Cinemorphosis

Tag: addiction

  • Why Your Watch Doesn’t Make You Happy Anymore

    Why Your Watch Doesn’t Make You Happy Anymore

    To understand the madness of the modern watch addict, you’d do well to consult Dopamine Nation by Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, a book that should be shelved somewhere between philosophy, neuroscience, and quiet screaming. Her central thesis? In an age of relentless indulgence, the line between pleasure and pain is not only blurry—it’s the same neurological pathway. You’re not escaping pain with your latest acquisition. You’re feeding it.

    “The smartphone,” she writes, “is the modern-day hypodermic needle.” And the drug? Dopamine—delivered in neat little parcels: TikToks, tweets, memes, and yes, wrist shots of watches you don’t own (yet). If you haven’t met your poison of choice, don’t worry. It’s just a click away.

    Lembke makes the uncomfortable truth clear: The more dopamine hits we seek, the more our brain adapts by reducing our baseline pleasure response. What once thrilled you—your grail watch, your Rolex Explorer, your Seiko with the Wabi-Sabi patina—now barely registers. You’re not chasing pleasure anymore. You’re just trying to feel something.

    Watch addicts, of course, understand this intimately. The pursuit of horological perfection starts out innocent enough: a G-Shock here, a vintage diver there. But soon you’re tumbling into the abyss of boutique limited editions and message board enablement, haunted by the need to stay relevant. Because here’s the twist: It’s not just about the watches. It’s about being seen. You post, you review, you flex because if you stop, you vanish. No new watches = no new content = digital extinction.

    And extinction, in a social-media world, feels like death.

    Lembke warns us that addiction thrives in secrecy, in the exhausting double life. The watch addict may present as a tasteful minimalist to family and friends, while secretly rotating 19 watches, five straps deep, waiting for the next “drop.” The addiction is fed by access, and we live in an access economy. New releases are no longer annual events—they’re hourly temptations. The vortex is bottomless. The supply creates the demand.

    Even worse, modern society normalizes this behavior. Everyone is scrolling. Everyone is upgrading. Our addiction to novelty is passed off as taste. Our frenzied consumption masquerades as identity. Lembke borrows from Philip Rieff to explain the deeper shift: “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” The modern watch collector doesn’t believe in salvation. He believes in configuration.

    But here’s the cruel irony: The more you seek to be pleased, the less capable you are of being pleased. In Lembke’s words: “Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia—the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”

    You can understand the watch addict’s feeble quest when you look at the Horological Dopamine Loop–the self-reinforcing cycle in which acquisition, posting, validation, and anticipation replace enjoyment. The watch no longer delivers pleasure; it merely resets the craving for the next hit.

    What’s the solution? A dopamine fast. Lembke prescribes it like a bitter medicine: Remove the source. Reset the brain. Let it reestablish homeostasis. For the watch addict, this means one thing: a watch fast.

    And yes—it’s brutal. I’ve been a watch obsessive for over twenty years. My longest fast? Six months. And I nearly went feral. New releases tempt. Friends enable. Algorithms whisper. Strap swaps and vintage reissues beckon like sirens. Even the FedEx truck starts to look like a personal tormentor.

    So you get creative. You stash watches in the safe and “rediscover” them. You buy new straps instead of new watches. You try to redirect the compulsion toward something productive: fitness, music, sourdough, monkish austerity. Anything but another chronograph.

    But the real cure, oddly enough, may be conversation—actual human connection. At watch meet-ups, we start out discussing bezels and spring bars, but within ten minutes we’re talking about life: real estate, parenting, knee surgeries, emotional burnout, dinner recipes. We talk for hours. But barely about watches.

    The truth slips out in these moments: we want to be free. We crave community more than we crave sapphire crystals. What began as a shared obsession has become a trap, and these conversations, paradoxically, offer relief from the very addiction that brought us together.

    Imagine a bunch of watch enthusiasts at a watch meet-up and we’re talking about everything but watches. Wrap your head around that.

  • How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation didn’t teach me anything comforting. It confirmed what I already suspected: addiction isn’t a habit; it’s a ravenous creature with a bottomless stomach. The more you feed it, the louder it howls. It storm-raids your mental vaults, looting the energy you need for your work, your relationships, and your sense of self. And your family feels the theft—spiritually, emotionally, domestically. Addiction doesn’t just eat you; it nibbles at everyone near you.

