Cinemorphosis

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  • Throwing Mom in the Deep End

    Throwing Mom in the Deep End

    In the 1960s, while attending backyard pool parties as a child, I witnessed a ritual that today would likely end the gathering, the marriage, and perhaps someone’s standing in the neighborhood Facebook group.

    The scene always began the same way. The wives lay stretched across poolside loungers like contented seals basking on a warm rock. Their skin glistened with tanning oil. Some drifted in and out of sleep beneath oversized sunglasses. Others were absorbed in paperback novels such as Valley of the Dolls, lost in worlds more glamorous than the suburban tract homes surrounding them.

    Relaxation, however, was a dangerous condition. The husbands regarded it almost as an invitation.

    I would see them gathering in small clusters, exchanging mischievous glances and whispered instructions. Then, with all the stealth of burglars planning a jewel heist, two or three men would creep toward the unsuspecting target. One grabbed the arms. Another grabbed the ankles. Before the woman could register what was happening, she was airborne.

    Splash.

    The victim surfaced in a burst of profanity and shock, treading water while trying to understand why the people closest to her had just transformed her into the afternoon’s entertainment.

    The husbands, meanwhile, doubled over with laughter. They laughed with the self-congratulatory delight of men convinced they had just performed comedy worthy of prime-time television. What they had actually performed was a public reminder of who possessed the power and who was expected to absorb the indignity.

    Eventually the woman climbed from the pool, dripping and annoyed. She would shake her head, towel herself dry, and wait for the laughter to burn itself out. Then came the final act of the ritual: she was expected to be a good sport. Boys will be boys. No hard feelings. Back to the lounge chair. Back to the conversation. Back to the novel.

    And so the party continued.

    No sociology professor is required to decode what was happening. The message was delivered with all the subtlety of a brick through a window. The prank was never merely a prank. It was a small public demonstration of dominance disguised as horseplay. The husbands enjoyed a privilege that permitted them to humiliate; the wives were expected to absorb the humiliation gracefully.

    You rarely see such scenes today because the cultural lens has changed. What once passed for harmless male shenanigans is now recognized for what it often was: a form of casual cruelty. The laughter remains the same. What has changed is our willingness to mistake it for innocence.

    Whenever I think about those afternoons, I am reminded of Mad Men. One of the show’s great insights is that the madness of mid-century masculinity was not simply its sexism but its astonishing lack of boundaries. Entitlement flourished because it was rarely challenged. And entitlement is inherently abusive because it operates as a zero-sum arrangement. One person enjoys the privilege of acting on every impulse; another person is expected to accommodate those impulses without complaint.

    The tragedy is that entitlement does not merely degrade the subordinate. It also degrades the entitled. When people are taught that their whims deserve immediate gratification, they are encouraged to remain emotionally juvenile. They never have to grow up. Looking back, what struck me most about those thirty-something men was not their authority but their immaturity. They seemed less like adults than oversized boys roaming freely through a culture that indulged them.

    Even as a child, I sensed that something was off. The atmosphere carried a strain of chaos beneath its cheerful surface. The adults were supposed to be creating security, yet often they generated instability instead. Children notice these things. We notice who laughs. We notice who gets hurt. We notice who is expected to pretend it didn’t matter.

    Perhaps that is why so many of us flocked to The Brady Bunch every Friday night. The show offered a fantasy of domestic civilization. Here was a blended family that somehow functioned as a cooperative unit. Problems were discussed instead of weaponized. Nobody humiliated anyone for sport. Lessons were learned. Conflicts were resolved. The adults behaved like adults.

    Compared to the poolside kingdoms of suburban entitlement, the Bradys looked less like a sitcom family than a utopian experiment.

  • Gollumification (a short story)

    Gollumification (a short story)

    I remain haunted by three men I attended high school with. More than four decades later, they are still gnashing their teeth over a missed romantic opportunity so catastrophic in their minds that it has become the organizing principle of their existence.

    The event occurred during the summer after their senior year, that magical season when testosterone, optimism, and stupidity join forces to create lifelong consequences.

    The three friends were driving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to attend a Dodgers game when they found themselves winding through the Grapevine. There, on the side of the highway, destiny appeared: four young women wearing tie-dye bikinis.

    An aging Volkswagen van, baked by the California sun into a shade best described as “burnt pumpkin regret,” had overheated and died. Standing beside it were four beautiful Grateful Dead devotees fresh from a concert and still drifting through the atmosphere on a cloud of music, freedom, and whatever else had been circulating at Dead shows in those years.

    These were not merely attractive women. In the mythology my friends later constructed, they became supernatural beings. They were road-worn muses, desert sirens, barefoot priestesses of possibility. They smelled of patchouli, sunscreen, and poor judgment. Their laughter floated through the air like wind chimes. Their sun-bronzed shoulders glistened beneath the California light. They waved their bikini tops and spaghetti-strap shirts overhead like flags announcing the arrival of a new religion.

    My friends, mechanically gifted but cosmically clueless, leaped into action.

    With grease-stained heroism, they diagnosed the problem, coaxed the van back to life, and restored order to the universe. The women were grateful. Very grateful.

    Then came the invitation.

    Forget the Dodgers game, they said. Come with us to the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival.

    To appreciate the magnitude of this offer, imagine being handed a winning lottery ticket, a backstage pass, and the keys to paradise simultaneously.

    My friends declined.

    They were committed to the Dodgers game.

    Even now, recounting the story causes physical pain.

    Armed with baseball tickets and the situational awareness of ornamental shrubbery, they thanked the women, climbed back into their car, and drove away. Behind them, the hippies disappeared into the California horizon, presumably continuing their lives completely unaware that they had become the central tragedy in three future divorces.

    My friends remember almost nothing about the baseball game.

    Not a single play.

    Not a single pitch.

    Not a single inning.

    But they can describe, with forensic precision, the exact moment they drove away from those women. They remember the sunlight, the smell of the road, the angle of the van, the sound of the laughter, and the fluttering of tie-dye fabric in the wind.

    Mention the incident today and they transform.

    Reason departs.

    Perspective evaporates.

    They begin snapping at one another like feral animals fighting over a scrap of meat. Each insists the others were responsible. Each argues that his entire life would have unfolded differently had they accepted the invitation.

    Their present lives barely register. Their former wives, their careers, their accomplishments, and their friendships all fade into the background. Spiritually speaking, they remain stranded on that highway, staring at those women as if they represented the entrance to a lost kingdom.

    The story would be funny if it were not so sad.

    The obsession has consumed them.

    They are bitter. They are divorced. They are trapped.

    They have spent decades worshipping a fantasy.

    What they believe they lost was not a romantic encounter. It was transcendence itself. They have convinced themselves that heaven briefly opened a window on a sunny California afternoon and that they foolishly chose baseball instead.

    This is what I call Gollumification: the process by which a person becomes spiritually deformed through obsessive attachment to a lost opportunity, fantasy, or object of desire, sacrificing present reality in worship of an imagined transcendence.

    The tragedy is not that they missed an opportunity.

    The tragedy is that they never stopped missing it.

    Their humanity has slowly curdled around a single idea: that fulfillment existed on the other side of that decision. Like Gollum clutching the Ring, they have spent decades staring at a false treasure while life continued to unfold around them.

    The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson warned that human beings frequently seek false transcendence through sex, alcohol, drugs, crowds, and ecstatic experiences. These pursuits promise elevation but often produce degradation. We imagine we are ascending toward something divine when in fact we are becoming diminished versions of ourselves.

    My friends illustrate this principle perfectly. They mistook a fleeting moment of possibility for ultimate meaning. They sought transcendence in the wrong place and became enslaved to the memory.

    To be human is not merely to desire transcendence. It is to recognize when that desire has attached itself to the wrong object. It is to notice the onset of Gollumification, slam on the brakes, and reverse the process before obsession calcifies into identity.

