Cinemorphosis

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  • If Kierkegaard Wrote a TV Review of The Pitt

    If Kierkegaard Wrote a TV Review of The Pitt

    Title: The Sickness Unto Careerism: A Review of The Pitt
    By S. Kierkegaard (translated from the dread)

    In The Pitt, we behold not a hospital, but a crucible of despair masquerading as productivity. Here, men and women do not treat illness—they perform competence. Each character is driven not by love of medicine or patient, but by the terrible fear of being unremarkable. The show is not about healing bodies; it is about sustaining the fiction of self.

    What torments the staff of The Pitt is not death, but possibility—the gnawing anxiety that their lives could be otherwise, that beneath the pager beeps and sterile monologues lies the choking truth: they have chosen incorrectly. They grasp at promotions, publications, and approval from institutions as if these might quiet the inward scream of inauthenticity. They cannot be alone, for solitude would demand an encounter with the Self, and such an encounter would destroy them.

    Thus The Pitt is not drama; it is diagnosis. Each scene is a new symptom of the despair that arises when one pursues admiration instead of inwardness, prestige instead of passion. These doctors do not fear God. They fear irrelevance. And in this, they are modern to the marrow.

  • If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”—that haunting anthem of denial, repression, and the unbearable weight of vulnerability—he would recognize a soul attempting to cloak longing in irony, and failing beautifully. Pascal might scribble in his notebook, pen dipped in both skepticism and sorrow:

    1.
     Man denies love not because he is free from it, but because he is enslaved by it. The louder he insists he feels nothing, the more we hear the tremor of devotion in his voice. “I’m not in love” is merely a liturgy of protest against the heart’s verdict.

    2.
     He removes her picture—not to forget her, but to stop trembling at the sight of it. In doing so, he seeks mastery over his affections by performing indifference. But emotion, like God, does not vanish because man has ceased to name it.

    3.
     He insists: “It’s just a silly phase.” But only those who are drowning need to rename the water. The one who plays casual most often suffers the deepest cut, for pride clutches at dignity even as the soul dissolves in yearning.

    4.
     We would rather say, “I don’t care,” than risk the shame of caring too much. Man arms himself with detachment the way cowards wear armor—not to protect the heart, but to avoid ever using it.

    5.
     Every word he utters is a mask stitched by fear. He cannot love openly, for he believes vulnerability is weakness. And yet, in avoiding weakness, he becomes truly pathetic—a captive of what he dares not name.

    6.
     To say “don’t think you’ve won” is to reveal that one has already lost. The war is over. The heart surrendered in the second verse. Only the mind marches on, planting flags on a battlefield already buried in flowers.

    7.
     There is no cruelty greater than pretending not to feel. It is a lie told to oneself in the presence of truth. Love, when denied, becomes not less real—but more dangerous, like a flame hidden under dry cloth. It will burn eventually.

  • If Blaise Pascal Had Listened to “Deacon Blues”

    If Blaise Pascal Had Listened to “Deacon Blues”

    If Blaise Pascal had listened to “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan—a song about the seductive dignity of failure, self-invention, and the strange glory of obscurity—he might have jotted down a set of Pensées to dissect the Deacon Blues persona.

    1.
     Man prefers to be a broken genius than an obedient saint. The dream of ruin, if it is romantic enough, intoxicates him more than the dull clarity of success. He calls this rebellion, but it is merely another form of vanity—failure dressed in excessive self-regard.

    2.
     He who calls himself “Deacon Blues” chooses a name of ironic grandeur. He does not wish to be great, but to appear profound in his brokenness. This too is a form of ambition—narcissism inverted and dipped in bourbon.

    3.
     The world offers two false promises: the applause of others and the nobility of being misunderstood. Deacon Blues seeks the latter, not because it is better, but because it hurts less to fail on one’s own terms than to succeed on another’s.

    4.
     To live in the margins and call it freedom—this is man’s trick. He flees from the burden of excellence and cloaks his retreat in poetry. But exile, chosen for aesthetic reasons, is still a form of cowardice.

