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Today I Gave My Students a Lesson on Real and Fake Engagement

I teach the student athletes at my college, and right now we’re exploring a question that cuts to the bone of modern life: Why are we so morally apathetic toward companies that feed our addictions, glamorize eating disorders, and employ CEOs who behave like cult leaders or predators?

We’ve watched three documentaries to anchor our research: Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion (Max), Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel (Max), and White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch (Netflix). Each one dissects a different brand, but the pathology beneath them is the same—companies built not on fabric, but fantasy. For four weeks, I lectured about this moral rot. My students listened politely. Eyes glazed. Interest flatlined. It was clear: they didn’t care about fashion.

So today, I tried something different. I told them to forget about the clothes. The essay, I explained, isn’t really about fashion—it’s about selling illusion. These brands were never peddling T-shirts or jeans; they were peddling a fantasy of beauty, popularity, and belonging. And they did it through something I called fake engagement—a kind of fever swamp where people mistake addiction for connection, and attention for meaning.

Fake engagement is the psychological engine of our times. It’s the dopamine loop of social media and the endless scroll. People feed their insecurities into it and get rewarded with the mirage of significance: likes, follows, attention. It’s an addictive system built on FOMO and self-erasure. Fake engagement is a demon. The more you feed it, the hungrier it gets. You buy things, post things, watch things, all to feel visible—and yet every click deepens the void.

This pathology is not confined to consumer brands. The entire economy now depends on it. Influencers sell fake authenticity. YouTubers stage “relatable” chaos. Politicians farm outrage to harvest donations. Every sphere of life—from entertainment to governance—has been infected by the logic of the algorithm: engagement above truth, virality above virtue.

I told my students they weren’t hearing anything new. The technologist Jaron Lanier has been warning us for over a decade that digital platforms are rewiring our brains, turning us into unpaid content providers for an economy of distraction. But then I reminded them that as athletes, they actually hold a kind of immunity to this epidemic.

Athletes can’t survive on fake engagement. They can’t pretend to win a game. They can’t filter a sprint or Photoshop a jump shot. Their work depends on real engagement—trust, discipline, and honest feedback. Their coaches demand evidence, not illusion. That’s what separates a competitor from a content creator. One lives in the real world; the other edits it out.

In sports, there’s no algorithm to flatter you. Reality is merciless and fair. You either make the shot or you don’t. You either train or you coast. You either improve or you plateau. The scoreboard has no patience for your self-image.

I contrasted this grounded reality with the digital circus we’ve come to call culture. Mukbang YouTubers stuff themselves with 10,000 calories on camera for likes. Watch obsessives blow through their savings chasing luxury dopamine. Influencers curate their “personal brand” as if selfhood were a marketing campaign. They call this engagement. I call it pathology. They’re chasing the same empty high that the fast-fashion industry monetized years ago: the belief that buying something—or becoming something online—can fill the hole of disconnection.

This is the epistemic crisis of our time: a collective break from reality. People no longer ask whether something is true or good; they ask whether it’s viral. We’re a civilization medicated by attention, high on engagement, and bankrupt in meaning.

That’s why I tell my athletes their essay isn’t about fashion—it’s about truth. About how human beings become spiritually and mentally sick when they lose their relationship to reality. You can’t heal what you refuse to see. And you can’t see anything clearly when your mind is hijacked by dopamine economics.

The world doesn’t need more influencers. It needs coaches—people who ground others in trust, expertise, and evidence. Coaches model a form of mentorship that Silicon Valley can’t replicate. They give feedback that isn’t gamified. They remind players that mastery requires patience, and that progress is measured in skill, not clicks.

When you think about it, the word coach itself has moral weight. It implies guidance, not manipulation. Accountability, not performance. A coach is the opposite of an influencer: they aren’t trying to be adored; they’re trying to make you better. They aren’t feeding your addiction to attention; they’re training your focus on reality.

I told my students that if society is going to survive this digital delirium, we’ll need millions of new coaches—mentors, teachers, parents, and friends who can anchor us in truth when everything around us is optimized for illusion. The fast-fashion brands we study are just one symptom of a larger disease: the worship of surface.

But reality, like sport, eventually wins. The body knows when it’s neglected. The mind knows when it’s being used. Truth has a way of breaking through even the loudest feed.