    Few people accomplish this.

    Most continue worshipping the lost opportunity, the former lover, the abandoned dream, the imagined paradise. Year after year, they become less flexible, less grateful, less alive. They harden around their regrets until they resemble pillars of salt, forever staring backward at the kingdom they believe should have been theirs.

    The missed opportunity did not ruin their lives.

    Their refusal to stop worshipping it did.

    I can worry about many things. I can worry about politics, the economy, my health, the future, and whether humanity is collectively losing its mind. But is there anything more important than waking up each morning prepared for my daily arm-wrestling match with Gollum?

    There he sits across the table waiting for me.

    He smiles with the confidence of an undefeated champion. He knows my weaknesses better than I do. He knows exactly where the cracks are in the foundation. He knows which temptations still sparkle in my imagination and which regrets still ache when I press on them.

    “Go ahead,” he says. “Try to beat me. Win today if you can. I’ll even let you enjoy the victory. But remember, I have thousands more opportunities. Tomorrow morning. This afternoon. Ten minutes from now. Next week. Next year. I can wait.”

    Then Gollum leans back in his chair and laughs.

    Unlike me, he never gets tired.

    Don’t feel sorry for me. My predicament is not unique. Like millions of others, I suffer from an addiction to shiny objects promising transcendence. What am I addicted to? That is the wrong question. The better question is: what am I not addicted to?

    Human beings have always been vulnerable to false promises of salvation. Some chase money. Others chase status, romance, sex, drugs, fame, luxury, political power, youth, beauty, watches, social media followers, or the approval of strangers. The particulars vary, but the underlying temptation remains the same. We convince ourselves that one more acquisition, one more achievement, one more experience, one more dopamine hit will finally complete us.

    There are tens of millions of us. I am not special.

    My life, like theirs, is defined by the constant struggle against vice, corruption, vanity, and the habits that threaten to reduce me to a lesser version of myself.

    Yet there is another danger.

    It is true that I am flawed. It is true that I have made mistakes. It is true that I possess an impressive talent for disappointing myself. But endlessly dwelling on my failures is simply another addiction wearing a different costume.

    I think of the writer and commentator Ana Marie Cox, who once observed that she struggled with many addictions, but the worst was picking up the bottle of self-loathing and drinking from it all day long.

    What a perfect image.

    Many of us stagger through life intoxicated by our own self-contempt. We nurse old embarrassments. We replay old failures. We rehearse our shortcomings with the diligence of scholars preserving sacred texts. We imagine this habit is a form of honesty or moral seriousness. In reality, it is often another form of self-absorption.

    The person addicted to self-loathing is no less trapped than the person addicted to alcohol, gambling, or pornography.

    Both are attempting to escape reality.

    And both find themselves drifting deeper into captivity.

    This compulsive consumption of self-hatred makes self-forgiveness nearly impossible. Yet self-forgiveness is one of the essential weapons in the fight against Gollumification.

    How can I forgive myself?

    The question sounds simple but feels impossible.

    After all, I know my failures better than anyone. I know the selfishness, vanity, cowardice, and foolishness that inhabit my history. I know the person I have been. Some days I find it nearly impossible to forgive myself for being such a wretched creature.

    But forgive myself I must.

    Forgiveness is not an act of indulgence. It is not a declaration that my failures never happened. It is not permission to continue living badly.

    Forgiveness is the first step in refusing to let my worst moments define me.

    It is the decision to stop worshipping my failures and start transcending them.

    Forgiveness is the commitment to become someone different from the stubborn sinner who generated so much regret in the first place. It is the refusal to spend the rest of my life drinking from the bottle of self-loathing while Gollum grins across the table.

    Because Gollum does not care whether I worship a lost opportunity or a past mistake.

    Either way, he wins.

    The only victory available to me is to stand up from the table, forgive myself, and continue the long work of becoming fully human.

    Once I understood that life is a continual test of character, and the struggle against Gollumification, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

    To be honest, however, there is something discouraging about viewing life as a daily battle against Gollum. I cannot always defeat him in an arm-wrestling match. Even on my best days, victory is incomplete. If I overcome Gollum half the time, I still fail the other half. The prospect can feel exhausting. How can I forgive myself if I remain locked in a struggle I never fully win? How can I live with peace if temptation is always waiting and I never know whether I will emerge victorious?

    The answer may be that the object of forgiveness is not perfection but perseverance. The purpose of self-forgiveness is not to transform me into a flawless person. It is to transform me into a person who continues striving toward the good despite repeated failures. The measure of my character is not whether temptation disappears, but whether I continue returning to the fight. Forgiveness allows me to rise after every fall rather than define myself by the fall itself. The truly unforgivable life is not the life marked by failure. It is the life that abandons the struggle altogether.

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily effective at razzle-dazzling you with objects of false transcendence and getting you to surrender.

    You can retreat into a climate-controlled cocoon furnished with streaming services, snack foods, delivery apps, and algorithmically engineered distractions. You can spend years drifting from one dopamine hit to the next while the world applauds your consumption and politely asks if you would like another. Temptation no longer lurks in dark alleys. It arrives in bright packaging and offers free shipping.

    The world will not object if you quit the struggle. On the contrary, it will happily assist you. Fresh temptations will appear on your phone, your television, your computer, and eventually your doorstep. At some point, however, a terrible realization emerges. You are no longer directing your life. Your cravings are directing it for you. As a result, you are becoming Gollum. 

    At that moment, you cease to be the protagonist of your own story. You become a supporting character in a drama written by your appetites, a bit player taking orders from every craving that wanders onto the stage. Perhaps you will grow numb to this reality and drift into a comfortable spiritual death, cushioned by convenience, entertained into submission, and surrounded by enough snacks and streaming content to dull any remaining sense of alarm. Or perhaps the discomfort will refuse to leave. Perhaps it will linger like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps it will haunt you until the life you have built begins to resemble a horror movie disguised as a luxury resort.

    That haunting may prove to be a gift. It may force you to confront the fact that you have been living in your own version of the Sunken Place, sinking ever deeper into passivity while your impulses seize control of the steering wheel. The tragedy is not that temptation exists. The tragedy is that you have mistaken indulgence for freedom and captivity for comfort. At some point, if you are fortunate, a voice will break through the fog. It will not whisper. It will not negotiate. It will issue a command as urgent as any ever spoken in a Jordan Peele horror film:

    Get out.

    The process of emancipating yourself from whatever hell you have wandered into is one of life’s essential tasks. Whether the prison is addiction, vanity, resentment, consumerism, or some other self-inflicted captivity, freedom rarely arrives on its own. 

    It helps to have role models—people who have somehow escaped the Sunken Place while the rest of us continue orbiting the same destructive habits.

    I have such a role model. His name is The Lonely Collector.

    I met him on the watch forums and social-media platforms where watch enthusiasts gather to discuss their latest acquisitions, compare collections, and reassure one another that purchasing yet another timepiece is not a symptom of a deeper problem. These communities often resemble support groups designed by the addiction itself. They are places where people seek solace and commiseration but rarely recovery. Imagine a convention of alcoholics held inside a liquor store. The attendees nod sympathetically as one another describes their struggles, then recommend a particularly excellent bottle that just arrived from Scotland.

    The watch world can be like that.

    Yet somehow The Lonely Collector moved among us untouched. While the rest of us disappeared down the timepiece rabbit hole, emerging weeks later clutching limited editions and obscure Japanese-market references, he remained curiously immune. He could admire a watch without needing to own it. He could discuss a new release without calculating how quickly he could justify purchasing it. He possessed a form of psychological insulation that bordered on the supernatural.

