Cinemorphosis

Category: TV and Movies

  • Escape from Margaritaville

    Escape from Margaritaville

    I recently dreamed I was in a public park. The grass was cartoonishly green, a kind of chlorophyll utopia, and families sprawled across it as if they’d been carefully arranged for a Chamber of Commerce brochure. My suitcase sat at my side. I felt lost. Like a misplaced airport refugee, I looked up.

    Looming above the park was a billboard—a monstrosity of sun-bleached cheer—featuring a leathery couple in their seventies. They were bronzed like overcooked turkeys, grinning wide, basking in the eternal glow of some Florida condo where “Margaritaville” played on an endless loop.

    The “Margaritaville” billboard—two geriatric smiles frozen in sunlit rapture—reminded me that I’d been meaning to watch Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages, that gargantuan playground for the aged about forty-five miles from Orlando.

    Deep down, I knew I needed to watch this documentary. I was born in Florida, and as my retirement crept closer and closer, I felt an urge to return home. I love the smell of mangos and coconuts at night. Nostalgia is a potent drug. It could cause me to sell my home and buy a condo in Orlando.

    So I watched the documentary. It was the opposite of a travel infomercial. It was a horror movie. It started with synchronized water ballet to Neil Sedaka and margarita-fueled Parrothead parties. The Villages are marketed as heaven with a tiki umbrella on top, but for anyone with taste, patience, or shame, the place looks more like an early-onset hell: a tropical gulag where you pay people to micromanage your leisure until leisure itself becomes a program of infantilization.

    The film’s most disturbing subject is Dennis Dean—an eighty-one-year-old small-time grifter wanted for a DUI in California, living out of a blue van on the edge of The Villages and scheming his way into the bed of a rich widow. He prowls bingo halls and church socials with the persistence of a con man who has practiced charm until it has fossilized. When police finally close in, Dennis slips back into Nancy’s apartment. In a scene that sticks with you, he lies on her bed while she calls from the kitchen: “Lunch!” He finds his new girlfriend, whom he’s leeching off, annoying. He doesn’t move. He stares at the ceiling fan as if it were a slow, merciless clock, and you can see, plain as day, that comfort can become a prison for someone whose last liberty was earned through deceit. As I watched Dennis staring at the ceiling fan, it hit me: He’s in purgatory.

    The director never sneers at his subjects. Pain and longing are shown with a kind of blunt respect. But the portrait of The Villages itself isn’t charitable. It’s a retirement complex caught in mid-regression, a carnival mirror reflecting geriatrics clinging to perpetual adolescence until the spectacle curdles into something queasy and cringe-worthy. The managed fun—shuffleboard courts, themed parties, and scheduled joy—becomes a machine that demands you perform your own amusement. It’s not freedom. It’s occupation by leisure.

    And yes, I realized, sitting there with my pride intact and my Florida fantasies suddenly damp, that watching this must have been my wife’s brilliant little psy-ops operation. For a year, I’d been nagging her about moving the family to Florida—stilt houses, salt air, a hammock with my name on it. She was skeptical about moving to Florida. She mentioned hurricanes and unavailable flood insurance, for starters. Florida also had a reputation for government corruption, contractor fraud, and credit card theft. When her credit card was used fraudulently and she called her bank, the customer service agent asked, “You weren’t in Florida recently, were you?”

    In fact, she was.

    Florida was not paradise. It was a crime syndicate.

    She did not discourage me from watching Some Kind of Heaven. She didn’t have to. The documentary demolished my fantasy of returning to my home state within the first thirty seconds, with its water ballet and sedated margaritas. My obsession evaporated.

    But only for a minute.

    After a quick snack, I was back at my computer looking at luxury condos in Henderson, Nevada.

  • Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    We should stop using the term social media.

    The phrase is almost comically dishonest. “Social media” sounds benign and convivial, suggesting a chatty little kaffeeklatsch where neighbors exchange vacation photographs, discuss their grandchildren, and recommend a good plumber. Pour some coffee. Pull up a chair. Let’s socialize.

    That is not what we built.

    The dominant platforms employ some of the most sophisticated behavioral engineering ever devised to keep human eyes fixed on screens. Algorithms learn which emotional buttons produce another swipe, another click, another minute of captivity. Outrage works. So does envy. Loneliness works beautifully. Add FOMO, sexual display, humiliation, tribal grievance, political hatred, and the irresistible pleasure of watching somebody you despise get publicly disemboweled, and you have a remarkably efficient machine for converting human weakness into advertising revenue.

    There is nothing particularly social about it. Much of the behavior is aggressively antisocial.

    Spend enough time inside these systems and something stranger begins to happen. People start becoming grotesque duplicates of themselves. Their opinions harden. Their language becomes more predictable. Their enemies become more monstrous. Their own tribe becomes more virtuous. Their emotional repertoire contracts until nearly every stimulus produces one of four responses: outrage, envy, contempt, or applause.

    To understand the transformation, forget Silicon Valley and think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

    Attention Captivity Platforms perform a kind of digital body snatching. You enter as yourself intending to check one message. Forty-five minutes later, you emerge as an algorithmically engineered duplicate—scrolling, liking, raging, purchasing, and repeating opinions mysteriously identical to those of ten million other pod people.

    In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, aliens replace your personality while you sleep. TikTok and Instagram have improved the technology.

    You remain awake and volunteer for the procedure.

    This is why I prefer the term Attention Captivity Platform. It describes the transaction with considerably greater accuracy. Your attention is the commodity. Captivity is the business strategy. The platform is the machinery that makes the transaction possible.

    I considered other names.

    The Rage Dungeon has possibilities. It captures the experience of descending voluntarily into a subterranean chamber where strangers scream at one another until everyone develops hypertension.

    Algorithmic Asylum isn’t bad either. Everyone appears agitated, nobody seems particularly well, and the people operating the institution have discovered a profitable reason not to discharge the patients.

    The Hostility Feed gets directly to the product being served.

    And I have a particular affection for the Grievance Casino. You sit before the machine pulling the lever again and again, except instead of cherries and sevens, it dispenses stories confirming that your enemies are even more depraved than you suspected. Occasionally you hit the jackpot: somebody you already hate says something stupid.

