Cinemorphosis

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  • The Salvation Hustle

    The Salvation Hustle

    You reach a point in life when everything feels desperate. Losing weight will save you from dying in your bed at night from sleep apnea. Writing a publishable book or viral essay will save you from being both irrelevant and useless. Making a viral video will do the same. Embarking on a successful podcast will keep you mentally alive and “part of the conversation.” Starting your own restaurant featuring your grandmother’s brisket with gravy made from a secret family recipe will put you on the map and change what it means to enjoy good brisket. Become a yoga instructor and open your own studio to help people reinvent themselves in ways no one could have imagined. You’re special, dammit, and you’re going to prove it. You just need to work harder. So you must do this. You must do that. Make more sacrifices. Get on the true path. Never take your eyes off the prize.

    But a voice breaks through your insanity and tells you that you’re on a fool’s errand. You’re trying to save your life. Deep down, you know you are losing it.

    That same voice says: Let go. Surrender to the things you can’t control. Don’t live out other people’s fantasies of success. Don’t think fame and popularity will make you whole. Don’t confuse fame and popularity with love. It’s not love. It’s desperation.

    So you retire your delusions. You realize that all the time and energy invested in your various mirages were killing you. You were making a bad investment. Take stock. Assess the damage. You become certain that it’s time to abandon your many chimeras and start from scratch. Use your time and energy on projects rooted in sanity, projects that might actually bear fruit.

    The problem is, you don’t have a clue what these new projects will be. You’ve lived in a fever dream for years, perhaps decades. Where do you begin?

    Such is the existential challenge presented in Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting: The Surprise Benefits of Opting Out. She observes that too many of us spend enormous amounts of desperate energy auditioning for the role of superstar—the venerated, successful person who sets records and raises the bar in whatever field we pursue, believing that this prized status will make us whole and happy. We create unrealistic expectations and often head down the wrong path. Then we become so exhausted from pursuing our dreams that we no longer have enough distance to assess whether those dreams are even viable.

    Crouse uses the metaphor of a duck to describe this desperate period of her life: “gliding along on the surface while my legs churned furiously below.” That brief description perfectly captures the life of quiet desperation described by Henry David Thoreau. Always auditioning for some desirable role, we glide along on the surface while below our legs churn furiously in pursuit of some fruitless endeavor.

    Crouse argues that we should take stock of all that furious churning and, when necessary, put an end to it. It’s called quitting. Contrary to society’s condemnation of “the quitter” as someone who lacks perseverance, the real character flaw may be the refusal to quit: cowardice. You need the courage to interrogate the results of your endeavors and ask whether those results merit perseverance. In some cases, quitting can be a good thing. Crouse offers an “alternative definition” of quitter from the Middle French: “to set free.”

    All her life, Crouse confesses, she has been a high achiever, fiercely competitive, always pushing herself to the limit and loath to interrupt her path to glory. When an injury threatened her athletic training, she’d forego the doctor and take an Advil instead. Late-night runs were aided by GPS. When her grandmother died, she didn’t tell her team for fear that it would compromise their performance.

    Looking back at the ways she pushed and punished herself, Crouse questions the wisdom of these often ruthless efforts. Her self-interrogation became serious after she had two children and realized she didn’t want to pass on her “darker types of perseverance” to them. Self-abuse is one thing. Teaching your children the habits of self-abuse crosses the line.

    When the forces of ambition are no longer part of your flourishing but have become a dark pact with fear and desperation, it may be time to abandon ship. It may be time to move on.

  • What If Nobody Shows Up?

    What If Nobody Shows Up?

    I know where my greatest reach is. A blog post might get a dozen readers. A ten-minute video essay about philosophy, retirement, materialism, addiction, or my twenty-five-year enthusiasm for timepieces can get a few thousand views. If I want to engage with a larger audience, the evidence is fairly clear: I should take more of my writing and turn it into video essays.

    After I retire, I’ll have more time to do this. I could become, for lack of a less embarrassing term, a YouTuber essayist. But it strikes me as dreadfully presumptuous to assume I could pull that off. I see five major impediments: desperate content mining, narcissism drift, mukbang-hangout syndrome, performance anxiety, and algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    The first problem is the demand for consistent content. Suppose I decide to make two fifteen-minute videos a week. Where does all that material come from? Inevitably, I start mining my own life. My anxious personality has provided me with plenty of comic misadventures, but I doubt it can reliably produce two worthwhile episodes every week.

    I see talented YouTubers run into this problem all the time. They need material, so they start digging toward the bottom of the barrel. A minor controversy becomes a major event. A molehill gets the full mountain treatment. Out comes the obligatory reaction video. Or we get some cutesy, self-referential meditation on the human condition that exists mainly because Thursday arrived and Thursday requires content.

    I know myself well enough to recognize the danger. The moment I catch myself digging through the dregs for “just something to say,” I’ll become too annoyed with myself to say it.

    The second problem is narcissism drift. You’re on camera. You’re talking about yourself. You’re watching yourself talk about yourself. You become the star of a program devoted largely to the continuing adventures of you.

