulsively watch other isolated individuals perform the mundane choreography of domestic life in order to simulate companionship without assuming the emotional risks, obligations, friction, compromise, or unpredictability of genuine human intimacy.

    This pathology is explored in Faith Hill’s essay “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” in which she examines the rise of what she calls “solitude influencers” and what their popularity reveals about contemporary society. These influencers present carefully curated lives of performative isolation: beautiful apartments, immaculate routines, quiet mornings, tasteful meals, dim lighting, tasteful melancholy, and endless scenes of one person existing in exquisitely controlled seclusion.

    The performance contains all the machinery of attention addiction without the inconvenience of actual friendship. There are no difficult conversations, no emotional demands, no conflicting schedules, no awkward silences, no disappointments, and no compromise. The viewer receives the emotional atmosphere of companionship without having to endure another person’s needs or complexity. It is intimacy stripped of reciprocity.

    Naturally, narcissism plays some role in this ecosystem. But narcissism alone does not explain the appeal. Control may be the deeper force at work. Real life is chaotic, humiliating, exhausting, and unpredictable. The solitude influencer offers the fantasy of total environmental management. Everything is calm. Everything is clean. Everything is curated. Nothing intrudes.

    For burned-out viewers, the effect can become psychologically narcotic, almost ASMR-like in its soothing predictability. After spending the day navigating economic stress, social tension, workplace absurdity, family obligations, and digital overload, people retreat into videos of someone silently pouring a glass of chablis while a Haydn sonata drifts through a minimalist apartment that appears untouched by conflict, debt, sickness, or despair.

    As I read Hill’s essay, I kept thinking about the word infantilization.

    The solitude influencer increasingly functions like a pacifier for emotionally exhausted adults. Millions of viewers recalibrate their nervous systems through these carefully controlled simulations of peace and containment. Some no longer wish to engage fully with the real world. Others feel incapable of doing so. Still others may have quietly surrendered altogether.

    And this is where the phenomenon begins to feel genuinely troubling.

    I suspect there is something psychologically regressive about spending one’s days and nights watching solitary performers enact sanitized domestic rituals for passive spectators. At some point, watching people “play house” begins replacing the harder work of building a life oneself. The performance of adulthood slowly replaces adulthood itself.

    Because you can only simulate intimacy, routine, domesticity, and emotional safety for so long before you begin forgetting what genuine growth requires: risk, struggle, awkwardness, responsibility, sacrifice, and contact with real people whose existence cannot be muted, paused, skipped, unsubscribed from, or optimized into aesthetic tranquility.

    The solitude influencer offers peace without vulnerability, companionship without obligation, and emotional atmosphere without genuine human entanglement.

    And that may be precisely why so many people find it irresistible.

  • Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    It was difficult to watch the Netflix documentary The Crash, which chronicles the horrifying case of two young men killed in a car crash after prosecutors argued that the driver, Mackenzie Shirilla, deliberately floored the gas pedal of her Toyota Camry to nearly one hundred miles per hour in an act deemed premeditated murder. The documentary is disturbing not merely because of the violence of the crash, but because of the portrait it paints of a young woman whose identity had become inseparable from her online performance. Mackenzie appeared trapped inside the exhausting machinery of self-curation, sculpting and broadcasting her existence with the kind of manic persistence social media now rewards as normal behavior. Her digital persona no longer seemed like an accessory to her life. It had metastasized into her life.

    Today, while listening to the podcast Blocked and Reported, I heard Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog discuss Gen Z’s eerie fluency for turning existence itself into a livestream. Both millennials sounded genuinely alienated by the phenomenon, as though they were describing a species only slightly adjacent to their own. Jesse referenced Mackenzie Shirilla’s relentless online presence as depicted in The Crash, pointing to the unsettling ease with which younger generations curate themselves for permanent digital exhibition. Yet one of the influencers discussed on the podcast commands nearly a million followers—a level of attention powerful enough to hijack almost any fragile human nervous system. Social media platforms have effectively industrialized validation, converting attention into a neurochemical slot machine that pays out in intermittent bursts of relevance, envy, and simulated affection.

