Cinemorphosis

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  • The Great Social Media Deconversion

    The Great Social Media Deconversion

    In 2008 I was doing power yoga in my office while listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy, on KFI 640. In the middle of discussing routers, spyware, and the eternal misery of Windows Vista, he casually remarked, “This Facebook thing is a big deal.”

    I had no idea what he meant.

    I wasn’t the sort of person who chased the latest technological revolution. I listened to Leo for a different reason. I loved hearing retirees call in with computers so old they belonged in an archaeological dig. They would ask whether they should keep a desktop that required thirty minutes to boot, wheezed like an emphysema patient opening Microsoft Word, and treated email as an Olympic event, or whether it was finally time to buy “one of these new computers.”

    Facebook barely registered on my radar.

    Then, in the summer of 2009, my wife was pregnant with our twin daughters. It occurred to me that Facebook might be a convenient way to share photos and updates with family and friends. So I created an account.

    Within weeks my friend list exploded like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

    I was enchanted.

    Perhaps this was the medium I had been waiting for all my life.

    Unfortunately, Facebook did not merely connect me to other people. It connected me to the most embarrassing parts of myself. My ego, which until then had lived quietly in the basement, burst upstairs carrying champagne.

    People would discover me.

    I would become famous.

    How many friends could I accumulate?

    How many likes?

    How many followers?

    Would humanity finally recognize my genius now that history had invented the proper delivery system?

    The intoxication was exquisite.

    That was seventeen years ago.

    Looking back, my relationship with Facebook has all the emotional contours of a failed marriage. There was the honeymoon, the infatuation, the passionate commitment, the slow accumulation of grievances, the disappointment, the resentment, and now something even colder than resentment.

    Contempt.

    Or perhaps futility.

    The old expression comes to mind: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

    Another comes from the Book of Acts, where the risen Christ asks Saul, “Why are you kicking against the goads?” Stop exhausting yourself fighting reality.

    That is how social media feels now.

    Not tragic.

    Pointless.

    Because the marriage was built on lies.

    The lies sounded persuasive enough.

    Metrics measure significance.

    Engagement proves value.

    Visibility creates influence.

    Influence creates meaning.

    If enough strangers notice you, your life has somehow become larger.

    It took me years to realize that every one of those propositions was counterfeit.

    The pursuit of attention slowly teaches us to manipulate others.

    Eventually it teaches us to manipulate ourselves.

    The more desperately we chase attention, the more anxious we become.

    The anxiety metastasizes into resentment.

    Soon we are no longer expressing ourselves.

    We are auditioning for an algorithm.

    Attention capture is not meaning.

    Attention capture is not love.

    Attention capture is not flourishing.

    One can dominate the internet and still become another version of Gollum, clutching a glowing ring instead of a precious one.

    A few days ago I watched a fitness YouTuber whose work I normally admire upload one of those interchangeable “What I Eat in a Day” videos. He microwaved leftovers. He poured cereal into a bowl. He assembled a few perfectly ordinary meals to reassure viewers that he was just like them.

    The video felt less like communication than contractual obligation.

    He looked exhausted.

    Not physically.

    Spiritually.

    As though the algorithm had shown up at his front door demanding another sacrifice.

    I watched perhaps thirty seconds before closing the window.

    I did it for his dignity.

    And for mine.

    Now I don’t know what to do with Facebook, Instagram, or my fifteen-year-old YouTube channel.

    They feel less like hobbies than reminders of a marriage that should have ended years ago.

    I still write on my blog.

    Almost nobody reads it.

    Wonderful.

    Obscurity has become strangely liberating.

    I write what genuinely interests me instead of what might seduce an algorithm into distributing me like digital fertilizer across the internet. I no longer feel compelled to manufacture outrage, optimize thumbnails, or package my thoughts into bite-sized dopamine pellets.

    The work belongs to me again.

    People often wonder what comes after divorce.

    The honest answer is that nobody knows.

    You spend a long time discovering who you are after years spent becoming someone else.

    I suspect millions of us are undergoing that same process with social media.

    We experienced the honeymoon.

    We believed the promises.

    We invested our identities.

    We discovered the betrayal.

    Now we are wandering through the emotional wreckage trying to remember who we were before engagement statistics became a measure of our worth.

    We are all, in one way or another, losing our religion.

    R.E.M. accidentally wrote the soundtrack for the algorithmic age.

    I have become convinced that social media has diminished us personally, culturally, politically, and spiritually. It rewarded vanity, monetized outrage, industrialized narcissism, and trained us to confuse visibility with virtue.

    But I have also become convinced that this era is ending.

    People are tiring of the performance.

    The masks have grown heavy.

    The applause no longer sounds convincing.

    Something new is approaching.

    Whether it will be better or merely different, I cannot say.

    I only know that the old marriage is over.

    And, for the first time in years, that feels less like a loss than a beginning.

  • The Dishwasher and the Soul

    The Dishwasher and the Soul

    People love to narrate themselves into virtue. They announce that they are resilient, compassionate, emotionally intelligent, enlightened. Fine. But character is not established by autobiography. It is established by collateral damage. The verdict is rendered not by the stories we tell about ourselves but by the people who must live with us.

    By that standard, I don’t receive flattering marks.

    I alienate people. Friendships wither. Members of my own family find me exhausting. I do not know how to repair whatever defect keeps reproducing these outcomes. Self-loathing only deepens the rut. It is like trying to escape quicksand by thrashing harder.