    Even with self-awareness, even with a clear understanding of triggers and a sincere desire for freedom, you don’t get a clean fight. The casino is rigged. Modern dopamine doesn’t drip from a bottle or a needle—it streams through fiber-optic cable. Our phones and laptops, the same devices we use to create, to earn, and to connect, also serve as the slot machines we keep in our pockets. The house never closes, and the drinks are free.

    Lembke tells us to avoid triggers, but what do you do when your trigger is baked into your professional life, disguised as “productivity” and “connection”? Avoidance becomes theater. You can only tiptoe around the swamp for so long before some lonely hour arrives, and curiosity knocks like an old vice with freshly polished shoes. A hit of self-pity, a twitch of boredom, a flicker of FOMO—and suddenly you’re back in the feed trough, gulping pixels like syrup. The crash comes fast: shame, exhaustion, vows of purity. Then the next impulse, the next relapse, the same ancient ritual. Lot’s wife didn’t want to look back; she simply couldn’t resist. Neither can we, sometimes. Salt is surprisingly modern.

    So the task becomes stark: learn to live in this world without turning yourself into a monument of regret. Train your gaze forward. Build the strength to resist that backward glance. The modern life mission isn’t to slay the demon—he regenerates too easily. It’s to starve him, inch by inch, while protecting the scarce, bright energy that makes you human.

    Becoming a human being is a high-stakes game. Learning to live a life in which you don’t become a pillar of salt is one of life’s chief endeavors.

  • The Keystone Habit: How One Change Rewires the Rest of Us

    The Keystone Habit: How One Change Rewires the Rest of Us

    Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business argues that vice, self-indulgence, and addiction operate on a neurological level. If we can deliberately rewire those pathways, we can free ourselves from much of our self-destructive behavior. Written more than a decade ago, the book anticipates the same themes that now surface in places like Reddit’s “Nofap” movement, where porn addicts admit their compulsions damage relationships and stunt growth, so they commit to abstinence—except with their partner. Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation makes a similar case, charting how dopamine overload leads to the inevitable crash of pleasure into misery.

    Duhigg opens with Lisa, an addict whose husband left her, likely exhausted by her behavior. When she finally saw how deranged her habits had become, she had the spark to change. She replaced her old compulsions with exercise and healthy eating. It’s the familiar “rock bottom” story: you face yourself stripped of illusions. Or as Marc Maron puts it, “Life hands you your ass on a stick.” Only when pride dissolves are you ready for answers.

    As someone who has wrestled with addictions and grown up with alcoholic parents, I read this story with recognition. The researchers studying Lisa’s brain found something striking: her old neural patterns were still visible, but they had been overridden by new ones. The impulses hadn’t vanished—they’d simply been crowded out. And while she overhauled many habits, it was quitting smoking that made the real difference. Duhigg calls this a “keystone habit.” In his words: “By focusing on one pattern…Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well.”

    The same principle applies to organizations: find the keystone habit, nurture it, and the ripple spreads across the whole system.

    I learned another useful term from the book: “behavioral inhibition.” It resonates painfully, because from 7 to 10 p.m. I suffer relentless food cravings. By then I’ve usually reached 2,300 calories, and eating more destroys my calorie deficit. But television sabotages my self-control—everywhere I look, people are drinking rosé, eating pizza, ice cream, carrot cake. Triggers, triggers everywhere. If I hid in an igloo, maybe I’d get ripped abs, though the view would be grim.

    Still, I’ve seen the power of a keystone habit. My mornings begin with coffee and buckwheat groats mixed with protein powder. Then I study a book and take notes, as I’m doing now. If I skip this, I get swallowed by the Internet, a dopamine carnival of watches, consumer temptations, and FOMO. I unfollow Instagram “safari” channels that inevitably mutate into half-naked influencers shaking their butts in gym close-ups. Once seen, such images can’t be unseen. Now I choose carefully.

    Replacing bad habits with good—writing, piano, exercise—changes not only my productivity but my temperament. I become friendlier, more patient with my family. But when I binge on Internet dopamine, I snap at people. I become “that guy.”

    The contrast reminds me of something Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin confessed in America’s Team: “We are all imperfect people. And each of us has at least two people in all of us; the person you show everybody and that person you never show to anybody.”