The good news is that after four weeks of blank stares, something finally broke through. When I reframed the essay—not as a takedown of fashion, but as a diagnosis of fake engagement—the room changed. My athletes sat up straighter. They started nodding. Their eyes lit up. For the first time all semester, they were engaged.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. The essay about fake engagement had just produced the real kind.

October 22, 2025
Thou Shalt Not Cram Thine Enormous Head into Symbols of Conformity

The Canyon High locker room smelled like a crime scene of adolescence—dirty socks fermenting in old sneakers, wet towels decaying in piles, and the sour musk of Old Spice cologne trying to mask failure. I sat on a cold bench, wearing my junior varsity football uniform—pants, cleats, pads, and a white jersey that clung to me like a bad decision. On the bench beside me gleamed a red helmet, polished to an evil shine. It looked less like protective gear and more like an executioner’s hood with a face mask.

Greg Migliore and Gil Gutierrez—two teammates with all the empathy of drill sergeants—were looming over me.
“Put on the helmet,” Migliore said. “O-line drills in five minutes.”
“Don’t rush me,” I said. “This may take a minute.”
Gutierrez folded his arms. “We’ve got to be on the field now.”
“Look at that thing,” I said, nodding toward the red dome. “It’s way too small.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Gutierrez. “That’s the biggest one.”
“But my head’s huge.”
Migliore rolled his eyes. “My head’s bigger and it fits fine.”
“It’s not just the size,” I said. “It’s the shape. Mine’s like a misshapen pumpkin.”
“Put the damn thing on,” said Gutierrez, tired of my existential crisis.

I obeyed, sort of. I placed the helmet on top of my head like a crown for a reluctant monarch. It perched there, refusing to descend.
“I told you—it’s too small.”
“Jesus, McMahon, are you crazy?” Gutierrez barked. “Pull it all the way down.”

Before I could protest, Gutierrez grabbed the helmet and forced it onto my head. My skull shrieked in silence. My temples were in a vise, my ears screaming in protest, my lungs begging for oxygen.
“Jesus, it’s tight!” I gasped. “I can’t breathe!”
“You’ll get used to it,” Migliore said, clearly an optimist about cranial suffocation.

I didn’t get used to it. I screamed—an unholy, primal shriek—and ripped the helmet off like it was on fire. My ears throbbed as if I’d peeled them off with the facemask.
Gutierrez and Migliore collapsed in laughter.
“It’s not funny!” I shouted, my face crimson. “I almost died!”
They laughed harder, which only deepened my martyrdom.
“You think this is funny? Great. Tell Coach Croswell I quit.”
“Quit?” Migliore said. “You haven’t even started.”
“Yeah, well not being able to wear the helmet kind of ruins the experience.”
Migliore turned to Gutierrez. “The dude’s got claustrophobia.”
“Stage three,” I said. “Can’t ride elevators. Tell the coach it’s over.”
“You’re the biggest freshman in the school,” Gutierrez said. “He’s going to flip.”
“Then tell him I’m a claustrophobic pacifist. I don’t even like football. I was doing this as a favor, but it’s not working out.”

I changed back into my civilian clothes and went home, where Master Po awaited—my inner monk of bad timing.
“Master Po,” I said, “should I feel guilty for quitting?”
“Grasshopper,” he said, “you must know the difference between self-improvement and self-distortion. Even if you conquered your fear of closed spaces, you’d still hate football. Do not pursue what pleases others. The Way of Heaven does not strive—yet it overcomes.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “But Coach Croswell’s going to want something more tangible than Zen paradoxes.”
“You owe him no explanation,” Po said. “Reveal your true self. Your authentic life will speak for itself.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure my authentic life is going to be running extra laps tomorrow in P.E.”

October 22, 2025
If You Spend Your Life Wanting Things, You Will be in a Constant Fever

One evening, I was holed up in my room, devouring a muscle magazine like it was scripture. I’d just finished an article on “progressive resistance training,” a phrase that made my adolescent heart thump with moral clarity. The world, I decided, was divided into two kinds of people: those who were progressing—pushing, grinding, improving—and those who were stuck, rotting in the swamps of inertia. Naturally, I placed myself in the first camp, the self-anointed pilgrim of progress.

