Cinemorphosis

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  • Obsolescence With Benefits: Life in the Age of Being Unnecessary

    Obsolescence With Benefits: Life in the Age of Being Unnecessary

    Existential Redundancy is what happens when the world keeps running smoothly—and you slowly realize it no longer needs you to keep the lights on. It isn’t unemployment; it’s obsolescence with benefits. Machines cook your meals, balance your passwords, drive your car, curate your entertainment, and tuck you into nine hours of perfect algorithmic sleep. Your life becomes a spa run by robots: efficient, serene, and quietly humiliating. Comfort increases. Consequence disappears. You are no longer relied upon, consulted, or required—only serviced. Meaning thins because it has always depended on friction: being useful to someone, being necessary somewhere, being the weak link a system cannot afford to lose. Existential Redundancy names the soft panic that arrives when efficiency outruns belonging and you’re left staring at a world that works flawlessly without your fingerprints on anything.

    Picture the daily routine. A robot prepares pasta with basil hand-picked by a drone. Another cleans the dishes before you’ve even tasted dessert. An app shepherds you into perfect sleep. A driverless car ferries you through traffic like a padded cell on wheels. Screens bloom on every wall in the name of safety, insurance, and convenience, until privacy becomes a fond memory you half suspect you invented. You have time—oceans of it. But you are not a novelist or a painter or anyone whose passions demand heroic labor. You are intelligent, capable, modestly ambitious, and suddenly unnecessary. With every task outsourced and every risk eliminated, the old question—What do you do with your life?—mutates into something colder: Where do you belong in a system that no longer needs your hands, your judgment, or your effort?

    So humanity does what it always does when it feels adrift: it forms support groups. Digital circles bloom overnight—forums, wellness pods, existential check-ins—places to talk about the hollow feeling of being perfectly cared for and utterly unnecessary. But even here, the machines step in. AI moderates the sessions. Bots curate the pain. Algorithms schedule the grief and optimize the empathy. Your confession is summarized before it lands. Your despair is tagged, categorized, and gently rerouted toward a premium subscription tier. Therapy becomes another frictionless service—efficient, soothing, and devastating in its implication. You sought human connection to escape redundancy, and found yourself processed by the very systems that made you redundant in the first place. In the end, even your loneliness is automated, and the final insult arrives wrapped in flawless customer service: Thank you for sharing. Your feelings have been successfully handled.

  • Optimized to Death: When Improvement Outruns Personal Growth

    Optimized to Death: When Improvement Outruns Personal Growth

    Optimization without integration produces a lopsided human being, and the AI age intensifies this distortion by overrewarding what can be optimized, automated, and displayed. Systems built on speed, output, and measurable performance train us to chase visible gains while starving the slower capacities that make those gains usable in real life. The result is a person who can execute flawlessly in one narrow lane yet falters the moment the situation becomes human—ambiguous, emotional, unscripted. The body may be sculpted while the self remains adolescent; the résumé gleams while judgment dulls; productivity accelerates while meaning evaporates. AI tools amplify this imbalance by making optimization cheap and frictionless, encouraging rapid improvement without requiring maturation, reflection, or integration. What emerges is not an unfinished person so much as an unevenly finished one—overdeveloped in what can be measured and underdeveloped in what must be lived. The tragedy is not incompetence but imbalance: strength without wisdom, speed without direction, polish without presence. In an age obsessed with optimization, what looks like progress is often a subtler form of arrested development.

    To encourage you to interrogate your own tendencies to achieve optimization without integration, write a 500–word personal narrative analyzing a period in your life when you aggressively optimized one part of yourself—your body, productivity, grades, skills, image, or output—while neglecting the integration of that growth into a fuller, more functional self.

    Begin by narrating the specific context in which optimization took hold. Describe the routines, metrics, sacrifices, and rewards that drove your improvement. Use concrete, sensory detail to show what was gained: strength, speed, recognition, efficiency, status, or validation. Make the optimization legible through action rather than abstraction.

    Then pivot. Identify the moment—or series of moments—when the imbalance became visible. What failed to develop alongside your optimized trait? Social competence? Emotional maturity? Judgment? Confidence? Meaning? Show how this lack of integration surfaced in a lived encounter: a conversation you couldn’t sustain, an opportunity you mishandled, a relationship you sabotaged, or a realization that exposed the limits of your progress.