    We curate public personas and believe our own polished lies, all while a darker self hides in the shadows. But once life hands you your ass on a stick, integrity becomes your only way forward. Rewiring the brain isn’t just a neurological project. It’s a moral one.

  • Dopamine Nation: Self-Help Without the Fairy Dust

    Dopamine Nation: Self-Help Without the Fairy Dust

    I’ve never trusted the mythology of self-help books—the fairy tale that you identify Problem X, buy a book, read a few hundred pages, and Problem X vanishes. What I do believe is that a self-help book, at best, can make you stare harder at your demon, dull its sharper edges, and maybe hand you a strategy or two to keep it from devouring you whole.

    That’s why Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence punched me in the gut. Her blunt lesson: dopamine addiction—whether through scrolling, swiping, shopping, or vaping—doesn’t lead to pleasure but to misery, pain, and the hollowing-out of your agency. Reading her, I shuddered at the years I wasted feeding my brain with Internet sugar highs.

    Lembke makes no bones about the world we live in: a digital carnival of “overwhelming abundance.” She puts it starkly: “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you.” Pleasure and pain, she reminds us, are processed in the same brain circuitry—and the more dopamine that flows, the stickier the addiction.

    The horror story isn’t abstract. Her case studies peel the skin off addiction’s double life: secret compulsions, corrosive shame, shattered relationships. Some people are more vulnerable—those with addictive parents, those with mental illness in the family—but Lembke insists access is the true accelerant. The Internet puts a casino in our pocket; supply breeds demand. Worse, social media monetizes outrage until we mistake 24/7 hair-on-fire hysteria for “normal.”

    Lembke’s most grotesque example is Jacob, a sex addict who literally builds himself a “Masturbation Machine.” She confesses she feels horror, compassion—and dread that she herself is not immune. Her verdict is bleak: “Not unlike Jacob, we are all at risk of titillating ourselves to death.” Seventy percent of global deaths, she notes, stem from modifiable behaviors like smoking, gluttony, and sloth. Addiction, in short, is a slow suicide dressed up as entertainment.

    Part of the problem is philosophical. As Philip Rieff noted in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” We’ve traded the pursuit of goodness for the pursuit of good feelings. Jeffrey Rosen put it more bluntly: classical wisdom insists we should aim to be good, not simply to feel good. Instead, we’re anesthetizing ourselves with meds, therapy-lite, dopamine drip-feeds, and hedonism. And as Lembke observes, hedonism curdles into its opposite: anhedonia, the inability to enjoy anything at all.

    Her prescription? The brutal reset of a “dopamine fast.” Four weeks off your drug of choice to force your brain back to balance. She offers a framework—DOPAMINE (data, objectives, problems, abstinence, mindfulness, insight, next steps, experiment). It’s clever, but the hard truth runs underneath: most addicts, myself included, are not “moderators.” We’re all-or-nothing. For me, the Internet isn’t moderation-friendly; it’s a rabbit hole with no bottom.

    Lembke knows willpower is not enough. She prescribes “self-binding”: physical, chronological, and categorical walls between you and your poison. But in the digital economy—where work and addiction ride on the same Internet rails—such barriers are fragile. Moderation may be the fantasy; abstinence the only real survival strategy.

    So yes, I’m glad I read Dopamine Nation. It clarified the trap, exposed the double life, and framed the fight as both biological and spiritual. But let’s not be naïve. Like all self-help, it’s not a magic pill. At best, it’s a mirror, a warning flare, and a rough map out of the dopamine swamp. The walking out is still on you.

  • The Voice of Glum: Watch Addiction, Loudermilk, and the Daily Battle Within

    The Voice of Glum: Watch Addiction, Loudermilk, and the Daily Battle Within

    The TV show Loudermilk is part sitcom, part group therapy, and part existential smackdown. Ron Livingston plays Sam Loudermilk, a grizzled music critic and recovering alcoholic with the face of a hungover basset hound and the social graces of a man allergic to kindness. He barrels through life offending everyone within a five-foot radius, insulting his fellow addicts with toxic flair. But beneath the wreckage lies a strange tenderness—a story not just about addiction, but about people trying to survive themselves.

    Loudermilk lives in a halfway house with a cast of human tire fires, and the comedy burns hot: irreverent, profane, and deeply affectionate. The show loves its damaged characters even as it roasts them alive. Naturally, I love Loudermilk. Love it like a convert. I’ve become a low-key evangelist, promoting it to anyone within earshot—including the assistant at my local watch shop.