    At some point, you have to look at yourself and ask, “What’s the big deal here? You’re just some schmuck complaining that somebody parked with a bumper sticking into your driveway.”

    Not every irritation is an essay. Not every confession deserves an audience. Not every personal experience contains some hidden philosophical treasure waiting to be excavated.

    My rule has to be simple: the personal story must lead to something universal. If it never escapes my own navel, it doesn’t deserve to be uploaded. Following that rule probably means I won’t make two videos a week. Maybe I’ll make one a week. Maybe one every two weeks. That seems preferable to manufacturing material simply because the channel needs feeding.

    The third problem is what I call mukbang-hangout syndrome. At some point, the creator stops producing meaningful content and starts hanging out with the audience. The channel becomes a parasocial living room. People eat, chat, open packages, answer questions, and keep one another company. The content is the hanging out.

    I can’t see myself doing this, partly because I don’t have the ego for it. Why would people want to hang out with me?

    My cousin Pete in Studio City recently said, “Jeff, you’re going to be sixty-five next month. Let’s have a big party.”

    I told him, “Pete, let me explain something about me. I don’t have the kind of ego that makes big birthday parties possible. The thought of dozens of people driving from afar bearing gifts to celebrate my birthday makes me feel chagrined and socially awkward. Let’s keep it small.”

    If I can barely tolerate the idea of holding court at my own birthday party, I’m certainly not going to hold court on YouTube while eating noodles.

    The fourth problem is performance anxiety. Few things are more demoralizing than uploading a video and watching it fail in real time. You get a spattering of views. Then YouTube helpfully sends you a notice: “This video is not performing as well as your previous videos.”

    I mentally translate this as: “Fix it, loser.”

    You start imagining the YouTube police arriving at your house to ask why you uploaded something so unpopular that you’ve become a liability to the platform.

    A poorly performing video feels like the grand opening of a restaurant where nobody shows up. The linen tablecloths are pressed. The napkins are folded. The menus are ready. The doors open.

    Nothing.

    Eventually, you want to turn off the lights, pack a suitcase, and check into an undisclosed hotel.

    And this leads to the fifth and most serious problem: algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    Once you become anxious about performance, you start trying to please the algorithm. You notice what gets rewarded and begin changing your work accordingly. Out comes the Shock-Face Thumbnail, with your eyes bulging as though you just put your hand on a hot stove. Then comes the Catastrophe Title: “I Made a HUGE Mistake!” Then the False Binary: Seiko or Citizen?

    The more these tactics work, the greater the temptation to repeat them.

    Eventually, you risk becoming less like yourself and more like the algorithm. You’re no longer asking what you genuinely want to say. You’re thinking about audience capture, retention, thumbnails, titles, hooks, and whatever else might earn another burst of YouTube confetti.

    At that point, the algorithm isn’t merely distributing your work. It is changing your brain.

    Looking at these five impediments makes a respectable case for not doing any of this.

    But there are two important counterarguments.

    First, I’ve spent the last ten years on my channel developing ideas about addiction, consumerism, timepieces, aging, and the stages of life. It would be foolish to throw away everything I’ve built simply because I’m frightened by the traps of becoming a YouTuber. I already have a body of material. Retirement will give me more time to develop it.

    Second, video gives me something that writing alone cannot. I’m physically present. I work from an outline or partial script, but I also improvise. My voice, body language, facial expressions, hesitations, peculiar phrases, and occasional mistakes become part of the essay.

    This matters more to me as Artificial Intelligence spreads.

    I call it the Human-Fingerprint Premium: the more synthetic expression surrounds us, the more valuable unmistakably human expression becomes. AI can generate oceans of polished language. What it cannot duplicate is the exact experience of a particular human being sitting before a camera, thinking through an idea and occasionally surprising himself with what comes out of his mouth.

    That may become increasingly valuable.

    So I’m going to make an earnest attempt at video essays after retirement. I don’t know how often I’ll make them, and I don’t want the demands of YouTube to determine the schedule. The essay has to justify the video, not the other way around.

    Still, there is one reality I can’t escape. Running a YouTube channel is a lot like running a restaurant.

    You can believe in what you’re serving.

    But the place stays open only as long as people show up.

  • 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?

  • The Waiting List for Napkin Folders

    The Waiting List for Napkin Folders

    One of the most valuable ideas in Steve Lopez’s retirement memoir Independence Day is that a meditation on retirement eventually becomes a meditation on something much larger: What does it mean to remain fully alive?

    Lopez keeps circling back to an answer that complicates the conventional retirement fantasy. Being fully alive is intimately connected to being useful to someone other than yourself. We don’t flourish merely because we possess freedom, comfort, entertainment, or an empty calendar. We need some evidence that our presence in the world matters.

    Call this the Useful-Self Principle: Human beings have a deep psychological need to exercise their abilities in ways that benefit others. Our inherent worth does not depend upon our productivity, but our sense of vitality often depends upon knowing that something is better because we showed up.

    Lopez considers this idea through the extraordinary example of Hedda Bolgar, a psychologist who continued working until she was 102. She told him, “What I grew up with was, if there’s an unmet need in this world, you try to meet it, and if there’s a problem, you try to solve it.”

