Category: TV and Movies

Escaping the G-Shock Dopamine Hamster Wheel

I offer no apologies for wearing my G-Shock Frogman with the unfiltered delight of a boy kneeling in the sandbox, staging epic battles with a platoon of GI Joes. When I strap that amphibious brick to my wrist, a certain kind of theater begins. I become a heroic caricature of myself—a grizzled football coach barking orders, a deep-sea operative, a cyborg navigator of hostile terrain. It’s ridiculous, yes. But it’s also fun. And fun, when properly contained, is one of life’s few renewable resources.

The key phrase, of course, is properly contained. Because there’s a difference between fun and desperation, and any hobby that survives long enough eventually reveals the line between the two.

Right now my G-Shock situation sits comfortably on the side of fun. I own three models: the Frogman, the GW-7900, and the GW-6900. By coincidence—or perhaps by horological fate—each of these watches debuted in 2009. That means the design language on my wrist has survived seventeen years without revision. The 6900, in fact, traces its lineage back to 1995, when the digital watch still believed it might someday conquer the Earth.

In other words, I have not assembled a museum of the new. I have assembled a small triumvirate of classics. No influencer told me to buy them. No YouTube oracle guided my hand. I simply chose them myself. It’s comforting to believe, even briefly, that one’s consumer decisions were made under the influence of free will.

And I genuinely enjoy wearing them. When I look down at the wrist, something childish and harmless awakens. The imagination reactivates. Suddenly I’m a spy, a special-ops diver, a space monster, and occasionally a wrestling coach with a suspiciously tactical sense of timekeeping. I accept this man-child energy. I embrace it. There are worse midlife coping mechanisms than a durable plastic watch that makes you smile.

But every hobby contains traps, and the G-Shock world offers two of them in fluorescent colors.

The first is the dopamine hamster wheel. This is the stage where watches cease being tools and begin behaving like glazed donuts. One purchase leads to another, then another, until the collector starts foaming with evangelical excitement over limited editions, colorways, and collaborations with Japanese streetwear designers whose names sound like software updates. The language shifts from appreciation to hysteria. FOMO spreads like a rash. Consumer diabetes sets in.

That spectacle has nothing to do with why G-Shock exists.

The brand was born to serve people who actually need tough watches—rescue workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, wilderness guides. It was designed to provide durable, accurate timekeeping to people whose jobs might involve cliffs, oceans, explosions, or at least a very bad Tuesday. It was never intended to become a glittering shrine to hype.

So I refuse to ride the hamster wheel.

The second trap is attention hunger. Sharing enthusiasm for a hobby is healthy. Talking about watches with fellow enthusiasts can be joyful. But somewhere along the spectrum, conversation mutates into performance. The watch becomes less about personal enjoyment and more about being seen enjoying it.

And that distinction reminds me of a film I loved in high school: Saturday Night Fever.

John Travolta’s Tony Manero dominates the disco floor with effortless charisma. When he dances with Stephanie Mangano, the attention they receive feels earned. Their chemistry produces its own gravitational field. People watch because something authentic is happening.

But the film also shows another kind of attention.

Tony’s friend Bobby C., trapped by family shame and a pregnancy he feels powerless to handle, tries desperately to be noticed. Near the end of the film, he asks Tony to look at a new shirt he bought. It’s a small request—a fragile signal that he wants someone to see him. Tony barely registers it. Shortly afterward, Bobby climbs the bridge railing and falls to his death.

The moment lingers because it exposes the difference between joyful attention and desperate attention.

When I think about my G-Shocks, I want to remain firmly on the joyful side of that divide. I don’t want to become the collector who escalates endlessly into more extreme watches—bigger, louder, rarer—while begging the internet to notice. In this regard, I want to employ the Contained Fun Principle: the discipline of enjoying a hobby while consciously preventing it from expanding into compulsive acquisition. The Contained Fun Principle recognizes that pleasure remains healthy only when boundaries are enforced—when a collector deliberately limits the size of the collection so the hobby remains play rather than psychological obligation.

Once containment is gone, the fun is gone.

Once containment is gone, I’m in the Bobby C. Zone.

So for now I’ll keep things simple. Three G-Shocks. Three classic designs. All born in 2009. I’ll enjoy the boyish pleasure they bring and try to stay off the dopamine treadmill.

After all, the whole point of a watch is to tell time—not to consume it.