    5.
     He dreams of learning to work the saxophone, not to make music, but to be seen as one who has suffered for his art. In this, he is like those who wish to be martyrs, not for truth, but for drama.

    6.
     “Drink Scotch whisky all night long and die behind the wheel.” Thus he crowns his life not with virtue, but with stylized destruction. He does not want to be saved—only to be mourned beautifully.

    7.
     Deacon Blues wants a name, not a self. He believes identity is a lyric he can write into being. But names do not change the soul, only the soundtrack to its delusions.

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    My journey with claustrophobia is not a quirk. It is a full-blown, sweat-drenched neurological prison riot. And nowhere does this disorder stage a more operatic coup than in two places: the dentist’s chair and the bowels of Universal Studios, Studio City.

    Let’s start with the latter—a cautionary tale that should be printed on the back of every park map. I should never have stepped foot in that glorified mall of overpriced grease traps and postmodern carnival barkers wearing epaulets, who reeked of mothballs and dashed dreams. But I did it—for my twin daughters. For my wife. For the illusion that fatherhood sometimes requires nobility.

    The fatal mistake? Boarding the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride, a title that now feels like prophecy. After a Kafkaesque hour in line, I was shoehorned into a toddler-sized aircraft seat, and then came the final insult: a steel bar clamped down on my chest like it was sealing me into a medieval torture rack. My 52-inch ribcage was not consulted. My lungs issued an immediate protest.

    As the ride lurched forward into a black tunnel engineered by Satan himself, I realized I was not going to survive. I began pleading, then shrieking for them to stop the ride—a desperate man reduced to primal terror. Mercifully, the passengers next to me joined in my hysteria, and their collective outcry finally penetrated the headset of some underpaid engineer who ground the machine to a halt. A stoic security guy with a Secret Service haircut approached as I peeled myself out of the deathtrap.

    “You want to debrief me in the trauma tent?” I muttered, trying to laugh through the ash cloud of my dignity.

    Fast-forward to a few weeks later: I’m back in another chamber of horrors—Dr. Howard Chen’s dental office. A kind, soft-spoken man, Dr. Chen has the patience of a monk and the eyes of someone who’s seen too much. During a routine procedure, he inserted a rubber bite block into my mouth—also known as the Mouth Prop from Hell. It jammed my jaw open, restricted my ability to swallow, and in seconds, transported me back to that Potter ride with its clamping harness and tunnel of doom.

    I shot up from the chair, peeled off my flannel shirt like it was doused in napalm, and stood hyperventilating while sweat poured down my face like I’d just run the Boston Marathon with a fever.

    Dr. Chen asked gently, “Are you going to be okay, Jeff?”

    “I can’t have this rubber thing in my mouth,” I gasped, holding it like it was radioactive.

    He removed it. Deep breaths. Back in the chair. We finished the procedure bite-block free, no further incidents—except for my lingering shame.

    My visits to Dr. Chen are a multisensory assault. I am what polite society would call a “super smeller.” What that means in a dental context is that I’m stewing in a noxious stew of clove oil, latex gloves, glutaraldehyde, and ghostly wafts of tooth dust from patients past. Throw in the sound of Neil Diamond warbling over the speakers and it becomes less a cleaning and more a ritualistic descent into madness.

    Every visit turns existential. I begin contemplating my soul, my legacy, and the probability that I’ll die while getting a fluoride rinse. It’s the only time I think about the afterlife more than I do during a colonoscopy—and that includes the part when they say, “You may feel a little pressure.”

    To his credit, Dr. Chen is a saint. He accommodates all my neuroses, never rushes me, and tries to soothe me with words that sound like Buddhist proverbs run through a dental insurance filter. “Let the Sonicare do the work,” he tells me. “But I don’t trust it,” I reply. “Then you must learn to trust.” “But I am a man of doubt.” “That, Jeff,” he says, “is obvious.”

    At my most recent appointment, he warned me of potential decay under an old filling. “We may need to do a root canal.” I responded like a man learning he’d tested positive for eternal damnation.

    “What can I do to stop this?”

    “Cut the sugar. Don’t brush like you’re sanding drywall.”