    There is an entire philosophy of life packed into those two sentences.

    Bolgar didn’t regard the world as a giant resort constructed for her personal gratification. She looked outward. Where is the need? Where is the problem? What can I do about it?

    Seen this way, retirement is a fairly narrow administrative concept. You retire from a job. You leave the classroom, hospital, office, factory, courtroom, newsroom, or whatever institution employed you for thirty or forty years. You surrender the title, paycheck, meetings, deadlines, performance evaluations, and passwords you can never remember.

    But you don’t retire from the human condition.

    The deeper obligation remains: escape the gravitational pull of narcissistic indifference, discover what you’re capable of doing, and connect those abilities to something the world needs.

    Bolgar died at 103. Her longevity is remarkable, but the number isn’t the most interesting thing about her life. More important was the fact that she remained engaged with other people almost until the end. Her usefulness gave her an identity that survived the conventional expiration date of a career. She had somewhere to direct herself.

    I think about my grandfather.

    He had been politically active throughout his life. He marched with longshoremen in San Pedro in defense of union rights and participated in similar forms of activism. He had spent decades believing that citizenship required more than sitting in a chair and complaining about the government.

    Then, at eighty, he fell.

    His body never completely recovered. Eventually he entered a senior-care home in Palos Verdes. I visited him at least once a week until he died at eighty-five.

    What tormented him wasn’t merely physical decline.

    He hated feeling useless.

    He looked around at the other residents and recognized the same despair in them. Their meals arrived. Their medications arrived. Their laundry was done. People cleaned their rooms, changed their sheets, pushed their wheelchairs, organized their activities, and watched over them.

    Everything was being done for them.

    That sounds like care, and of course it was. But there was another side to dependency that became increasingly visible to my grandfather: almost nothing was being asked of them.

    Then he discovered a job.

    The cafeteria needed residents to fold napkins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

    Napkins.

    Of all the grand human enterprises—building bridges, teaching children, performing surgery, defending workers, composing symphonies—we are talking about folding pieces of cloth before somebody eats meatloaf.

    And there was a waiting list.

    That waiting list has stayed with me because it reveals the Useful-Self Principle in its most concentrated form. Those residents weren’t desperate for napkins. They were desperate to be needed.

    Give me something to do.

    Let somebody depend upon me.

    Let there be one small corner of this institution that functions differently because I am here.

    When opportunities for usefulness become scarce, even folding a napkin can acquire dignity.

    I remember another moment in that cafeteria. A woman in a wheelchair who appeared to have dementia saw me and suddenly began shouting. She wanted me to rescue her. Take me out of here. Get me away from this godforsaken place.

    I looked at her and tried to reassure her. I told her everything would be okay.

    She knew I was lying.

    She was trapped, and some part of her understood it. What frightened her wasn’t simply the building. Her world had contracted. Other people determined where she lived, when she ate, where she went, and what happened next. She had become dependent upon strangers for the ordinary machinery of existence.

    I don’t know what remained intact inside her mind, and I don’t want to romanticize dementia or pretend that usefulness could have rescued her from neurological decline. But the memory has always represented something larger to me: the terror of becoming entirely acted upon rather than retaining the ability to act upon the world.

    That distinction becomes increasingly important as we age.

    The Useful-Self Principle should never be confused with the cruel proposition that human beings earn their worth through productivity. A bedridden person has no less value than a surgeon. A person with dementia does not become less human because she can no longer contribute as she once did.

    Human worth is unconditional.

    But the experience of usefulness is something different. It is one of the ways we feel our connection to other people. We teach. We repair. We cook. We listen. We volunteer. We write. We mentor. We drive someone to an appointment. We watch a grandchild. We call a lonely friend. We fold the napkins.

    This is why usefulness should not be treated as the broccoli of life—the dreary obligation we endure before finally earning the cheesecake of retirement.

    Usefulness is not the broccoli.

    It is part of the feast.

    The great opportunity of retirement isn’t merely that nobody tells you what to do anymore. It is that you can finally ask a better question:

    What needs doing that I am still capable of doing?

    Hedda Bolgar kept answering that question until she was 102.

    My grandfather understood its importance when he watched elderly people compete for the privilege of folding napkins.

    Perhaps that is one of retirement’s most important lessons. We spend decades dreaming about the day when nobody will need anything from us.

    Then the day arrives.

    And we discover how desperately we want to be needed.

  • Hell Insurance and the Problem of Love

    Hell Insurance and the Problem of Love

    I have struggled with the hell doctrine since the age of seventeen. When Francis Xavier preached Christianity in Japan, some converts reportedly wept through the night after learning that family members who had died outside the faith were condemned to eternal hell. I understood something of that anguish when I encountered Christianity in 1979. My new Christian friends told me that my Jewish relatives were in hell. In the next breath, they assured me that Jesus loved me. I had trouble reconciling the two propositions. I wasn’t feeling the love.

