Cinemorphosis

Tag: books

  • When Beauty Stops Telling the Truth

    When Beauty Stops Telling the Truth

    In “I Was Lucky to Be Alive. But I Missed Being Pretty,” Hannah Viederman chronicles her move to New York at twenty-two to become a bar-mitzvah motivator. The job is essentially that of a party entertainer, making sure everyone in attendance is dancing, socializing, and participating in the festivities. Parents who pay good money for this rite of passage want a heightened fantasy that justifies the expense.

    The job was a welcome improvement over her exhausting schedule of working from five in the morning until eleven at night, juggling catering, babysitting, and staffing jobs at SoulCycle while trying to make it as an actress. As a woman in her early twenties, she was already learning that youth, glamour, and beauty are a kind of drug, and that administering this drug to others can bring success and a sense of self-worth.

    To become a bar-mitzvah motivator, Viederman had to audition against fifty other contenders in tip-top shape, most of whom were professional dancers. She got the job and was delighted. The attire was skimpy, consisting mostly of “too-tight shorts and cheerleader costumes.” She loved the attention the job brought her. She writes, “No matter what happened in the real world, I could stand on a podium in a flash of white lights, looking like the love child of a camp counselor and a prostitute, and feel the desire of a surging crowd.” Staying in shape and performing as a glamorous entertainer gave her a simple, comforting narrative that aligned with the work ethic: Work hard, play the role assigned to you, and reap the rewards.

    But her delight in the limelight came to a sudden halt at twenty-five when she suffered a stroke. She learned from medical experts that strokes among people in their twenties are more common than most people imagine. She also discovered how dramatically a stroke can age a person. She writes, “Having a stroke is like aging 60 years in the course of a few days.” She couldn’t shower on her own. She needed frequent naps. Her vision was blurry. Her hair fell out. She had tremors. The brutality of this new reality brought her dream world to an end. She writes, “Getting sick strips life of its fantasy, like sheets pulled from a mattress for the wash.” I would add a corollary to that insight: Getting old can do the same thing. Youth and beauty are part of a seductive dream, but it’s a confectionary dream that offers few tools for living when things get rough.

    Five years have passed since her stroke, and Viederman has made significant improvements. Her tremors are gone. Her vision has returned. Her face is no longer bloated from steroids. Those years have also given her time to reconsider a distorted value system that made her equate self-worth with the desire her good looks inspired in others. She writes, “I was sick, and now I am better, and I know that youth and beauty are unreliable narrators.” Her job is no longer to be a beautiful body for others to admire and behold. Her new task is to discover what reliable narrator might replace the unreliable one.

    What is the reliable narrator for all of us, sick and healthy, young and old? Perhaps there is no narrator, per se. Perhaps there is a principle worth living by.

    I’m thinking of attorney Reggie Williams, whose story I recently heard on The Moth Radio Hour, in an episode titled “On the Job.” In a story worthy of a screenplay, Williams recounts being unfairly fired by a successful attorney at a time when he and his pregnant wife were struggling financially. Years later, in an ironic reversal, that same attorney had fallen on hard times. Disheveled and desperate, he came to Williams seeking legal advice.

    Williams faced a choice. Should he help the man who had betrayed him when he and his wife were most vulnerable? He decided to help.

    Why? Because Williams had grown up believing that we all encounter other people as we move through life. There’s nothing remarkable about that. What matters is whether those people are better off for having known us.

    That principle offers a more durable foundation for self-worth than youth, beauty, or the admiration of strangers. Viederman’s glamorous appearance could inspire desire, admiration, and envy, but those reactions told her little about her worth as a person. Williams offers another measure: not how others respond to our appearance, but how our actions affect their lives.

    There is also something demanding about his principle. It’s easy enough to be generous toward people who admire us, flatter us, or treat us well. Williams extended his generosity to a man who had treated him badly. He had every reason to refuse, yet he chose to help. His decision suggests that character becomes most visible when doing the right thing offers no obvious reward.

    I don’t think Viederman needs to apologize for missing her beauty. Nor should any of us pretend that aging, illness, and the loss of physical attractiveness are painless. But if youth and beauty are unreliable narrators, perhaps the answer is to stop asking them to tell us who we are. We might instead judge ourselves by a more difficult standard: whether the people who pass through our lives are better off for having known us. That seems a worthy ambition at twenty-five, at sixty-five, or at any age when the mirror begins telling a story we no longer want to hear.