    “So what you’re saying is, I’m threading the needle here.”

    “Basically, yes.”

    “Doctor, I crave absolutes.”

    “Join the club.”

    Dr. Chen’s resignation to life’s uncertainty is what keeps me coming back. That, and the knowledge that no other dentist could possibly endure the psychological obstacle course that is my biannual cleaning.

    After my last visit, dazed from polishing paste and light dental trauma, I left the office only to nearly reverse my car into a black SUV. The horn blast nearly cracked my molars. As I sat there recovering, I looked up and saw Dr. Chen watching me from behind the blinds—no longer smiling, but staring with the flat, weary eyes of a man who had just confirmed what he’d long suspected: his patient was, in fact, completely insane.

    And he was right.

  • Cartoon Eve and the Algorithmic Hangover

    Cartoon Eve and the Algorithmic Hangover

    In the early ’70s, the network execs at ABC, CBS, and NBC pulled a marketing move so manipulative it should’ve been illegal under the Geneva Conventions. On a hallowed Friday night in the month of September, they handed kids a psychic dog biscuit: a glittering preview of Saturday morning’s new cartoon lineup. As a nine-year-old, I’d sit cross-legged in front of the TV, slack-jawed and vibrating, watching grainy flashes of The Bugaloos and H.R. Pufnstuf like I was being shown a trailer for heaven. It was less of a preview and more of a grilled Ribeye waved under my nose by a smiling sadist who tells me breakfast is in 12 hours.

    Sleep was not an option on Cartoon Eve, a night more sacred than Christmas, Easter, and your grandma’s funeral combined. I’d lie in bed thinking, What if I sleep in? What if I miss the premiere of Lidsville? What if, in a moment of tragic miscalculation, I eat my Cap’n Crunch in the kitchen instead of the TV room and lose valuable viewing seconds? These were the pre-digital days—no DVR, no YouTube, no forgiveness. If you missed it, you missed it. You could cry, but the cathode ray tube did not care.

    The masterminds behind these shows weren’t just marketers—they were psychological arsonists, setting fire to our dopamine circuits before we were old enough to spell serotonin. They didn’t just sell cartoons. They sold Tang, Danish Go-Rounds, and Pillsbury Space Sticks with the breathless urgency of black-market opioids. The shows started at 7 a.m. and ran till 11, but by 10 I’d start to feel queasy. I’d hear the crack of a baseball bat outside and realize I was sitting in a dim living room while my real childhood was playing third base across the street. That’s when the guilt set in—the primal, shame-soaked knowledge that I was trading sunshine and scraped knees for anthropomorphic cereal mascots and animated product placement.

    Eventually I’d fling off my pajamas like a molting larva, throw on jeans, and bolt out the door, desperate to reclaim the morning before it calcified into regret. Childhood, I realized, was a loop of anticipation, overstimulation, and the fear of having made the wrong choice.

    But compared to today’s chaos, that quaint Saturday-morning psychodrama feels like a gentle massage from Mr. Rogers. Social media is Cartoon Eve with weapons-grade dopamine—a psychic arms race where even adults devolve into sweaty, wide-eyed nine-year-olds, tapping their screens like they’re trying to summon a cartoon genie.

    After a decade of scrolling, I’ve pulled the plug. I’ve cut back my digital exposure by 97%, and what’s left is like being a shell-shocked tourist floating down the Amazon on a deflating raft, watching piranhas in mid-frenzy shred a water buffalo. It’s gruesomely riveting, but it fries your soul and robs you of original thought. Now, like millions of others, I am in post-social media convalescence—pale, twitchy, and unsure if I’ll ever feel real sunlight again.

    But one thing’s for certain: I don’t miss the Space Sticks.

  • The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    About ten years ago, I found myself standing on the sun-scorched lawn outside the campus library, chatting with a colleague who was edging into his sixties. I was freshly minted into my early fifties, just far enough along to start scanning the horizon for signs of irrelevance. Naturally, our conversation slid into that black hole topic older academics can’t resist: retirement—or, as my colleague eloquently rebranded it, “a form of extinction.” According to him, the day you stop teaching is the day your name starts sliding off the whiteboard of history. You don’t just stop working—you vanish. The world changes its locks, and your keycard stops scanning.