When the article ended, I drifted into the ads—the sacred appendix of every muscle mag. Protein powders, chrome dumbbells, pulleys, powders, potions—alchemy for the ambitious. But one ad stopped me cold: the Bullworker. A gleaming, three-foot rod of plastic and steel with cables sprouting from its sides like mechanical tendons. When you pulled the cables, the thing bowed like a crossbow for Hercules. A shirtless bodybuilder—pecs like carved mahogany—was using it to crush air itself. Price tag: forty-five bucks. Steep, but wasn’t self-transformation always costly?

I marched into the living room, magazine in hand. My father sat in his recliner, beer in one hand, football roaring from the TV like an angry god.
“Dad, what do you think?” I said, pointing to the Bullworker.

He barely glanced at it. Still had the infantryman haircut, the square jaw, the tattoo—MICHAEL, bold and blue—across his right bicep like a relic from some forgotten war.
“You want big muscles?” he said. “Pull weeds. Mow the lawn. Clean the gutters. Chop some kindling. That should do it.”

“Dad, come on, I’m serious. This would be great for my workouts.”

He sighed, studied the ad, then set the magazine down.
“Son, this is marketing dressed up as science. But if you want to waste your allowance, go ahead.”

“I’m short on cash.”

“Then save. But make sure you want it. Do your research. My guess? The more you learn, the less you’ll want it.”

“Why do you say that?”

He smirked. “You ever heard of Sturgeon’s Law?”

“No.”

“Ninety-nine percent of everything is bullshit. Including that. Remember that martial arts course you bought? The one that promised black-belt skills in six weeks? What did you get? Stick figures in a pamphlet. Bullshit. Perform your due diligence, son. It’ll save you money.”

“What’s ‘due diligence’?”

“It means don’t be a sucker. Look closely before you buy anything. Most things collapse under scrutiny. Always be eager to save your money and reluctant to spend it. You hear me?”

“Yes, Dad.”

I retreated to my room, unimpressed by football and existentially wounded by paternal pragmatism. I opened another magazine and, in a desperate act of spiritual outsourcing, asked Master Po—my imaginary monk mentor—what he thought.

“Your father is right, Grasshopper,” he said, somewhere between my conscience and my guilt. “If you spend your life wanting things, you will stay forever busy saving for them—and it will not be a noble busyness. It will be the feverish pacing of a man hypnotized by catalogs. Simplify your life, Grasshopper, and do the work that needs to be done.”

“And what work is that?” I asked.

“To stop pretending the world owes you the front of the line,” he said. “Stand at the back. Wait your turn. While you wait, develop yourself. Earn your place.”

“How long will that take?”

“A lifetime, Grasshopper,” he said. “And when you think you’ve arrived, the journey will have only begun.”

October 22, 2025
Thou Shalt Not Measure Thy Goodness Against Fools

In eighth grade, Erika Jenkins was every boy’s favorite target—a tall, freckled volleyball player with legs that seemed to go on for miles and a face that couldn’t hide her fear. The boys called her Horse, Giraffe, Hyena, Zebra—an entire menagerie of cruelty. Every morning she had to walk the gauntlet from her locker to the corridor, clutching her books to her chest like a shield, her eyes darting from side to side as if she were trying to survive a nature documentary. She looked like someone bracing for an attack, because she was.

Then summer arrived—and performed a miracle. Her grandmother took her on a Caribbean cruise, and somewhere between the turquoise waves and the buffet line, Erika Jenkins molted. When she returned that fall, she was unrecognizable. The boys at Canyon High buzzed with talk of “The Caribbean Transformation.”

At lunch on the first day, she made her debut. Gone was the awkward, lanky girl. In her place stood someone who could have walked off a shampoo commercial. She wore a sleeveless white linen dress that caught the light, her tan skin glowing like toasted sugar. Her once-flat hair now tumbled over her shoulders in glossy brown waves. Her limbs, once all elbows and knees, now belonged to a young woman who had grown into herself.