    All of these names illuminate some aspect of the machinery.

    But social media illuminates nothing.

    Calling these systems social media is like calling a colonoscopy a spa treatment. The procedure may have its uses, but let’s not pretend we’re getting a hot-stone massage.

    Language matters because euphemisms conceal mechanisms. The phrase social media encourages us to think we’re participating in an electronic town square. Attention Captivity Platform forces us to ask the more uncomfortable question:

    If I’m the one being captured, who exactly is being served?

  • Paradise by the Hour

    Paradise by the Hour

    It is perfectly reasonable to think more about death as you get older. I am approaching sixty-five. Mortality has stopped being an abstraction involving unfortunate people in newspaper obituaries and begun appearing in the neighborhood. Thinking about it is not necessarily morbid. The question is what those thoughts do to you.

    Ideally, thinking more about dying should make you think harder about living.

    Call this the Mortality-Vitality Paradox: as the remaining quantity of life becomes more conspicuously finite, its individual moments can acquire greater intensity. The clock doesn’t merely frighten you. Sometimes it turns up the voltage.

    What gets you out of bed? What do you still long for? What produces that surge of anticipation that makes you think, Yes, I want more of this?

    I was thinking about these questions last night while having dinner with my family, my brother, and his girlfriend at Tiki Kai, an “island-inspired” restaurant at the mouth of Pier Plaza in Hermosa Beach.

    We barely made it there.

    Parking in Hermosa on a warm Saturday evening requires either divine intervention or the predatory instincts of a great white shark. Every parking space within half a mile had been claimed. Cars circled the neighborhood with the grim determination of bombers awaiting clearance to land.

    There was a reason.

    Everyone wanted to be there.

    By six o’clock, the temperature was still around eighty degrees, softened by an ocean breeze. We sat outside drinking mocktails and eating ceviche, mahi mahi, fire shrimp, Hawaiian salad, and other foods that become considerably more expensive when served within smelling distance of the Pacific Ocean.

    Across the plaza stood Patrick Molloy’s. Twenty years ago, my wife and I used to meet her coworkers there on Fridays for fish tacos. I looked at the building and experienced one of those increasingly common late-life distortions of time. Twenty years had passed, yet some part of me expected to walk across the plaza and find our younger selves still sitting there.

    Nearby, televisions in another bar were showing Ohio State against Texas. The game was close, and every few minutes the crowd erupted. Cheers spilled into the plaza. Pedestrians streamed toward the pier. Restaurants overflowed. People were laughing, drinking, eating, flirting, watching football, pushing strollers, meeting friends.

    The entire place seemed electrically charged.

    This is what I call the Paradise-Proximity Principle: certain places make us feel that paradise, while obviously unattainable, might at least be geographically nearby.

    Southern California has been selling this proposition for more than a century.

    The evidence was all around us. Warm September air. Pacific Ocean. Palm trees. Beautiful people. Outdoor restaurants. Sunset. Young couples walking toward the beach. Middle-aged couples pretending not to notice the young couples. Retirees demonstrating through aggressively casual linen clothing that Tuesday and Saturday have become essentially the same day.

    The California Dream was operating at full voltage.

    We constantly hear about Californians fleeing for Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and other places where a modest house does not require the financial resources of a minor European principality. The migration is real. So are California’s taxes, traffic, housing costs, bureaucracy, and innumerable other aggravations.

    Yet somehow nobody sent the memo to Hermosa Beach.

    The place was packed.

    People from around the world still cram themselves into Southern California’s coastal cities because the California Dream remains one of America’s most durable fantasies. The dream promises good weather, beauty, abundance, health, youth, reinvention, and proximity to the ocean.

    In this respect, the California Dream resembles the Hawaiian Dream. Both are modern expressions of something much older: the Paradise Instinct.

    Human beings have always imagined a place where suffering recedes and abundance takes its place. Eden. Arcadia. Shangri-La. The Land of Milk and Honey. Hawaii. Southern California.

    The scenery changes. The fantasy doesn’t.

    We want to believe there is some place where the weather is warm, the fruit is ripe, the body remains healthy, the family gathers around the table, and death has temporarily misplaced our address.

    Cynics will point out that much of this paradise is manufactured.

    Of course it is.

    Tiki Kai isn’t an untouched Polynesian village mysteriously deposited at the western end of Pier Avenue. Somebody held meetings. Somebody hired designers. Somebody selected the lighting. Somebody developed the cocktail menu. Somebody decided exactly how much tropical vegetation was required before a customer would willingly pay twenty dollars for something containing ube.

    This is the Vibe Economy.

    Restaurants such as Tiki Kai aren’t merely selling food. They’re selling admission to an emotional atmosphere. The mahi mahi is real, but so is the fantasy surrounding it. For two hours you purchase temporary citizenship in an imaginary country where everyone is relaxed, the ocean breeze is permanent, and nobody has an appointment with a urologist Monday morning.

    There is a temptation to dismiss all this as superficial consumerism.

    I resist that conclusion.

    Human beings have always constructed places designed to produce particular states of mind. We built cathedrals, gardens, theaters, plazas, resorts, stadiums, restaurants. We manipulate architecture, music, light, food, landscape, and ritual because consciousness responds to surroundings.

    The fact that an experience has been designed doesn’t necessarily make the experience fraudulent.

    The Beach Boys understood this long before anybody invented the term “vibes.” They didn’t call the song “Good Rational Assessment of Objective Conditions.”

    They called it “Good Vibrations.”

    Then the bill arrived.

    With tip, dinner cost more than five hundred dollars. I paid roughly two-thirds; my brother picked up the rest.

    For a moment, the Puritan accountant who apparently lives somewhere behind my frontal lobe emerged carrying a clipboard.

    Five hundred dollars?

    For dinner?

    I asked myself how often I did something like this. Once a year? Once every two years?

    The accountant returned to his cave.

    This was not Tuesday night takeout. My family was together. My brother was there. We were sitting outside on an eighty-degree September evening near the Pacific Ocean. Twenty years of memory were standing across the plaza. Football crowds were cheering. Everyone around us seemed delighted to have secured a small piece of this particular evening.