    From there, the conversation took its next logical step—death. And that’s when I said something that was equal parts earnest and glib:
    “Even at my lowest, most gut-punched moments, I’ve always had this strange, burning desire not only to live—but to never die.”
    Why? Because I am possessed by a compulsive need to know how it all turns out.

    On the grand scale:
    Was Martin Luther King Jr. right? Does the moral arc of the universe really bend toward justice—or is it more like a warped coat hanger, twisted in a fit of cosmic indifference?
    Will humanity eventually outgrow its primal stupidity and evolve into a species guided by reason?
    Or will we just become meat-bots—part flesh, part firmware—hunched under the cold glow of the Tech Lords who now sell us grief as a service?
    Will thinking, one day, come in capsule form—a sort of Philosophy 101 chewable tablet for those who can’t be bothered?

    But my curiosity isn’t all grandiloquent and philosophical. I want to know the dumb stuff, too.
    Who’s going to win the Super Bowl?
    What will dethrone the current Netflix darling?
    Who will succeed Salma Hayek as the reigning goddess of unattainable beauty?

    Like every other poor soul conscripted onto Planet Earth, I didn’t ask to be born. But now that I’m here, uninvited and overcommitted, I can’t help it—I want to see how this mess plays out.

    Still, I sometimes wonder: Am I just a naive late bloomer clinging to a plot twist that isn’t coming?
    Is there some ancient nihilist out there—smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and muttering aphorisms in a grim little café—who would look at me and sneer, “What’s the fuss, kid? It’s all the same. Same story, different soundtrack.”

    Maybe.
    But I think there’s a stubborn ember in me that keeps expecting irony to trump monotony, that believes the cynic’s spreadsheet of life’s futility has a few formula errors. Maybe my refusal to give up on surprise is what keeps my inner candle burning.

    And maybe, just maybe, that makes me an optimist in exile—still walking the fence between wonder and weary resignation, while the true cynics stand on the other side, arms crossed, whispering,
    “Don’t worry, you’ll be like us soon enough.”

  • Field-Testing FOMO: A Preteen Cautionary Tale

    Field-Testing FOMO: A Preteen Cautionary Tale

    One warm California afternoon in the spring of 1973, after sixth-grade classes had spit us out like a bad punchline and the school bus rumbled off down Crow Canyon Road, my friends and I embarked on our sacred post-school ritual: a pilgrimage to 7-Eleven to score a Slurpee before the long, punishing hike up Greenridge Road. Inside that fluorescent-lit temple of artificial flavors, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” crackled from the tinny store radio, bouncing off racks of bubble gum, jerky, and preteen dreams.

    That’s when the Horsefault sisters burst through the door like a blonde tornado.

    They were tall, freckled, sunburned Valkyries from the far reaches of suburban myth—bohemian chaos in halter tops. One was an eighth grader; the other, a high school sophomore with the kind of don’t-care confidence that could collapse a twelve-year-old boy’s worldview with a single sideways glance. They lived in a crumbling farmhouse behind the store, surrounded by the ghosts of chickens and a rumored pony.

    “Wanna see a rabbit in a cage?” the younger one asked, her grin full of bad intentions and orthodontic defiance.

    I didn’t care about rabbits. I cared about girls who looked like they had stepped out of a beer commercial set in a wheat field. And so I followed, fully aware I was marching into a trap and fully unable to care.

    The promised rabbit, of course, was a fiction. There was only a rusted cage yawning open like a rural Venus flytrap and the pungent perfume of hay, alfalfa, and whatever was left of last week’s poultry. The ambush was swift. The sisters descended with whoops and laughter, a feral tag team of dusty mischief trying to stuff me into the iron cage like I was tomorrow’s 4-H exhibit.

    I fought back. I was stocky, wired with sixth-grade testosterone and Charles Atlas dreams. We tumbled in the grass in a chaotic montage of limbs, dust, and feathers—a scene less like a flirtation and more like a deleted sequence from Deliverance if Deliverance had a laugh track.