The same boys who had brayed at her like hyenas now worshiped her like pilgrims before a shrine. They tripped over themselves to compliment her, their awe soon sliding into the same loutish cruelty—just with a new vocabulary. The tone changed from mockery to hunger, but the malice was the same. By October, Erika Jenkins vanished—transferred, rumor had it, to a small private school where maybe she could breathe.

I was furious—but not for noble reasons. I had finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. And now she was gone, like a dream that evaporates the moment you wake.

That night, I asked Master Po why her story hadn’t followed the script of The Ugly Duckling. “Why wasn’t there a happy ending?” I asked.

“Because, Grasshopper,” he said, “not all fairytales are true. The boys mocked her when she was an ‘ugly duckling,’ and they mocked her again when she became a ‘beautiful swan.’ Only their weapons changed—from insult to lust. They remained prisoners of their malice. It was they, not she, who failed to evolve.”

He said this with a sharpness I wasn’t used to. “But I never teased her,” I protested. “Not once.”

“Do not congratulate yourself for being less vile than the wicked,” he said. “You still measured your worth by their ugliness. You did not defend her. You simply waited for your turn to possess her beauty. Her radiance blinded them—and you as well.”

“Are you saying I’m no better than they are?”

“I am saying,” Master Po said, “that even a moth believes itself noble until it burns in the flame. I can already see you falling from the sky.”

He was right, of course. My heartbreak wasn’t about Erika’s suffering—it was about my own loss. I didn’t mourn her pain. I mourned my missed opportunity to bask in her glow. Even in my sympathy, I was self-absorbed. Master Po saw the rot beneath my pity.

He always did.

October 21, 2025
Thou Shall Not Skip Gravity Day

When I was fourteen, I read in The San Francisco Chronicle that the future of humanity was apparently doomed to unfold inside a giant space terrarium. The article, steeped in optimism and mild insanity, described how overpopulation and resource depletion would eventually force us to evacuate Earth aboard lunar shuttles and live in “closed-ecology habitats in free orbit.” The prophet of this plan was Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, whose forthcoming book The High Frontier promised solar-powered utopias floating blissfully through the void.

The paper ran lush illustrations by Don Davis: rolling green hills, placid lakes, couples in flowing white linen strolling past solar panels, all living in a pastel Garden of Eden. But something about those inhabitants unsettled me. They all looked frail—thin, pale, gravity-deprived stick figures with the musculature of boiled linguine. That’s when the horror struck me: in space, there would be no gyms. No dumbbells. No pumping up. No gravity—no gains. My future would be a floating hell of atrophied muscles and existential despair. The very thought made my biceps twitch in protest.

At the same time, a girl at school named Jennifer slipped me a birthday card with hearts on the envelope. Inside, she’d written that she liked me and wanted me to ask her out. But how could I ask her out when civilization was on the brink of being exiled to a zero-gravity tofu colony? What was the point of romance when dumbbells were about to become obsolete?

I tore up the card, retreated to my room, and did what any hormonally charged doomsday philosopher would do: I consulted Master Po.
“Master Po,” I said, “how can I go on living if bodybuilding dies in orbit?”
“Grasshopper,” he said, “you live too much for yourself. You must empty yourself of self-interest.”
“But I’m obsessed with myself.”
“Exactly. And it shows in your quest to make your body beautiful.”
“But bodybuilding is my life.”
“And that,” he said, “is your curse. You train your body but let residue accumulate in your soul.”
“So I should quit working out?”
“Not quit. But see your body as not belonging to you. It is part of something larger.”
“You mean, like the universe?”
“Yes, Grasshopper. The body of the world.”
“So, what—you want me to start picking up trash on the freeway? That’s your cosmic wisdom?”
“Once again,” he sighed, “you are far from The Way.”

I looked at my reflection in the mirror that night—fourteen years old, terrified of zero gravity—and realized that maybe Master Po was right. I wasn’t afraid of space. I was afraid of floating away from myself.

October 21, 2025
When the Cloud Crashes and Humanity Briefly Reboots

Amazon Web Services crashed this morning, dragging half the digital universe down with it. Canvas, my college’s sacred “learning management system,” is among the casualties. I have a class in an hour. No panic, though. I can still hand out a physical sheet of paper—what the ancients called attendance—and my Google Slides are miraculously alive. So yes, the show will go on.