    I looked at the other diners. Some were clearly regulars. They greeted servers by name. They laughed across tables. They leaned back into the tropical breeze with the ease of people who had performed this ritual many times before.

    They weren’t merely buying dinner.

    They were buying access to the dream.

    And perhaps retirement intensifies the Paradise Instinct rather than extinguishing it. The career begins receding. The children grow older. Time becomes more visible. You become increasingly aware that the body has terms and conditions you apparently accepted without reading.

    Yet the desire for life remains.

    Perhaps it becomes stronger.

    You want to stay healthy. You want to remain vigorous. You want dinners with your family. You want warm evenings near the ocean. You want places that generate energy rather than drain it. You want experiences that make the remaining years feel expansive rather than diminished.

    That is the Mortality-Vitality Paradox again.

    Death enters the picture, and instead of making life smaller, its presence can make life glow.

    This doesn’t mean pretending that Southern California is paradise. Drive east on the 91 at five o’clock and the theological case collapses rapidly. Nor does it mean spending retirement in an endless procession of restaurants, resorts, cruises, and premium experiences in a desperate attempt to purchase immortality.

    It means recognizing the Paradise Instinct for what it is: an ancient human longing for abundance, health, fellowship, beauty, and peace.

    At sixty-five, I don’t feel embarrassed by that longing.

    I trust it more.

    Man does not live by bread alone. Apparently he also requires ocean breezes, family, football cheers, tropical lighting, memories of fish tacos from twenty years ago, and an occasional Ube Nada Colada costing considerably more than good judgment would recommend.

    The bill comes eventually.

    It always does.

    Until then, the dream lives.

  • The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    Popular psychology has taken Carl Jung’s sprawling ideas about psychological development and compressed them into a tidy Four Stages of Life paradigm. The scheme is probably too neat to be Jung, but it is useful nonetheless, especially if you are approaching retirement and wondering whether the final decades of life will produce wisdom or merely better lumbar support.

    In the first stage, adolescence, you are supposedly the Athlete. You are acutely conscious of your body, appearance, appetites, and sexual power. Self-awareness remains under construction. You occupy the center of the universe and assume everyone else has been assigned supporting roles. You fantasize about dominance, dislike being challenged, and naturally prefer the company of people who recognize your magnificence. If invited to someone else’s birthday party, some primitive corner of your psyche wonders why your name isn’t on the cake. “Athlete” seems far too charitable. I prefer Imperial Narcissist.

    Then adulthood throws you into competition. You acquire a career, make money, take action, climb hierarchies, accumulate trophies, and cultivate a reputation as “a force to be reckoned with.” Hugh Hefner supplied the operating philosophy: Work hard, play hard. You want money, sexual success, professional status, and that most intoxicating commodity of all—respect. The popular Jungian formulation calls this figure the Warrior. I prefer Status Gladiator. He experiences adulthood as an arena with an invisible scoreboard hanging over it, and he checks the standings constantly to make sure his name hasn’t slipped.

    If life goes reasonably well, however, the trophies eventually lose some of their phosphorescence. The expensive car becomes a car. The promotion becomes another job with more email. Sexual conquest begins to resemble an exhausting administrative project. You start wondering whether the purpose of existence might involve something beyond accumulating evidence that you have defeated other people. The Jungian term attributed to this stage is Statesman. I prefer The Man Tired of the Bullshit. He has not necessarily become a saint. He has simply developed enough pattern recognition to notice that status, ambition, possessions, and applause make lousy gods.

    Finally comes the stage usually called Spirit. Here you stop looking for transcendence in a Mercedes and begin looking for the genuine article: love, generosity, service, connection, perhaps God. “Spirit,” however, feels too vaporous for me. My mind goes instead to the famous 1971 “Hilltop” Coca-Cola commercial, with people from around the world standing on an Italian hillside holding bottles of Coke and singing about peace and harmony. They practically glow. This is Radiant Man. He has undergone a metamorphosis. He no longer needs to dominate the room because he is no longer terrified of disappearing inside it. His strength has become generosity. He beams outward.

    The graceful trajectory of aging, then, is to move through these stages rather than establish permanent residency in one of them. Shed the old skins. Outgrow the Imperial Narcissist. Survive the Status Gladiator. Become tired of the bullshit. With luck, arrive at retirement age radiating enough benevolence that other people do not instinctively flee when they see you approaching.

    Unfortunately, modern culture has constructed an enormous industrial complex devoted to preventing this development. It does not particularly want Radiant Man. Radiant Man is bad for business. He already has enough. He doesn’t need another trophy, another grievance, another sexual conquest, another luxury object, another algorithm telling him how important he is. Consumer culture has much greater use for the Imperial Narcissist: the adolescent who refuses to vacate adolescence and possesses enough adult money to finance the occupation.

    Such a man spends his life constructing what I call an Adolescent Fortress. Every purchase, possession, sycophant, grievance narrative, algorithm, and carefully selected media source becomes another brick in the wall protecting him from reality. Eventually he suffers from Adolescent Fortress Syndrome: the lifelong construction of a psychological kingdom into which adult correction cannot penetrate. From inside, the fortress looks like sovereignty. From outside, it looks like a sixty-five-year-old man wearing the costume of a king while hiding from anyone willing to tell him the truth.

    Jon Ronson introduces an astonishing specimen of this condition in The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men: Christopher Mark, owner of a Gothic castle in Woodstock, Connecticut. Mark, approaching his mid-sixties, inhabits a medieval fantasy world of elaborate clothing, exotic animals, darkened rooms, and women who address him as “My lord.” His guard dog is named Cerberus, after the multiheaded hound guarding the gates of Hades. Camels wander the grounds. The drapes remain closed. Hugh Hefner is his North Star. The Playboy Mansion has been reincarnated as a Gothic fortress, as if Dracula had purchased a subscription to Maxim.

    Ronson first visits the castle after his son encounters the place under the pretense of attending a party. What they discover is considerably darker: a wealthy man in his sixties attempting to convert an adolescent harem fantasy into a reality television show called 101 Princesses. The number itself contains the pathology. Why one princess when you can have 101? And why 101 when, if the experiment somehow succeeded, the appetite would inevitably demand 1,001?