March 16, 2026
Castle Kings and Backyard Wars in the HBO TV Series Neighbors

For a while I was determined to build a writing assignment around the often mesmerizing HBO series Neighbors, a show that turns suburban living into a laboratory of petty grievances. The program is an anthology of paranoia, narcissism, wounded pride, and backyard cold wars. Broken neighbors glare at one another across property lines as if those strips of grass were the demilitarized zones of Eastern Europe. Everyone is intoxicated by the phrase “Be the king of your castle,” and each homeowner interprets that slogan with medieval enthusiasm. Lawn edges become sacred borders. Wind chimes become psychological warfare. A misplaced trash bin becomes an act of territorial aggression. It seemed like fertile ground for a classroom essay about the intoxication of home ownership, the cult of hyper-individualism, and the strange pettiness that emerges when people confuse property rights with personal sovereignty.

The idea tempted me. Students could analyze how the mythology of the suburban castle feeds grievance culture—how people who should be exchanging tomatoes over the fence instead become amateur border patrol agents guarding their kingdoms of mulch and vinyl siding. The show practically begs for a discussion of how hyper-individualism corrodes the habits of community. Every driveway is a throne room; every neighbor is a potential usurper. It’s an American morality play performed with leaf blowers.

But the more I watched, the more my enthusiasm cooled. The truth is almost too obvious to sustain a thoughtful essay. Many of the people featured in these conflicts aren’t philosophical case studies; they’re simply hurting. Some appear lonely, unstable, or chronically aggrieved. They need counseling, medication, friendship—anything that might interrupt the feedback loop of suspicion and hostility that has taken up residence in their living rooms.

Of course I could dress the whole spectacle in sociological clothing. I could write about post-pandemic malaise, the alienation of the social-media age, or the surveillance paranoia that grows when every doorbell camera becomes a witness stand. Those are real themes. But beneath all the academic scaffolding lies a simpler truth.

Strip away the respectable lighting and the neatly trimmed hedges, and the show begins to resemble The Jerry Springer Show, except the stage has been dismantled and moved into people’s kitchens and backyards. The audience isn’t clapping from studio seats; it’s watching through Ring cameras and HOA newsletters.

That realization drained my appetite for turning the show into a classroom exercise. Sometimes a spectacle is just a spectacle. Not every shouting match across a picket fence needs to be converted into a philosophical treatise.

Tempting as the assignment might have been, I think I’ll pass.

March 15, 2026
The Narrative of Justified Cruelty and Heroic Delusion (college essay prompt)
When disturbing acts of manipulation or cruelty appear in documentaries, viewers often search for a simple explanation. One explanation is psychological: the person must be mentally unstable. Another explanation is moral: the person knowingly chose to harm others. Yet many real cases resist this clean distinction. Individuals who commit harmful acts rarely see themselves as villains. Instead, they construct narratives that justify their behavior. They portray themselves as victims, defenders, truth-tellers, or heroes correcting an injustice.

The documentaries The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish explore this unsettling dynamic. In both films, individuals escalate conflict through patterns of deception, resentment, and obsessive grievance. At times their behavior appears irrational or emotionally unstable. At other moments their actions seem deliberate, strategic, and calculated. What makes these stories disturbing is not simply the harm they cause, but the way the individuals involved interpret their own actions. Each person constructs a story that makes their behavior appear reasonable—even righteous—from their own perspective.

These documentaries raise an important question about human behavior:

How do people justify cruelty to themselves?

Psychologists often describe this process as moral disengagement—the ability to harm others while preserving the belief that one is still a good or justified person. People may blame the victim, exaggerate their grievances, reinterpret their actions as self-defense, or frame themselves as the victim of a hostile world. Or they may see themselves as heroes in their own drama. Some people commit harmful acts while believing they are the morally righteous or aggrieved protagonist in a moral drama. Both documentaries actually illustrate that pattern remarkably well. When these narratives take hold, the line between psychological instability and moral wrongdoing becomes difficult to distinguish.

Essay Task

Write a 1,000-word comparative argumentative essay analyzing how The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish portray the stories people tell themselves to justify harmful behavior.

Your essay should develop a thesis that addresses this question:

Do the individuals in these documentaries appear primarily mentally unstable, morally responsible for their actions, or trapped inside narratives that allow them to see cruelty as justified?