    For years my wife has insisted that I have Asperger’s, though I have never received a formal diagnosis. In 2013, I saw a psychiatrist who concluded that I had escaped my mother’s severe depression and bipolar disorder only to inherit a milder companion: dysthymia, a chronic, low-grade depression that rarely knocks you flat but seldom lets you stand fully upright. I eventually stopped seeing him after realizing that I seemed to be providing more entertainment than receiving treatment. I would leave his office lighter in wallet but not in spirit. The experience merely reinforced my suspicion that therapy, at least in my case, was proving more theatrical than therapeutic.

    So I became my own maintenance department.

    Routine is my antidepressant. I cling to it with the desperation of a fish clinging to water. Remove it, and anxiety rushes in to occupy the vacuum. Home becomes less a residence than a fortified monastery whose sacred relics are my kettlebells, exercise bike, piano, protein powder, creatine, and carefully arranged supplements. Every object reassures me that the machinery of the day can continue without surprise.

    Leaving this sanctuary, even for something as benign as a vacation, often feels less like recreation than exile.

    While other people return from holidays refreshed, carrying photographs and amusing anecdotes, I return as though I have survived a natural disaster. Friends ask, “How was your vacation?” I usually shrug because I honestly cannot answer. It dissolves into a hazy montage of disrupted routines, low-grade dread, and the relief of finally coming home. Rather than becoming more engaged with life, I retreat inward. I regress. I become emotionally unavailable. Sometimes I stay home to spare my family the burden of dragging me through another reluctant excursion. They enjoy themselves more, but they miss me all the same.

    That realization hurts.

    I often feel as though I am the heaviest burden my family carries. I bought us a home in a beautiful coastal suburb. The mortgage is gone. We enjoy financial security and enough discretionary income to live comfortably. Yet I cannot escape Christ’s unsettling question, slightly rewritten for my own circumstances: What does it profit a family to live in a lovely house if the husband and father carries conspicuous gaps in his emotional life?

    If there were a genuine cure, I would pursue it tomorrow.

    A retreat deep in the woods. An ayahuasca ceremony promising psychic rebirth. A religious conversion dramatic enough to rearrange the furniture of my soul. If someone could convincingly promise to transform me from an anxious, melancholy recluse into a man whose presence naturally enlarged the lives of others, I would sign the consent form before they finished explaining the side effects.

    Instead, the dishwasher beeps.

    In half an hour I’ll empty it, wipe down the counters, and make salmon, rice, and salad for my family. It is not redemption, but it is dinner.

    Perhaps this is where real life usually unfolds—not in miraculous transformations but in ordinary competence. I can contribute. I can keep the kitchen running. I can exercise. I can stay away from alcohol. I can show up for the responsibilities that lie directly before me, even if I stumble over the emotional ones that lie beyond them.

    There is an old wisdom about staying in your lane. It is not a cure, but it prevents unnecessary collisions.

    Good physical health is not salvation, but it helps. Financial stability is not happiness, but it removes many unnecessary sorrows. A clean kitchen does not heal the mind, but it gives tomorrow one less disorder to inherit.

    So, for now, gratitude remains my most reliable therapy—not because it erases my defects, but because it keeps them from becoming the only facts I recognize. It reminds me that a life can be imperfect without being worthless, that a man can remain unfinished without being beyond repair, and that sometimes the most meaningful victories are measured not in dramatic breakthroughs but in quietly making dinner when your mind insists you’ve accomplished nothing at all.

  • The Ghost at the End of My Block

    The Ghost at the End of My Block

    An unkempt, unemployed man in his sixties—I’ll call him D—lives on my street. He is painfully thin, wears a beard that seems less grown than surrendered to, and carries the thousand-yard stare of someone who has spent too many years trapped inside his own mind. He is the neighborhood’s resident ghost, the subject of whispered conversations held over hedges and driveways whenever his name comes up.

    I rarely see him anymore.

    With each passing year he seems to retreat another step from the world. According to my neighbors, he now walks his dog only after dark, as if daylight itself has become an adversary.

    The last time we spoke was more than a decade ago. He told me his mother had emigrated from Ukraine. She was still alive then but has since passed away. He admitted he struggled with clinical depression. Once upon a time he earned his living in real estate. He loved photography. He struck me as intelligent, thoughtful, even pleasant. Nothing about him suggested the caricature of the neighborhood eccentric.

    Depression, however, is not content merely to inhabit a person. Given enough years, it colonizes the landscape around him.

    D’s house looks less like a residence than a psychological self-portrait.

    Weeds have risen high enough to conceal much of the property, swallowing the front yard as if nature were quietly reclaiming it. Enormous rocks lie scattered across the lot—not arranged with the intention of landscaping but dumped haphazardly, as though an avalanche had paused just long enough to empty its pockets. A rusted car sits permanently marooned in the driveway, stripped of its engine, one of those eternal restoration projects that never progresses beyond the fantasy stage.

    Then there is the roof.

    Or rather, the absence of one.

    Instead of shingles, enormous black tarps have been stretched across the house like bandages wrapped around a wound too deep to heal. The place resembles less a home than a disaster site awaiting inspectors who never arrive.

    The neighbors tell me D has owned five yellow Labrador retrievers over the past twenty-five years.

    Each one has had exactly the same name.

    Reggie.

    Perhaps it is sentiment. Perhaps ritual. Or perhaps depression dislikes novelty and prefers the comforting illusion that nothing essential has changed.