    Around 1981, after reading Erich Fromm’s critique of fundamentalist religion, I experienced an enormous release. I felt liberated from what Alfred North Whitehead, in Religion in the Making, describes as the image of an evil God. The relief was so powerful that it felt almost religious itself, as if an immense weight had been lifted from my chest. Over the years, I came to call that experience Fromm Night, a shorthand for an emotional and spiritual liberation too complicated to summarize every time I referred to it.

    This is where my attempts to return to Christianity become painful. Conversion can seem to require me to repudiate Fromm Night—the very experience that once restored my psychological and moral health. To accept orthodox Christianity, I seem required to return to the anguish of those Japanese converts and call that anguish truth. My Jewish relatives are lost. Their suffering is eternal. My horror at this doctrine is something I must overcome. That, presumably, is my cross to bear.

    And this is the love of Jesus. This is the light. This is the true path. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through him.

    But I keep encountering a problem that I cannot bully myself into resolving. Suppose I force myself to bow before Jesus. Is submission the same thing as love? If some part of me remains horrified by what I am required to believe, can I truthfully say that I love Jesus with all my heart, mind, and soul? If accepting Christ requires me to suppress Fromm Night, what exactly have I accepted—Jesus, or my fear of being wrong about Jesus?

    These questions lead me toward still more disturbing ones. Is Jesus cruel? Is orthodox Christianity cruel? Or have I misunderstood Christianity so profoundly that I have mistaken a human theology of exclusion for the person of Jesus himself?

    Yet the easy escape doesn’t satisfy me either. I don’t want to manufacture a domesticated Christianity stripped of every difficult doctrine until Jesus becomes little more than a dispenser of therapeutic reassurance. If Christianity is true, I want to confront what it actually claims, not dilute it into spiritual pablum because the harder version frightens me.

    So I remain caught between two powerful experiences. One tells me that escaping a theology of eternal punishment was among the great liberations of my life. The other tells me not to dismiss Jesus merely because Christianity makes demands upon me that I find unbearable.

    I am still trying to understand spiritual reality. I have not given up. There are profound aspects of Jesus that continue to draw me. Part of me longs to relinquish the selfish ego, turn outward, serve others, forgive, sacrifice, and discover whether that really is the path toward a fuller life.

    But the contradiction remains. I cannot make myself forget Fromm Night, nor can I make myself stop looking toward Jesus.

    That ambivalence is not an intellectual puzzle I occasionally entertain. It has been one of the enduring torments of my spiritual life.

  • 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.

  • No One Wants Your Beautifully Written Blog Post

    No One Wants Your Beautifully Written Blog Post

    As I have continued writing my blog and adapting some of those pieces into video essays for YouTube, I have begun to understand that writing and video are not simply two delivery systems for the same material. They make different demands on an idea, attract radically different audiences, and increasingly occupy different positions in a culture saturated with algorithmic and AI-generated language.

    The first lesson is what I call the Medium Stress Test. An idea that works perfectly well as a blog post may die the moment I imagine myself sitting in front of a camera talking about it for eight minutes. Writing gives an idea certain protections. A reader can stop, reread a sentence, skim a paragraph, or admire an interesting digression. Video is less forgiving. The subject needs momentum. It needs stakes. It needs a reason for someone not to click on a video of a bear breaking into a Subaru.

    This makes the video essay a useful test of my own material. Before I record, I find myself asking harder questions. Is there really an idea here? Is there tension? Does the argument develop? Is there something at the end that wasn’t obvious at the beginning? The camera is a ruthless editor. It stares back at me without encouragement and asks the question every writer would prefer to avoid: Is this actually interesting?

    That pressure is good for me. Video forces me to compress, sharpen, and dramatize ideas that might have survived comfortably on the page in a more leisurely form. In that sense, making videos does not compete with my writing. It interrogates it.

    The second lesson is harder for someone who has spent most of his life teaching writing to accept: people are far more willing to watch than read.

    A blog post that receives twenty or thirty visits over the course of a month can become a video that receives more than a thousand views in twenty-four hours. These numbers are not subtle. They do not require advanced statistical analysis. The audience has voted with its eyeballs.

    I could respond by lamenting the death of reading, shaking my fist at TikTok, and retreating into my study with a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. That might be emotionally satisfying, but it would not alter the numbers. If I want my ideas to travel beyond a small circle of dedicated readers, I have to reckon with the culture that exists rather than the one I would prefer to exist.

    But I don’t think the migration from prose to video can be explained entirely by shrinking attention spans. Something has also happened to written language itself.

    Call it Linguistic Flattening.

    We now inhabit an environment in which algorithms reward familiar forms of expression while generative AI can manufacture competent prose in industrial quantities. Certain words, rhythms, transitions, metaphors, and argumentative structures circulate so widely that they begin to lose their fingerprints. The writing may be polished. It may be grammatically impeccable. It may even be clever. Yet increasingly it produces the eerie sensation that you’ve read it before.

    Social media accelerates the process. A successful phrase gets repeated, imitated, parodied, optimized, and reproduced until language that once seemed fresh acquires the smoothness of a pebble handled by ten thousand people. Generative AI adds another machine to this process. It absorbs rhetorical patterns and reproduces variations of them at enormous scale. What begins as voice becomes mannerism; mannerism becomes formula; formula becomes cliché.