    Thomas Aquinas had a word for this: concupiscence, the disordered appetite that grows hungrier as you feed it. The promise is satisfaction; the mechanism guarantees dissatisfaction. You keep adding women, possessions, attention, status, spectacle, and power, expecting the next acquisition to fill the void. Instead, the void develops an appetite of its own. Psychiatrist Phil Stutz describes a related condition as living in the “lower channel,” where existence contracts around immediate gratification rather than purpose. Whatever terminology you prefer, the destination looks much the same: entropy. Or, to borrow Ronson’s word, unraveling.

    What makes Mark particularly useful to someone contemplating retirement is his conspicuous absence of guardrails. An heir to a fortune, he never had to build his adult life around employment. No boss expected him at nine. No colleagues depended on him. No students awaited him. No HR department required him to sit through sexual-harassment training. No professional code periodically forced his ego to accommodate the irritating existence of other people. What sounds like magnificent freedom begins to resemble the Guardrail Deficit: the absence of work, schedules, bosses, deadlines, colleagues, and professional expectations that periodically force us into contact with reality.

    We complain bitterly about these constraints while quietly benefiting from them. Work makes us shower. Deadlines make us finish things. Colleagues make us compromise. Students make us explain ourselves. Institutions routinely irritate us, but irritation is sometimes the friction that prevents psychological free fall. Remove enough guardrails and the Imperial Narcissist can drive wherever his appetites point him.

    Mark therefore embodies what I call the Never-Employed Retiree Paradox. He has reached retirement age with nothing to retire from. The ordinary retiree loses the external structures of employment at sixty-five. Mark never acquired them. In that sense, he has been retired since adolescence, with no workplace, career, professional standards, or institutional obligations separating youthful fantasy from late-life reality. He possesses radical freedom and uses it to dress like medieval royalty while planning a reality show about acquiring 101 princesses. Apparently freedom without maturation does not produce Marcus Aurelius. Sometimes it produces The Bachelor with camels.

    This brings me uncomfortably close to home.

    Most men cannot afford Gothic castles, exotic animals, and harems, but we have developed a more economical version of the Adolescent Fortress: the Man Cave. We carve out little kingdoms where reality agrees to leave us alone for a while. There is the football den with the enormous television, recliner, pizza, nachos, and master remote. On Married… with Children, Peggy Bundy understands that her husband Al’s deepest erotic fantasy is not another woman but a remote capable of controlling every television in the house. Absolute power, apparently, requires batteries.

    Watch enthusiasts have their own castles. I have spent embarrassing quantities of time watching YouTube videos in which grown men gather around expensive watches, conduct ceremonial unboxings, discuss “wrist presence,” and deliver solemn State of the Collection addresses as though NATO were awaiting their conclusions. The watch community becomes a tiny sovereign ecosystem with its own language, hierarchies, rituals, grails, and moat. The outside world may be collapsing, but inside the fortress we urgently need to determine whether forty-four millimeters is too large for a seven-and-a-quarter-inch wrist.

    And then there is my couch.

    Because the ordinary cushions proved inadequate for my 230-pound retired-linebacker chassis, I fortified the couch with a four-inch self-inflating camping mattress, stacked pillows, and a throw blanket. My daughters call it Dad’s Homeless Encampment. In the late afternoon, it exerts a gravitational pull. I lie there watching true-crime documentaries while eating red grapes, hummus, and Wheat Thins, observing homicide detectives restore order to a universe temporarily disrupted by murder.

    The documentaries are disturbing, but they are also strangely comforting. Chaos occurs. Detectives arrive. Evidence accumulates. The suspect lies. The detective catches the lie. Handcuffs appear. Order is restored. The narrative offers precisely what real life refuses to provide: control. Al Bundy has his master remote. The watch collector has his gleaming collection. The football fan has his nacho bunker. Christopher Mark has his Gothic castle and Cerberus. I have my padded couch and a homicide detective explaining why the suspect’s timeline makes no sense.

    None of these refuges is inherently pathological. Everyone needs respite. The danger begins when respite becomes habitat—when the place where you occasionally retreat from life becomes the place from which you conduct it. The fortress gets more comfortable. The moat gets wider. The drawbridge comes up more often. Eventually, freedom from irritation becomes freedom from challenge, freedom from obligation, freedom from other people, and finally freedom from reality itself.

    That is what makes Christopher Mark more than an eccentric character in someone else’s book. For a man approaching retirement, he is a warning. Employment has spent forty years dragging me out of the house, making demands upon me, exposing me to people I did not choose, and preventing my padded couch from becoming the geographical center of my existence. Soon those guardrails will disappear.

    So when late afternoon arrives and I lower myself onto four inches of premium camping foam, arrange my pillows, pull the blanket across my legs, open the Wheat Thins, and watch a homicide detective interrogate a suspect while Cerberus sleeps safely several states away, I do not feel myself approaching the incandescence of Radiant Man.

    I feel like I may already be retired.

  • Mediated Persona Fatigue

    Mediated Persona Fatigue

    Sometime in the 1990s, I encountered two words about television that fascinated me. The first was médiatique: possessing the kind of face, presence, and personality that translates well through a camera. The second was mediated: knowing how to perform once the red light comes on—polished, relaxed, articulate, confident, seemingly spontaneous while remaining completely aware that thousands or millions of people may be watching.

    At the time, these qualities seemed impressive. Television still possessed a certain distance and glamour. Not everyone could stare into a camera and appear comfortable. Most ordinary people, confronted by a lens, suddenly became aware of their hands, forgot how their mouths worked, and developed the facial expression of someone being questioned by customs officials.

    Then came YouTube.

    Then TikTok.

    Then Instagram Reels.

    The rare skill became an industry.

    Millions of people learned how to become médiatique. They mastered the raised eyebrow, the conspiratorial lean toward the camera, the strategic pause, the widened eyes, the incredulous head shake, the sudden whisper, the explosion of outrage, the knowing smirk. They learned to speak in hooks. They learned to manufacture urgency. They learned that apparently nothing in human experience could simply be interesting. It had to be INSANE.