    Reggie, unfortunately, is also a source of neighborhood diplomacy. D has a habit of letting him roam unleashed, which periodically inspires shouted exchanges with nearby homeowners who are less enchanted by canine freedom than D appears to be.

    Recently, the family next door began an ambitious renovation. They moved out for a year while contractors demolished and rebuilt much of their home at a cost north of half a million dollars.

    During one conversation, one of the neighbors revealed something I had never considered.

    The tarps.

    They aren’t merely ugly.

    They are loud.

    Every windy night they snap, crack, and whip against the roof structure with relentless fury, sounding less like construction material than a chorus of agitated ghosts auditioning for Poltergeist. Sleep becomes impossible.

    So the neighbors arrived at a remarkably practical conclusion.

    Since they were already spending roughly $600,000 rebuilding their own home, they decided to buy D a new roof.

    The cost?

    About $20,000.

    It is an act of generosity, certainly.

    It is also an investment in uninterrupted sleep.

    When you’ve already committed well over half a million dollars to creating your dream home, another twenty thousand begins to look less like charity than an effective noise-canceling device.

    Every neighborhood, it seems, has its own D.

    There is always one house that refuses to cooperate with the local mythology of upward mobility. Every freshly painted facade, every manicured lawn, every luxury SUV in the driveway quietly tells a story of competence, prosperity, and orderly lives. Then there is the one property that interrupts the narrative like an uncomfortable footnote. It reminds everyone that not every life can be renovated with quartz countertops, drought-tolerant landscaping, and a designer front door.

    Some houses broadcast success.

    Others testify to defeat.

    D’s house has become an architectural memoir of prolonged suffering, a place where depression has seeped from the mind into the soil, the weeds, the rusting car, and finally the roof itself.

    Replacing the tarps with shingles will not rewrite that story.

    A new roof cannot cure clinical depression. It cannot restore lost ambition, resurrect old dreams, or persuade a haunted man that tomorrow will be kinder than yesterday.

    But it can silence the ghosts.

  • The Authenticity Paradox

    The Authenticity Paradox

    Damascus is the mother of all superhero origin stories. Before Peter Parker is bitten by a spider or Bruce Wayne enters the Batcave, there is Saul of Tarsus riding toward Damascus with murder in his heart. He is not searching for truth. He believes he already possesses it. He is intent on hunting down followers of “The Way” and dragging them to their deaths. His path is one of certainty, violence, and righteous darkness.

    Then, against every instinct and every intention, his story is hijacked.

    A blinding light crashes into his world. The risen Christ—the very Savior whose followers Saul has dedicated himself to destroying—confronts him directly. “Why do you keep goading the ox?” the voice asks. Then comes the devastating revelation: “I am your Lord.”

    The encounter leaves Saul shattered. Blind. Disoriented. Helpless. For three days he sits in darkness while a far greater darkness collapses inside him. His old identity has suffered an internal earthquake. The architecture of his soul has cracked beyond repair.

    Then a stranger arrives.

    The man claims to have been sent by the Lord. More unsettling still, he addresses him not as the man Saul understands himself to be but as the man history will remember: Paul.

    The new identity feels like an insult.

    Saul wants nothing to do with this strange future. He wants his old certainties, his old mission, his old enemies. Like nearly every great hero, he is reluctant. He does not answer a call to adventure with enthusiasm but with resistance. He loves the familiar darkness more than the terrifying demands of the light.

    But the light proves stronger than his will.

    He can no longer goad the ox. He can no longer wage war against the truth that has invaded him. At last he surrenders, becoming Paul the evangelist, whose letters would shape Western civilization more profoundly than those of any emperor, philosopher, or statesman.

    Paul’s conversion reminds me of one of the strangest moments in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” After exhausting himself trying to remove Bartleby from his office, the narrator presses money into Bartleby’s hand in hopes that he will finally leave. Bartleby lets the money fall to the floor. Then the narrator confesses:

    “But it dropped to the floor, and then strange to say, I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of.”

    It is one of literature’s finest descriptions of divided desire.

    Like Paul, Melville’s narrator longs for change while simultaneously resisting it. He wants liberation, but only on terms that preserve the person he already is. He discovers that the obstacle standing in his way is not Bartleby but himself.

    Perhaps this is the hidden struggle behind every genuine transformation.

    Each of us carries within us a pillar of salt—a hardened identity built from habit, fear, pride, resentment, and old certainties. We mistake this calcified self for our true self because it has been with us for so long. Yet the longer we cling to it, the heavier it becomes. Eventually it drags us beneath the surface, where it is no longer an anchor but a tomb.

    Most of us never let go.

    The pillar of salt sinks us.

    But for the rare few who are not merely called but chosen, another possibility emerges. Their lives reveal what novelist Emmanuel Carrère sees at the heart of Paul’s Damascus encounter. Reflecting on Paul’s conversion, Carrère writes:

    “Paul was no longer himself; he was finally himself.”

    It is one of the deepest paradoxes of the spiritual life.

    We usually imagine authenticity as self-expression, the freedom to become more completely the person we already believe ourselves to be. Damascus turns that comforting assumption upside down. It suggests that our deepest self may be buried beneath the very identity we defend most fiercely. Before we can become who we truly are, we must relinquish the person we cannot imagine living without.