    I often imagined him wearing some kind of invisible protective suit, the sort of flame-retardant gear stuntmen wear before walking through walls of fire on Hollywood movie sets. Around him, collectors were exploding into fits of acquisition fever, setting their wallets ablaze in pursuit of the next grail watch, while he calmly strolled through the inferno without so much as singeing an eyebrow. He seemed to understand something the rest of us did not: that collecting a watch and being possessed by the desire to collect watches are two entirely different things.

    I met the Lonely Watch Collector about six years ago in the digital bazaar of watch enthusiasts, where grown men gather to convince one another that a slightly different arrangement of steel, sapphire, and gears constitutes a life-changing event. We became friends across several watch forums and social-media platforms. His Americanized name was Peter. He was a Vietnamese immigrant who worked in the tech industry and lived in the Dallas area.

    One day he sent me a message that immediately distinguished him from the usual crowd of enablers and acquisition evangelists. He confessed that he was, like me, a watch addict. Not a casual enthusiast. Not a collector. An addict. His condition had become so severe that he eventually sold every watch he owned, including pieces that cost nearly ten thousand dollars. In their place he bought a twenty-dollar Casio F91.

    The move struck me as both absurd and profound. Imagine a man abandoning a wine cellar filled with rare vintages only to drink tap water for the rest of his life.

    Peter explained that the Casio served a purpose beyond telling time. It was a daily reminder of how thoroughly the hobby had colonized his mind. Every glance at its tiny digital display reminded him of the sharp jaws of the addiction from which he had escaped. The humble plastic watch became a form of self-discipline, a wearable warning label. He never wanted to return to those feverish days when every waking hour was spent chasing the next purchase, the next dopamine hit, the next fantasy of completion that vanished the moment the package arrived.

    At the time he was in his mid-thirties, married, and raising a newborn child. He had decided that his attention was a finite resource. Every ounce of mental energy spent obsessing over watches was energy unavailable to his wife, his son, and the life unfolding directly in front of him. He chose his family over watches.

    Over the years he would occasionally contact me. He would compliment one of my latest acquisitions, mention that he had watched another video from my YouTube channel, where I often explored the psychology of watch addiction, and then close with the same refrain.

    He was still wearing the Casio.

    The statement was never delivered with judgment. He never lectured me. Never told me to sell my collection. Never suggested I quit the hobby. Yet I could feel the unspoken message beneath his words. It radiated from the quiet contentment he seemed to have found. He had escaped a maze that many of us were still wandering. Without saying so directly, he wanted me to find the exit as well.

    Then, about a year ago, I noticed that he had vanished.

    Not from my life specifically. From the platforms themselves.

    His accounts disappeared. No dramatic farewell. No manifesto. No final post announcing his liberation from the algorithmic plantation. He simply left.

    I found myself oddly moved by his disappearance. He had already been a hero of mine for replacing a small fortune in luxury watches with a twenty-dollar Casio. But abandoning social media entirely elevated him to an even higher category. Even more important than escaping the watch addiction, he had escaped from the social media platforms. 

    Most of us treat these platforms as public squares. However, they are closer to dopamine troughs—vast digital feedlots where human attention is harvested, processed, and sold. Every notification is a pellet tossed into the cage. Every scroll promises stimulation and delivers restlessness instead.

    Peter walked away from all of it.

    I have experienced watch-related FOMO countless times. I have watched men on YouTube peel the protective plastic from a new Panerai, Omega, or Tudor with the reverence of archaeologists uncovering a sacred relic. For a moment, I would feel the familiar pang—that small stab of desire convincing me that happiness was apparently one purchase away.

    But that feeling was insignificant compared to the FOMO I felt when I thought about Peter.

    I did not envy his watches. He no longer had any.

    I envied his freedom.

    He had escaped not only the watch fever dream but also the sprawling digital carnival that feeds it. He had walked away from the endless cycle of acquisition, validation, comparison, and display. No wrist shots. No watch forums. No YouTube rabbit holes. No dopamine pellets dispensed by algorithms disguised as communities.

    Sometimes I imagined becoming like him.

    Of course, being afflicted with a healthy case of vanity, I never imagined quietly disappearing the way Peter did. No. In my fantasy, I would announce my departure with a bombastic YouTube video worthy of a retiring televangelist, a defeated Roman emperor, and a recovering addict all rolled into one.

    The thumbnail would feature me staring solemnly into the camera beneath giant yellow letters:

    I AM LEAVING THE WATCH HOBBY.

    The video would begin with a dramatic pause.

    “God has told me to quit collecting watches.”

    Another pause.

    “I do not wish to quit collecting watches. Quite frankly, I would prefer to buy several more. But this is no longer a matter of my will. It is a matter of God’s will.”

    At this point I would lean toward the camera as if preparing to reveal the final secret of existence.

    “Today, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to discuss freedom. Not the freedom we celebrate, but the freedom we counterfeit. We tell ourselves that every indulgence is an act of self-expression. We call surrendering to our impulses freedom. We call compulsive consumption freedom. We call addiction freedom.”

    Then I would hold up a luxury watch.

    “This is not freedom.”

    A dramatic pause.

    “This is jewelry for Gollum.”

    I would continue.

    “We are undergoing a process I call Gollumification. We clutch our precious possessions with trembling fingers and then congratulate ourselves for being independent thinkers. We mistake obedience to our appetites for self-mastery. We chain ourselves to desires and then celebrate the length of the chain.”

    By this point the comments section would be in flames.

    Half the audience would accuse me of having a nervous breakdown. The other half would demand to know whether I was selling my collection.

    Meanwhile, Peter would be sitting somewhere in Dallas wearing his twenty-dollar Casio, helping his kid with homework, blissfully unaware that I had just uploaded a forty-five-minute philosophical monologue about the spiritual dangers of luxury watches.

    And that contrast is precisely why he won.

    I needed an audience to imagine my liberation.

    Peter simply liberated himself.

    Could I ever forgive myself for not possessing Peter’s strength? For lacking his discipline? For remaining vulnerable to the vanity and compulsions that he had managed to escape?

    I did not know.

    But I knew I had to try.

    In many ways, that is the reason for telling this story. Not to celebrate Peter as some flawless saint, nor to condemn myself as uniquely weak, but to confront a question that lurks beneath every addiction and every act of self-deception: What would it mean to become a little more free than I am now?

    Peter answered that question by quietly walking away.

    I didn’t hear from Peter for about a year, but one day he commented on my YouTube channel that he and his wife were visiting family in Los Angeles, and he suggested we meet for coffee at a local cafe. 

    The coffee shop possessed the warm, cultivated coziness that modern cafés seem to manufacture with scientific precision. Sunlight spilled through tall front windows and settled across weathered wooden tables polished smooth by years of elbows, laptops, and lingering conversations. The air carried a mingled perfume of freshly ground coffee beans, toasted pastries, steamed milk, and cinnamon. A low murmur of conversation drifted through the room, punctuated by the occasional hiss of the espresso machine and the clatter of ceramic cups meeting saucers.

    Peter sat at a corner table with his wife and two young children. I had expected to find him alone, but instead I found a scene of quiet domestic happiness. The children, perhaps two and four years old, sat absorbed in coloring books spread across the table. They worked with the intense concentration that only young children can summon for such endeavors. One would occasionally hold up a page for parental approval while the other remained determined to keep every crayon stroke inside the lines.

    Peter’s wife, Pam, an attractive redhead in her mid-thirties, watched over them with an easy smile, alternating between conversation and gentle supervision. Both she and Peter had their arms covered in an impressive collection of tattoos. Yet whatever rebellious or edgy associations I once attached to tattoos evaporated almost immediately. The two of them radiated warmth, kindness, and ease with one another. They possessed that unmistakable quality found in genuinely happy couples: a relaxed affection that requires no performance and no explanation. Watching them interact with their children, it became clear that the tattoos were merely decoration. The deeper story was written in their patience, their attentiveness, and the quiet contentment they shared as a family.