    At first, this new breed of camera personality could seem engaging. After sufficient exposure, however, I developed what I call Mediated Persona Fatigue: the exhaustion produced by prolonged contact with people who have optimized every gesture, vocal inflection, facial expression, and emotional reaction for maximum engagement.

    Eventually, you stop seeing the personality and start seeing the machinery.

    The intimacy begins to feel synthetic. The enthusiasm feels pharmaceutical. The spontaneous outrage arrives with suspicious punctuality. These people no longer strike me as companions sharing something interesting. Increasingly, they resemble dopamine peddlers standing on digital street corners, opening their trench coats and whispering, “Psst. Want to see something absolutely crazy?”

    The commodity is attention.

    The subject hardly matters. Murder. Politics. Celebrity divorce. Watches. Football. Restaurants. Skin cream. A disagreement between two strangers at Costco. Everything gets processed through the same engagement refinery and converted into thirty-second pellets of stimulation for an audience whose attention span is already being sandblasted into oblivion.

    I thought about this last night while my wife and I watched Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel. The docuseries was generally excellent, but inevitably it reached the point where the filmmakers had to demonstrate how enormous the case had become online.

    Up came the social-media personalities.

    There they were.

    The faces.

    The voices.

    The incredulity.

    The histrionics.

    The solemn promise that somebody was about to “spill the tea” concerning an actual murder.

    I felt immediate revulsion.

    Part of my reaction may simply be generational. Perhaps I am an aging man standing on his porch demanding that the influencers get off his lawn. Fair enough. Every generation eventually discovers that the communication style of the next generation sounds like civilization being fed into a wood chipper.

    But I suspect something larger is happening.

    We may be approaching Engagement Saturation: the point at which techniques designed to capture attention become so ubiquitous that they begin repelling the very audience they were designed to attract.

    The raised eyebrow once worked.

    So everyone raised an eyebrow.

    The dramatic pause worked.

    So everyone paused dramatically.

    Outrage worked.

    So everyone became outraged.

    The reaction face worked.

    So the internet filled with adults staring at thumbnails as though they had just witnessed the Resurrection in the parking lot of a Cheesecake Factory.

    Eventually the entire digital environment begins screaming at once.

    And when everyone screams, screaming loses its power.

    This is why I have difficulty believing the current social-media aesthetic can continue indefinitely. Human beings habituate. Yesterday’s stimulation becomes today’s background noise. The influencer must therefore become louder, faster, more emotional, more intimate, more outraged, more revealing. The engagement economy contains its own escalation mechanism, and eventually the needle reaches the red zone.

    Something has to give.

    Perhaps the next form of charisma will be restraint.

    Perhaps the radical media personality of the future will sit in front of a camera, speak in complete sentences, refrain from widening his eyes, and allow three consecutive seconds to pass without a jump cut.

    Perhaps someone will tell us something interesting without promising that it will blow our minds.

    Perhaps understatement will become exotic.

    I hope so.

    Because watching millions of people trapped inside this social-media hellscape—performers frantically stimulating audiences who require increasingly intense stimulation—feels less like communication than a civilization repeatedly pressing the button on a laboratory cage.

    I have to believe this particular chapter of media culture will eventually exhaust itself.

    After enough Mediated Persona Fatigue and Engagement Saturation, calm and composure may become a form of rebellion.

  • The TV Series Best Medicine Is Cognitive Comfort Food

    The TV Series Best Medicine Is Cognitive Comfort Food

    The television series Best Medicine follows a neurotic, antisocial city doctor who relocates to a small coastal town in Maine and discovers, to his horror, other human beings. Gradually, the townspeople penetrate his emotional armor and teach him how to connect, belong, and presumably stop behaving like someone who regards casual conversation as an infectious disease.

    We’ve been here before. Northern Exposure built an entire world around the city doctor exiled among lovable eccentrics. Schitt’s Creek perfected the transformation of prickly outsiders through prolonged exposure to decent people. Best Medicine doesn’t pretend to have discovered a new continent. It arrives at a familiar resort, puts its suitcase on the bed, and settles in.

    Nor is it profound television.

    No one is going to teach a graduate seminar on its metaphysics. You don’t finish an episode and stare silently through the window while reconsidering the foundations of Western civilization. The characters are eccentric but lovable, the town is picturesque, the conflicts remain manageable, and a warm heart beats beneath the entire production.

    Naturally, I enjoy it.

    My wife and I can sit down together and enter this agreeable little Maine universe where damaged people are basically decent, neighbors care about one another, and the human condition can usually be repaired before bedtime.

    This is Cognitive Comfort Food: warm, undemanding entertainment consumed not because we’ve abandoned serious thought but because serious thought occasionally needs to shut up.

    The distinction matters.

    I know Best Medicine can be sentimental. The show knows it too. You can practically see the writers wheeling the emotional casserole into the oven. Here comes the lonely eccentric. Here comes the misunderstanding. Here comes the unexpected kindness. Give it forty-five minutes at 350 degrees and somebody will learn something about friendship.

    Fine.

    I’ll have seconds.

    Normally, sentimentality makes me suspicious. I can see the machinery. I can hear the violins warming up behind the curtain. I know when a television show is reaching into my chest and squeezing the designated emotion gland.

    But there are evenings when I don’t want to fight it.

    The real world has already done enough.

    To say that the world is nasty is hardly an insight. Human beings have been murdering, cheating, betraying, invading, exploiting, and humiliating one another since somebody first discovered that a rock could be used for something other than sitting.

    What has changed is our access to the spectacle.

    We now carry a global misery-delivery system in our pockets.

    War before breakfast. Political outrage with lunch. Murder during the afternoon. Environmental catastrophe before dinner. Then a few minutes of social-media lunacy before bed, just in case the nervous system had somehow retained a molecule of serenity.

    Scroll.

    Atrocity.

    Scroll.

    Corruption.

    Scroll.

    Some lunatic screaming into a camera from the driver’s seat of his car.

    Scroll.

    Civilization apparently ending again.

    Against this backdrop, Best Medicine begins to look less like escapism than neurological first aid.