    Eventually they gave up, giggling, breathless, their cheeks streaked with dirt and conquest. I bolted through the field, leaving behind my Slurpee and what might’ve been the preamble to an adolescence worth bragging about.

    But here’s the thing: they never kissed me.
    They never flirted. Never winked or smirked in that conspiratorial way older girls sometimes do when they’re letting you in on a secret you can’t yet handle. They tried to lock me in a cage and laughed when they couldn’t. That was it.

    And that—not the dirt, not the missing rabbit, not the poultry apocalypse—is what still lingers decades later: the almost. The sense that something wild and electric passed me by, and I walked away not transformed but merely dirty.

    That was my first real encounter with FOMO—before the word existed, before social media turned it into a lifestyle disorder. The regret wasn’t that I was almost caged. It was that I didn’t emerge with a story soaked in danger and romance. I didn’t get the wink. I didn’t get the kiss. I didn’t get them.

    I went home and turned on the TV to find Barbara Eden cooing in her harem pants, still radiant, still unattainable, still safely contained in her bottle. And I realized that day: I didn’t want to summon Jeannie. I wanted to be summoned—chosen, winked at, whispered to. But the Horsefault sisters were not granting wishes. They were disrupting ecosystems and giving boys premature nostalgia.

    And I, poor idiot, had missed my moment.

  • Foam Alone: The Hipster Bed Hustle and the Cult of Compressed Cool

    Foam Alone: The Hipster Bed Hustle and the Cult of Compressed Cool

    Recently, my wife and I embarked on that most sacred and ridiculous rite of modern consumer adulthood: mattress shopping. But not just any mattress. No, we were lured—like moths to an ironic Edison bulb—by the siren song of the “bed in a box” movement. You know the pitch: memory foam meets gel, vacuum-sealed into a tight roll like a Chipotle burrito of luxury. Just slice it open with a box cutter and voilà!—it unfurls into a California King, like some latex-based resurrection miracle, all while promising to align your spine and your chakras.

    The in-store experience was a curated fever dream. We lay on foam slabs priced between three and nine thousand dollars, enveloped in mood lighting, whisper-soft sales pitches, and ambient indie folk. The mattresses were… fine. They cradled our backs, cupped our hip joints, whispered sweet nothings to our lumbar region. But I wasn’t feeling transcendent—I was feeling sold. Somewhere, I imagined a marketing team high-fiving over a whiteboard with phrases like “Artisanal Sleep” and “Millennial Mattress Disruption” scribbled in dry-erase bravado.

    It wasn’t just a mattress we were meant to be buying—it was an identity. A lifestyle. Minimalist, eco-cool, unburdened by the dusty sins of box springs and showroom floor futons. The subtext was loud: if you’re still buying a traditional mattress, you might as well admit you still use a rotary phone and tuck in your t-shirts. FOMO was baked into every layer of that overpriced memory foam: Buy this, or accept your fate as an aging square who sleeps like a Boomer.

    Once home, I turned to the digital sages—AI platforms, review aggregators, comment sections brimming with keyboard philosophers. The consensus was sobering: “Bed in a box? Cute gimmick. Overhyped. Questionable lifespan.” It turns out luxury doesn’t arrive folded like a quesadilla and held together by hope and branding. Traditional mattresses—those innerspring tanks and hybrid fortresses—still dominate in sheer performance. They don’t need to be unpacked with surgical caution, and they’ll cradle your creaky skeleton well into the next presidential administration.

    The most damning flaw? Durability. You can drop four grand on a foam mattress with a name that sounds like a startup and a logo that belongs on a vape pen, and five years later you’ll be sleeping in a crater. Meanwhile, that crusty old-school mattress from the showroom? Still holding you up like a reliable ex who pays their taxes and owns real furniture.

    In the end, we walked away—me, a little wiser, a little smugger, fully unfooled. I had dodged the algorithmic shame cycle of “Buy now or die alone in orthopedic misery.” I collapsed onto my overpriced sectional—a remnant of a different consumer panic—and streamed stand-up comedy with the gentle satisfaction of a man who knew that comfort, real comfort, doesn’t need branding. It just needs springs that don’t flatten and marketing that doesn’t gaslight you into thinking your dignity lies inside a vacuum-sealed tube of artisanal foam.