    Around them, the coffee shop’s usual cast of characters carried on with their rituals. Young professionals peered into glowing laptops. Students hunched over textbooks as though preparing for oral examinations before a medieval tribunal. A retired couple shared a muffin and the morning’s gossip. Yet the scene at Peter’s table seemed somehow untouched by the surrounding bustle. The children colored. The parents relaxed. The aroma of coffee drifted through the air. It was the sort of ordinary family moment that often passes unnoticed while it is happening but later returns in memory with surprising clarity and affection.

    Peter introduced me to his wife as his “YouTube hero.”

    I immediately objected.

    “I can’t be your hero,” I said. “You’re my hero.”

    After all, Peter had accomplished something I had not. He had escaped. He had walked away from the watch addiction, abandoned social media, and returned to the land of the living. While the rest of us were still debating the merits of sapphire crystals and limited editions, Peter had slipped out of the casino and gone home.

    Pam laughed.

    As a therapist, she had developed a dim view of social media. What had once seemed novel now struck her as tacky—a vast digital theater in which people carefully curated evidence that their lives were perpetually delightful. The result was a form of psychological vandalism. People scrolled through these highlight reels and concluded that everyone else was happier, prettier, wealthier, more successful, and more fulfilled than they were.

    “People think we’re perfect,” Pam said. “But we have our struggles.”

    The statement caught me off guard.

    From where I sat, they looked like the cover photo for a family counseling brochure. Two adorable children. A happy marriage. Meaningful careers. The sort of family that made you assume the universe had quietly decided to be generous.

    Then Pam explained that she suffered from clinical depression.

    There were periods, she said, when the depression became so severe that she could go months without being emotionally available to her husband or children. I found this difficult to reconcile with the woman sitting across from me. She appeared warm, attentive, thoughtful, and fully engaged. She looked like the last person who would disappear behind a wall of emotional darkness.

    Yet there she was describing a battle that remained invisible to everyone except those closest to her.

    The irony was striking. Here was a therapist who attended therapy herself. Here was a mental-health professional who required help from other mental-health professionals. After years of trial and error, she had finally found the proper balance of medication—enough to keep the depression from swallowing her whole but not so much that it dulled her emotions and left her disconnected from the people she loved.

    The conversation reminded me how deceptive appearances can be. Social media trains us to judge lives from the outside, but real life operates differently. Everyone is carrying something. Some burdens are simply hidden beneath better lighting, flattering camera angles, and carefully edited captions.

    The family sitting before me was not perfect.

    They were something far more impressive.

    They were real.

    I sat there taking in the scene before me. The children colored quietly. Peter and Pam exchanged the effortless glances of people who genuinely liked each other. The entire family radiated a warmth that was difficult to describe and impossible to fake. To my surprise, I felt myself getting emotional. I wanted so badly for them to be happy that my eyes began to sting.

    To distract myself, I pointed at the small Casio on Peter’s wrist.

    “Peter,” I asked, “how did you do it? How did you walk away from the watch addiction?”

    He didn’t hesitate.

    “It’s like this,” he said. “I think of addiction as a hot stove. You touch it and it burns like hell. After a while, you stop romanticizing the stove. You stop admiring the stove. You stop writing poems about the stove. You realize the stove can hurt you. Once you see it for what it is, it becomes easier to stay away.”

    I laughed.

    “But you still watch my YouTube channel. That’s like an alcoholic hanging around a liquor store. Every week some lost soul gets on camera, complains about his watch addiction, and then spends twenty minutes showing off shiny watches.”

    Peter laughed.

    Tall and slender, with short dark hair, sharp features, and glasses that gave him the appearance of a thoughtful professor, he seemed amused by the accusation.

    “I watch cooking competition shows,” he said. “I enjoy the craftsmanship, the attention to detail, the incredible food. But I know I’m not going to spend twelve hours making those dishes. It’s entertainment. Your videos are the same thing. I can enjoy watching them without feeling compelled to live that life.”

    “I’m a cautionary tale,” I said.

    That earned a laugh from both him and Pam.

    The two of them shared a piece of banana bread while looking at me with the kind of affection usually reserved for eccentric relatives.

    “You see me for what I am,” I continued. “But you don’t glorify my life. You understand there is no transcendence in watches.”

    Peter smiled.

    “There’s no transcendence,” he repeated.

    The sentence hung in the air for a moment.

    “You have your family,” I said. “You have real things to take care of.”

    Peter reached for Pam’s hand and squeezed it.

    Then he smiled at her.

    “I have no time for fantasies.”

    The simplicity of the statement struck me harder than any self-help book ever could.

    I found myself thinking about the three men from my high school days. I told Peter and Pam the entire story: the broken-down Volkswagen van, the Grateful Dead girls, the invitation to the Summer Solstice Festival, and the decades of regret that followed. I explained how the men had become consumed by what might have been, how they had transformed a brief encounter into a lost Eden, and how they had spent years undergoing the process I call Gollumification.

    As I spoke, I could see that Peter and Pam were enjoying the story.

    “What happened to them?” Pam finally asked.

    “Where are they now?” Peter added.

    I told them.

    They lived alone in modest apartments. They drifted from paycheck to paycheck. Their lives felt provisional, as though they were still waiting for the real story to begin. They possessed no grand purpose, only old grievances. Their conversations revolved around disappointments, regrets, and imagined alternate timelines in which everything had gone right.

    They had become caretakers of a fantasy.

    And that fantasy had slowly devoured them.

    As I spoke, I realized why the story continued to haunt me.

    It wasn’t because of the hippie girls.

    It wasn’t because of the missed opportunity.

    It was because I understood how easily their fate could become mine.

    Every day I struggle not to become one of those men. Every day I fight the temptation to believe that fulfillment lies somewhere else: in another watch, another achievement, another fantasy, another version of my life that never existed.

    Every day I struggle against Gollumification.

    And sitting there across from Peter and Pam, watching their children color pictures while they shared a piece of banana bread, I was struck by a thought so obvious that it felt profound.

    Perhaps transcendence had never been hiding in the Volkswagen van.

    Perhaps it had been sitting quietly at this coffee-shop table all along.

  • Gollumification: How False Paradise Deforms the Soul

    Gollumification: How False Paradise Deforms the Soul

    I remain haunted by three men I attended high school with. More than four decades later, they are still gnashing their teeth over a missed romantic opportunity so catastrophic in their minds that it has become the organizing principle of their existence.

    The event occurred during the summer after their senior year, that magical season when testosterone, optimism, and stupidity join forces to create lifelong consequences.

    The three friends were driving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to attend a Dodgers game when they found themselves winding through the Grapevine. There, on the side of the highway, destiny appeared: four young women wearing tie-dye bikinis.

    An aging Volkswagen van, baked by the California sun into a shade best described as “burnt pumpkin regret,” had overheated and died. Standing beside it were four beautiful Grateful Dead devotees fresh from a concert and still drifting through the atmosphere on a cloud of music, freedom, and whatever else had been circulating at Dead shows in those years.

    These were not merely attractive women. In the mythology my friends later constructed, they became supernatural beings. They were road-worn muses, desert sirens, barefoot priestesses of possibility. They smelled of patchouli, sunscreen, and poor judgment. Their laughter floated through the air like wind chimes. Their sun-bronzed shoulders glistened beneath the California light. They waved their bikini tops and spaghetti-strap shirts overhead like flags announcing the arrival of a new religion.

    My friends, mechanically gifted but cosmically clueless, leaped into action.

    With grease-stained heroism, they diagnosed the problem, coaxed the van back to life, and restored order to the universe. The women were grateful. Very grateful.

    Then came the invitation.

    Forget the Dodgers game, they said. Come with us to the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival.

    To appreciate the magnitude of this offer, imagine being handed a winning lottery ticket, a backstage pass, and the keys to paradise simultaneously.