    For an hour, nobody is trying to overthrow a government.

    Nobody is uploading a manifesto.

    Nobody is explaining why the apocalypse will arrive Thursday.

    Instead, a neurotic doctor is learning to tolerate his neighbors in coastal Maine.

    Perfect.

    Cognitive Comfort Food works because it asks very little from us. Serious art can be magnificent, but serious art is greedy. It wants attention. It wants interpretation. It wants us to confront ambiguity, suffering, mortality, moral compromise, unreliable narrators, fractured identities, and the terrifying possibility that the protagonist’s crisis is somehow our crisis.

    Sometimes I don’t want a crisis.

    Sometimes I want mashed potatoes.

    This doesn’t mean I’ve surrendered my standards. I haven’t decided that every television show should resemble a Hallmark movie in which a high-powered attorney returns to Vermont, saves the family Christmas-tree farm, and marries a carpenter named Luke.

    There is a difference between living on Cognitive Comfort Food and occasionally needing it.

    Nobody should eat cheesecake for every meal.

    But after chewing through the gristle of contemporary life all day, a little cheesecake isn’t evidence of moral collapse.

    Nor does watching an uncomplicated television show necessarily dumb us down. The opposite may occasionally be true. The brain needs recovery just as the body does. Nobody finishes a hard workout and announces that resting afterward represents a betrayal of physical fitness. Yet we sometimes imagine that an intelligent person should remain intellectually clenched from breakfast until bedtime.

    Read the difficult novel.

    Study the political crisis.

    Listen to the serious podcast.

    Watch the prestige drama about intergenerational trauma.

    Contemplate death.

    Repeat.

    Eventually the brain files a grievance.

    So my wife and I sit down and watch Best Medicine.

    We forgive its sentimentality.

    We forgive its lovable eccentrics.

    We forgive the suspiciously therapeutic properties of small-town Maine.

    Most importantly, we forgive ourselves for enjoying it.

    Tomorrow there will be plenty of time for difficult books, serious arguments, moral ambiguity, and the latest evidence that civilization is being operated by raccoons who have broken into the control room.

    Tonight, I’ll take the mashed potatoes.

    The brain needs comfort food too.

    Sometimes that’s the best medicine of all.

  • The Edna Challenge

    The Edna Challenge

    My great-grandmother Edna was born in Poland shortly before 1900. In 1904, when she was still a little girl, pogroms swept through her city and her parents were massacred. She was taken in by a cruel stepmother who treated her less like a daughter than a household slave.

    Somehow, in 1911, Edna escaped. Still a girl, she crossed an ocean and arrived in New York.

    The family she left behind would fare even worse. Much of it was eventually annihilated by the Nazis. Her older brother Ellis, his wife, and their two children were sent to Auschwitz. His wife and children were murdered there. Ellis survived, came to New York after the war, became a dentist, and eventually retired to Miami.

    Edna married a man afflicted with severe arthritis. A doctor prescribed injections of gold, a treatment that sounds today like something devised by an alchemist with excellent malpractice insurance. The gold didn’t cure him. His condition worsened until he became an invalid, leaving Edna with the exhausting responsibility of caring for him.

    By the time I met her, in 1968, her husband was dead and Edna was living in Leisure World in Seal Beach.

    I was six.

    I loved her immediately.

    She spoke with a thick Polish accent and carried a melancholy that somehow made me feel safe. She cooked savory kasha dishes for me and let me sit beside her watching soap operas. Her favorite was As the World Turns. Edna, who had survived pogroms, an abusive childhood, immigration, family annihilation, and years caring for an invalid husband, could become magnificently agitated over the romantic judgment of a fictional woman on daytime television.

    When some charlatan started courting one of the female characters, Edna would shake her fist at the television.

    “Leave him!”

    Apparently surviving the twentieth century did not prepare her to tolerate a bad boyfriend.

    I found this deeply touching. Life had given Edna every conceivable reason to withdraw from the world, yet there she was, emotionally invested in some ridiculous soap-opera romance as though civilization itself depended upon this woman dumping the bum before the next commercial break.

    Edna was ethnically Jewish, but as far as I could tell, she wasn’t religious.

    And here begins what I call The Edna Challenge.

    The Edna Challenge is the difficulty of reconciling Christianity’s diagnosis of universal spiritual deficiency with the memory of a nonreligious person who seemed morally whole without religion.

    Edna didn’t strike me as someone waiting to be completed.

    She possessed a fierce moral intelligence. Once, one of her great-grandchildren, a red-haired boy with serious behavioral problems, knocked my younger brother off a bunk bed. My brother landed hard and began crying, a large bump rising on his head.

    Edna gathered him into her arms and rocked him.

    Then came the verdict.

    “He is not worthy of being my great-grandchild.”

    There was no committee meeting. No therapeutic language. No discussion of developmental stages or impulse control. The Supreme Court of Edna had convened, heard the evidence, and handed down its decision.

    I loved her all the more for it.

    Her daughter Mildred, my maternal grandmother, wasn’t religious either. When I was eight, she told me plainly that she believed this earthly life was the whole story. No heaven. No afterlife. No celestial sequel.

    Like Edna, Mildred seemed complete to me.

    Neither woman appeared to experience herself as fallen, spiritually dead, estranged from God, or afflicted by some invisible metaphysical disease requiring a supernatural cure. They loved people. They made moral judgments. They endured suffering. They possessed humor, loyalty, anger, tenderness, and dignity.

    I cannot look backward and identify the missing piece.

    Then there’s me.

    I’m a different beast altogether.

    When I read Paul’s Letter to the Romans, I feel as though Paul has somehow obtained my psychological records. I know what I should do and don’t do it. I do things I have already decided I shouldn’t do. Appetite fights judgment. Vanity fights humility. Intention fights behavior. The person I am seems perpetually at war with the person I believe I should become.

    Paul describes the divided consciousness, and I recognize the address.

    I understand the hunger for salvation because I experience the condition for which salvation appears to be the remedy. I want the wholeness and holiness Paul describes. I understand what it means to feel incapable of repairing yourself with the same machinery that keeps producing the damage.