    By the end of the essay, articulate what optimization without integration cost you. Do not reduce this to a moral lesson or self-help platitude. Instead, reflect on what this experience taught you about human development itself: why improving a single dimension of the self can create distortion rather than wholeness, and how true growth requires coordination between capacity, character, and context.

    Your goal is not confession or nostalgia but clarity. Show how a life can look impressive on the surface while remaining structurally incomplete—and what it takes to move from optimization toward integration.

    Avoid clichés about “balance” or “being well-rounded.” This essay should demonstrate insight through specificity, humor, and honest self-assessment. Let the reader see the mismatch before you explain it.

    As a model for the assignment, consider the following self-interrogation—a case study in optimization gone feral and integration nowhere to be found.

    At nineteen, I fell into a job at UPS, where they specialized in turning young men into over-caffeinated parcel gladiators. Picture a cardboard coliseum where bubble wrap was treated like a minor deity and the only sacrament was speed. My assignment was simple and brutal: load 1,200 boxes an hour into trailer walls so tight and elegant they could’ve qualified for Olympic Tetris. Five nights a week, from eleven p.m. to three a.m., I lived under fluorescent lights, sprinting on concrete, powered by caffeine, testosterone, and a belief that exhaustion was a personality trait. Without meaning to, I dropped ten pounds and watched my body harden into something out of a comic book—biceps with delusions of automotive lifting.

    This mattered because my early bodybuilding career had been a public embarrassment. At sixteen, I competed in the Mr. Teenage Golden State in Sacramento, smooth as a marble countertop and just as defined. A year later, at the Mr. Teenage California in San Jose, I repeated the humiliation, proving that consistency was my only strength. I refused to let my legacy be “promising kid, zero cuts.” Now, thanks to UPS cardio masquerading as labor, I watched striations appear like divine handwriting. Redemption no longer seemed possible; it felt scheduled.

    So I did what any responsible nineteen-year-old bodybuilder would do: I declared war on carbohydrates. I starved myself with religious fervor and trained like a man auditioning for sainthood. By the time the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco rolled around at Mission High School, I had achieved what I believed was human perfection—180 pounds of bronzed, veined, magazine-ready beefcake. The downside was logistical. My clothes no longer fit. They hung off me like a visual apology. This triggered an emergency trip to a Pleasanton mall, where I entered a fitting room that felt like a shrine to Joey Scarbury’s “Theme from The Greatest American Hero,” the soundtrack of peak Reagan-era delusion.

    While changing behind a curtain so thin it offered plausible deniability rather than privacy, I overheard two young women working the store arguing—audibly—about which one should ask me out. Their voices escalated. Stakes rose. I imagined them staging a full WWE brawl among the racks: flying elbows, folding chairs, all for the right to split a breadstick with me at Sbarro. This, I thought, was the payoff. This was what discipline looked like.

    And then—nothing. I froze. I adopted an aloof, icy expression so effective it could’ve extinguished a bonfire. The women scattered, muttering about my arrogance, while I stood there in my Calvin Kleins, immobilized by the very attention I had trained for. I had optimized everything except the part of me required to be human.

    For a brief, shimmering window, I possessed the body of a Greek god and the social competence of a malfunctioning Atari joystick. I looked like James Bond and interacted like a background extra waiting for direction. Beneath the Herculean exterior was a hollow shell—a construction site abandoned mid-project, rusted scaffolding still up, a plywood sign nailed crookedly to the entrance: SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED.

  • Crossing the Line: A Dream About Authority, Fear, and Painted Boundaries

    Crossing the Line: A Dream About Authority, Fear, and Painted Boundaries

    Last night I dreamed I was part of a procession—about a hundred people, uniformly drab, dressed in the colors of resignation. Their faces carried the dull serenity of those who had long ago outsourced judgment. We moved in silence toward a high school, then funneled onto the soccer field like obedient data packets. At the painted boundary lines, the crowd stopped as one body, lifted their arms, and pointed north.

    There, planted beside the goalpost like a sanctioned myth, stood the figure they feared. He was Zeus-shaped—early sixties, six feet tall, silver beard, posture stiff with authority. His eyes were sharp, avian, and distinctly unwelcoming. The crowd murmured instructions without turning around: Do not cross the line. Do not approach. This is as close as you’re allowed to get.

    Naturally, I crossed it.