    This isn’t just any watch shop. I’ve been going there for 25 years. The Owner and the Assistant know me well—well enough to have witnessed the slow, expensive progression of my watch addiction, including the day I came in twice because the first bracelet adjustment “didn’t feel quite right.” It’s my barbershop. My confessional. My dopamine dispensary.

    So one afternoon, I’m there getting a link removed from my Seiko diver and I bring up Loudermilk. I describe the show’s gallery of screwups—addicts clawing toward redemption by way of insults, setbacks, and semi-functional group hugs. The Assistant looks up from his tools and tells me something personal. He watches Loudermilk too. And he gets it. He’s thirteen days sober and goes to five meetings every morning—not because he’s a morning person. He tells me that in his culture, drinking into one’s eighties is just called “living.” But for him, it was a slow-motion self-immolation. Now, he’s trying to claw his way back.

    Before I can respond, a woman with a chihuahua tucked under her arm chimes in from across the shop. She too is a Loudermilk fan. “What a shame it got canceled after three seasons,” she laments. The Assistant counters—there’s still hope for a revival. They argue lightly, both fully engaged, two strangers momentarily bonded over their shared love of a comedy about pain.

    I say goodbye and step out of the store. That’s when it hits me.

    I love Loudermilk because I see myself in it. I am an addict. Not just of watches, but of distraction, validation, control—whatever lets me delay the moment when I must confront the snarling voice inside me.

    Writers like Steven Pressfield and Phil Stutz describe this inner saboteur with chilling clarity. Pressfield calls it Resistance, the destructive force that undermines your better self. Stutz names it Part X, the anti-you that wants you to abandon meaning and pursue comfort. Both insist the enemy must be fought daily.

    And I know that voice. It’s lived in my head for decades.

    Once, at an English Department Christmas party, a colleague called me “Captain Comedown.” I don’t remember what I said to earn the nickname, but it tracks. I’ve got that bleak edge, the voice that sees futility everywhere and calls it wisdom. But a better name than Captain Comedown comes from my childhood: Glum, the joyless little pessimist from The Adventures of Gulliver, whose go-to phrase was: “It will never work. We’ll never make it. We’re doomed.”

    That’s my inner monologue. That’s my Resistance. That’s my Glum.

    Every day I wrestle him. He tells me not to bother, not to try, not to hope. That joy is a scam and effort is for suckers. And some days, I believe him. Other days, I don’t. But the battle is constant. It doesn’t end. As Pressfield says, the dragon regenerates. My job is to keep swinging the sword.

    And maybe, just maybe, buying a new watch is my way of telling Glum to shut up. It’s a shiny, ticking middle finger to despair. A symbolic declaration: The world still contains wonder. And precision. And brushed stainless steel.

    But there must be cheaper ways to silence Glum. A walk. A song. A friend. A laugh. Even a half-hour with Loudermilk.

    Because, irony of ironies, what addicts like me really want isn’t the next hit. It’s relief from the craving.

  • The Dopamine Dial: Why Your Grail Watch Can’t Make You Happy

    The Dopamine Dial: Why Your Grail Watch Can’t Make You Happy

    To understand the madness of the modern watch addict, you’d do well to consult Dopamine Nation by Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, a book that should be shelved somewhere between philosophy, neuroscience, and quiet screaming. Her central thesis? In an age of relentless indulgence, the line between pleasure and pain is not only blurry—it’s the same neurological pathway. You’re not escaping pain with your latest acquisition. You’re feeding it.

    “The smartphone,” she writes, “is the modern-day hypodermic needle.” And the drug? Dopamine—delivered in neat little parcels: TikToks, tweets, memes, and yes, wrist shots of watches you don’t own (yet). If you haven’t met your poison of choice, don’t worry. It’s just a click away.

    Lembke makes the uncomfortable truth clear: The more dopamine hits we seek, the more our brain adapts by reducing our baseline pleasure response. What once thrilled you—your grail watch, your Rolex Explorer, your Seiko with the Wabi-Sabi patina—now barely registers. You’re not chasing pleasure anymore. You’re just trying to feel something.