  • Floating on FOMO: My Personal Waterbed Fiasco

    Floating on FOMO: My Personal Waterbed Fiasco

    I spent my early childhood in VA housing—decommissioned army barracks optimistically rebadged “Flavet Villages”—in Gainesville, Florida. These were no-frills dwellings nestled near an alligator swamp and a patch of forest where a Mynah bird with the patience of a Zen master perched on the same branch every evening like it was punching a time clock. It became a ritual: before bed, my father and I would wander out to talk with the bird, who responded with eerie, robotic mimicry, as if channeling some extraterrestrial intelligence trapped in a tropical feather suit.

    At dusk, the low tide would pull back just enough to let the aroma of fermented alligator dung waft through the air—a stench so strong it could thin paint. Most people would gag. I inhaled deeply. Something about that swampy, putrid tang made me feel alive, elemental, cosmically tethered. It wasn’t beautiful, but it was real. And standing beside my father, breathing in swamp funk and chatting with a talking bird, I felt no lack. No longing. No itch. I was in paradise, the kind not found in brochures or Instagram feeds—though we didn’t yet have the latter to weaponize our dissatisfaction.

    Then came I Dream of Jeannie in 1965, and with it, the slow-burn tragedy of FOMO. Barbara Eden lived inside a jewel-toned genie bottle—a plush, circular sanctum upholstered in royal purples and pinks, encrusted with glass baubles and satin pillows. It was luxury wrapped in fantasy, and I wanted in. Badly. Suddenly, my swamp lost its sparkle. I began to ache—not for something real, but for something better. Something else.

    The cruelest part? Jeannie’s bottle was a repainted Jim Beam whiskey decanter. A piece of throwaway Americana converted into a portal of impossible longing. That detail says everything: desire is often just repackaged delusion. And once I tasted that kind of fantasy, the swamp and the Mynah bird—once holy—became mere prelude.

    By 1974, I was barely thirteen and neck-deep in my search for substitutes. The object of obsession that year? Waterbeds. Several friends and neighbors had them, and after a few demo flops onto their undulating surfaces, I became convinced that waterbeds were the gateway to pleasure, sophistication, and sensual repose. Surely, I reasoned, the waterbed was Jeannie’s bottle in disguise—fluid, decadent, vaguely erotic.

    I lobbied my parents hard. They relented. Victory tasted like vinyl and faint mildew.

    What followed was not paradise but an ongoing science experiment in disappointment. The temperature was always wrong—Sahara one night, Arctic the next. It leaked with the consistency of a bad marriage. The smell? Somewhere between wet dog and pond scum. And then there was the sensation: if I moved, the bed retaliated. A slow-motion punch of resistance, as if Poseidon himself were shoving back. I wasn’t cradled—I was stalked by unseen waves. One night it leaked so catastrophically that my bedroom floor bowed like a sinking schooner. I woke up in what felt like Act II of Hurricane Katrina: The Bedroom Years.

    This, I realized, was the fool’s errand of FOMO: chasing after glossy substitutes for longing we barely understand. Jeannie’s bottle wasn’t just a dream—it became the prototype for every ill-fated quest for magic in mundane form. Every waterbed, every gadget, every trend promising comfort, coolness, or connection is just another glittering bottle with no genie inside.

    The Mynah bird never promised me anything. It never asked me to chase or wish or want. It just sat, unbothered, mimicking the world as it was. And perhaps that’s what I miss most: the pre-FOMO clarity of being content beside a swamp, before marketing told me I was supposed to want more.