    Attention itself is not the enemy. Human beings need recognition. Writers, artists, teachers, comedians, philosophers, and musicians all seek an audience because they are attempting to contribute something meaningful to the ongoing argument about what it means to be alive. But attention detached from substance becomes false gold. It glitters, intoxicates, and ultimately leaves the soul spiritually bankrupt. The dopamine cycle masquerades as significance while quietly hollowing out the self.

    The danger comes when a person can no longer distinguish between authentic identity and algorithmic performance. The online persona begins as branding, then evolves into compulsion, and finally hardens into pathology. It becomes louder, crueler, more narcissistic, and more detached from ordinary human proportion. The person starts living not for reality itself, but for its documentation. Meals become props. Relationships become content. Suffering becomes theater. Even grief gets optimized for engagement metrics. At that point, the self is no longer steering the machine; the machine is steering the self.

    Mackenzie Shirilla appears to have crossed that line. She allowed the curated self to consume the actual self. What remained was not individuality but a kind of digital possession—a consciousness warped by attention addiction, performative intensity, and emotional exhibitionism. The tragedy of The Crash is not merely that lives were destroyed in a violent instant. It is that modern culture increasingly trains young people to confuse visibility with meaning, performance with identity, and online relevance with human worth. Mackenzie lost that distinction entirely. In the end, the algorithm did not merely shape her personality. It devoured it.

  • This Is No Country for Old Men in Lycra

    This Is No Country for Old Men in Lycra

    No one warns you that approaching your mid-sixties feels less like aging and more like becoming technologically obsolete while still conscious enough to notice it. One day you are a functioning member of civilization; the next you are standing in a Costco parking lot wondering whether you already bought twelve gallons of trash bags or merely fantasized about buying them. You begin dropping references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, and Super Chicken only to receive the same vacant stares one might reserve for a Civil War reenactor muttering battlefield coordinates.

    Meanwhile, your body begins quietly renegotiating its contract with reality.

    As a lifelong bodybuilder whose recovery now resembles a bankrupt public-works project—slow, inefficient, and riddled with delays—I understand how difficult it is to relinquish the fantasy of permanent vitality. Spend a week in Maui and the fantasy returns with tropical force. Hawaii is not merely a vacation destination. It is a pharmaceutical hallucination disguised as geography. You board a four-hundred-million-dollar jet, dry yourself into salted beef jerky for five hours, and land convinced that mortality itself has suffered a clerical error.

    Within twenty-four hours you are marinating in mai tais, vaporizing lilikoi pie with devotional intensity, and sitting beneath sunsets so offensively beautiful they seem personally designed by God to restore your self-esteem. Time dissolves. Deadlines vanish. Your phone feels vulgar. Maui whispers into your ear like a luxury hypnotist: Relax. Death can’t locate you here.

    Which is why leaving the island feels psychologically violent.

    You are not simply returning to California. You are returning to spam emails, lower-back stiffness, Costco receipts, cholesterol panels, and the humiliating realization that gravity remains undefeated. For weeks afterward you wander through suburbia in a tropical narcotic haze while your neighbor’s leaf blower screams through the morning air like dental equipment excavating a wisdom tooth from your skull. Maui is less a place than a controlled substance for affluent aging people desperate to suspend disbelief.

    It is also a theater of curated immortality.

    Old men roam the beaches in tiny Lycra swim briefs with the confidence of Roman emperors who somehow survived into the Ozempic era. Their skin resembles expensive leather luggage abandoned too long in the sun, yet they strut beside trophy wives young enough to think dial-up internet was a Bronze Age inconvenience. Wealth, GLP-1 drugs, testosterone clinics, cosmetic dentistry, peptide injections, and Hawaiian sunlight collaborate to create the illusion that biology has become negotiable.