    But then I remember Edna.

    And Christianity’s universal diagnosis becomes difficult for me.

    Perhaps Paul is right about me. But was he right about her?

    A Christian can answer that Edna’s apparent wholeness doesn’t matter. Sin isn’t merely psychological distress or bad behavior. She could have been loving, courageous, morally serious, and emotionally integrated while remaining estranged from God at some deeper level.

    I understand the argument.

    But The Edna Challenge remains.

    Because the diagnosis begins to describe something I cannot see.

    Edna survived horrors I can barely imagine. Her parents were murdered. Her childhood was stolen. Much of her family disappeared into the Holocaust. Her brother walked out of Auschwitz without his wife and children. She crossed an ocean, built a life, cared for an invalid husband, became a widow, and grew old carrying memories I was too young to understand.

    Yet she did not strike me as spiritually defective.

    She struck me as Edna.

    Meanwhile, her comparatively fortunate great-grandson sits decades later reading Romans and recognizing himself on every page.

    Perhaps Christianity is right that both of us needed the same salvation.

    Perhaps my memory of Edna tells me nothing about her deepest spiritual condition.

    Or perhaps Paul discovered something extraordinarily true about certain human beings and mistook it for the universal condition.

    I don’t know.

    That uncertainty sits at the center of my struggle with religious faith. Before I can accept the prescription, I have to understand the diagnosis. And whenever I’m told that humanity suffers from a universal spiritual deficiency that only religion can address, I find myself returning to Leisure World in 1968.

    There is Edna in her chair.

    The television is on.

    As the World Turns has presented another romantic scoundrel.

    Edna shakes her fist at the screen.

    And I find myself asking the question Christianity has not yet answered to my satisfaction:

    What, exactly, was missing from her?

  • Damascus Syndrome

    Damascus Syndrome

    Many years ago, my wife explained something about men that has stayed with me: we are suckers for violent conversions.

    She grew up in a church where people regularly stood before the congregation and delivered their testimonies. These were rarely modest affairs. Nobody announced that over several years he had gradually become less selfish and slightly easier to live with. That would hardly justify taking the microphone.

    No, there had to be an abyss.

    The man had been drinking, drugging, fighting, fornicating, worshipping money, driving ninety miles an hour toward eternal damnation—and then, at 3:17 one Tuesday morning, Jesus grabbed the steering wheel.

    My wife would roll her eyes.

    She suspected that some of these testimonies contained less piety than theater. Ostensibly, the man was glorifying God. Curiously, however, God had given him forty-five minutes of stage time to explain what an exceptionally fascinating sinner he had been.

    Call it Damascus Syndrome: the male longing for a catastrophic encounter that divides life into a disgraced Before and a redeemed After.

    Men seem particularly susceptible to it. We don’t want gradual improvement. We don’t want to become five percent more patient every year. We want an earthquake. We want the old self dragged from the wreckage and a new self emerging through the smoke.

    In other words, we want an origin story.

    Before Peter Parker gets bitten by the spider and Bruce Wayne enters the Batcave, Saul of Tarsus is riding toward Damascus with murder in his heart.

    Saul isn’t searching for truth. He believes he already owns it. He has his convictions, his mission, his enemies. Then comes the light.

    A vision. A voice.

    Suddenly the man who knows exactly where he is going cannot see the road.

    Saul is left blind, helpless, and disoriented. For three days he sits in darkness while a greater darkness collapses inside him. His old identity has suffered an internal earthquake. The load-bearing walls have cracked. The building has been condemned.

    Then a stranger arrives claiming to have been sent by the Lord.

    More unsettling still, Saul will become Paul.

    This new identity feels less like self-actualization than an eviction notice. Saul wants his old certainties back. His old mission. His old enemies. He doesn’t want transformation. He wants things returned to factory settings.

    But Damascus doesn’t negotiate.

    The light has hijacked his life.

    This is the part of the story that fascinates me and makes my wife suspicious. Men love the idea that somewhere out there awaits an event sufficiently violent to blast through the accumulated concrete of the false self. We don’t merely want to change. We want to be struck down, preferably with witnesses.

    A quiet epiphany while loading the dishwasher lacks production value.

    Damascus Syndrome demands thunder.

    Emmanuel Carrère captures the deeper paradox of Paul’s conversion in The Kingdom: “Paul was no longer himself; he was finally himself.”

    That sentence overturns our comforting modern idea of authenticity. We usually imagine the authentic self as something we express: Follow your instincts. Find your voice. Be true to yourself. Peel away society’s expectations until the magnificent original You finally appears.

    Damascus proposes something considerably more terrifying.

    What if the self you are determined to express is precisely the self that has to go?

    What if your deepest identity lies underneath the personality, convictions, ambitions, resentments, appetites, and certainties you have spent decades defending?

    Then becoming yourself requires losing yourself.

    This possibility gives Damascus Syndrome its genuine spiritual power. It also gives men an irresistible opportunity for grandiosity. After all, once you’ve been annihilated and reborn, somebody needs to hear about it.

    Preferably everybody.

    Preferably in hardcover.

    My wife remains skeptical. She has heard too many testimonies, watched too many men turn repentance into performance art, seen too many ordinary psychological crises inflated into The Dark Night of the Soul: My Journey from Darkness into Light.

    Perhaps she has a point.

    Maybe men can’t tolerate the thought that maturity might happen quietly—that becoming a better person could involve thousands of small corrections made without applause, lightning bolts, blindness, voices from heaven, or a publishing contract.

    We want Damascus.

    We want the spider bite.

    We want the Batcave.

    We want our old identity blown to pieces so that we can stagger from the crater transformed, finally ourselves, with one additional blessing from God:

    a hell of a story.

  • Your Inner Thirteen-Year-Old Still Sits on the Thrown

    Your Inner Thirteen-Year-Old Still Sits on the Thrown

    Grown men like to pretend they have escaped adolescence. They acquire careers, mortgages, spouses, children, retirement accounts, cholesterol numbers, and opinions about property taxes. They learn to discuss interest rates without giggling. They attend funerals. They replace water heaters. They become, by every outward measure, adults.