    I wasn’t hostile. I didn’t charge or shout. I walked toward him calmly, the way someone does when they want to verify whether a warning is wisdom or superstition. I told him I meant no harm. I only wanted to test the claims made on his behalf. He responded tersely. He ordered me back behind the line and, to clarify his sincerity, lobbed a few lightning bolts in my direction—carefully calibrated to miss, close enough to educate but not annihilate. The message was precise: curiosity would be tolerated once; persistence would be punished.

    That was enough. I had learned what I came to learn—not from the crowd’s trembling consensus, but from direct encounter. The boundary wasn’t imaginary. It had teeth. I stepped back across the painted line and rejoined the mass, now wiser, now compliant, waiting quietly for the next instruction to arrive from the sky.

  • Experience Has Left the Building: Teaching Writing After Representational Displacement

    Experience Has Left the Building: Teaching Writing After Representational Displacement

    Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience names the quiet catastrophe of our moment: experience itself has been replaced by its press release. We no longer meet the world face-to-face; we encounter its avatar—curated, quantified, filtered, and politely optimized for consumption. Reality arrives pre-processed. Life is no longer lived so much as represented. We scroll through it, measure it, track it, and somehow wonder why it feels thin. This is what I call Representational Displacement: a condition in which lived reality is steadily displaced by its mediated substitutes—screens, metrics, feeds, dashboards—until experience is filtered before it is even felt. The world is not encountered but managed, not inhabited but previewed. We live one remove away from our own lives, alienated not by scarcity but by overrepresentation.

    Rosen is clear about the cost. “Experiences,” she writes, “are the ways we become acquainted with the world. Direct experience is our first teacher.” Strip that away and education becomes a simulation of learning rather than the thing itself. And that is precisely what is happening in classrooms. Direct experience is contracting. AI-driven functions are expanding. Students are increasingly trained to manage outputs, assemble responses, and comply with systems rather than grapple with ideas, language, and uncertainty. The result is a generation at risk of becoming well-behaved functionaries—NPCs with decent syntax—rather than human beings engaged in Higher Learning as a transformative act. As a writing instructor, I refuse to let the classroom collapse into a content farm staffed by polite machines. My job now is counterinsurgency: designing assignments that restore friction, embodiment, memory, and lived encounter—work that forces experience back into the center of learning, where it belongs.

     One such counterinsurgency is the Memory-Specific Writing Prompt. It is deliberately designed to anchor writing in lived experience rather than transferable knowledge, requiring details that arise from a writer’s embodied past and cannot be convincingly generated by pattern recognition alone. It demands concrete, localized specificity—named places, obsolete objects, idiosyncratic rituals, sensory impressions, and personal contradictions—that exist only because the writer was physically present at a particular time. By tying meaning to unrepeatable memory rather than generalizable insight, the assignment makes fluency insufficient and forces authorship to matter. The result is writing that values presence over polish, consequence over coherence, and recollection over reproduction—conditions under which AI tools become at best marginal assistants and at worst obvious impostors.

    Dismissing this assignment as “merely creative writing” misunderstands both its purpose and its rigor. Memory-specific writing trains the same cognitive skills demanded by the so-called real world: sustained attention, accurate observation, causal reasoning, ethical self-representation, and the ability to translate raw experience into accountable language. Professionals do not succeed by producing generic prose; they succeed by noticing what others miss, explaining complex situations clearly, and grounding claims in evidence that can withstand scrutiny. This assignment treats memory as data, description as analysis, and narrative as a method for testing meaning rather than decorating it. In an economy saturated with frictionless text generation, the capacity to produce precise, credible, experience-based writing is not ornamental—it is a core competency, and one that cannot be automated away.

    One such prompt I’ll give you is titled “The Unlikely Happy Place”: Write an 800-word personal narrative essay about a place that was not designed to make anyone happy. The place was ugly, uncomfortable, mundane, or even faintly miserable—yet it became a genuine source of refuge or joy for you. The power of the essay should come from the contradiction between the place’s surface qualities and the deep meaning it held for you. Ground your writing in dense sensory detail and memory-specific facts: textures, smells, sounds, named people, obsolete objects, routines, and rituals that could only belong to that place at that time. Do not smooth over its flaws. Show how this unlikely happiness allowed you to escape, rehearse, or become. The goal is to show what your connection to this place said about your character, values, and personality. Here is a sample based on a gym that still haunts me from my teens:

    My Unlikely Happy Place–Walt’s Gym

    By the time I hit fourteen, my sacred sanctuary was none other than Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California—a temple of iron that had started its inglorious life as a chicken coop in the 1950s. The place was a veritable swamp of fungus and bacteria, a thriving petri dish of maladies eager to latch onto the unsuspecting. Members whispered in hushed tones about incurable athlete’s foot, the kind that made dermatologists throw up their hands in defeat. Some swore that the strains of fungus and mold festering in the corners were so exotic they had yet to be classified by the most intrepid of mycologists. Roosting among the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog that the pro wrestlers had affectionately named Charlie. I never saw Charlie myself, but I often wondered if he was a real creature or a figment of the wrestlers’ imagination, birthed by too many concussions and late-night benders.

    The locker room was perpetually occupied by a rotating cast of characters who looked like they’d been plucked straight out of a grimy noir film. There was always some bankrupt divorcee draped in a velour tracksuit and a gold chain thick enough to anchor a ship, hogging the payphone for marathon sessions with his attorney. He’d discuss his sordid life choices and the staggering attorney fees required to sweep his past under a rug large enough to cover the entire state of California.

    Out back, an unused swimming pool lurked, its water murky and black—a cauldron of plague, dead rats, and God knows what else. Walt, the gym’s owner and part-time crypt keeper, had a peculiar ritual. Every so often, he’d saunter outside, brandishing a pool net like a scepter, and scoop up some unfortunate deceased creature. He’d hold it aloft for all to see, like a demented priest presenting an unholy sacrament. This grim ceremony was invariably met with a thunderous round of applause from the gym-goers, who treated Walt’s rodent exorcisms like a halftime show. Walt would then toss the cadaver into a nearby dumpster with all the flourish of a Shakespearean actor delivering a monologue, bowing deeply as if he’d just conquered a dragon.

    Walt’s Gym showcased a walking fossil named Wally, an octogenarian who swore he was the original model for human anatomy textbooks—perhaps ones etched on cave walls. We all loved Wally. He was a beloved gym fixture even though he could be a pain in the butt. Wally’s routine was the stuff of myth: He’d righteously correct everyone’s form whether they asked for his advice or not. He’d monopolize the gym for hours, his workout punctuated by monologues worthy of an Oscar about his deadbeat relatives who “borrowed” money, his former lovers who once graced the silver screen, and his eternal battle with arthritis. Between sets, he’d often deliver a Ted Talk on muscle inflammation and the sorry state of the national economy. He delivered these soliloquies with the gravitas of a news anchor, then spent an eternity in the sauna and shower, emerging like a phoenix from the ashes only to douse himself head-to-toe in talcum powder, turning into a spectral beacon of gym dedication. When Wally spoke, he was engulfed in such a thick talcum haze you’d swear a lighthouse was about to blare its foghorn warning.

    The radio played the same hits on a relentless loop, as if the DJ had been possessed by the spirit of a broken record. Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town,” and Norman Connors’ “You Are My Starship” echoed through the gym like a soundtrack to my personal purgatory. As a kid navigating this adult world, the gym was my barbershop, my public square, where I eavesdropped on conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the exorbitant costs of sending kids to college, and the soul-sucking burdens of caring for elderly parents.

    It dawned on me then that I was at fourteen the perfect age: old enough to start building biceps like bowling balls, yet young enough to be spared the drudgery and tedium of adult life. The Road to Swoleville, I realized, was all about sidestepping the real world entirely. Why bother with mortgages and 401(k)s when I could disappear into my true paradise, the gym? As Arnold himself wrote in Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, the gym was the ultimate Happy Place: “The weight lifters shone with sweat; they were powerful looking. Herculean. And there it was before me—my life, the answer I’d been seeking. It clicked. It was something I suddenly just seemed to reach out and find, as if I’d been crossing a suspended bridge and finally stepped off onto solid ground.”

    My “solid ground” was the 1976 incarnation of Walt’s Gym, a germ-infested, rat-plagued wonderland where dreams of muscle-bound glory were forged—and quite possibly the greatest place I’ve ever visited on this planet.