    My friends declined.

    They were committed to the Dodgers game.

    Even now, recounting the story causes physical pain.

    Armed with baseball tickets and the situational awareness of ornamental shrubbery, they thanked the women, climbed back into their car, and drove away. Behind them, the hippies disappeared into the California horizon, presumably continuing their lives completely unaware that they had become the central tragedy in three future divorces.

    My friends remember almost nothing about the baseball game.

    Not a single play.

    Not a single pitch.

    Not a single inning.

    But they can describe, with forensic precision, the exact moment they drove away from those women. They remember the sunlight, the smell of the road, the angle of the van, the sound of the laughter, and the fluttering of tie-dye fabric in the wind.

    Mention the incident today and they transform.

    Reason departs.

    Perspective evaporates.

    They begin snapping at one another like feral animals fighting over a scrap of meat. Each insists the others were responsible. Each argues that his entire life would have unfolded differently had they accepted the invitation.

    Their present lives barely register. Their former wives, their careers, their accomplishments, and their friendships all fade into the background. Spiritually speaking, they remain stranded on that highway, staring at those women as if they represented the entrance to a lost kingdom.

    The story would be funny if it were not so sad.

    The obsession has consumed them.

    They are bitter. They are divorced. They are trapped.

    They have spent decades worshipping a fantasy.

    What they believe they lost was not a romantic encounter. It was transcendence itself. They have convinced themselves that heaven briefly opened a window on a sunny California afternoon and that they foolishly chose baseball instead.

    This is what I call Gollumification: the process by which a person becomes spiritually deformed through obsessive attachment to a lost opportunity, fantasy, or object of desire, sacrificing present reality in worship of an imagined transcendence.

    The tragedy is not that they missed an opportunity.

    The tragedy is that they never stopped missing it.

    Their humanity has slowly curdled around a single idea: that fulfillment existed on the other side of that decision. Like Gollum clutching the Ring, they have spent decades staring at a false treasure while life continued to unfold around them.

    The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson warned that human beings frequently seek false transcendence through sex, alcohol, drugs, crowds, and ecstatic experiences. These pursuits promise elevation but often produce degradation. We imagine we are ascending toward something divine when in fact we are becoming diminished versions of ourselves.

    My friends illustrate this principle perfectly. They mistook a fleeting moment of possibility for ultimate meaning. They sought transcendence in the wrong place and became enslaved to the memory.

    To be human is not merely to desire transcendence. It is to recognize when that desire has attached itself to the wrong object. It is to notice the onset of Gollumification, slam on the brakes, and reverse the process before obsession calcifies into identity.

    Few people accomplish this.

    Most continue worshipping the lost opportunity, the former lover, the abandoned dream, the imagined paradise. Year after year, they become less flexible, less grateful, less alive. They harden around their regrets until they resemble pillars of salt, forever staring backward at the kingdom they believe should have been theirs.

    The missed opportunity did not ruin their lives.

    Their refusal to stop worshipping it did.

  • The Greatness Trap

    The Greatness Trap

    At fourteen, after watching Pumping Iron, I stared at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s physique with the reverence medieval peasants reserved for cathedral stained glass. His muscles seemed less like anatomy than a supernatural event. I concluded, with the confidence available only to teenage boys, that all men should look like Arnold. Failure to do so was a form of degradation. You were not a man so much as a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of it, wobbling through life in a state of preventable mediocrity.

    The disease did not stop with bodybuilding.

    In college, I encountered Franz Kafka and Vladimir Nabokov. Their prose represented another form of muscularity. Their sentences flexed. Their imaginations performed feats of strength. Later, listening to Sviatoslav Richter play Sergei Rachmaninoff, I experienced the same sensation. Arnold had built impossible muscles. Kafka built impossible stories. Richter built impossible beauty. All of them seemed to occupy a realm beyond the ordinary, and they inspired me to believe that I must do the same.

    Thus I spent much of my life trapped in what I call The Greatness Trap: the belief that happiness, self-respect, and fulfillment can only be earned through exceptional achievement. Under its spell, ordinary life appears not merely insufficient but vaguely shameful. A quiet existence becomes a form of failure. Every accomplishment must lead to a larger accomplishment. Every summit reveals another mountain. Every victory quickly curdles into dissatisfaction.

    Like Arnold, who once spoke of wanting to be remembered thousands of years after his death, I wanted to leave a mark. I wanted my existence to strike the world with such force that its impact could be called Clout Fist: the invisible power exerted by a person, institution, or cultural force that shapes the thoughts and behaviors of others. Without such influence, I feared my life would dissolve into obscurity. If I was not spectacular, what was I?

    This anxiety lies at the heart of Joshua Rothman’s essay, “Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?” Rothman observes that excellence and ordinariness coexist uneasily because modern society relentlessly pressures us toward optimization. We are told to maximize everything: our careers, our bodies, our relationships, our finances, our hobbies, our personal brands. Existence itself becomes a self-improvement project. Unless we leave a mark, we fear we do not count.

    The result is a culture of hype. Everything must be bigger, faster, richer, more influential, more disruptive, and more unforgettable. We become trapped in an endless escalator of status. Climb one rung and another immediately appears above it. Achievement ceases to satisfy because satisfaction would end the game.

    Rothman points to philosopher Avram Alpert, who describes this condition as greatness thinking—the belief that greatness can somehow cure the disappointments and imperfections of life. Yet greatness, by definition, is rare. If everyone could be extraordinary, the word would lose its meaning. The pursuit therefore condemns most people to a perpetual feeling of insufficiency. We become disappointed not because our lives are inadequate but because our expectations are delusional.

    What, then, is the exit sign?

    Alpert’s answer is to abandon the obsession with being spectacular and embrace Aristotle’s concept of arete—the fulfillment of one’s potential. Under this view, the goal is not to transform yourself into someone else. It is to become the best version of the person you already are. You cultivate your moral and rational faculties. You seek integrity rather than applause. You pursue excellence not because you crave admiration but because you wish to live well.

    These ideas animate Alpert’s book The Good-Enough Life, though his argument collides with a long tradition of thinkers who demand more. Immanuel Kant viewed human beings as obligated to develop their capacities as fully as possible. Friedrich Nietzsche urged us to stretch ourselves toward the Übermensch, a higher form of human existence. Compared to these visions, Alpert’s philosophy can sound almost suspiciously modest.

    Yet Rothman points out that the greatness-oriented philosophies of Kant and Nietzsche often collide with our intuition that ordinary life possesses genuine value. What if greatness is not required? What if a life marked by decency, moderation, friendship, competence, and love is enough?

    I suspect the answer lies somewhere between these extremes. We should not surrender our aspirations. Human beings are built to grow, create, test themselves, and pursue excellence. Yet neither should we allow a culture saturated with dopamine, hype, vanity, and status anxiety to convince us that greatness and fame are synonymous. Alpert is correct that being “good enough” is often a worthy goal. But I am not convinced that the choice is binary.

    Perhaps the real challenge is to cherish ordinary life while still striving toward extraordinary achievement. Perhaps we can enjoy a family dinner and write a great novel. Perhaps we can appreciate a quiet walk and pursue ambitious goals. Perhaps we can cultivate arete without becoming addicted to applause.

    In that case, the true enemy is not greatness. The true enemy is the delusion that greatness alone can save us.

  • The Great E-Bike Menace

    The Great E-Bike Menace

    I live in Torrance, where over the past few years I have watched an invasive species establish itself on our streets: the teenage e-bike rider. They dart through traffic at unpredictable speeds, weave between cars as though participating in an unauthorized video game, perform wheelies in busy intersections, blow through stop signs with religious devotion, and occasionally taunt motorists who have the misfortune of sharing the road with them. Most appear blissfully unaware of the danger they create. A smaller but more troubling minority seem fully aware and simply do not care.