    This does not mean great writing will disappear. A writer such as Helen Lewis can still attract a large readership because readers recognize a particular intelligence behind the prose. But even a writer of her stature can reach vastly more people by appearing on a popular podcast that subsequently circulates on YouTube. The contemporary audience increasingly wants not merely the argument but the person making the argument.

    This leads to the third lesson, and perhaps the most important one for me: the Embodied-Fingerprint Principle.

    When I write a blog post, readers encounter my language. When I make a video, they encounter me.

    My voice enters the argument. So do my cadence, facial expressions, pauses, gestures, irritations, hesitations, and improvisations. I may begin with a script, but I inevitably depart from it. A sentence occurs to me in the moment. I emphasize a word differently than I expected. I become amused by my own example. Something happens between the prepared language and the person speaking it.

    That something is difficult to reproduce.

    Generative AI can imitate prose styles. Algorithms can identify successful formats. Other writers can borrow rhetorical devices. But the peculiar combination of a person’s face, voice, timing, vocabulary, temperament, physical presence, and spontaneous thought constitutes something closer to an individual fingerprint.

    This may become increasingly important as artificial intelligence makes polished language cheap. For most of human history, a well-written essay provided reasonably strong evidence that someone had sat alone and struggled to produce it. That assumption is disappearing. A perfectly competent thousand-word essay can now materialize in seconds.

    Video changes the evidentiary equation. There is a human being sitting in front of you, inhabiting the language.

    The Embodied-Fingerprint Principle therefore suggests that the apparent limitation of video is actually its advantage. Ideas cannot be separated cleanly from the imperfect human creature delivering them. The body becomes part of the authorship.

    This realization changes the way I think about my YouTube videos. I originally regarded them as adaptations of my writing, a secondary format for people who would rather watch something than read it. I now think that hierarchy may be wrong. The video essay is its own form, and it allows me to do something the blog cannot fully accomplish: combine written language with embodied presence.

    The Medium Stress Test makes the ideas stronger. Linguistic Flattening makes distinctive written language harder to preserve. The Embodied-Fingerprint Principle gives me a way to resist that flattening by putting the person back inside the prose.

    So I will continue writing. I need writing to discover what I think.

    But increasingly, I may need video to prove that someone is still there doing the thinking.

  • My Master Control Center Has No Control

    My Master Control Center Has No Control

    I love sitting inside a premium automobile because the dashboard permits me, briefly, to believe I have been entrusted with something more consequential than driving to Costco.

    The displays glow. The gauges awaken. Climate control maintains the cabin at precisely seventy-one degrees. Cameras watch my blind spots. Radar measures the distance between me and surrounding vehicles. A satellite knows where I am even when I don’t. The center display resembles something Boeing might install in a modest interplanetary spacecraft.

    I settle into the driver’s seat and survey my domain.

    This is my Master Control Center.

    For a few glorious moments, I am Captain Kirk.

    Then the light turns green.

    The woman in front of me doesn’t move because she is staring at her phone, presumably receiving information of greater importance than the traffic signal directly above her windshield. I wait. She continues texting. The man behind me cannot see her, so he concludes that I am the idiot and begins pounding his horn.

    Now I am trapped between two strangers whose behavior I cannot control: one oblivious, the other enraged.

    My Master Control Center has become a $40,000 waiting room.

    So much for command.

    The same fantasy takes hold when I sit at my computer. My silver Mac mini is an exquisite little machine, a futuristic square with rounded corners smaller than a paperback. It feeds two twenty-seven-inch 4K monitors. In front of them sits my six-pound aluminum mechanical keyboard, an instrument substantial enough to survive a direct artillery strike.

    I lower myself into the chair.

    Again, the feeling arrives.

    Master Control Center.

    Two enormous screens await my instructions. Chrome launches instantly. Documents synchronize across the cloud. I can access libraries, maps, financial accounts, newspapers, artificial intelligence, satellite photographs, and most of the accumulated knowledge of civilization without leaving my chair.

    Then I decide to order a burrito from Chipotle.

    The website wants me to create an account.

    I enter a password.

    Rejected.

    Apparently, ordering carnitas now requires the cryptographic sophistication of a NATO intelligence officer. The password must contain at least twelve characters, one capital letter, one lowercase letter, three numbers, an obscure punctuation mark, the blood type of my maternal grandfather, and a hieroglyph unavailable on my keyboard. It cannot resemble any password I have used since 1987, contain an actual word, or be remembered by the human brain.

    I try again.

    Rejected.

    I am sitting behind two 4K monitors with enough computing power to help design a suspension bridge, and I cannot obtain guacamole.

    By now I’ve lost my appetite.

    So much for control.

    This recurring humiliation points to something I call the Master Control Delusion: the belief that sufficiently sophisticated equipment, information, planning, and preparation can place us at the controls of our lives.

    Modern life encourages this fantasy because it gives us extraordinary control over trivial things. I can regulate the temperature inside my automobile to a single degree. I can synchronize a wristwatch to an atomic clock in Colorado. I can watch my retirement account fluctuate by the dollar. I can determine how many calories I burned on an exercise bike, how many grams of protein I consumed at lunch, and exactly how many minutes it will take me to drive to Costco.