    Watch addicts, of course, understand this intimately. The pursuit of horological perfection starts out innocent enough: a G-Shock here, a vintage diver there. But soon you’re tumbling into the abyss of boutique limited editions and message board enablement, haunted by the need to stay relevant. Because here’s the twist: It’s not just about the watches. It’s about being seen. You post, you review, you flex because if you stop, you vanish. No new watches = no new content = digital extinction.

    And extinction, in a social-media world, feels like death.

    Lembke warns us that addiction thrives in secrecy, in the exhausting double life. The watch addict may present as a tasteful minimalist to family and friends, while secretly rotating 19 watches, five straps deep, waiting for the next “drop.” The addiction is fed by access, and we live in an access economy. New releases are no longer annual events—they’re hourly temptations. The vortex is bottomless. The supply creates the demand.

    Even worse, modern society normalizes this behavior. Everyone is scrolling. Everyone is upgrading. Our addiction to novelty is passed off as taste. Our frenzied consumption masquerades as identity. Lembke borrows from Philip Rieff to explain the deeper shift: “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” The modern watch collector doesn’t believe in salvation. He believes in configuration.

    But here’s the cruel irony: The more you seek to be pleased, the less capable you are of being pleased. In Lembke’s words: “Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia—the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”

    What’s the solution? A dopamine fast. Lembke prescribes it like a bitter medicine: Remove the source. Reset the brain. Let it reestablish homeostasis. For the watch addict, this means one thing: a watch fast.

    And yes—it’s brutal. I’ve been a watch obsessive for over twenty years. My longest fast? Six months. And I nearly went feral. New releases tempt. Friends enable. Algorithms whisper. Strap swaps and vintage reissues beckon like sirens. Even the FedEx truck starts to look like a personal tormentor.

    So you get creative. You stash watches in the safe and “rediscover” them. You buy new straps instead of new watches. You try to redirect the compulsion toward something productive: fitness, music, sourdough, monkish austerity. Anything but another chronograph.

    But the real cure, oddly enough, may be conversation—actual human connection. At watch meet-ups, we start out discussing bezels and spring bars, but within ten minutes we’re talking about life: real estate, parenting, knee surgeries, emotional burnout, dinner recipes. We talk for hours. But barely about watches.

    The truth slips out in these moments: we want to be free. We crave community more than we crave sapphire crystals. What began as a shared obsession has become a trap, and these conversations, paradoxically, offer relief from the very addiction that brought us together.

    Imagine a bunch of watch enthusiasts at a watch meet-up and we’re talking about everything but watches. Wrap your head around that.

  • Uncut Bezels: Watch Addiction and the Cult of Chaos

    Uncut Bezels: Watch Addiction and the Cult of Chaos

    Watch obsessives have more in common with Howard Ratner than we care to admit. Yes, that Howard Ratner—the unhinged gem pusher played with twitchy brilliance by Adam Sandler in the Safdie brothers’ cinematic panic attack, Uncut Gems. Ratner operates in the Diamond District behind bulletproof glass, drowning in sparkle and debt. We operate behind the bulletproof delusions of horological obsession, buried in brushed steel and moonphase complications.

    Like Ratner, we gamble—not at sportsbooks, but with FedEx tracking numbers. We tell ourselves, this is the one as we refresh the delivery status of the next “grail” watch. The package might as well be glowing, Pulp Fiction-style. And like Ratner chasing a cursed Ethiopian black opal mined from the bloodied crust of the Earth, we twist ourselves into financial and emotional pretzels to score that one special piece—the wrist-mounted miracle that will finally quiet the voices.

    Spoiler: it never does.

    Ratner is a man who thinks more is the cure. More bets. More jewels. More chaos. The watch obsessive runs the same play. We soothe our midlife despair not with therapy or silence, but with spring drives, meteorite dials, and limited edition bronze cases. Our collections don’t grow—they metastasize.

    Like Ratner, our problem isn’t the world. Our problem is internal. The call is coming from inside the skull. He can’t stop because he doesn’t want to stop. The thrill is the point. Every acquisition, every wrist shot, every gushing forum post—just another hit of synthetic joy to distract from the gnawing void. We call it a hobby. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s dopamine addiction disguised as design appreciation.

    Uncut Gems is a cinematic espresso shot laced with panic. My wife and brother couldn’t sit through thirty minutes. Too stressful, they said. Too jittery. I’ve watched it three times.

    But of course I have. I’m a watch addict.