Thesis Requirement

Your introduction must include a thesis that:
1. Takes a clear position on the role of self-justifying narratives in the documentaries.
2. Maps the major reasons that will organize your body paragraphs.
Example thesis with mapping:

The destructive behavior portrayed in The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish becomes understandable when we examine the self-justifying narratives constructed by the individuals involved: each person frames themselves as a victim of injustice, interprets retaliation as moral correction, and gradually loses the ability to see their actions from the perspective of others.

Mapping components:
- victim narratives
- retaliation framed as justice
- loss of empathy or perspective
Each of these becomes a body paragraph.

Essay Requirements

Your essay must include:

• a clear thesis with mapping components
• comparison of both documentaries throughout the essay
• analysis of specific moments from the films
• a counterargument that challenges your interpretation
• a rebuttal defending your position
• a concluding paragraph reflecting on what these documentaries reveal about human moral reasoning

Possible Directions for Your Argument

You might argue that:

• people justify cruelty by constructing victim narratives
• resentment allows individuals to reinterpret retaliation as justice
• deception becomes easier when someone believes they are morally right
• psychological instability intensifies but does not fully explain destructive behavior
• the documentaries reveal how ordinary people can become morally dangerous when they stop questioning their own stories
March 15, 2026
The Loneliness Hypothesis: Is Social Isolation Making America Mean? (college essay prompt)
Read “How America Got Mean” by David Brooks and “The Anti-Social Century” by Derek Thompson. Then watch the comedy special Lonely Flowers by Roy Wood Jr..

In Lonely Flowers, Roy Wood Jr. argues that increasing loneliness and social disconnection are contributing to a rise in anger, hostility, and violence in American society. Brooks and Thompson also describe a culture that is becoming more fragmented, isolated, and socially brittle.

Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay that develops a thesis responding to Roy Wood Jr.’s claim. Using the ideas from Brooks and Thompson, argue whether social isolation is a convincing explanation for the rise in cultural hostility and violence. Your essay may support, refute, or complicate Wood’s claim.

Thesis + Mapping Requirement

Your introduction must include a thesis that does two things:
1. Takes a clear position on Wood’s claim about loneliness and violence.
2. Maps the major reasons that will organize your body paragraphs.
Example thesis with mapping

Roy Wood Jr.’s claim that loneliness is fueling violence in America is persuasive because, as David Brooks and Derek Thompson show, the collapse of community institutions, the rise of hyper-individualism, and the retreat into private digital life have produced a society that is increasingly disconnected and emotionally volatile.

In this thesis, the mapping components are:
- collapse of community institutions
- retreat into private digital life
- loss of meaningful language
- loss of intuition to connect with others
Each of those becomes a body paragraph.

Essay Requirements

Your essay should include:

• a clear thesis with mapping components
• analysis of key ideas from Brooks and Thompson
• references to Roy Wood Jr.’s argument in Lonely Flowers
• a counterargument that challenges your thesis
• a rebuttal defending your position
• a concluding paragraph that reflects on what these ideas suggest about modern American culture

Possible directions for your argument

You might argue that:

• loneliness and isolation are making Americans angrier and more volatile
• loneliness explains some hostility but not actual violence
• digital life is replacing real community and increasing resentment
• other forces (economic anxiety, media outrage, politics) are stronger causes of violence
March 15, 2026
College Essay Prompt: Crime, Entertainment, and the Ethics of Vigilantism

Few crimes provoke stronger public outrage than the exploitation of children. In the digital age, the internet has expanded the opportunities for predatory behavior, making the protection of minors an urgent social concern. At the same time, some media platforms and online personalities have turned the pursuit and exposure of suspected predators into a form of public entertainment. These productions often present themselves as acts of justice, but they also raise difficult ethical questions.

The 2025 documentary Predators explores these tensions by examining the growing trend of turning crime-fighting into a spectacle. In some cases, individuals attempt to expose suspected offenders through online stings, public confrontations, and viral videos. Supporters argue that these tactics raise awareness and help bring dangerous individuals to light. Critics, however, argue that transforming criminal investigations into entertainment risks exploiting a serious issue, encouraging voyeurism and vigilantism, and potentially interfering with legitimate law enforcement.

In a 1,000-word argumentative essay, respond to the following claim:

Turning the pursuit of suspected predators into entertainment or sport is a form of exploitation that undermines justice and trivializes the serious problem of child predation.

In your essay, you may defend, challenge, or complicate this claim. Consider questions such as: Does public exposure help deter crime and protect victims, or does it encourage reckless vigilantism? What are the ethical risks of turning criminal investigations into viral entertainment? Can awareness and entertainment coexist responsibly, or does spectacle inevitably distort justice?