    All these measurements create the intoxicating sensation that someone is in charge.

    Me.

    Retirement may be the Master Control Delusion’s final examination.

    You know retirement is coming, so you prepare. You fill out forms for months. You email HR so many times that the benefits coordinator becomes one of the most enduring relationships in adult life. You calculate pension income and net cash flow. You investigate Medicare. You take your omega-3s and magnesium. You exercise. You adhere to something vaguely resembling a Mediterranean diet. You consult financial advisers. You read books.

    Eventually, you begin to feel that you have gotten your ducks in a row.

    There they are.

    The ducks.

    Perfectly aligned.

    Steve Lopez does his version of this in Independence Day. Trying to understand retirement before surrendering himself to it, he consults Nancy Schlossberg, the psychologist and author of Retire Smart, Retire Happy. If retirement has a Sherpa, Schlossberg qualifies. She has spent decades studying how people negotiate transitions, and she identifies several kinds of retirees.

    Lopez recognizes himself as a Continuer. He doesn’t intend to stop using the abilities he spent a lifetime developing. He will carry his skills into retirement, remain engaged, and find new ways to be useful.

    Excellent.

    Another switch illuminated on the Master Control Center.

    Lopez also establishes a more personal priority. Whatever else happens after retirement, he wants to remain close to his grown children.

    This seems eminently reasonable.

    Schlossberg does not reassure him.

    She pauses.

    Then she tells him, in effect, that even the plans occupying the top shelf of our lives remain vulnerable to circumstances we cannot anticipate. Retirement changes routines, relationships, assumptions, identities. Children move. Spouses change. Friends disappear. Bodies malfunction. People die. Other people unexpectedly enter our lives.

    Schlossberg knows this not merely because she has studied retirement but because she has survived it.

    She lost her husband. She could not have predicted that afterward she would develop a close relationship with another man. Then, five years later, that man died too. At ninety-one, after a lifetime studying human transitions, Schlossberg still cannot tell you what will happen next.

    And during her conversation with Lopez, her phone rings.

    It’s her latest boyfriend.

    I love this detail.

    The woman who has devoted her professional life to mapping transitions is herself living a life that refuses to stay on the map.

    That is the Master Control Delusion demolished in a single telephone call.

    The lesson isn’t that planning is foolish. Quite the opposite. Fill out the forms. Calculate the pension. Exercise. Eat the salmon. Maintain relationships. Decide where you want to live. Know what matters to you.

    Build the finest Master Control Center you can.

    Just don’t confuse the dashboard with the universe.

    Retirement exposes that confusion because aging steadily enlarges the territory outside our command. You can manage risk but not abolish it. You can strengthen your body but not negotiate a permanent treaty with biology. You can love your children without determining where they will live. You can construct a meaningful life without controlling who remains in it.

    This is difficult for people like me because preparation feels so much like control.

    Give me a spreadsheet, two 4K monitors, a financial projection, a Mediterranean diet, and an ergonomically magnificent keyboard, and within fifteen minutes I begin to believe I have subdued contingency itself.

    Then somebody dies.

    Somebody falls in love.

    Somebody moves away.

    Somebody calls.

    Or the woman in front of me doesn’t notice that the light has turned green.

    The dashboard remains magnificent.

    The future remains unimpressed.

  • You Ate the Broccoli. There Is No Cheesecake

    You Ate the Broccoli. There Is No Cheesecake

    As Steve Lopez explores the psychological terrain of retirement in Independence Day, he consults psychologist Nancy Schlossberg, who has identified six broad species of retiree. Reading through them feels a little like examining a field guide to aging mammals. You recognize several immediately. Others make you hope natural selection intervenes before you become one.

    The Continuer takes the skills accumulated over a career and redeploys them after retirement. Why dismantle a perfectly good machine? The teacher tutors, mentors, writes, or volunteers. The accountant helps a nonprofit keep its books. The journalist continues writing without having an editor texting him at 6:15 in the morning. The Continuer changes the employment arrangement without performing an unnecessary personality transplant.

    The Easy Glider has no master plan and regards your insistence upon having one as evidence that you require medication. He wakes up, drinks coffee, looks outside, and sees what happens. Perhaps he gardens. Perhaps he meets someone for lunch. Perhaps he spends forty minutes watching a hummingbird. His calendar contains vast white spaces that do not frighten him. To someone who has spent forty years organizing life around semesters, deadlines, meetings, workouts, and carefully calibrated lunch times, the Easy Glider appears to possess either profound spiritual wisdom or frontal-lobe damage.

    The Adventurer goes in the opposite direction. Retirement becomes an opportunity to blow up the laboratory. New country. New hobby. New identity. New diet. I know a former vegan who became a carnivore and hunter and now makes her own liverwurst from venison. Evidently retirement can involve discovering that the person who once regarded a chicken breast as an ethical crisis now owns sausage-making equipment.