  • The Brady Bunch Delusion: A FOMO-Fueled Fever Dream from Mount Shasta

    The Brady Bunch Delusion: A FOMO-Fueled Fever Dream from Mount Shasta

    In the blistering summer of 1971, when I was nine years old and fully convinced that the universe owed me something dazzling—preferably in Technicolor—my family and four others staked out a patch of wilderness on Mount Shasta. For two solid weeks, we rough-camped our way through a supposedly idyllic escape: fishing, water-skiing, dodging hornets, and marinating under the sun to a soundtrack of The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night blasting from a battery-powered boom box the size of a microwave. It should have been paradise. It had all the ingredients. But for me, something essential was missing—specifically, a split-level ranch house with shag carpeting and Alice the maid humming in the kitchen.

    One morning, while the other families performed their pioneer cosplay—flipping pancakes and waxing poetic about fish guts—I was still swaddled in my sleeping bag, experiencing what I can only describe as a divine transmission. In my dream, I had been plucked from obscurity and absorbed into The Brady Bunch. Not as a guest star. As family. It all unfolded on a sun-drenched San Francisco street corner, beside a cable car gleaming like a chariot of middle-class destiny. Mike, Carol, Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby, and Cindy—smiling like cult recruiters in polyester—welcomed me into the fold. It was done. The adoption papers had been processed. I was now officially Brady-adjacent.

    The implications were staggering. Would I get my own room in this avocado-hued utopia? Or would I bunk with Greg and be forced to suffer his groovy condescension? Would I be featured in a Very Special Episode? Just as these critical logistics were about to be resolved, reality sucker-punched me. Mark and Tosh—my alleged friends—yanked me out of my dream state, barking something about going fishing. Fishing? I had just been inducted into America’s Most Wholesome Family, and now I was supposed to sit on a rotting log and bait a hook like some peasant?

    I sulked through the day like a dethroned sitcom prince, scowling at everything from the trees to the trout. But what could I say? That I’d just been psychically ejected from a pastel-tinted suburban heaven? That I was mourning the loss of a pretend life more emotionally satisfying than my real one? Try explaining that to your father, a military man in tube socks and Tevas, who barked, “We’re living in the wild!” with the enthusiasm of someone allergic to introspection.

    I didn’t want the wild. I wanted shag rugs and chore wheels. I wanted avocado-colored appliances and a staircase for dramatic entrances. I wanted to wake up in a house where even problems came with laugh tracks and gentle moral resolutions. But instead, I got mosquitoes, hornet attacks, and the cold reality that I was not, in fact, a Brady.

    But here’s the kicker: I wasn’t alone in this delusion. In the pre-digital 1970s, The Brady Bunch was the mother of all FOMO engines. Long before Instagram filtered our envy, Sherwood Schwartz’s sitcom utopia beamed into our wood-paneled living rooms and convinced millions of us that we’d been born into the wrong family. It wasn’t just television—it was aspirational family porn.

    And the letters poured in. Hundreds, maybe thousands, from children in broken homes offering to renounce their worldly possessions if they could just live under that sacred A-frame roof with Carol and Mike. The Bradys weren’t just a TV family—they were a mirage of emotional security, mass-produced and broadcast at 7 p.m., five nights a week. Sherwood Schwartz accidentally started a cult, and every kid in America wanted in.

    What no one knew, of course, was that the real Brady kids were unraveling offscreen. Drugs, affairs, backstabbing—your standard-issue Hollywood breakdown, now available in bell-bottoms. While we were fantasizing about solving our adolescent angst in a 30-minute morality play, the actors playing our surrogate siblings were spiraling. Turns out, the squeaky-clean family fantasy was just that: a brilliantly lit lie.

    And yet, we clung to it. Why? Because once you’ve tasted Brady-level manufactured bliss, the real world—be it Mount Shasta or your own dysfunctional dining room—feels insufficient. That’s the cruel brilliance of FOMO: it convinces you there’s a better life just out of frame. And if you don’t have it, something must be wrong with you.

    To this day, I still occasionally dream I’m floating inside that iconic title sequence, my face glowing in one of the boxes, beaming down at Bobby or Jan as if everything in the world had finally clicked. In that dream, I am forever young, forever welcome, and forever untouched by the grinding disappointments of real life. I am, for thirty glorious seconds, a Brady.

    And then I wake up. And it’s just me, my real family, and whatever wildness we’ve decided to romanticize that year.