    I live in Ratner’s world. The caffeinated chaos? That’s not discomfort. That’s home.

  • Cavebrain, Clickfinger: How Evolution Doomed the Watch Addict

    Cavebrain, Clickfinger: How Evolution Doomed the Watch Addict


    In the early 1990s, I saw comedian Rob Becker perform Defending the Caveman in San Francisco—a one-man anthropology class disguised as stand-up. His central thesis, stitched together from kitchen-table spats with his wife, was that men are hunters, women are gatherers, and this prehistoric wiring still runs our modern relationships like a bad operating system.

    His proof? Shopping.

    For the gatherer, shopping is a leisurely daydream. Wandering the mall for six hours and imagining buying things she can’t afford is an enriching sensory experience—like spiritual window-shopping. For the hunter, shopping is a surgical strike. He wants pants. He buys pants. He leaves. The suggestion to “just browse” makes his eye twitch.

    “Let’s get the hell out of here,” says the man. He has completed his mission. He has felled the beast.

    That moment—man as single-focus, tunnel-visioned, goal-oriented predator—explains a great deal about the pathology of watch addiction. We are still cavemen, just hairier and worse at squatting. And we don’t hunt food anymore. We hunt wristwear.

    We see a watch online and a brontosaurus steak lights up in our brain. Locked in. Target acquired. Our dopamine circuits spark like faulty Christmas lights. We must have it. There is no tranquility, no peace, until the object is in our possession.

    The problem? Our primitive instincts weren’t designed for the digital age. Back then, acquiring a new object meant trekking through wilderness, battling saber-toothed tigers, and earning your meal. Today, it’s clicking a “Buy Now” button while half-watching a YouTube review at your ergonomic standing desk, surrounded by a sea of unopened Amazon boxes.

    Our brains still think we’re walking 40 miles to spear a mammoth. In reality, we’re reclining in office chairs with lumbar support, ordering $2,000 divers like they’re takeout sushi. The hunt requires no sacrifice, no sweat, no real effort. And so it never satisfies.

    You get the watch. You admire it. You post a photo to Instagram. Then—you twitch. You fidget. Your brain says, “Good job. Now go get another.”

    We are not content in the cave. Evolution didn’t design us for stillness. It designed us to be hungry. To prepare. To hoard. So we keep hunting. And the cave fills with stainless steel trophies until the glint attracts low-flying pterodactyls that dive-bomb us in our sleep and try to pluck the Omega off our wrist.

    We are maladapted creatures. Our eyeballs evolved for survival. Now they doom us. We were built to scan the horizon for danger. Now we scan Hodinkee, Instagram, Reddit, eBay, WatchRecon, and Chrono24 until our dopamine is a wrung-out dishrag and our bank account is an obituary.

    We’re trapped in a glitch—stone-age instincts, 5G bandwidth. Our visual fixation, once essential to survival, now chains us to a cycle of desire and regret. Thousands of watches flood our screens in a single hour, and our brains are too old and too soft to resist. The only real solution is exile. But exile from what? Our jobs, our networks, our entire digital lives?

    There is no cave to retreat to. Just another tab open.

  • Buy Now, Cry Later: A Watch Addict’s Morning Routine

    Buy Now, Cry Later: A Watch Addict’s Morning Routine

    This morning, I sprang from bed at 5:50 like a man trying to outrun his own restlessness. Coffee in one hand, buckwheat groats in the other—my monkish morning ritual. By 6:20, I was deep into David Brooks’ New York Times lament over the death of the novel, parsing his elegy like a coroner looking for signs of life in a genre comatose under TikTok’s reign.

    I then pivoted to writing a YouTube essay on how to discover your watch identity without torching your bank account or your sanity. This required revisiting my own horological spiral, which could be summarized as: “I bought all the watches so you don’t have to.”

    Then, somewhere between the second paragraph and the first pangs of self-loathing, a thought struck me with the force of a stale TED Talk: I despise one-word-title books. You know the type—Grit, Blink, Regret, Drive, Trust—as if a single syllable can carry the weight of human experience. These are not books; they are glorified blog posts wearing a lab coat. They stretch one mediocre insight across 300 pages like butter scraped over too much toast. Malcolm Gladwell may not have invented this genre, but he certainly weaponized it.