Your essay should present a clear thesis, analyze examples from the documentary, consider counterarguments, and explain why your interpretation of the issue is the most persuasive.

March 13, 2026
Narcissism, Status Anxiety, and the Manosphere: College Writing Prompt
In recent years, online communities sometimes described as the “manosphere” have attracted attention for their discussions about masculinity, dating, gender roles, and male identity. Supporters often argue that these spaces help men discuss frustrations they feel are ignored elsewhere. Critics argue that many of these communities promote resentment toward women and normalize misogyny.

One way to analyze this phenomenon is to examine the relationship between male self-absorption and misogyny. When a person’s worldview centers heavily on personal validation, recognition, or entitlement, other people may begin to appear primarily as tools for confirming one’s identity. In this framework, rejection or disagreement can feel like a personal injury rather than a normal part of human interaction. Some analysts argue that this dynamic can turn frustration or disappointment into resentment toward women. Others argue that such explanations oversimplify the motivations of men who participate in these communities.

For this assignment, watch the Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere. Then write a 1,000-word argumentative essay that explores the relationship between male self-absorption and misogyny in the communities portrayed in the film.

In your essay, you may choose to:
- Defend the claim that self-absorption and status anxiety play a major role in producing misogynistic attitudes within the manosphere.
- Challenge the claim by arguing that the documentary overlooks other social, economic, or cultural factors that shape the behavior of men in these communities.
- Complicate the claim by arguing that both personal psychology and broader social forces contribute to the dynamics seen in the film.
As you develop your argument, consider questions such as:
- How do the men in the documentary describe their frustrations or grievances?
- In what ways do issues of status, recognition, or entitlement appear in their narratives?
- How does the documentary portray the role of women in these communities’ discussions?
- To what extent do these attitudes reflect individual psychology versus broader cultural changes?
- Does the documentary present a balanced explanation of the problem, or does it simplify the issue?
Your essay should include a clear thesis, specific references to scenes or ideas from the documentary, careful reasoning, and engagement with possible counterarguments. The goal is not merely to summarize the film but to analyze the deeper connection—if any—between self-focused identity narratives and the emergence of misogynistic beliefs.
March 12, 2026
Delusional Heroes in Bugonia and The Inventor: A College Essay Prompt

In her Bugonia movie analysis “An Intimate Portrait of Humanity at Its Worst,” Shirley Li brilliantly observes that in the movie’s central characters Teddy and Michele are both delusional heroes. She writes, “They’re so self-important and solipsistic that they’re oblivious to how heartless they’ve become.” To add to their alienation, they cannot listen to each other. Li writes that their “conversations tend to resemble a feedback loop, in which neither character is willing to compromise”: Teddy is certain Michelle is a dangerous alien; Michelle is certain Teddy suffers a mental illness that requires urgent help.

Saddled with delusions of grandeur, these cosplay heroes from the fictional movie resemble the cosplay or fake hero and notorious fraudster Elizabeth Holmes featured in the HBO documentary: The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. Your job is to write a 1,000-word essay in which you compare the theme of the delusional hero as is embodied in Bugonia and Out for Blood. Explore the following questions: Is the hero a product of sincere madness, cynicism, both? Does the hero possess a fragment of truth that they confuse for a whole or absolute truth and this confusion makes them go crazy? Does this type of fake hero represent certain pathologies roiling in our society? Explore these questions in your comparison essay.

March 12, 2026
The Day the Dream Team Got Punched in the Mouth

The documentary We Beat the Dream Team transports us back to 1992, when basketball briefly resembled mythology. For the first time, the Olympics allowed NBA professionals, and the United States responded by assembling a roster that looked less like a team and more like an Avengers summit: Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, and a lineup of future Hall of Famers whose collective talent could have bent the earth’s axis.

Presiding over this gathering of basketball demigods was Coach Chuck Daly, a man as famous for psychological maneuvering as he was for play diagrams. Daly understood something that many coaches never quite grasp: elite athletes do not merely need strategy; they need emotional calibration. Their egos must be tuned like instruments.

Standing opposite this galaxy of NBA legends was the Dream Team’s practice partner—the Select Team. On paper they were merely college players: Grant Hill, Chris Webber, Penny Hardaway, Allan Houston, Jamal Mashburn, Bobby Hurley, Rodney Rogers. In reality they were the future of the NBA, still young enough to be starstruck and arrogant enough to believe they belonged.