    I remember one grotesque specimen vividly from the summer of 2019: a compact man in his mid-seventies parading through Maui in dark-blue Speedos beside a Mediterranean twenty-something so beautiful she looked less like a spouse and more like an acquisition. He moved with the frantic confidence of a hedge-fund satyr convinced that constant motion itself could keep death wheezing several yards behind him. He dove into the surf not like a swimmer but like a man bargaining with Time.

    You could smell his wealth before you could smell the salt air.

    The strange thing was not the age gap. Human vanity has always outsourced dignity whenever money allows it. No, what fascinated me was the unmistakable misalignment of the tableau. The forced smiles. The awkward touches. The overcompensating strut. It did not feel like youth preserved. It felt like youth taxidermied.

    And this, I increasingly realize, is the central agony of aging in modern America: not decline itself, but visible misalignment with the surrounding culture.

    You can fight it. God knows I do. You can swallow vats of omega-3 fish oil, consume two hundred grams of protein a day, swing kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the rough approximation of a man twenty years younger. But eventually biology leaks through the cracks. Your night vision deteriorates. Downtown Los Angeles traffic begins to resemble a psychedelic military simulation. Google Maps betrays you into six-lane intersections populated by homicidal scooters, distracted pedestrians, and pastel-lit Waymo vehicles gliding through the streets like cheerful robot hearses escorting you toward irrelevance.

    That realization hit me hardest while driving my wife and twin daughters to Camp Flog Gnaw, a music festival whose title sounds less like an entertainment event and more like a medieval punishment device. Downtown Los Angeles unfolded before me like a gladiatorial arena engineered specifically to eliminate men my age. The traffic signals appeared designed by schizophrenic graphic designers. Pedestrians hurled themselves into intersections like feral pigeons auditioning for lawsuits. By the time I dropped my family off, I leaned toward my wife and quietly informed her that I was considering retirement from driving altogether.

    They did not laugh.

    Because they’ve begun noticing the cracks too.

    And this is where the Speedo delusion enters the story.

    Give a man enough money, enough Ozempic, enough oceanfront property, and enough panic about aging, and eventually he will parade across a Maui beach in Lycra briefs convinced he has conquered time itself. But the spectacle never communicates triumph. It communicates fear. The tighter the Speedo, the louder the desperation.

    You can optimize the body. You can chemically suppress appetite. You can biohack your sleep, inject peptides into your abdomen, freeze your face, laser your skin, and marry someone young enough to regard Nirvana as “classic rock.” But eventually the truth arrives anyway: youth culture is moving in one direction while you are moving in another.

    No amount of Hawaiian sunlight can conceal the gap forever.

  • The Case of the Mudman with Missing Multiband

    The Case of the Mudman with Missing Multiband

    I bought a used Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman for $100, though I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I was buying its more sophisticated cousin—the Multiband-6 GW-9300—listed at $200. When the package arrived, the truth was stamped plainly on the caseback: G-9300. No atomic sync, no nightly communion with Colorado—just a solid, stubborn quartz soldier. My heart sank with the dull thud of a man who realizes he’s paid twice the price for half the feature set.

    I contacted the seller, assuming incompetence rather than malice. His inventory was 99% clothing; this was not a man who spent his evenings debating radio signal strength and solar charging rituals. I offered him a dignified exit: refund me $100 and I’ll keep the watch, or take it back for a full refund. His first move was to offer $80, which was optimistic in the way that a man hopes you won’t notice arithmetic. I declined gently and reiterated my willingness to return the watch. That sobered him. He apologized, agreed to refund the full $100, and we both avoided the bureaucratic headache of returns.

    I could have pressed harder. There’s always a way to extract a little more when the other party is off-balance. But squeezing a man who’s clearly trying to piece together a living from eBay listings feels less like savvy and more like moral corrosion. You squeeze out a few more dollars but lose your soul.

    In the end, I kept the watch, opened ChatGPT for a tutorial, and in two minutes had it set and behaving like the reliable instrument it is. No atomic precision, no midnight syncs—just time, ticking along with modest competence. The transaction, briefly absurd, resolved itself into something tolerable, even instructive. I paid for a mistake, corrected it, and walked away with a working watch and an untroubled conscience.