  • The Sleepwalking Student: Why Friction, Not Optimization, Reawakens Learning

    The Sleepwalking Student: Why Friction, Not Optimization, Reawakens Learning

    Academic Anhedonia is what it feels like to keep advancing through your education while feeling absolutely nothing about it. The assignments get done. The rubrics are satisfied. The credentials inch closer. And yet curiosity never sparks, pride never arrives, and learning registers as a faint neurological hum—like an appliance left on in another room. You move forward without momentum, effort without appetite. AI language machines make this easier, smoother, quieter. The result is not rebellion but compliance: efficient, bloodless, and hollow.

    When I started teaching college writing in the 1980s, this condition didn’t exist. Back then, I suffered from a different affliction: the conviction that I was destined to be the David Letterman of higher education—a twenty-five-year-old irony specialist armed with a chalkboard, a raised eyebrow, and impeccable timing. For a while, the bit landed. A well-placed joke could levitate a classroom. Students laughed. I mistook that laughter for learning. If I could entertain them, I told myself, I could teach them. For two decades, I confused engagement with applause and thought I was winning.

    That illusion began to crack around 2012. Phones lit up like votive candles. Attention splintered. Students weren’t bored; they were overclocked—curating identities, performing themselves, measuring worth in metrics. They ran hot: anxious, stimulated, desperate for recognition. Teaching became a cage match with the algorithm. Still, those students were alive. Distracted, yes—but capable of obsession, outrage, infatuation. Their pulses were fast. Their temperatures high.

    What we face now is colder. Around 2022, a different creature arrived. Not overstimulated, but under-responsive. Years of screen saturation, pandemic isolation, dopamine-dense apps, and frictionless AI assistance collapsed the internal reward system that once made discovery feel electric. This isn’t laziness. It’s learning-specific anhedonia. Students can assemble essays, follow scaffolds, and march through rubrics—but they do it like sleepwalkers. Curiosity is muted. Persistence is brittle. Critical thinking arrives pre-flattened, shrink-wrapped, and emotionally inert.

    The tragedy isn’t inefficiency; it’s emptiness. Today’s classrooms hum with quiet productivity and emotional frost—cognition without hunger, performance without investment, education stripped of its pulse.

    If there is a way forward, it won’t come from louder performances, cleverer prompts, or better optimization. Those are the same tools that bleached learning in the first place. Academic anhedonia cannot be cured with stimulation. It requires friction: slow reading that refuses to skim, sustained writing that will not autocomplete itself, intellectual solitude that feels mildly wrong, and work that denies the cheap dopamine hit of instant payoff. The cure is not novelty but depth; not entertainment but seriousness. Struggle isn’t a design flaw. It is the design.

    To interrupt academic anhedonia, I use an AI-resistant assignment that reintroduces cost, memory, and embodiment: The Transformative Moment. Students write 400–500 words about an experience that altered the trajectory of their lives. The assignment demands sensory precision—the one domain where AI reliably produces fluent oatmeal. It insists on transformation, which is what education is supposed to enact. And it drags students back into lived experience, away from the anesthetic glow of screens.

    I offer a model from my own life. When I was sixteen, visiting my recently divorced father, he asked what I planned to do after high school. I told him—without irony—that I intended to become a garbage man so I could finish work early and train at the gym all day. He laughed, then calmly informed me that I would go to college and join the professional class because I was far too vain to tell people at cocktail parties that I collected trash for a living. In that instant, I knew two things: my father knew me better than I knew myself, and my future had just been decided. I walked out of that conversation college-bound, whether I liked it or not.

    I tell them about a friend of mine, now a high school principal, who has been a vegetarian since his early twenties. While working at a deli during college, he watched a coworker carve into a bleeding slab of roast beef. In that moment—knife slicing, flesh yielding—something inside him snapped shut. He knew he would never eat meat again. He hasn’t. Transformation can be instantaneous. Conversion doesn’t always send a memo.

    My final example is a fireman I trained with at a gym in the 1970s. He was a recent finalist in the Mr. California bodybuilding contest: blond shag, broom-thick mustache, horn-rimmed glasses—Clark Kent with a bench press habit. One afternoon, after repping over three hundred pounds, he stood before the mirror, flexed his chest, and watched his muscles swell like they were auditioning for their own sitcom. “When I first saw Arnold,” he said, reverent, “I felt I was in the presence of the Lord. ‘There stands the Messiah,’ I said to myself. ‘There stands God Almighty come to bring good cheer to this world.’”