    To be fair, a few have earned their keep: Testosterone, Breathe, and Dopamine Nation didn’t insult my intelligence. But the rest? They’re just placebo pills for the terminally curious.

    By 8:30, my family was still asleep, and I had hit the boredom wall with a dull thud. To numb the ennui, I began configuring a Toyota Camry online—my version of sniffing glue. I checked Southern California inventory as if I were a buyer, even though I won’t be pulling the trigger for at least a year. Classic FOMO, no doubt stirred by my best friend’s recent $70K Lexus purchase. His automotive flex triggered my inner consumer gremlin.

    Next came the Seiko browsing—Astrons, King Seikos, shiny little lies I tell myself in stainless steel form. I’m a man pushing into his 60s. I should be downsizing my neuroses, not accessorizing them.

    Right on cue, a depression fog rolled in. The psychic hangover of retail fantasy. I remembered a dream I’d had the night before: I was adding tofu to someone’s salad to increase their protein. They devoured it like they hadn’t eaten in days. Later in the same dream, I was at a party, where a couple asked me to mentor their autistic daughter. I smiled politely, feeling like a fraud. Me? A mentor? I can barely manage my own dopamine addiction.

    That’s when the epiphany hit like a steel bracelet to the skull: the urge to buy a watch hits hardest when you’re bored, self-pitying, or both. In those moments, a $2,000 watch becomes emotional currency—a metal antidepressant disguised as self-expression. And like all impulsive purchases, it cures nothing but your momentary discomfort.

    I hovered over the “Buy Now” button. Then, mercy. I pulled back.

    At 9:00, one of my twin daughters wandered into the kitchen and asked what happened to the leftover buttermilk pancakes from yesterday. I told her the truth: she’d left the door open when she went to ask the neighbors about babysitting their granddaughter, and a massive fly invited itself in. I saw it licking the pancakes like a dog at a water bowl. Into the trash they went. She laughed. I suggested Cheerios with a scoop of strawberry protein powder. She agreed. In that small, domestic exchange—an absurd fly, a ruined pancake, a shared laugh—I found myself re-entering the land of the living.

    Gratitude, not consumption, had done the trick.

    So now, I prepare for my kettlebell workout, towel in hand, wondering which podcast will offer the most delicious repartee to sweat by. My soul has steadied, for now.

  • DeDopaminification: Breaking Up with the Machine That Loves You Too Much

    DeDopaminification: Breaking Up with the Machine That Loves You Too Much

    DeDopaminification is the deliberate and uncomfortable process of recalibrating the brain’s reward circuitry after years—sometimes decades—of synthetic overstimulation. It’s what happens when you look your phone in the face and whisper, “It’s not me, it’s you.” In a culture addicted to frictionless pleasure and frictionless communication, DeDopaminification means reintroducing friction on purpose. It’s the detox of the soul, not with celery juice, but with withdrawal from digital dopamine driplines—apps, feeds, alerts, porn, outrage, and validation loops disguised as “engagement.”

    In Alone Together, Sherry Turkle diagnosed the psychic fragmentation wrought by constant digital interaction: we’ve become people who talk less but text more, who perform connection while starving for authenticity. In one of her most haunting observations, she notes how teens feel panicked without their phones—not because they’re afraid of missing messages, but because they fear missing themselves in the mirror of others’ attention. Turkle’s world is one where dopamine dependency isn’t just neurological—it’s existential. We’ve been trained to outsource our worth to the algorithmic gaze.

    Anne Lembke’s Dopamine Nation picks up this thread like a clinical slap to the face. Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist, makes it plain: the modern world is engineered to overstimulate us into oblivion. Pleasure is no longer earned—it’s swipeable. Whether it’s TikTok, sugar, or digital outrage, our brains are being rewired to expect fireworks where there used to be a slow-burning candle. Lembke writes that to reset our internal reward systems, we must embrace discomfort—yes, want less, enjoy silence, and learn how to sit with boredom like it’s a spiritual practice.

    DeDopaminification is not some puritanical rejection of pleasure. It’s the fight to reclaim pleasure that isn’t bankrupting us. It’s deleting TikTok not because you’re better than it, but because it’s better than you—so good it’s lethal. It’s deciding that your attention span deserves a tombstone with dignity, not a death-by-scroll. It’s not heroic or Instagrammable. In fact, it’s boring, slow, sometimes lonely—but it’s also real. And that’s what makes it revolutionary.