    Not every deal needs to be a conquest. Some are better as small acts of grace and kindness.

  • The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    My YouTube channel, now more than a decade old, has gathered over 11,000 subscribers and delivers anywhere from a polite 700 views to a respectable 5,000, depending on how shameless I’m willing to be. The high performers are predictable: watch reviews and those ceremonial “State of the Collection” videos—rituals of conspicuous enthusiasm that the algorithm devours like a starving dog. These are the videos where I feel myself performing, angling, posturing. I can practically see the hook in the water. I am not expressing myself; I am fishing. And the bait is always the same: dopamine, desire, envy, and that most reliable narcotic of all—FOMO. These are not just videos; they are small moral compromises dressed as content. They feed what the famous therapist Phil Stutz calls the “lower channel.”

    Then there are the other videos—the ones where I sit back and become a kind of rambling talk show host, reflecting on the week, my thoughts, my minor existential skirmishes. I sprinkle in a bit of watch talk as a courtesy to the faithful, but the real subject is the human condition, or at least my version of it. These videos are closer to the truth. Naturally, they struggle to crack a thousand views. Authenticity, it turns out, is not algorithm-friendly.

    This creates a tidy little crisis. Do I continue manufacturing these glossy, attention-seeking performances—feed the beast, play the game, become a caricature of myself? Or do I choose integrity and accept the role of a man speaking into an increasingly empty room? If the audience shrinks in proportion to my honesty, why not go all the way—abandon video altogether and disappear into a novel no one will read?

    The problem is, I’m not built for that kind of monastic focus. Eighty thousand words on a single idea feels less like a creative challenge and more like a prison sentence. I prefer miscellany. I like to ricochet between obsessions: watches, my adolescent bodybuilding fantasies, the enduring mystery of my own arrested development. I am, by any reasonable definition, a man-child with a specialty in distraction.

    Take food. Not just eating—how I eat. I am obsessed with meals that can be held in one hand: tacos, burritos, sandwiches, wraps—portable architecture. The ideal scenario involves standing over the kitchen sink, dispensing with plates, silverware, and any trace of ceremony. It is efficiency elevated to philosophy. Why sit down when you can hover? Why clean dishes when you can bypass them entirely? This is my idea of innovation: reducing life to its lowest possible friction. Call it optimization if you’re feeling generous. Call it laziness if you’re not.

    And yet, paradoxically, I am disciplined—ferociously so—when it comes to exercise. Olympic lifting in my youth, kettlebells and power yoga now. But even here, discipline is the wrong word. This is compulsion. I don’t train because I choose to; I train because I need to. The workout is less a virtue than a medication, a daily dose of relief for a mind that resists stillness.

    My days split cleanly in two. Morning brings optimism: coffee, steel-cut oats with protein powder, the illusion of infinite possibility. I feel like a serious person, a thinker, someone on the verge of producing meaningful work. By night, the illusion collapses. Fatigue sets in, mood darkens, and I retreat into a fog of lethargy and low-grade dread. The same man who greeted the day with ambition now negotiates with anxiety before sleep, wondering what small catastrophe might arrive in the dark. Will the dream render me so helpless I have a heart attack? Will I even wake up from this dream or succumb to eternal slumber? 

    Hovering over all of this is a private mythology, one I’ve borrowed—perhaps stolen—from Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” I cast myself as the misunderstood artist, the outsider, the man quietly suffering for his craft. It’s a flattering fiction. In reality, I’m less tortured genius and more well-fed procrastinator—an enthusiast of shortcuts, a collector of appetites, a man who stands over the sink eating a breakfast burrito while postponing his lab work. The cholesterol test can wait. The scale will sort itself out. The fantasy persists.

    And that, I suppose, is the truth: I oscillate between aspiration and avoidance, between the higher and lower channels, between the man I imagine myself to be and the one holding a sandwich over the sink.