    He wasn’t speaking only for himself. He spoke for all of us. We wanted to be claimed by something larger than our small, awkward lives. Arnold was the messiah—the Pied Piper of Pecs—leading us toward the promised land of biceps, triceps, and quads capable of crushing produce.

    I assign The Transformative Moment because I want students to recreate an experience no machine can counterfeit. I want them to remember that education is not credential management but metamorphosis. And I want them to interrogate the conditions under which real change occurred in their lives—what they were paying attention to, what they risked, what it cost.

    Transformation—actual forward movement—is the antidote to anhedonia. And it cannot be outsourced.

  • Bezel Clicks and Sentence Cuts: On Watches, Writing, and the Discipline of Precision

    Bezel Clicks and Sentence Cuts: On Watches, Writing, and the Discipline of Precision

    I am a connoisseur of fine timepieces. I notice the way a sunray dial catches light like a held breath, the authority of a bezel click that says someone cared. I’ve worn Tudor Black Bays and Omega Planet Oceans as loaners—the horological equivalent of renting a Maserati for a reckless weekend—exhilarating, loud with competence, impossible to forget. My own collection is high-end Seiko divers, watches that deliver lapidary excellence at half the tariff: fewer theatrics, just ruthless execution. Precision doesn’t need a luxury tax.

    That same appetite governs my reading. A tight, aphoristic paragraph can spike my pulse the way a Planet Ocean does on the wrist. I collect sentences the way others collect steel and sapphire. Wilde. Pascal. Kierkegaard. La Rochefoucauld. These writers practice compression as a moral discipline. A lapidary writer treats language like stone—cuts until only the hardest facet remains, then stops. Anything extra is vanity.

    I am not, however, a tourist. I have no patience for writers who mistake arch tone for insight, who wear cynicism like a designer jacket and call it wisdom. Aphorisms can curdle into poses. Style without penetration is just a shiny case housing a dead movement.

    This is why I’m unsentimental about AI. Left alone, language models are unruly factories—endless output, hollow shine, fluent nonsense by the ton. Slop with manners. But handled by someone with a lapidary sensibility, they can polish. They can refine. They can help a sentence find its edge. What they cannot do is teach taste.

    Taste precedes tools. Before you let a machine touch your prose, you must have lived with the masters long enough to feel the difference between a gem and its counterfeit. That discernment takes years. There is no shortcut. You become a jeweler by ruining stones, by learning what breaks and what holds.

    Lapidary sensibility is not impressed by abundance or fluency. It responds to compression, inevitability, and bite. It is bodily: a tightening of attention, a flicker of pleasure, the instant you know a sentence could not be otherwise. You don’t acquire it through mimicry or prompts. You acquire it through exposure, failure, and long intimacy with sentences that refuse to waste your time.

    Remember this, then: AI can assist only where judgment already exists. Without that baseline, you are not collaborating with a tool. You are feeding quarters into a very expensive Slop Machine.

  • No Backup World: Martin Hägglund, C.S. Lewis, and the Moral Urgency of Now

    No Backup World: Martin Hägglund, C.S. Lewis, and the Moral Urgency of Now

    Philosopher Martin Hägglund, in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, advances a stark and unsettling claim: genuine goodness is impossible unless we accept that death is final. There is no afterlife to balance the books, no celestial extension cord supplying meaning from beyond the grave. This life—finite, fragile, irrevocable—is all we have. Faith in eternity, Hägglund argues, is not a comfort but a distraction, a metaphysical detour that siphons urgency away from the hard, unglamorous work of building justice here and now. To make his case, he turns to an unlikely witness: C.S. Lewis. In A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, Lewis—Christian apologist, defender of heaven—finds his theology torn open by loss. Scripture offers no shelter. Promises of eternal reunion ring thin. Lewis admits to “bitter resentment,” to madness, to a grief so absolute that it flattens piety on contact. What he wants is not God, not eternity, not consolation—but Joy. Her absence exposes a truth Lewis cannot escape: the intensity of love is inseparable from its fragility. Love hurts because it can be lost. Its power comes from time running out. Hägglund presses the implication Lewis cannot fully accept: even if eternity existed, love could not survive there. With no stakes, no risk, no irreversibility, existence would congeal into something inert—an endless, consequence-free duration. Heaven, in this view, is not fulfillment but sedation. To imagine God as a valet who merely returns our loved ones to us is, for both Lewis and Hägglund, a form of idolatry. But where Lewis is torn—desperate to hold faith and grief in the same trembling hands—Hägglund feels no such strain. For him, religion does not deepen love; it dilutes it. It shifts responsibility elsewhere. It turns this world into a waiting room and this life into a rehearsal. Secular living, by contrast, is an act of commitment without backup plans. There is no “later” to fix what we neglect now. That is precisely why what we do here matters so much.