    Paul’s conversion thus reveals what might be called the Authenticity Paradox: the condition in which becoming one’s truest self first requires ceasing to be the person one believes oneself to be. Authenticity is not achieved by polishing the old self until it shines. It is achieved by surrendering the old self altogether, trusting that what feels like annihilation is, in fact, the beginning of a more truthful life.

  • Where Are You Coming From?

    Where Are You Coming From?

    The best-selling author Emmanuel Carrère is obsessed with what might be called narrative authority. He refuses to write in the third person. In fact, he claims he is incapable of it. He is drawn, as both writer and reader, to the intimate gravity of I. A first-person narrator does not merely present ideas; he presents the life that forged those ideas. Carrère follows such voices more willingly because they answer the question every audience silently asks before deciding whether to believe someone: Where are you coming from?

    That preference draws him to the Gospel writer Luke. What captivates Carrère is not that Luke throws open the gates of the New Testament with fanfare. Rather, Luke slips inside “through a small, hidden side door.” Through Luke’s quiet, observant voice, the New Testament becomes not a monument demanding reverence but a human story inviting investigation.

    Luke’s subject is Paul—the man who, more than any emperor, philosopher, or conqueror, shaped the moral and intellectual landscape of the West. Whether one reveres him or resents him is almost beside the point. In the marketplace of ideas, Paul won. His letters became the architecture upon which two millennia of Western Christianity would be built.

    Unlike the Gospels, Paul’s epistles expose an astonishing amount of their author’s interior life. Their pages read less like polished theological treatises than like relentless self-interrogations. The most influential missionary in history repeatedly drags his own soul into the light, subjects it to examination, and then offers the resulting X-ray to the world in the hope that others might recognize themselves within it.

    Paul’s physical appearance only heightens the paradox. Unlike Jesus, whose appearance remains a mystery, Paul emerges from early tradition with surprising clarity. He is short, stooped from chronic pain, prematurely bald, heavily bearded, and distinctly unimpressive. Carrère notes that painters often portray him with “a bulging forehead and eyebrows meeting above the nose,” giving him less the appearance of a saint than that of an exhausted scholar worn down by relentless suffering.

    His personality proves no less complicated. One moment he is magnanimous and disarmingly humble. The next he is blisteringly sarcastic, combative, or consumed by righteous indignation. At times he advances startlingly egalitarian ideas about spiritual equality; elsewhere he appears censorious toward women and eager to silence them. He can be generous, insecure, tender, arrogant, self-effacing, and overbearing—sometimes within the span of a single letter. If sanctity requires flawless likability, Paul fails spectacularly.

    Luke, by contrast, remains almost invisible. We are told nothing of his appearance. He leaves behind no psychological self-portrait. Yet Carrère finds him irresistible precisely because of this restraint. Luke was an educated physician steeped in Greek philosophy, a man who seems less interested in religious ecstasy than in understanding the human condition.

    Carrère imagines Luke arriving at the synagogue not as a pilgrim seeking salvation but as an intellectual searching for wisdom. He was fascinated by what Carrère calls “the long domestic quarrel between Israel and the God of Israel,” seeing in that struggle a metaphor for humanity itself: creatures perpetually sabotaging their own flourishing through laziness, vanity, impulsiveness, and moral confusion. Perhaps, Luke wondered, people trapped in this cycle could be redirected toward a life of discipline, aspiration, and virtue.

    For Luke, religion initially resembled philosophy more than faith. Carrère writes, “For Luke, going to the synagogue was less like embracing a religion than attending a philosophy class—just as when we practice yoga or meditation we become interested in Buddhist texts without feeling obliged to believe in Tibetan divinities or turn a prayer wheel.”

    Then Paul stood up to speak.

    At first, nothing sounded remarkable. Another preacher announcing another Messiah hardly deserved attention. Messianic claimants appeared with enough frequency to become almost routine.

    Then Luke noticed something extraordinary.

    Paul was not proclaiming that the Messiah would come.

    He insisted the Messiah had already come.

    Carrère imagines Paul declaring to the synagogue:

    “Jesus was the Christ. The inhabitants of Jerusalem and their leaders failed to recognize him, and by condemning him they fulfilled the prophets they claimed to honor. They mocked him. They condemned him without cause. They crucified him. But three days later God raised him from the dead.”

    The effect was electric.

    Every sermon seemed to split the audience into two irreconcilable camps. Some dismissed Paul as delusional or blasphemous. Others embraced his message with overwhelming enthusiasm, convinced they had witnessed history’s decisive turning point.

    Luke belonged to neither camp—not at first.

    Carrère imagines him lingering in the uncomfortable territory between skepticism and fascination. Paul’s claims offended his reason, yet they refused to leave his mind. Curiosity led to another conversation, then another journey, then another question, until skepticism slowly dissolved into conviction.

    Carrère imagines the physician tending to Paul’s battered body after beatings and imprisonments, dressing wounds while their conversations stretched late into the evening like long discussions in a quiet café. Paul became less a patient than a mentor. Luke listened. Questioned. Objected. Returned the next day. Gradually he found himself inhabiting Paul’s vision of reality.

    Whether any of these conversations occurred exactly as Carrère imagines is almost irrelevant. They reveal something equally important about Carrère himself.

    The Kingdom is as much an autobiography as it is historical reconstruction. Beneath its investigation of Luke and Paul lies Carrère’s own confession. He envies Luke. What writer would not? Luke enjoyed what every biographer dreams of: direct access to one of history’s most consequential figures. He could watch Paul think, question him face to face, observe his contradictions, and transform those encounters into a narrative that would outlive empires.