    The problem has steadily worsened. A few months ago, during a night of heavy rain, I watched three teenage e-bike riders navigate the intersection of Torrance Boulevard and Anza Avenue. The roads were slick, visibility was poor, and the conditions were dangerous even for experienced drivers. Yet there they were, riding through the storm with the confidence of young people who have not yet learned that physics is undefeated.

    For that reason, I was not surprised to read Salvador Hernandez’s Los Angeles Times article, “California’s New Hell’s Angels: Teens on E-Bikes Cut a Path of Danger.” Hernandez describes much of what residents like me have witnessed firsthand. Among the incidents he recounts is the death of an elderly man who was struck by a fourteen-year-old riding recklessly on an e-bike. The problem has grown serious enough that law enforcement agencies are developing specialized responses. Police departments have begun cracking down on illegally modified e-bikes that exceed state regulations, and in Orange County authorities have created dedicated task forces to pursue dangerous riders.

    Many parents remain unaware that California recognizes three distinct classes of e-bikes.

    Class 1 bikes use pedal assist only and have a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour. They are permitted for riders of all ages and require helmets.

    Class 2 bikes combine pedal assist with a throttle and are also limited to twenty miles per hour. They too are available to riders of all ages and require helmets.

    Class 3 bikes use pedal assist and can reach twenty-eight miles per hour. Riders must be at least sixteen years old and wear helmets.

    All three classes are required to display a visible label identifying their classification, though one suspects that some of today’s young speed merchants regard regulatory labels with roughly the same respect they show stop signs.

    Like many public-safety problems, this one seems destined to become worse before it gets better. Driving in Los Angeles was already a test of patience before the arrival of the e-bike era. The city had long mastered the arts of congestion, stress, discourtesy, and occasional road rage. The addition of e-bikes has introduced a fresh layer of chaos. Every morning when I drive my daughters to school, I encounter a gauntlet of obstacles: teenagers weaving through traffic, ignoring traffic laws, and treating the safety of others as an optional consideration.

    The irony is that e-bikes themselves are not the problem. Used responsibly, they are efficient, economical, and environmentally friendly. The problem is the culture that has developed around them—a culture that often treats traffic laws as suggestions and regards reckless behavior as a form of entertainment.

    Where I live, pulling to the side of the road for emergency vehicles is a routine occurrence. We have both Little Company of Mary and Torrance Memorial nearby, and sirens are part of the local soundtrack. Perhaps the increase in emergency activity has nothing to do with e-bikes. Perhaps it is merely my imagination. But after watching teenagers launch themselves through intersections on machines capable of twenty-eight miles per hour while possessing the judgment of teenagers, I cannot help suspecting that at least some of those sirens are chasing the inevitable consequences of youthful overconfidence meeting the laws of motion.

  • Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every day it feels as though I wake up to an arm-wrestling match with sin. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m an addict. What am I addicted to? That’s a stupid question. The better question is what am I not addicted to? In any event, that’s not the point of the story just yet. The point is that there are tens of millions of us. I know I’m not special. My life is defined by the constant challenge to overcome vice, corruption, and the habits that make it nearly impossible for me to forgive myself for being the wretched and loathsome individual that I am. 

    But forgive myself I must. Forgiveness is the only way I can mend my broken self. Forgiveness is a commitment to become someone different from the recalcitrant sinner that fills my life with regret. 

    Some say I am too hard on myself, but they are mistaken because once I understood that life is a continual test of character, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

    To be honest, however, there is something discouraging about viewing life as a daily battle against temptation. I cannot always defeat sin in an arm-wrestling match. Even on my best days, victory is incomplete. If I overcome temptation half the time, I still fail the other half. The prospect can feel exhausting. How can I forgive myself if I remain locked in a struggle I never fully win? How can I live with peace if temptation is always waiting and I never know whether I will emerge victorious?

    The answer may be that the object of forgiveness is not perfection but perseverance. The purpose of self-forgiveness is not to transform me into a flawless person. It is to transform me into a person who continues striving toward the good despite repeated failures. The measure of my character is not whether temptation disappears, but whether I continue returning to the fight. Forgiveness allows me to rise after every fall rather than define myself by the fall itself. The truly unforgivable life is not the life marked by failure. It is the life that abandons the struggle altogether.

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily efficient at encouraging surrender.

    You can retreat into a climate-controlled cocoon furnished with streaming services, snack foods, delivery apps, and algorithmically engineered distractions. You can spend years drifting from one dopamine hit to the next while the world applauds your consumption and politely asks if you would like another. Temptation no longer lurks in dark alleys. It arrives in bright packaging and offers free shipping.

    The world will not object if you quit the struggle. On the contrary, it will happily assist you. Fresh temptations will appear on your phone, your television, your computer, and eventually your doorstep. At some point, however, a terrible realization emerges. You are no longer directing your life. Your cravings are directing it for you.

    At that moment, you cease to be the protagonist of your own story. You become a supporting character in a drama written by your appetites, a bit player taking orders from every craving that wanders onto the stage. Perhaps you will grow numb to this reality and drift into a comfortable spiritual death, cushioned by convenience, entertained into submission, and surrounded by enough snacks and streaming content to dull any remaining sense of alarm. Or perhaps the discomfort will refuse to leave. Perhaps it will linger like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps it will haunt you until the life you have built begins to resemble a horror movie disguised as a luxury resort.

    That haunting may prove to be a gift. It may force you to confront the fact that you have been living in your own version of the Sunken Place, sinking ever deeper into passivity while your impulses seize control of the steering wheel. The tragedy is not that temptation exists. The tragedy is that you have mistaken indulgence for freedom and captivity for comfort. At some point, if you are fortunate, a voice will break through the fog. It will not whisper. It will not negotiate. It will issue a command as urgent as any ever spoken in a Jordan Peele horror film:

    Get out.

  • The Forgiveness Paradox

    The Forgiveness Paradox

    Learning to forgive yourself would become far less difficult if you understood what self-forgiveness actually is. It is not indulgence. It is not self-flattery. It is not a permission slip to ignore your failures and move on as though nothing happened. Genuine self-forgiveness demands the opposite. It requires you to clarify your moral code, raise the standard of your conduct, and commit yourself to a life that justifies forgiveness. The goal is not to erase the past but to answer it with better behavior.

    When you refuse to forgive yourself, however, you become haunted by the worst versions of your former self. Old humiliations emerge uninvited. Forgotten acts of selfishness return with startling clarity. You cringe, wince, and recoil as though the memories possess physical force. Part of the pain comes from the distance between who you were and who you are now. You look upon your former self with disbelief and wonder how you could ever have acted that way. Yet instead of moving toward redemption, you become trapped in a kind of moral purgatory—a psychological limbo in which you endlessly replay past wrongdoing without arriving at either genuine repentance or genuine forgiveness. You remain suspended between condemnation and redemption, unable to reach either shore.

    Paradoxically, this unforgiven state often makes you more likely to repeat the very behaviors that trouble your conscience. Burdened by guilt, you seek relief. Instead of confronting your pain directly, you look for escape in distractions, compulsions, and addictive pleasures. Whether the refuge is food, alcohol, entertainment, gambling, pornography, or some other dopamine-rich diversion, the purpose is the same: to silence the accusing voice within. The relief is temporary. The guilt soon returns, accompanied by fresh reasons for self-reproach. What follows is a guilt-dopamine loop, a self-perpetuating cycle in which unresolved guilt drives a person toward unhealthy pleasures for relief, only to create new guilt that deepens the original wound.