Still, I can’t help savoring the schadenfreude of this AWS outage. What if it took social media down with it? Imagine: no more performative friendships, no more dopamine duels in the comment sections, no more algorithmic outrage masquerading as civic discourse. Maybe we’d start talking to each other again—face to face, like mammals. Maybe we’d even regain the human capacity for silence.

Of course, this is delusional optimism on my part. Civilization won’t reboot itself because a few data centers hiccuped. I need to quit romanticizing the apocalypse and focus on my real challenge: surviving two hours with a roomful of chatty college athletes while explaining “emotional depth” and “mapping components.”

Wish me luck. My Canvas may be dead, but my dry-erase marker still lives.

October 20, 2025
Thou Shall Not Confuse Franco Columbu with Thyself

One sluggish afternoon at Canyon High, as Mrs. Hanson’s freshman English class shuffled into their desks and prepared to feign interest in Romeo and Juliet, I had something far more compelling on my desk: Pumping Iron. It was my sacred text, my adolescent scripture, filled with black-and-white photos of demi-gods flexing under the Californian sun. My favorite shot was of Mr. Universe Franco Columbu, hanging upside down from a chin-up bar like a bat carved from granite.

Next to me sat Jill Swanson—tall, sleek, with the effortless grace of a swimmer and the smile of someone who had never sweated through a protein fart. I decided this was my moment. I turned the page toward her.
“Hey,” I said, “check out this bodybuilder at the beach.”
She leaned in. “Holy smokes, he’s huge.”
I nodded solemnly. “That’s me.”
She blinked. “What?”
“That’s me. Can’t you tell?”
Jill squinted at the photograph, studying the Herculean Italian upside down in all his vascular glory.
“Oh my God,” she said slowly. “That’s you?”
“Yep.”
And just like that, I was Franco Columbu. I spun a whole mythology—how I’d been visiting my grandparents in L.A., hanging out with my “bodybuilding friends” in Venice, when a photographer captured me mid-workout.

For five glorious minutes, I was a god among freshmen. Then, as Jill flipped back to her notes and I basked in the afterglow of deceit, the truth curdled in my gut. The lie that had inflated me like a balloon was already leaking air. By the time I got home, I felt hollow and cheap. I stared into the bathroom mirror, splashed cold water on my face, and summoned my inner monk.

“Master Po,” I said, “why am I such a compulsive liar?”
“Because, Grasshopper,” he replied, “you wish to appear strong because you are weak. True strength is not forged in muscle but in mastering your inner demons.”
“I have only one?”
“No,” he said, “but let’s start with the demon of inadequacy—the one that makes you trade truth for applause.”
“How do I kill it?”
“You don’t,” he said. “You chip away at it. Great acts are made of small deeds. Each honest act is a strike against the demon.”
“But where do I start?”
“Stop gazing at your reflection as though it’s a sculpture to be admired,” he said. “When you cease to worship yourself, you’ll stop fearing imperfection. The sage who puts himself last finds nourishment. You, Grasshopper, are still starving.”

I looked at my reflection—small, soft, and decidedly un-Franco-like—and realized Master Po was right. The hardest muscle to build is the one that keeps you honest.

October 20, 2025
Thou Shalt Find Beauty in Freakishness—or Die Trying

By high school, I had fully accepted that I was not designed for the mainstream assembly line. Master Po—the blind sage from Kung Fu—had become my imaginary spiritual adviser, reminding me that I was a misfit, “a brooding soul misaligned with this world.” I wore that label like a second skin. While the cool kids air-guitared to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, I was hypnotized by the twelve-minute prog-rock epics of Yes, King Crimson, The Strawbs, and Genesis—bands that required liner notes and a calculator to appreciate.

Football was for the square-jawed; I preferred curling iron plates in the garage, sculpting myself into a protein-powered statue of misplaced purpose. Worse, I wasn’t just eccentric—I was evangelical. At parties, I arrived armed with Genesis LPs, a blender, and the self-righteous zeal of a macrobiotic missionary. While everyone else chugged beer, I lectured them on amino acid assimilation. “Beer tastes like horse piss!” I declared, mid-flex, clutching a protein shake like a chalice. Girls scattered like pigeons from a lawn sprinkler. “Come back!” I shouted after them. “I’m the only one here with abs!”