    The Searcher approaches retirement as an existential emergency. He wants meaning. Purpose. Transcendence. He has questions about mortality, identity, God, consciousness, and what exactly he has been doing for the previous sixty-five years. Somewhere nearby rests a battered copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning with seventeen passages underlined. The Searcher doesn’t merely take a walk. He takes a walk while contemplating Being.

    The Involved Spectator keeps one foot in the professional world without allowing the professional world to climb back onto his chest. He attends events, advises former colleagues, mentors younger people, perhaps takes on occasional projects. He remains connected to the game but no longer has to shower afterward.

    Then there is the Retreater.

    The Retreater confronts unlimited freedom and discovers that he has absolutely no idea what to do with it. Work disappears, structure collapses, social contact diminishes, and instead of constructing a new life, he withdraws. The house becomes his habitat. The recliner develops gravitational force. Going to Costco qualifies as an expedition. Netflix asks whether he is still watching, and he considers the question unnecessarily judgmental.

    What catches Lopez’s attention, however, is not merely Schlossberg’s taxonomy. It is Schlossberg herself. She remains useful. Her decades of research have become a roadmap for other people trying to negotiate one of life’s most disorienting transitions. Whatever category describes her retirement, she has not confused freedom from employment with freedom from contribution.

    That distinction points toward something larger. Arnold Schwarzenegger states it with admirable bluntness in the title of his book Be Useful. Human beings appear to do better when somebody or something needs them. Teaching, mentoring, writing, caring, building, volunteering, creating, helping—these activities direct the self outward. A life organized exclusively around personal gratification eventually becomes a very small life, no matter how comfortable the furniture.

    Yet retirement culture frequently encourages precisely the opposite fantasy.

    Call it the Retirement Dessert Fallacy.

    The Retirement Dessert Fallacy begins with one of our culture’s most persistent stories about work. Adulthood is broccoli.

    For thirty or forty years, you sit at life’s dinner table grimly chewing the cruciferous vegetable of employment. You wake to alarms. You commute. You answer emails. You attend meetings. You endure performance evaluations. You nod solemnly while someone explains a new strategic initiative. You keep eating the broccoli because responsible adults understand that dessert must be earned.

    And somewhere in the distance waits retirement.

    Cheesecake.

    Not ordinary cheesecake. Magical cheesecake.

    At sixty-five, the universe delivers an enormous slice to your doorstep. You take a bite and discover that the missing portion immediately regenerates. You eat another. It regenerates again. For the remainder of your earthly existence, your only obligation is consumption.

    Travel.

    Golf.

    Restaurants.

    Television.

    Shopping.

    Cruises.

    A premium mattress.

    A premium automobile.

    A premium experience.

    You have eaten your broccoli. Now you are entitled to infinite cheesecake.

    The problem is that there is no cheesecake.

    More precisely, pleasure exists, and retirement should contain plenty of it. Travel somewhere beautiful. Eat something magnificent. Sleep late occasionally. Sit beside a swimming pool and do absolutely nothing. After forty years of employment, nobody needs to defend the moral legitimacy of an afternoon nap.

    The fallacy lies in imagining that gratification can provide the architecture of a life.

    It can’t.

    Pleasure works beautifully as pleasure. Ask it to provide identity, purpose, connection, usefulness, and meaning, and eventually the cheesecake begins tasting like paste. What initially feels like liberation can curdle into spiritual entropy: fewer obligations, fewer challenges, fewer people depending upon you, fewer reasons to leave the house, until freedom has quietly become disengagement.

    The original metaphor was wrong anyway.

    Work was never simply broccoli.

    Work contained aggravation, bureaucracy, exhaustion, ridiculous meetings, difficult personalities, and enough administrative nonsense to make a grown man contemplate fleeing into the mountains. But work also provided friendship, competence, challenge, contribution, recognition, structure, accomplishment, and the satisfaction of occasionally being useful to another human being.

    That wasn’t broccoli.

    That was part of the meal.

    The Retirement Dessert Fallacy is therefore built upon a catastrophic piece of nutritional symbolism. We have mistaken responsibility for deprivation and consumption for reward. A consumer culture happily reinforces the mistake because a seventy-year-old convinced that happiness awaits in the next purchase is an excellent customer.

    Buy the cruise.

    Buy the watch.

    Buy the laptop.

    Buy the luxury SUV to transport yourself three miles to buy more things.

    Surely the next premium experience will produce the feeling you’ve been waiting for.

    It won’t.

    Schlossberg’s six retirees may follow radically different routes, but the healthier roads seem to share something fundamental: movement outward. Remain curious. Remain connected. Remain useful. Give somebody a reason to notice whether you showed up.

    Retirement should certainly contain dessert.

    But if dessert becomes the entire meal, eventually you aren’t retired.

    You’re just sitting at the table getting sick.

  • Humanity Falls from Too Much Ambition

    Humanity Falls from Too Much Ambition

    Last night I dreamed that several friends and I entered a peculiar store whose employees were apparently required to be geniuses. Nothing was sold. You went there to discuss history with exceptionally intelligent people, which strikes me as the sort of retail concept that would survive approximately eleven minutes in the American marketplace.