    Carrère recognizes another truth hidden inside Luke’s achievement.

    Persuasion makes us significant.

    Ideas alone rarely persuade. Before listeners evaluate our conclusions, they instinctively ask: Where are you coming from?

    Every opinion emerges from somewhere—from childhood wounds, intellectual struggles, humiliations, triumphs, conversions, failures, and the slow accumulation of experience. Without that story, convictions float weightlessly above the speaker, untethered from any recognizable human life.

    Paul understood this instinctively. He never merely announced doctrines. He told the story that produced them. He confessed his former persecution of Christians. He described his blindness on the road to Damascus. He recounted his imprisonments, failures, doubts, physical suffering, and relentless calling. His theology carried weight because it had been earned. Every argument arrived attached to a life.

    He hid nothing.

    He laid every card on the table.

    That, Carrère concludes, is the essence of Narrative Authority: the persuasive force that emerges when ideas grow organically from a coherent life story rather than appearing as detached abstractions. We trust those whose beliefs seem purchased through experience instead of assembled from borrowed opinions. Long before we judge what they believe, we judge whether they have honestly shown us the life that made belief inevitable.

  • The Conversion We Never Finish

    The Conversion We Never Finish

    Afflicted by depression, anxiety, and relentless religious doubt, Emmanuel Carrère wrote The Kingdom partly as an act of remembrance—a way of revisiting the years when belief and unbelief tore him apart with equal ferocity. He could summon every argument against faith. Years of therapy had supplied him with a formidable psychological vocabulary, while Nietzsche, Freud, and other skeptics stood ready to dismantle every religious impulse that arose within him.

    Yet every skeptical argument seemed to awaken an equally persuasive rebuttal.

    Nietzsche argued that religion is an escape from reality, a consoling fantasy that allows frightened creatures to imagine a God who knows their names and treasures their souls. Carrère’s reply is disarmingly simple: perhaps anxiety is not evidence against God but one of His instruments. Perhaps our restlessness exists precisely to drive us toward Him.

    The skeptic objects that religious conversion is merely a psychological escape hatch from despair.

    Carrère counters that despair itself may be God’s invitation to conversion.

    The debate becomes impossible to resolve because every objection is absorbed into the very faith it seeks to destroy.

    Yet Carrère eventually discovers that the greatest threat to his belief is not Nietzsche.

    It is Emmanuel Carrère.

    He confesses that he wants to believe too desperately. His longing for faith becomes evidence against the authenticity of that very faith. Like someone compulsively insisting that he is happy, the insistence itself begins to sound suspicious. The more urgently Carrère reaches for God, the more he wonders whether the reaching itself proves that God has already slipped away.

    That dilemma belongs to far more people than religious believers.

    It may describe the human condition itself.

    Our hunger for conversion explains, in part, why we go to the movies.

    For two hours we borrow another person’s destiny. We watch an ordinary soul undergo extraordinary transformation and momentarily imagine the same miracle awaiting us. We feel our throats tighten as Jor-El tells his son that he must become not merely Superman but a light to the world. For one luminous moment we are convinced that greatness, sacrifice, and moral courage are the only things that matter.

    Then the credits roll.

    The spell evaporates somewhere between the parking lot and the nearest café, where we resume discussing office gossip over coffee and cake. The desire for transformation was genuine.

    Its duration was not.

    New Year’s resolutions repeat the same ritual.

    Each January we announce that this year will be different. We join the gym. We buy immaculate workout clothes. We embrace a revolutionary diet and enthusiastically explain to friends how astonishingly “simple” the whole thing is. Six weeks later the gym card has migrated to the back of the wallet, the diet books have become decorative objects, and the only weight we’ve successfully lost is our enthusiasm.

    Social media has industrialized this cycle.

    Every week a new influencer appears bearing the latest gospel of self-reinvention. Follow this morning routine. Buy this supplement. Build this side hustle. Practice this mindset. Soon you will possess wealth, influence, discipline, admiration, and a jawline sharp enough to cut glass.

    Millions eagerly enroll in these digital revival meetings.

    Almost none experience resurrection.

    What they experience instead is rebranding.

    Life increasingly resembles a succession of false conversions.

    We repeatedly announce the beginning of a new chapter, only to abandon the manuscript after the novelty fades. We restart our lives the way aspiring novelists restart first drafts—full of magnificent intentions, derailed by boredom, distraction, or the irresistible glitter of the next shiny object.

    The modern self has become a serial convert without a church.

    We are forever renouncing one identity in favor of another, mistaking novelty for transformation and enthusiasm for character.

  • The G-Shock Boys

    The G-Shock Boys

    For decades he devoted himself to mechanical dive watches.

    His collection consumed tens of thousands of dollars, countless evenings on watch forums, and enough YouTube viewing to qualify as graduate work in horology. Every purchase promised permanence. Every new bezel, movement, and dial texture whispered that contentment was only one more acquisition away.

    Then, almost by accident, he bought a humble resin Casio G-Shock with Multiband 6 and Tough Solar.

    Everything changed.

    For the first time in his adult life, he glanced at his wrist and saw not merely the time, but the correct time. Alongside it sat the date and the day of the week, all delivered with effortless certainty. No winding. No resetting. No wondering whether the movement had drifted six or seven seconds since breakfast.

    He had quietly crossed a border.

    He had left the Kingdom of Approximate Time and entered the Republic of Accurate Time.

    The conversion brought unexpected peace.