    If you are a political-sapien, this conclusion feels not bleak but bracing. History—not heaven—is where salvation must be worked out. There is no eternal kingdom hovering offstage, no divine reset button waiting beyond the clouds. This world is the only stage, and its outcomes depend on the quality of the institutions we build and maintain. Moral authority does not descend from above; it emerges from human reason struggling, imperfectly but persistently, toward fairness. People, in this view, are not saints or sinners by nature so much as products of systems—capable of decency when the scaffolding is sound, capable of cruelty when it is not. Politics therefore becomes the highest moral labor: not a sideshow to spiritual life but the arena in which justice either materializes or fails. AI machines enter this worldview as probationary instruments. They are not saviors and not demons. They earn trust only insofar as they distribute power downward, widen access, and reduce structural inequity. If AI flattens hierarchies and democratizes opportunity, it is a tool worth refining. If it concentrates wealth, authority, and decision-making into fewer hands, it ceases to be innovation and becomes a threat—something to regulate, constrain, or dismantle in defense of the only life that counts.

  • Pleasure Island Goes Digital: The Rise of the Hedonist-Sapien

    Pleasure Island Goes Digital: The Rise of the Hedonist-Sapien

    Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss introduces one of the great cautionary silhouettes of modern travel writing: the Farang. In Thailand, the word names a particular species of Western pleasure-seeker—less tourist than residue. He is instantly legible. White. Middle-aged. Soft around the middle and hard around the eyes. His skin has that sickly, overcooked hue of someone who hasn’t slept, eaten, or hoped correctly in years. He lurches down the beach in baggy, sweat-darkened clothes, face glazed, spirit half-evacuated, as if his soul stepped out for air and never came back. What keeps him upright is not health or purpose but a wallet swollen with cash. When the money runs out, so does the illusion. He staggers home to recover, refill, and then returns to the same tropical oubliette to repeat the cycle—debauch, deplete, disappear, reload. Pleasure, in this form, isn’t joy. It’s maintenance.

    Pinocchio offers its own version of the Farang, with less sunscreen and more clarity. Linger too long on Pleasure Island and you don’t just lose your moral compass—you sprout hooves. The boy becomes a jackass. The metaphor is unsubtle and mercifully so. Pleasure without restraint doesn’t make you free; it makes you stupid, loud, and increasingly unrecognizable to yourself. World culture is thick with such warnings. Myths, fables, scriptures, novels—whole libraries exist to explain why worshiping pleasure ends badly. And yet hedonism has never been more ascendant, because unlike virtue, it scales beautifully. It drives commerce. It sells. Entire industries are built on the catechism that pleasure is the highest good and discomfort the only sin. Billions now live as functional hedonists without ever using the word, while a more self-aware elite practices a refined variant—“mindful hedonism”—spending staggering sums to curate lives of seamless comfort, aesthetic indulgence, and moral exemption. In a culture that treats pleasure as proof of success, the hedonist-sapien is not a cautionary tale; he is a lifestyle influencer.

    If you are a hedonist-sapien, your gaze turns inward, away from society’s disputes and toward the sovereign self. The highest goods are pleasure, freedom, and the smooth, uninterrupted unfolding of personal desire. Politics is static. Transcendence is optional. What matters is feeling good, living well, and sanding down every rough edge along the way. Into this worldview step the AI machines, not as ethical dilemmas but as gift baskets. They curate taste, anticipate desire, eliminate friction, and turn effort into an avoidable inconvenience. They promise a life where comfort feels earned simply by existing, and choice replaces discipline. Of the four orientations, the hedonist-sapien greets AI with the least suspicion and the widest grin, welcoming it as the perfect accomplice in the lifelong project of maximizing pleasure and minimizing resistance—Pleasure Island, now fully automated.