Later, alone in my room, my biceps and I sulked together under the blue glow of my bedside lamp.
“Master Po,” I sighed, “why am I such a freak?”
“Because you throw banana peels in people’s path to keep them from getting close to you,” he said.
“And why would I do that?”
“To protect yourself.”
“From what?”
“Everyone is broken, Grasshopper—but you are cracked to the core. Yet remember: beauty can be found even in freakishness. If you don’t draw that beauty out, it will turn inward and destroy you.”
“How so?”
“Because if you keep throwing banana peels for others, you’ll eventually slip on them yourself.”
I sighed. “I think it’s already happened.”

October 20, 2025
Breaking Up with the Protein Powder Industrial Complex

The deeper I dug into protein powders, the less convinced I became. What I’d been calling “nutrition” was really convenience dressed up in a plastic tub—processed, low in fiber, and shadowed by questions about heavy metals. So I scrapped the shortcuts. Instead, I built a rotation of four plant-based staples that quietly do the job: plain soy milk, pumpkin seeds, nutritional yeast, and hemp hearts.

Now, my breakfast writes itself: oats or buckwheat groats folded with soy milk, pumpkin seeds, and hemp hearts—a meal that actually feels alive instead of engineered. For lunch and dinner, I toss the same mix with nutritional yeast into sautéed tofu, quinoa or millet, roasted sweet potatoes, and dark greens like broccoli or kale.

Knowing exactly where my protein comes from—and how clean those sources are—has wiped out the low-grade anxiety that came with every scoop of powder. I’m no longer buying peace of mind from a supplement jar. I’ve reclaimed it in the kitchen, where real food and a decent spice rack make every meal something worth anticipating.

October 19, 2025
Your Tears Won’t Change the World

When I was thirteen, I decided the path to popularity ran straight through Soul Train. I spent months studying the dance troupe Captain Crunch and the Funky Bunch, who could pivot from the robotic precision of the Funky Robot to doing splits so fast you’d think they were animated. I practiced every night in front of my bedroom mirror until my limbs clicked like clockwork and my expression was as vacant as a mannequin’s. I was ready to unleash my Funky Robot at the Earl Warren Junior High dance.

The playlist that night was pure chaos. Whoever the DJ was, he seemed to be drawing songs from a hat. “Free Bird” dragged like a eulogy, “Walk This Way” felt like cardiac arrest, and “Midnight at the Oasis” was exactly what it sounded like—a languid romp in the desert. But when Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” came on, I sprang into motion. My body jerked and popped with righteous purpose. I was a mechanical deity in Adidas, a human jukebox powered by insecurity.

By some miracle of social physics, I ended up dancing all night with Cheryl Atkins—the prettiest girl there—because her boyfriend Rick hated to dance. While we funked and twirled under the mirrored ball, I noticed the misfits pressed against the gym walls like condemned prisoners. They’d ask for dances, get shot down, and limp back to their corner of despair. Watching them, I felt an unexpected pang—an ache sharper than any muscle burn.

Meanwhile, the popular eighth-graders were perfecting a ritual called “getting wasted,” which apparently involved puking and maintaining high social standing at the same time. As a Junior Olympic weightlifter, I found this baffling. I could clean and jerk my body weight, but I couldn’t comprehend how vomiting could make you cool.

By the end of the night, Cheryl and I won the dance contest. Vice Principal Gillis handed me a trophy, but instead of basking in my Funky Robot glory, I felt hollow. The faces of the wallflowers haunted me. That night, I dreamed of a beach where a giant elephant seal handed each lonely misfit a beautiful radio, and as they tuned it, they glowed and vanished into the horizon. I woke up certain of one thing: radios were holy.

“Master Po,” I said, “the world is cruel. I can’t be happy knowing people like those misfits suffer.”
“Spare me your tears, Grasshopper,” he said. “Sadness feels noble, but it’s an addiction. It comforts the ego while changing nothing.”
“But what can I do?” I asked. “Darwin was right—the strong thrive, and the weak pay the price.”
“Indeed,” he said. “And in case you haven’t noticed, you’re one of the weak. So tend your own garden, Grasshopper. The misfit must save himself before he can save the world.”

October 19, 2025