    It also brought guilt.

    He felt as though he had betrayed lifelong companions—the mechanical-watch enthusiasts with whom he had shared triumphs, disappointments, and endless debates about lume, bezel action, and the superiority of one Swiss caliber over another. His social-media tribe suddenly felt like an abandoned religion. He experienced disorientation, grief, and the peculiar emotional wreckage that accompanies every genuine conversion.

    Confused, he confided in a trusted colleague.

    The man listened patiently and nodded.

    “I think you’re ready,” he finally said.

    “Ready for what?”

    “The House of Resin.”

    Perched atop one of the hills in Palos Verdes stood a sprawling Mediterranean mansion known only among initiates as The House of Resin.

    It existed for one purpose: helping newly converted souls orient themselves to life inside Accurate Time.

    Desperate, our hero made the pilgrimage.

    The front door swung open to reveal a portly, smiling gentleman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Sebastian Cabot. His cheerful eyes suggested that nothing in the universe surprised him anymore.

    “Welcome,” he said warmly. “I’m Jaunty.”

    The living room resembled an English country house designed by Casio. Bach cello suites floated through magnificent loudspeakers. Delicate porcelain cups brimmed with tea. Crackers of suspiciously exceptional quality circulated on silver trays.

    Around the room sat a dozen men.

    Every one of them wore a G-Shock.

    Every one of them looked profoundly uncomfortable, like survivors of a shipwreck who had somehow washed ashore in paradise but still missed the sinking vessel.

    After the tea had been poured and the crackers consumed, Jaunty’s smile disappeared.

    His posture stiffened.

    His eyes narrowed.

    “The time for pleasantries has ended.”

    Silence swallowed the room.

    “You are here because you have awakened. You have escaped Approximate Time, but you are not yet free. Freedom demands sacrifice.”

    He paused.

    “The first step is simple.”

    Another pause.

    “You will sell every mechanical watch you own.”

    A collective gasp swept through the room.

    “You will donate the proceeds to organizations that feed the hungry. Research them carefully. Find those worthy of your trust.”

    His voice softened.

    “You cannot carry two kingdoms on one wrist.”

    No one argued.

    The command possessed the quiet authority of Scripture.

    Within days the watches were gone.

    The strange thing was not the loss.

    It was what followed.

    Every man felt lighter.

    Younger.

    More awake.

    Many developed an overwhelming urge to walk for hours. During those solitary journeys, decades of buying, selling, flipping, chasing limited editions, and refreshing dealer websites replayed in vivid detail.

    They watched themselves as though observing strangers.

    Marionettes dancing on strings they had never noticed.

    As realization deepened, their pace quickened.

    Many found themselves crying.

    Not polite tears.

    Not cinematic tears.

    The deep, involuntary tears that arrive when an illusion finally surrenders.

    They no longer cared who saw them.

    The tears required no apology.

    The following week they returned.

    Each told essentially the same story.

    Jaunty nodded.

    “Excellent.”

    Then his expression darkened.

    “Do not mistake liberation for completion.”

    He explained that exhilaration would eventually give way to doubt, loneliness, and nostalgia. Recovery always progressed that way.

    Then he introduced Step Two.

    “You will train.”

    The men looked puzzled.

    “You will exercise four days each week. Lift weights. Swing kettlebells. Practice yoga. Climb ropes. Do calisthenics. I do not care what discipline you choose. Your body has spent years transporting your obsession. It is now time for your obsession to transport your body.”

    One participant timidly raised his hand.

    “Ever since selling my watches I’ve been walking two hours every day.”

    The others nodded enthusiastically.

    “So have we.”

    Jaunty smiled kindly.

    “Those are not workouts.”

    “What are they?”

    “Exorcisms.”

    The room fell silent.

    “They are necessary.”

    “But they do not count.”

    Within days the men discovered the irresistible simplicity of a twenty-five-pound kettlebell and an online instructor promising complete physical transformation through twelve exercises performed in a continuous one-hour circuit.

    Every garage became a monastery.

    Every kettlebell became a sacrament.

    By the third week something extraordinary began happening.

    Crows appeared.

    One landed on a fence and clearly announced,

    “Casio.”

    Another cried,

    “G-Shock.”

    A third declared,

    “Solar.”

    When the men nervously described these encounters, Jaunty beamed.

    “Entirely normal,” he assured them.

    “The crows always come.”

    “What should we do?”

    “Feed them breadcrumbs.”

    By the fourth week, no one arrived wearing ordinary clothes.

    Their bodies had changed.

    Their old wardrobes no longer fit—not physically or psychologically.

    Athletic clothing had become their natural attire.

    Their wrists displayed beloved G-Shocks with the quiet confidence formerly reserved for Swiss luxury.

    Jaunty surveyed them with unmistakable satisfaction.

    “You have completed your initiation.”

    He dimmed the lights.

    “For your graduation…”

    “…I have prepared a film.”

    The title appeared.

    THE G-SHOCK BOYS

    Part documentary.

    Part infomercial.

    Part religious testimony.

    It chronicled every stage of their transformation—from obsessive collectors imprisoned by luxury to cheerful disciples liberated by resin, solar charging, and atomic time.

    Against every expectation, the film became a worldwide sensation.

    Clips flooded social media.

    Millions watched.

    Soon the men found themselves traveling the globe, not to discuss watches, but to explain the strange freedom that arrived only after they stopped believing that another purchase could save them.

    They still wore watches.