The documentary wisely tells the story from their perspective.

The Select Team players describe walking into the gym like tourists visiting Mount Olympus. They were sharing the court with Jordan, Magic, and Bird—the men whose posters hung on their bedroom walls. You can still see the grin spread across Chris Webber’s face as he recalls those practices, the mixture of disbelief and pride. Jamal Mashburn and the others felt two contradictory emotions pulling them in opposite directions.

On one side was reverence. These were basketball gods.

On the other side was pride. Pride whispered: prove you belong here.

So the young players performed a delicate dance. Respect the legends—but challenge them. Bow slightly, then throw an elbow.

And challenge them they did.

In one now-famous scrimmage, the Dream Team—perhaps relaxed, perhaps overconfident—found themselves ambushed. The hungry college players came at them like wolves that had been smelling steak all week. Possession by possession, the Select Team outplayed them. By the end of the scrimmage, the impossible had happened.

The Select Team beat the Dream Team.

To the young players, the moment felt electric. They had just taken down the greatest assembly of basketball talent the world had ever seen. It was the kind of victory that becomes a permanent souvenir in the heart.

But the story refuses to stay simple.

Coach Mike Krzyzewski later offered a different interpretation. According to him, Chuck Daly deliberately sabotaged the scrimmage. Daly allegedly benched key players and allowed the Select Team to win in order to shock the Dream Team out of complacency. In this version, the loss was psychological theater. Daly was staging a controlled humiliation to inject the team with rage and urgency before the Olympics.

And in fairness, the strategy would make sense. After that scrimmage, the Dream Team entered the Olympics like a pack of irritated lions. They obliterated their competition and walked away with the gold medal.

But Grant Hill isn’t buying the conspiracy.

Hill insists the Select Team won fair and square. According to him, Daly looked genuinely rattled after the loss and even made sure the score mysteriously disappeared before reporters could record it.

So which story is true?

Was Daly a chess master orchestrating a motivational ambush? Or did a group of fearless college players simply catch the greatest team ever assembled on a sleepy afternoon?

Like most sports legends, the truth may be tangled somewhere in between.

What the documentary makes clear, however, is something deeper about elite athletes: their competitiveness doesn’t end when the buzzer sounds. Great athletes compete in everything—including memory. They compete over who really won, who deserves credit, and whose version of the story survives.

Narrative itself becomes a championship.

You can see that dynamic unfold in the documentary as Krzyzewski and Hill politely debate the event. Neither man is shouting. Both are smiling. Yet beneath the civility you can feel the competitive instinct humming like a live wire.

Who owns the story matters.

As someone who teaches college writing to athletes, I couldn’t resist imagining how useful this documentary would be in the classroom. It’s a perfect springboard for an argumentative essay. Did Daly throw the game? Is the “thrown game” theory simply a face-saving myth for wounded legends? Or does the truth lie somewhere in the murky middle?

But for me the film worked on another level entirely.

While watching it, I stopped thinking like a writing instructor and started thinking like the young man I was in 1992. I was back on my couch watching Jordan, Magic, and Bird—the superheroes of my youth—reminisce about the day a group of fearless kids punched them in the mouth.

And I couldn’t stop smiling.

March 11, 2026
Watch Potency Principle

In the late 1960s, I was watching The High Chaparral when a line lodged itself in my brain like a splinter of frontier wisdom: beware the dog who sees a second bone reflected in the water. He opens his mouth to grab more—and loses the one he already had. Even as a child, I understood the tragedy. Greed doesn’t always give you more. Sometimes it just subtracts.

That old parable came back to me as I stared at my wrist, where a perfectly contented G-Shock Frogman has been living its best life. The temptation, of course, is to “complement” it with a Rangeman GW-9400. Complement is the polite word collectors use when they mean escalate. But a viewer on my YouTube channel issued a quiet warning: the magic of a single perfect Frogman might evaporate the moment I introduce a rival. In other words, I might reach for the reflection and drop the bone.

This is where the psychology of the watch obsessive turns ruthless. The mind assumes addition will create abundance. In practice, it creates competition. Two watches don’t cooperate; they campaign. Wrist time fragments. Attention splits. The Frogman’s calm authority turns into a rotation debate, and the Rangeman, instead of enhancing the experience, becomes a co-conspirator in low-grade decision fatigue. Each piece loses the gravity it once held alone.