  • The G-Shock Square GW-S5600 Vanishes in More Ways Than One

    The G-Shock Square GW-S5600 Vanishes in More Ways Than One

    I’ve had the G-Shock GW-S5600U-1JF on my wrist for about twenty hours. The initial impressions were encouraging. The carbon strap finally accommodates my 8-inch wrist without negotiation—I land comfortably on the third-to-last hole. The watch is astonishingly light, almost evasive, and every function behaves as advertised.

    Then my displeasure began.

    First, the presence—or lack of it. On the wrist, the watch reads smaller than its dimensions suggest. It doesn’t anchor itself; it hovers. At a glance, it recalls a Fitbit—more lozenge than instrument—an object that seems designed to be forgotten. Its small size is its first vanishing act.

    My second displeasure is reception. My other G-Shocks behave like disciplined students, checking in with Colorado every night without complaint. The S5600, by contrast, requires coaxing. Last night, lined up at the window with its larger siblings, it alone refused to sync. At one in the morning, I found myself manually initiating reception, a small ritual of disappointment.

    But the real issue revealed itself this morning: legibility. The watch sits so flat against my wrist that even a slight tilt sends the display into retreat. The digits don’t fade—they vanish. The viewing angle feels narrow, unforgiving, as if the watch demands a precise alignment before it agrees to be read. The vanishing numbers are a vanishing act I really don’t like.

    This is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural flaw. A watch that requires negotiation at every glance begins to feel less like a tool and more like a chore.

    Which leaves me with an unappealing conclusion: I may have to sell it. Not because it fails outright, but because its virtues—lightness, subtlety, restraint—don’t compensate for its flaws.

  • A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    In “Has College Gotten Too Easy?”, Joe Pinsker notes a curious inversion: grades rise as the quality of student work declines. He borrows a distinction from a Harvard sociologist—“easy” can mean lighter material or looser grading—and suggests the latter is doing most of the work. From where I sit, it’s both. Around 2010, as reading skills began to erode, writing instructors quietly trimmed the syllabus. Fewer essays, fewer books, and almost nothing long. The last time I assigned The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a 500-page climb, the backlash was volcanic. Students weren’t being asked to read; they were being asked to endure. It felt less like instruction and more like pitting a white belt against a black belt and calling it pedagogy.

    Something fundamental shifted at the same moment. The smartphone didn’t just arrive; it reprogrammed. We moved from readers to watchers. As readers, we practiced interiority—the habit of turning language inward until it took root. Sentences weren’t skimmed; they were inhabited. Ideas weren’t collected; they were argued with, revised, made to answer to memory and conscience. Interiority is not mere comprehension; it is a private workshop where meaning is built, not downloaded.

    Around 2010, that workshop closed early. In its place came what I’ll call dopaminergic exteriority: attention pulled outward by a conveyor belt of novelty—short videos, endless scroll, perpetual interruption—until thought has no time to cohere. The mind becomes a relay station for images, optimized for reaction rather than reflection. The inner dialogue thins to a whisper; the feed does the talking.

    The consequences show up in the classroom. Interiority tends to produce patience, skepticism, and a tolerance for difficulty—the raw materials of maturity. Exteriority produces the opposite: impatience, certainty without evidence, and a preference for the quick hit. Ask for Moby-Dick and you’ll get a highlight reel about “the great whale” in thirty seconds. The novel becomes a rumor; the rumor earns the grade.

    Institutions adapt. They always do. Assignments shrink. Expectations soften. Grades inflate to meet the new baseline of attention. Students, understandably, demand high marks for low friction; colleges, increasingly, oblige. The result is not a conspiracy but a convergence: a curriculum calibrated to the scroll.

    We tell ourselves this is access, flexibility, modernization. There’s some truth in that. But there’s also evasion. A watered-down education is what you get when a culture trades interiority for the next stimulus. We begin to prefer performance to thinking, identity to argument, and ease to effort. We stop reading the world and start skimming it.

    None of this is irreversible, but it is cumulative. Interiority is a practice; it returns when practiced. Assign the long book again. Require the sustained argument. Give students something that resists them. Not because difficulty is virtuous, but because without it, the mind never learns to stay.