    They had simply stopped asking them to tell them who they were.

  • Good Enough or As Good as It Can Be?

    Good Enough or As Good as It Can Be?

    Left to my own devices, I would eat like a monk with low standards and no culinary imagination. If I were a bachelor living alone, my menu would consist of oatmeal, yogurt, bananas, protein shakes, and peanut butter, repeated with liturgical regularity until death or scurvy intervened. Meal preparation, in my ideal world, should require almost no preparation and even less cleanup. If I can eat standing over the kitchen sink and spare myself the burden of washing a plate, I consider that a small triumph of civilization.

    Marriage and children have prevented me from fully indulging this philosophy.

    Fortunately for my nutritional health—and unfortunately for my laziness—other people insist on actual meals.

    My instinct toward optimization, however, resurfaces elsewhere. When planning family outings, my ideal destination is always the closest one. The fewer miles on the odometer, the happier I become. Beach picnic? Wonderful—as long as the beach is practically in the backyard. Restaurant? Excellent—as long as I don’t have to cross two freeways to reach it.

    Vacation travel follows the same principle.

    Five hours on an airplane is my absolute ceiling. Beyond that, my claustrophobia stages a hostile takeover of my personality. I stop resembling a husband on holiday and begin resembling Cinderella’s forgotten stepbrother, slowly decomposing into a resentful pumpkin somewhere over the Pacific.

    Clearly, I possess a strong instinct toward efficiency.

    Yet I have gradually realized that some parts of life cannot survive this instinct.

    An essay should never be merely good enough. It should be rewritten until every sentence earns its place and every paragraph justifies its existence. Likewise, a composer may spend years reshaping a single piece until it finally matches the elusive musical vision that first appeared in the imagination. The original spark deserves nothing less.

    That realization has led me to think that human beings generally organize their lives around one of two competing philosophies.

    The first is Optimization Ethics.

    Optimization Ethics seeks to maximize efficiency, profit, and measurable return while eliminating effort that produces diminishing rewards. It asks a relentlessly practical question:

    How good does this need to be?

    The second is Maximalist Ethics.

    Maximalist Ethics begins from a completely different premise. It holds that excellence possesses intrinsic worth. The highest obligation is not to satisfy expectations but to produce the fullest, richest, and finest work one is capable of, even when no customer notices, no employer rewards it, and no spreadsheet can justify the additional effort.

    Its governing question is equally simple:

    How good can this become?

    I encountered perhaps the clearest illustration of these competing philosophies while watching Mike Holst’s YouTube channel, This Watch, That Watch. Discussing whether Grand Seiko deserves its reputation, Holst makes an observation that reaches far beyond horology:

    “The key difference between Rolex and Grand Seiko is that Rolex generally makes a watch that is as good as it needs to be for the price. Grand Seiko chooses to make a watch that is as good as it can be for the price.”

    That may be one of the most insightful business observations I’ve heard in years.

    Rolex asks, What level of excellence justifies a $15,000 watch?

    Grand Seiko asks, What is the finest watch we know how to build for $15,000?

    Those are not merely different manufacturing strategies.

    They are different moral imaginations.

    Rolex operates according to what I would call Adequacy Culture. Its goal is to satisfy expectations with extraordinary consistency while carefully managing costs, margins, and brand prestige. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. It has produced one of the most successful luxury companies in history.

    Grand Seiko, by contrast, embodies Abundance Culture.

    Its instinct is to give more than circumstances require—to lavish finishing on surfaces few owners will ever examine, to polish components hidden from casual view, to pursue refinements that accountants would probably classify as unnecessary and customers may never consciously notice.

    One philosophy asks, Have we done enough?

    The other asks, Have we done our best?

    That distinction extends far beyond watches.

    A teacher can prepare the lecture that fulfills contractual obligations or the lecture students will remember twenty years later.

    A physician can treat symptoms or relentlessly pursue the best possible outcome.

    A novelist can submit a manuscript that is publishable or continue revising until every page feels inevitable.

    A marriage can consist of meeting expectations or continually exceeding them.

    If you are about to spend ten or twenty thousand dollars on a watch, you must decide which philosophy you wish to reward. Would you rather buy from a company whose guiding question is, What do we have to do? Or from one whose guiding question is, What is the finest thing we know how to make?

    Rolex has built one of the greatest brands in the world.

    Grand Seiko has built one of the greatest arguments for excellence.

    Those are not the same achievement. In the long run, they may not even belong to the same philosophy of life.

  • The Demon Lake and Heavenly Noodles

    The Demon Lake and Heavenly Noodles

    For the past two nights my subconscious has apparently dispensed with realism altogether and hired a surrealist screenwriter.

    The first dream began with an assignment that would have challenged even the most ambitious evolutionary biologist. I was ordered to travel millions of years into the past to locate one of my primordial ancestors—a prehistoric shark. Armed with nothing but a pair of pliers and inexplicable confidence, I extracted the shark’s razor-sharp teeth and painstakingly strung them into a necklace.

    This was no ordinary necklace.

    It had become my official faculty lanyard at the college where I teach.

    Somehow I lost it.

    The college president responded with the righteous fury usually reserved for embezzlement or plagiarism. She informed me that unless I journeyed back through evolutionary history, located the same prehistoric shark, and painstakingly reconstructed the necklace, I would be fired.

    The situation struck me as hopeless.