This is the Watch Potency Principle: the hard law of emotional physics in collecting. The more you add, the weaker each piece becomes. What looks like expansion is often dilution. Instead of one watch with presence, you now have two candidates negotiating for relevance, each diminished by the other’s existence. Potency thrives on focus. Divide the focus, and the magic doesn’t multiply—it thins.

So here I stand at the edge. The Rangeman might deliver fresh excitement. Or it might turn my singular satisfaction into a committee meeting. Like that dog at the water’s edge, I’m staring at the reflection—wondering whether reaching for more will leave me holding less.

March 3, 2026
The Day the Watch Cyborg Found Me

I did not wake up one morning and decide to become a watch obsessive. No sober adult says, “My life lacks turmoil. I should find something small, expensive, and unnecessary to dominate my mental real estate.” The watch hobby did not enter politely. It arrived like a chrome-plated cyborg from the future—metallic, relentless, humorless about its mission. If you’ve seen The Terminator, you understand. Something inhuman drops from the sky, scans the room, locks onto a target, and does not blink. That was the watch addiction. It didn’t ask for consent. It assessed, targeted, and possessed.

The possession began on an unremarkable Sunday in August 2005. My wife and I went to the mall for something innocent: a battery change. On the way out of the store, one foot inside, one foot outside, I turned my head and saw it—my first true enabler—the Citizen Ecozilla. The bezel alone looked like it had been machined for a submarine hatch: thick, L-shaped, deeply notched, unapologetically stainless. It wasn’t elegant. It was infrastructural. I was a lifelong bodybuilder raised on 1970s images of Arnold flexing under theatrical lighting, and there, in that watch case, was a wrist-mounted barbell. I wasn’t a diver. I didn’t own a wetsuit. But I could cosplay as a man who detonates underwater mines before breakfast.

I walked five feet out of the store, stopped, executed a full U-turn like a man who had left his child behind, and returned for one final look. My inner cyborg engaged photographic memory mode. Screenshot acquired. Target locked. At home, I found it online for $205. That was the down payment on twenty years of psychological turbulence.

For a year, I wore the Ecozilla daily. Then I committed the first of many aesthetic crimes: I drifted into the swamp of television-brand watches—oversized, gaudy, the horological equivalent of energy drinks. They accumulated in my drawers like glittering mistakes. It took a Seiko Black Monster—first generation, lume like a radioactive halo—to wake me from my stupor. Its quality was not subtle. It was the difference between steak and beef jerky. I sold the TV watches in a purge that felt like shedding adipose tissue on The Biggest Loser. Each sale was a small moral victory.

And then the real religion began: Seiko diver devotion. Fifteen years of it. SLA models entered the collection, whispered about by influencers as if assembled in some mythic atelier. Whether they were built in a sacred Grand Seiko studio or a fluorescent-lit factory, I didn’t care. They scratched the itch. Or so I told myself.

Friends loaned me Rolex, Tudor, Omega—fine watches, impressive watches. I enjoyed them the way one enjoys visiting a well-appointed home. But I never felt the urge to move in. Tastes, like obsessions, are not democratic. We do not vote on them. We discover them the way we discover allergies—after the reaction.

Then came the surprise. At sixty-four, long after I thought my trajectory was fixed, I bought the watch my inner cyborg had been whispering about for a decade: the G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000. It hasn’t left my wrist. Not for ceremony. Not for nostalgia. Not even for the Seiko elders in their box, who now stare at me like retired generals. The Frogman is frictionless. Accurate. Indifferent to admiration. It feels less like a purchase and more like a jailbreak.

This book is my attempt to understand the madness. It is personal—because the watch cyborg lives in my head—but it is also communal. Over decades, fellow travelers have confessed their anxieties, their grail delusions, their rotation guilt, their midnight research spirals. The watch obsessive speaks a dialect all his own. So I built a lexicon—a taxonomy of the strange mental weather patterns that govern this hobby. I began thinking I might squeeze out a modest essay. Instead, the terms multiplied. The categories metastasized. Sixty thousand words later, I had to concede the obvious: I am sufficiently mad to write a sufficiently long book about it.

Even now, as I finish this introduction to The Man Who Lost His Mind to Watches, my inner watch cyborg stirs. He is suggesting sapphire upgrade versions of the Frogman. Larger numerals. Limited editions that cost twice what I paid for the one on my wrist. He is persuasive. He does not sleep.

I protest weakly.

He is already browsing.

March 3, 2026