    And yet somewhere inside the sixty-something man sits a thirteen-year-old boy whose hormones have just detonated.

    The boy remembers when the world fizzed like a glass of Alka-Seltzer. He remembers Eva Gabor floating onto Match Game, Adrienne Barbeau on Maude, Dahlia Lavi in Catlow, Jennifer O’Neill in Summer of ’42, Ursula Andress in Dr. No, Nancy Archer and Honey Parker in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and Mary Ann and Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. These women did not merely appear on television or movie screens. They altered atmospheric pressure. They made the furniture hum. They turned an ordinary Tuesday night into an annunciation.

    Half a century later, the man remembers them with an intensity he finds embarrassing.

    He should be past all this. Good God, he is in his sixties. He has accomplishments. He has experience. He has endured loss, raised children, paid bills, navigated marriage, watched his parents age, and contemplated his own mortality. Surely all this should have transformed him into that mythical creature known as the Mature Man.

    And to some extent it has.

    But not enough.

    Because deep inside him, untouched by the decades, the thirteen-year-old remains seated on his throne.

    Call it Adolescent Apotheosis: the elevation of one’s adolescent self into the supreme version of the self, the golden incarnation against which every subsequent stage of life seems slightly fraudulent. The boy is not merely remembered. He has been canonized.

    At first the man assumes this is nostalgia. But nostalgia doesn’t explain the voltage.

    Neither does sex.

    Certainly sex is involved. Let us not insult the evidence. The thirteen-year-old did not admire Adrienne Barbeau because of her comic timing.

    But what he really worships is the consciousness he possessed when he first saw these women. At thirteen, desire had arrived before disappointment had acquired tenure. The future stretched before him like an enormous amusement park whose gates had just opened. Anything might happen.

    The women became icons of this state. Eva Gabor, Jennifer O’Neill, Honey Parker, Mary Ann, Ginger, Adrienne Barbeau—stained-glass saints in the Church of Infinite Possibility.

    This is why seeing their photographs decades later can produce such disproportionate emotion. He isn’t merely looking at Adrienne Barbeau.

    He is looking through her.

    On the other side is himself at thirteen: absurd, frightened, libidinous, hopeful, ignorant, unfinished—and magnificently alive.

    The sixty-something man possesses things the boy could not imagine: maturity, competence, money, domesticity, fatherhood, knowledge. He should regard these as victories.

    And he does.

    Sort of.

    That is his shame.

    Because none of them make the world fizz.

    Sometimes he suspects that everything after adolescence has been an elaborate diplomatic mission conducted on the boy’s behalf. The adult travels through the world collecting experiences, possessions, accomplishments, and relationships, periodically returning to the palace to report his findings.

    The boy listens politely.

    “Very impressive,” he says.

    “Now tell me about Honey Parker.”

  • The Glum Principle

    The Glum Principle

    One of the most unforgettable cartoon characters from my childhood was a tiny Lilliputian from The Adventures of Gulliver named Glum. Glum appeared to have been placed on earth for one purpose: to extinguish hope before it had a chance to embarrass itself. Whenever his friends devised a clever plan to escape disaster, Glum would clear his throat and deliver his familiar three-point sermon.

    “It’ll never work.”

    “We’ll never make it.”

    “We’re doomed.”

    Glum never offered an alternative. He didn’t solve problems. He protected them.

    As a child, I found him amusing. As an adult, I recognized him immediately.

    He lives inside me.

    He probably lives inside you.

    Glum is the patron saint of what I call The Glum Principle: the tendency of the inner saboteur to mistake pessimism for realism, undermining action before reality has rendered its verdict. Glum derives enormous comfort from certainty, particularly the certainty that everything is about to collapse. His pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By convincing everyone to surrender before the battle begins, he manufactures the defeat that later serves as evidence that he was right all along.

    Stephen Pressfield encountered the same character and gave him a different name.

    He called him Resistance.

    In The War of Art, Resistance is the invisible force that whispers, “Start tomorrow,” “You’re not talented enough,” or “Who do you think you are?” It is perfectly content for you to live a life of comfortable mediocrity, provided you mistake your surrender for prudence.

    Psychiatrist Phil Stutz identifies the same adversary in The Tools.

    He calls it Part X.

    Different vocabulary.

    Same miserable roommate.

    You never evict him. You merely learn to stop letting him hold the house keys.

    Every morning he wakes up eager to renegotiate yesterday’s victories. Every meaningful life is therefore less a destination than a daily engagement with the same familiar opponent. The battle itself becomes part of the point. Character is forged not by eliminating the inner saboteur but by repeatedly refusing to obey him.

    Religious traditions have been describing Glum for thousands of years.

    Judaism calls him the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. The struggle is real, but so is human responsibility. God has equipped us with sufficient moral strength, discipline, and wisdom to resist our lower impulses. Victory requires vigilance, habit, and obedience rather than supernatural replacement.

    Pauline Christianity offers a far darker diagnosis.

    Writing in Romans, Paul confesses that he repeatedly does the very things he hates and neglects the things he longs to do. His problem is not ignorance. It is inability.

    “I do not do the good I want,” he laments, “but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

    Paul’s Glum is more than a troublesome inclination.

    He is a tyrant.

    The human self has become so compromised that no amount of discipline, mindfulness, or moral exertion can overthrow him. What is needed is not better habits but a new nature—a kind of spiritual heart transplant accomplished through Christ.

    This marks one of Christianity’s great departures from many other traditions.

    Judaism, Stoicism, Buddhism, and much of modern self-help begin with the conviction that human beings, though flawed, possess the capacity to cultivate virtue through disciplined practice. Daily habits, mindful attention, moral training, and repeated acts of self-government gradually strengthen the better self.

    Paul is unconvinced.

    For him, the dragon cannot be domesticated.

    It must die.

    The debate has never really ended.

    One side believes the road to flourishing is paved with discipline.

    The other believes discipline alone merely teaches Glum better manners.

    That is why Romans remains one of history’s most unsettling books.

    It is, in many ways, the ultimate anti-self-help manual.

    It insists that the deepest problem is not that we lack better techniques.

    It is that the person trying to use those techniques is himself in need of redemption.