    How had I misplaced something so miraculous? How does one retrace one’s steps across millions of years? More importantly, how could anyone recreate a necklace that seemed less handcrafted than divinely manufactured? The shark’s teeth no longer felt like jewelry. They had become sacred relics, and I had managed to lose them somewhere between the Devonian Period and faculty parking.

    I awoke relieved that neither the necklace nor the disciplinary hearing had actually existed.

    Then came the following night.

    This time I found myself standing beside a dark lake surrounded by hundreds of people.

    Everyone issued the same warning.

    Do not disturb the water.

    A demon slept beneath the surface, they explained, and if awakened it would unleash unimaginable destruction upon us all.

    Unfortunately, I happened to be holding a very long stick.

    The human race has a long and distinguished history of ignoring good advice simply because the forbidden object happens to be within arm’s reach. Give Adam an apple, Pandora a box, or me a suspicious lake and an unnecessarily long pole, and curiosity will almost always defeat wisdom.

    Naturally, I stirred the water.

    The demon awoke.

    The earth shuddered. The air vibrated. Reality itself seemed to tremble as the creature announced its displeasure.

    People screamed.

    I was terrified.

    Yet there was one surprising consolation. I was frightened collectively rather than privately. Most of my nightmares isolate me inside my own panic, but this time hundreds of us shared the catastrophe. Terror, it turns out, becomes marginally more bearable when it has company.

    Eventually the demon grew bored with intimidating us and retreated once again into the depths.

    The dream then executed one of those abrupt transitions that only dreams consider perfectly logical.

    I stepped into an elevator.

    When the doors opened, I found myself in an ethereal kingdom devoted entirely to noodles.

    Not ordinary noodles.

    Transcendent noodles.

    Families, many of them from Taiwan, wandered the heavenly complex with unmistakable pride, as though civilization itself had culminated in this celestial noodle palace. They smiled with the quiet confidence of people who knew they possessed the finest cuisine in the universe.

    Hungry, I asked one family where I could find the noodle bar.

    Beaming, they pointed north.

    I confidently walked in precisely the direction that would ensure I never reached it.

    Instead, I became hopelessly lost, descended a spiral staircase, and somehow ended up asleep in the damp basement of a forgotten library.

    When I awoke inside the dream, I remembered the noodles.

    I was starving.

    Yet I had become too exhausted to climb back upstairs in search of them.

    So I settled for imagination.

    Unable to eat the heavenly noodles themselves, I pictured them so vividly that I convinced myself they might sustain me until I found the strength to move.

    Perhaps that final scene is the most revealing of all.

    Most of us spend our lives chasing some version of those heavenly noodles—peace, happiness, God, retirement, artistic achievement, perfect love, or simply the conviction that life has finally become what it was always meant to be. We receive directions. We begin confidently enough. Then we wander into the wrong corridor, descend a staircase we never intended to take, and wake up in the dusty basement of our own lives, too weary to continue.

    So we nourish ourselves with imagination until hope returns.

  • The Trapdoor Effect

    The Trapdoor Effect

    Alfred North Whitehead argued that religion arises from the desire to discover permanence in a transient world. Schopenhauer believed religion exists because we fear death. Tolstoy reached a more demanding conclusion. Death, he argued, forces us to make a choice: either surrender to despair or reshape our lives so that death cannot rob them of meaning. For Tolstoy, that reckoning culminated in religious conversion.

    Most of us encounter this reckoning in waves. There are seasons when mortality remains an abstraction, politely waiting its turn. Then there are moments when it barges through the front door and makes itself at home.

    The first time that happened to me was in 2004 with the death of football legend Reggie White. He had been born only a month after I was. At forty-three, he died from a cardiac arrhythmia related to sleep apnea. His death shook me, but I eventually regained my footing.

    Then came Lance Reddick.

    His death in 2023 hit me with far greater force. Reddick was sixty—my age. On screen he projected effortless authority. He played towering, intimidating police officers, wore a Tag Heuer as Chief Irvin Irving in Bosch, and somehow combined physical power with artistic refinement as an accomplished jazz pianist. He seemed built to endure. Seeing a man who embodied such strength simply vanish was profoundly disorienting. Nearly every day for the past three years, his death has crossed my mind.

    As if that weren’t enough, Facebook has become an obituary page for my adolescence.

    High school classmates—people who were posting vacation photos, political opinions, and pictures of their grandchildren only weeks earlier—suddenly reappear as memorial tributes. Healthy faces become framed portraits. Birthday wishes become eulogies. A life that looked perfectly ordinary on Tuesday has become a remembrance by Friday.

    The algorithm has quietly become an undertaker.

    Against that backdrop, my own routines begin to feel faintly absurd.

    There I am on my exercise bike, obsessed with burning exactly seven hundred calories in under an hour. I calculate how many grams of omega-3 a can of salmon will contribute to lunch. I debate whether next week’s garage workout should include walking lunges with twenty-pound kettlebells. I fine-tune my health strategy with the seriousness of a NASA engineer.

    And yet another part of me whispers that I am merely organizing deck chairs above a collapsing floor.

    At times I feel consumed by what I call The Trapdoor Effect: the unsettling awareness that beneath the routines of ordinary life—planning meals, exercising, paying bills, booking vacations, arguing over cholesterol, buying retirement clothes—lies an invisible trapdoor that may open without warning. We behave as though the future belongs to us, when in fact we possess nothing more than a reasonable expectation that tomorrow will resemble today.

    That expectation is comforting.

    It is also, perhaps, life’s most necessary illusion.