  • The Gospel of Optimization: Inside the Mind of the Techno-Sapien

    The Gospel of Optimization: Inside the Mind of the Techno-Sapien

    A techno-sapien is a person for whom the highest good is not pleasure, piety, justice, or even happiness, but optimization. Optimization is their religion, their aesthetic, their moral compass. They worship metrics. Steps. Biomarkers. Load times. Longevity curves. With the right stack of technologies, they want the perfect body, the frictionless mind, and—why think small?—eternal life. Death, in this worldview, is not a mystery or a boundary but a bug to be patched. Meaning and purpose are sentimental leftovers from an unoptimized age. To be fully optimized is to win, and winning, for the techno-sapien, is always zero-sum. I have the toys. I have the data. I have the escape plan. You don’t.

    On some level, they know this worldview won’t poll well. So while they preach abundance, they prepare for scarcity. They sink billions into subterranean bunkers stocked with caviar, rare vodka, cryotherapy chambers, Peloton-grade gyms, and spa lighting calibrated to simulate “circadian wellness” at the end of civilization. These aren’t shelters; they’re luxury arks—underground city-states that make Atlantis look like a Chevron off the interstate. If the world burns, they intend to ride it out at optimal humidity.

    Publicly, however, the techno-sapien sings a very different hymn. On the TED stage and at product launches, they serve a thick glaze of uplift: their latest platform will “connect humanity,” “democratize knowledge,” and “unlock new vistas of understanding.” It’s a greatest-hits album of moral aspiration, performed with a straight face. The tell, of course, is how quickly the music stops. At the first whiff of unrest—one protest, one spike in instability—they are a single remote-control click away from disappearing into the earth, leaving the rest of humanity to enjoy the togetherness from above.

  • AI as Tool, Toy, or Idol: A Taxonomy of Belief

    AI as Tool, Toy, or Idol: A Taxonomy of Belief

    Your attitude toward AI machines is not primarily technical; it is theological—whether you admit it or not. Long before you form an opinion about prompts, models, or productivity gains, you have already decided what you believe about human nature, meaning, and salvation. That orientation quietly determines whether AI strikes you as a tool, a toy, or a temptation. There are three dominant postures.

    If you are a political-sapien, you believe history is the only stage that matters and justice is the closest thing we have to salvation. There is no eternal kingdom waiting in the wings; this world is the whole play, and it must be repaired with human hands. Divine law holds no authority here—only reason, negotiation, and evolving ethical frameworks shaped by shared notions of fairness. Humans, you believe, are essentially good if the scaffolding is sound. Build the right systems and decency will follow. Politics is not mere governance; it is moral engineering. AI machines, from this view, are tools on probation. If they democratize power, flatten hierarchies, and distribute wealth more equitably, they are allies. If they concentrate power, automate inequality, or deepen asymmetry, they are villains in need of constraint or dismantling.

    If you are a hedonist-sapien, you turn away from society’s moral drama and toward the sovereign self. The highest goods are pleasure, freedom, and self-actualization. Politics is background noise; transcendence is unnecessary. Life is about feeling good, living well, and removing friction wherever possible. AI machines arrive not as a problem but as a gift—tools that streamline consumption, curate taste, and optimize comfort. They promise a smoother, more luxurious life with fewer obstacles and more options. Of the three orientations, the hedonist-sapien embraces AI with the least hesitation and the widest grin, welcoming it as the ultimate personal assistant in the lifelong project of maximizing pleasure and minimizing inconvenience.

    If you are a devotional-sapien, you begin with a darker diagnosis. Humanity is fallen, and no amount of policy reform, pleasure, or purchasing power can make it whole. You don’t expect salvation from governments, markets, or optimization schemes; you expect it only from your Maker. You may share the political-sapien’s concern for justice and enjoy the hedonist-sapien’s creature comforts, but you refuse to confuse either with redemption. You are not shopping for happiness; you are seeking restoration. Spiritual health—not efficiency—is the measure that matters. From this vantage, AI machines look less like neutral tools and more like idols-in-training: shiny substitutes promising mastery, insight, or transcendence without repentance or grace. Unsurprisingly, the devotional-sapien is the most skeptical of AI’s expanding role in human life.

    Because your orientation shapes what you think humans need most—justice, pleasure, or redemption—it also shapes how you use AI, how much you trust it, and what you expect it to deliver. Before asking what AI can do for you, it is worth asking a more dangerous question: what are you secretly hoping it will save you from?