    The way out is not punishment but transformation. To escape guilt properly requires two acts. First, you forgive yourself. Second, you dedicate yourself to living with greater integrity, clearer intentions, and a moral seriousness that defies your former conduct. In doing so, you embrace what might be called the Forgiveness Paradox: the truth that people often become more virtuous after forgiving themselves than they ever were while punishing themselves. Endless self-condemnation rarely produces wisdom or character. Forgiveness, when joined to genuine moral renewal, often does. It allows you to stop staring at the wreckage behind you and begin building the life that your better self has been calling you toward all along.

    If you resist forgiving yourself, you must confront an uncomfortable possibility: on some level, you derive satisfaction from your own self-punishment. You rehearse old failures, revisit old humiliations, and keep your guilt alive as though tending a wound that has already begun to heal. But do not mistake this habit for moral seriousness. Self-flagellation is not a sign of piety, humility, or virtue. More often, it is a sign of someone unwilling to leave the familiar misery of guilt behind. It is easier to remain trapped in the guilt-dopamine loop—oscillating between self-condemnation and temporary escape—than to undertake the harder work of forgiveness and renewal. Genuine moral growth requires the courage to step out of the mire, accept that the past cannot be changed, and begin the difficult task of becoming a better person. The purpose of guilt is not to imprison you forever. Its purpose is to teach you what kind of life you must now live.

    Another way to understand self-forgiveness is to think of it as laying down a predicate. A predicate is incomplete by itself; it requires an object. What, then, is the object of forgiveness? It is the deliberate renunciation of your former way of life and the commitment to a new one. The purpose of forgiveness is not merely to erase guilt but to make moral renewal possible. When a person is forgiven, the message is not simply, “You are absolved.” It is also, “Go and sin no more.” Forgiveness is therefore not a form of moral amnesia. It is a moral summons. It calls you to become the kind of person whose present conduct stands in defiance of a shameful past. In this sense, forgiveness is not free. It imposes an obligation. Forgiveness is the predicate; a life of integrity is its object.

    Failing to forgive yourself lays down a very different predicate. It becomes a permission slip to remain trapped in the guilt-dopamine loop, endlessly oscillating between self-condemnation and temporary escape. The longer you remain in that cycle, the more you surrender your sense of agency. Instead of directing your life, you become directed by your cravings, compulsions, and darker passions. Whatever your station in life, such submission is a profound failure because it places your impulses in command and reduces your capacity for self-governance.

    To be ruled by your passions is to live in a kind of bondage. You may possess degrees, professional accomplishments, and worldly success, but you have not received the deepest form of education. As author and professor Luke Burgis argues, the purpose of education is to become the protagonist of your own life. A truly educated person is not merely informed; he possesses the freedom and discipline to shape his own destiny rather than being dragged along by appetite, resentment, or fear.

    Forgiveness is therefore not a luxury but a necessity. Without it, you remain chained to your past, allowing old failures to dictate the terms of your present existence. With it, you reclaim authorship of your life. You step out of the role of a passive observer, a background character, a non-player character reacting mechanically to circumstance. Self-forgiveness allows you to become the protagonist of your own story, capable of choosing a better path and living a life that is no longer defined by the worst things you have done.

  • When Evil Goes Viral

    When Evil Goes Viral

    In “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse,” Heidi Blake examines the disturbing world built by influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan from their base in a wealthy enclave north of Bucharest known as the American Village. What emerges is not merely a pornography business but an entire ideology. According to Blake’s reporting, the Tate brothers are accused of recruiting and exploiting women while simultaneously constructing an online empire designed to sell young men a vision of unrestrained power. Through a private network called the War Room, Tate promises liberation from what he describes as the imprisonment of conventional morality. In its place, he offers a creed of domination in which women become trophies, commodities, or servants to male desire. One woman’s experience illustrates the cruelty of this worldview. After recruiting her, Tate reportedly subjected her to humiliation, financed cosmetic procedures, and had the words “Tate Owned” tattooed on her body, branding another human being as though she were property.

    Tate’s worldview is so grotesque that it often feels less like reality than an abandoned screenplay rejected for lacking subtlety. Hollywood villains are usually granted complexity, vulnerability, or redeeming traits. Tate seems determined to eliminate all such nuances. He openly cultivates the image of a man who views empathy as weakness and domination as virtue. Yet what makes him truly alarming is not the extremity of his beliefs but the enthusiasm with which he markets them. Tate does not hide from accusations of evil. Instead, he recasts himself as a prophet. To his followers, he presents himself as a shepherd leading lost men toward a promised land of wealth, sexual conquest, and absolute freedom from moral restraint.

    The nightmare grows darker when one considers the size of his audience. Tate possesses what our culture increasingly values above wisdom, character, or integrity: clout. He commands a vast social-media following and uses it to promote a lifestyle assembled from luxury watches, cigars, supercars, conspicuous wealth, and an aggressively performative version of masculinity. His genius, if one can call it that, lies in understanding the mechanics of attention. In an age where visibility often substitutes for virtue, influence itself becomes evidence of success. The result is that millions of young men encounter Tate not as a fringe extremist but as a glamorous symbol of aspiration.

    Tate is also intensely political. He boasts of shifting the Overton window, expanding the boundaries of what can be publicly said and tolerated. In his telling, this is a triumph. In reality, it often resembles an effort to normalize ideas that were once regarded as beyond the pale. The objective is not simply to win arguments but to redefine the moral landscape itself, widening the escape hatch through which cruelty, misogyny, and contempt can pass into public life disguised as courage or authenticity.

    When Tate faced arrest on human-trafficking charges, he was defended by a collection of prominent allies and media figures who viewed him as useful to broader political and cultural battles. In a polarized age, alliances are increasingly forged not through shared principles but through shared enemies. The question ceases to be whether a person is decent and becomes whether that person can help advance a cause. Under such conditions, moral judgment is replaced by strategic calculation.

    It has often been said that shamelessness is a superpower. There is truth in that observation. Shame restrains. Conscience hesitates. Moral reflection slows us down. The shameless suffer from none of these inconveniences. They can say anything, excuse anything, and justify anything. But if shamelessness is a superpower, it is one purchased at a tremendous cost. To embrace figures like Tate is to announce that power matters more than virtue and influence more than decency. It is to make one’s bargain with the devil publicly visible.

    What Blake’s article ultimately reveals is not merely the story of Andrew Tate but the story of a culture increasingly intoxicated by clout. In a society obsessed with metrics, followers, engagement, and influence, visibility itself becomes a moral credential. The result is a world in which people who openly celebrate cruelty can become celebrities while those who practice humility and integrity are rewarded with obscurity. Tate thrives because he understands this reality better than most. He has discovered that in the attention economy, notoriety often pays better than goodness. The tragedy is not simply that men like Andrew Tate exist. The tragedy is that so many people have decided he is worth following.

  • The Astrology Queen and the Ghost Daughter

    The Astrology Queen and the Ghost Daughter

    In Rachel Syme’s “The Star-Crossed Recluse Who Brought Astrology to the Masses,” she examines the improbable rise of Linda Goodman, the woman who transformed astrology from a fringe curiosity into a cultural phenomenon. Before Goodman, astrology occupied the margins of American life, an embarrassing diversion for eccentrics and mystics. After Goodman, it became mainstream entertainment, a cosmic personality test for the masses. Her books sold tens of millions of copies by offering readers an irresistible promise: the universe had you in mind. Your zodiac sign explained your personality, your appearance, your virtues, your flaws, your romantic prospects, and perhaps even your destiny. Goodman didn’t merely sell astrology. She sold the comforting idea that the stars were paying attention.