    We began discussing 9/11. But because dreams have no obligation to respect architecture, history, or basic proportionality, the Twin Towers had been replaced by twelve yoga blocks. I began stacking them, one on top of another, until I had constructed a precarious foam monument to civilization.

    I studied my creation and announced, with the confidence available only to prophets and sleeping people, “Humanity falls from too much ambition.”

    Everyone seemed impressed.

    Apparently, I had solved history with yoga equipment.

    The conversation turned melancholy. We commiserated over tragedy and began exchanging memories. I told everyone about having lived in Africa. This was technically true: I lived in Nairobi when I was young. But Dream Me found those actual memories insufficiently interesting. Instead, I began describing African countries that did not exist, places I had visited only in other dreams several years earlier.

    Nobody challenged me.

    Quite the opposite. My African past conferred enormous prestige. The room seemed to interpret my stories as evidence that I possessed some rare combination of worldliness, political sophistication, moral seriousness, and international cachet. I was no longer merely a man who had lived in Nairobi as a boy. I had become Africa Man, seasoned traveler of nonexistent republics, bearer of mysterious geopolitical wisdom.

    Among those impressed was the podcaster Josh Szeps.

    Szeps decided that a man of my obvious stature could not simply be allowed to return home. He invited me to stay at his mansion-apartment in New York.

    The dream version of Josh Szeps had achieved success on a scale that would embarrass a Russian oligarch. His apartment building had an enormous green elevator—not merely painted green but glowing with some supernatural emerald radiance. Stepping inside filled me with childish exhilaration. This was not an elevator designed to transport residents between floors. This was an elevator announcing that you had ascended into another caste.

    When the doors opened, we entered an immense atrium where Szeps was entertaining the global elect. Diplomats circulated among the guests. Relatives of former presidents lounged around an enormous swimming pool. Beautiful people floated in the water with the effortless tans of people who apparently had assistants responsible for ultraviolet exposure.

    I prepared to join them.

    Then I removed my shirt.

    I looked down.

    My pale torso confronted me with brutal democratic clarity.

    Everyone else seemed bronzed, sleek, and organically adapted to wealth. I looked like a man who had accidentally wandered out of Costco carrying a rotisserie chicken.

    Suddenly I wasn’t sure I belonged in the pool.

    Yet what struck me most strongly wasn’t embarrassment. It was desire.

    I looked around at the atrium, the pool, the diplomats, the presidential relatives, the magical elevator, the impossible dimensions of the apartment, and discovered something about myself I might have preferred not to know.

    I loved it.

    “This is really for me,” I thought.

    The realization was almost obscene.

    I had apparently spent decades cultivating the identity of a reasonably skeptical intellectual while concealing somewhere inside myself a minor Bourbon monarch waiting for suitable accommodations.

    But this wasn’t ordinary wealth. Dreams don’t bother with granite countertops and favorable mortgage rates. The opulence had been elevated into myth. Everything glowed. Wealth had become majesty. Privilege had become transcendence. I wasn’t merely visiting a luxurious apartment. I had been admitted into Olympus.

    And admission was the crucial part.

    The dream wasn’t really about money. It was about tribal membership.

    My stories about Africa—an Africa partly real and partly manufactured by my unconscious—had functioned as my entrance credential. I possessed the correct experiences. I understood the correct things. I had traveled through the correct worlds. Therefore, the tribe had recognized me.

    Come in.

    You’re one of us.

    Ride the green elevator.

    Meet the diplomats.

    Get in the pool.

    For a few magnificent minutes, my existence had been externally certified. I was sophisticated. Interesting. Cosmopolitan. Important. People wanted me there. I belonged among the beautiful and consequential.

    And apparently my unconscious wasn’t content with mere belonging. It threw in staggering wealth as part of the benefits package.

    I got moral prestige, intellectual prestige, social prestige, friendship, acceptance, a New York mansion, international dignitaries, a swimming pool, and a magical green elevator.

    My unconscious has extremely reasonable expectations.

    The source of this extravaganza was considerably less mysterious than the dream itself. I had fallen asleep listening to Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps. The episode was “Just Josh: The Unlearned Lesson of 9/11.” His voice apparently slipped past the guards at the entrance to my sleeping brain, commandeered the production department, and spent the night directing a surreal pageant about 9/11, Africa, ambition, wealth, status, tribalism, and my insufficiently tanned stomach.

    I’ve had these dreams before. A podcast continues playing while I sleep, and its host crosses the membrane between audio and consciousness. Suddenly we are friends. We travel together. We undertake adventures. The voice coming through my earbud becomes a character inhabiting an elaborate world assembled from memories, anxieties, vanity, and whatever psychological contraband happens to be lying around.

    This time, however, the dream exposed something wonderfully embarrassing.

    I began the evening listening to a serious discussion about the lessons of 9/11.

    By morning, my unconscious had transformed it into a fantasy in which my profound connection to imaginary African nations earned me admission to an international aristocracy.

    Humanity falls from too much ambition, I had solemnly declared while stacking yoga blocks.

    Then I got on the magic elevator because apparently I wanted the penthouse.