    Syme argues that the strangeness of Goodman’s life is captured beautifully in Colurmey Ann LaFaive’s biography Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America’s Forgotten Astrology Queen. LaFaive first encountered Goodman as a teenager and adored her books. Yet the deeper she dug into her subject’s life, the more Goodman resisted easy admiration. She was not merely eccentric but genuinely perplexing. An oddball visionary, a successful entrepreneur, a seeker, and at times a deeply troubled woman, Goodman inhabited a reality in which ordinary boundaries between belief and fantasy seemed remarkably porous. Nowhere was this more evident than in her refusal to accept the death of her daughter Sally. Although authorities ruled the death a suicide, Goodman became convinced that her daughter remained alive somewhere in the world. Whatever fate had befallen the body found in the apartment, Goodman believed it belonged to someone else. The real Sally, she insisted, was still out there.

    Born Mary Alice Kemery in Morgantown, West Virginia, Goodman displayed an appetite for the mystical from an early age. She embraced occult ideas with enthusiasm, believing in fairies, druids, hidden wisdom, and unseen dimensions. After marrying, having two children, and divorcing, she supported herself as a single mother by hosting a radio program called Love Letters from Linda. There she read letters from soldiers separated from their loved ones and soothed listeners with a voice that projected warmth, reassurance, and hope. Long before she became an astrology celebrity, Goodman had already discovered a gift that would define her career: the ability to comfort anxious people.

    Her conversion to astrology occurred during her second marriage after reading a book on the subject. The experience altered the trajectory of her life. Goodman immersed herself in astrology, teaching herself how to construct charts and interpret celestial patterns. She began offering consultations in Manhattan, and demand for her services steadily grew. Then, in the late 1960s, she published Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs. The book became a runaway bestseller and effectively launched mainstream astrology into American popular culture. Goodman had discovered a formula as powerful as it was profitable: tell people that the cosmos has a special explanation for who they are, and they will eagerly listen.

    Success, however, did not bring stability. After divorcing her second husband and moving to Cripple Creek, Colorado, Goodman received the devastating news of Sally’s death in Manhattan. From that moment forward, her life took on the quality of a fever dream. Faced with a suicide note and evidence that convinced everyone else, Goodman remained unmoved. The body was not Sally’s, she insisted, but a double. Dreams convinced her she alone understood the truth. She wandered Manhattan in a state of near delirium, sleeping on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and pleading with detectives to reopen the case. Eventually she hired a man claiming to be a former CIA agent and pursued leads in Maine, where Sally had once acted. The investigation grew increasingly bizarre, culminating in confrontations with Sally’s former associates and threats designed to silence anyone who questioned Goodman’s theory.

    It is here that LaFaive’s biography becomes most compelling. Rather than offering a reverential portrait of a beloved cultural icon, she confronts the contradictions that made Goodman both fascinating and troubling. Goodman was capable of extraordinary intuition and extraordinary self-deception. She brought comfort to millions while remaining unable to accept devastating truths in her own life. LaFaive ultimately concludes that her book is, in some sense, a failure because she could not construct a neat, unified theory of Linda Goodman. Yet Syme suggests that this failure is precisely what makes the biography succeed. Goodman remains elusive, contradictory, and mysterious. She emerges not as a saint, a fraud, or a visionary, but as something more interesting: a deeply human figure whose life, like the constellations she loved to interpret, resists being connected into a perfectly coherent pattern.

  • Gimpel in the Age of Clout

    Gimpel in the Age of Clout

    During the last several months, I have found myself thinking about a word that appears everywhere in the manosphere and influencer culture: clout. The word carries the scent of raw power and money. It implies that deception, manipulation, and cleverness are not merely acceptable but admirable, provided they produce influence. The idea depresses me because the merchants of clout often succeed. They accumulate followers by the millions, preaching a form of practical nihilism in which visibility becomes the highest good. Every religion has its devil, and the devil of clout has an opposite: obscurity. In the attention economy, we possess endless metrics for measuring who matters and who does not. Once we accept those metrics, we become captives of a grotesque vision of optimization. As I contemplate this folly, I find myself haunted by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story Gimpel the Fool.

    Gimpel is an orphan, a misfit, and a lovable man-child wandering the streets of Frampol. He possesses a sweetness so genuine that it appears almost supernatural. The townspeople, by contrast, pride themselves on their irony, cynicism, and cleverness. Because Gimpel is trusting, they become addicted to deceiving him. They lie to him, mock him, trick him, and turn him into a public spectacle whenever the opportunity presents itself. His innocence functions like catnip for the town’s cruelty.

    Gimpel’s only true ally is the rabbi, who insists that Gimpel is no fool at all. The real fools are those who delight in evil and humiliation. They mistake malice for intelligence. Gimpel, on the other hand, radiates goodness. Singer’s story repeatedly suggests that goodness and foolishness are not the same thing, even if the world often confuses them.

    When Gimpel expresses a desire to leave town, he is persuaded to marry Elka, who turns out to be the exact opposite of the pure and virtuous maiden he has been promised. Elka openly admits she is no innocent, yet demands that she be treated with dignity. Gimpel agrees, and they marry. Before long, Elka gives birth to a child that is plainly not his.

    Yet Gimpel loves the boy anyway. He devotes himself to the child and gradually comes to love Elka as well. His devotion is not rewarded. Elka treats him with contempt. While he works, she entertains other men and continually rejects his attempts at affection. The rabbi urges Gimpel to divorce her, but he cannot bring himself to do it. Instead, he continues supporting Elka and her children with money, food, and patience.

    For twenty years he remains loyal to a woman who repeatedly betrays him. Elka eventually bears six children, none of whom appear to be his. Then she falls ill and dies. Her final request is simple: that Gimpel forgive her. Reflecting on her life, he imagines her summing it up with a bleak confession: “I deceived Gimpel. That was the meaning of my brief life.”

    After her death, the Spirit of Evil visits Gimpel and offers him a tempting form of revenge. The townspeople have mocked him his entire life. Why not repay them? Why not urinate in the bakery’s bread dough and feed them corruption disguised as nourishment? When Gimpel hesitates, the spirit mocks his faith. There is no God, it says. There is no judgment. There is no meaning. The world is nothing but a swamp of lies. Seduced by resentment, Gimpel finally gives in and contaminates the dough.

    The act immediately wounds his conscience. Soon afterward, Elka appears to him in a dream. Wrapped in a burial shroud, she asks a single question: “What have you done, Gimpel?” He tries to blame her for his anger and bitterness, but she rejects the excuse. Her life may have been false, she tells him, but that does not mean all of life is false. She reveals that her deceptions have led her into profound suffering after death. When Gimpel looks at her face, he sees it consumed by darkness. The vision shocks him awake.

    Terrified by what he has done, Gimpel gathers the loaves and buries them in a chasm before anyone can eat them.

    Then he leaves Frampol.

    He gives provisions to his children and becomes a wanderer, drifting from place to place. Along the way he discovers that the world is overflowing with lies, yet no lie remains hidden forever. Every deception eventually reveals a truth. Every fraud leaves a trail. Even dreams become witnesses against those who seek to escape reality.

    As he travels, Gimpel accumulates stories. He learns that humanity is capable of every vice imaginable and that today’s absurdity often becomes tomorrow’s reality. Yet he also discovers that people hunger for meaning. They crave stories because stories impose order on a world that frequently resembles chaos. Gimpel becomes a storyteller, and audiences gather around him because his tales help them navigate a universe that often seems abandoned to cynicism and nihilism.

    In old age, he still dreams of Elka. He remembers her betrayals, but he remembers her with tenderness rather than bitterness. It is as though the generosity of his own heart gradually redeems her memory. The woman who spent her life deceiving him becomes, in recollection, the woman she might have been.

    The story ends with Gimpel reflecting that the world itself may be a kind of illusion. We may be little more than shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Yet Singer’s point is not that truth is unattainable. It is that truth exists beyond our distortions. We are always one breath away from a more real world. The response to deception is not greater deception. The response to nihilism is not surrender. We must live with goodness, integrity, and faith. Otherwise, in our pursuit of clout, cleverness, and self-interest, we become the fools we imagined ourselves too sophisticated to be.