  • The Cringe That Defines You

    The Cringe That Defines You

    Cringe television refers to those comedies that bypass sentimentality altogether and go straight for the jugular by creating socially awkward situations–the equivalent of a social car crash–that are almost unbearable to watch. You squirm, gasp, cover your eyes, tell yourself you can’t believe what’s happening, and insist that you need to watch something less distressing. Yet you remain glued to the television, watching in spite of yourself. The Larry Sanders Show, the British and American versions of The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and You’re the Worst mercilessly floor the pedal, taking you to the golden nougat of cringe, that horrific center where fallen social graces, eviscerated decorum, spectacular embarrassment, and irrevocable humiliation achieve a ripeness and potency you never dreamed possible.

    We watch cringe television for complex reasons. There is the perverse enjoyment of it, which almost defies psychological analysis, except to acknowledge that we harbor a streak of cruelty that enjoys watching others lose their dignity. But there is also the survivor inside us who wants to learn from these humiliating spectacles so that we won’t follow in these hapless people’s footsteps and suffer their ostracism and disgrace.

    One lesson we learn from cringe television is that the more swollen our egos become, the more stupid and socially unaware we are likely to be. The more aggressively we assert our egotism in social situations, the more we alienate others, often without the slightest awareness that we’re being perceived as pompous, overbearing, bullying, obnoxious, and just plain boring.

    Offering an abundance of cringe is the reality show Below Deck in all its variations. My wife and I were recently watching the Down Under version when chef Ben Robinson decided he deserved to sleep in the more spacious guest quarters for one night to catch up on his sleep. The chief stew explicitly told him not to do so because the bed had been made with clean linens for guests arriving the next day. But Ben, having an inglorious hissy fit, marched into the luxurious guest quarters, messed up the bed, and refused to leave, even after his co-worker, second officer João Franco, urged him to get out.

    Ben Robinson is a talented, intelligent, well-read, articulate chef, but thanks to cringe television, those are not the qualities I will remember. I will remember a broken forty-five-year-old man selfishly violating every rule of decorum so he could indulge himself in the forbidden guest quarters. That episode taught me a painful lesson: A single moment of cringe can be so potent that it obliterates your finer qualities and reduces you to your lowest common denominator in the eyes of others. Whatever Ben does with the rest of his life, I will always see him throwing an infantile tantrum in the guest quarters, clinging to the sheets while João begs him to leave for the chief stew’s sake.

    Regardless of how generous I want to be toward Ben, I cannot erase the image of him behaving like a five-year-old. This is an example of the Reverse-Halo Effect, also known as the Horn Effect, in which one conspicuous negative action contaminates our overall judgment of a person, regardless of that person’s other admirable qualities.

    We all fear becoming victims of the Reverse-Halo Effect. Perhaps that’s one reason we watch cringe television: We hope to immunize ourselves against a similar fate.

    Because my own ego has gotten the better of me on more occasions than I care to count, I’m sure I’ve suffered from the Reverse-Halo Effect myself. I’m therefore in no position to judge Ben Robinson. Like him, I’ve dished up more cringe than is healthy for a lifetime.

    One potential source of cringe I’ve been imagining lately involves telling my co-workers that I’m retiring within a year and then changing my mind. The cat is already out of the bag. Everyone in my department knows I’m retiring. On several occasions, I’ve told colleagues that I’m hanging it up, only to have them interrupt me with, “I know. The word is out.” They’ve been treating me with the warmth and kindness people instinctively extend to someone approaching retirement. It’s a sentimental occasion, after all—the twilight of a career, a time for reflection and appreciation of the good years.

    But after twenty years of watching cringe television, I found myself entertaining a perverse thought: What if I changed my mind? What if, after announcing my retirement to everyone, perhaps even enjoying a retirement party, I decided I wasn’t ready to make the leap? I needed the money. I needed the work routine. I needed human interaction. I needed to be needed. God, how awkward it would be to show up at the fall department meeting the following year when everyone thought I was gone. I could imagine being about as welcome as a bride who wakes up on her wedding day with a boil in the center of her forehead.

    The good news is that I have no doubts about retiring. I will not show up like an unwanted boil next fall. I will be retired. But years of watching cringe television have instilled in me the crazed desire to imagine scenarios that would put me in socially awkward situations. This is surely a terrible use of my time. I would be better off concentrating on avoiding the very real moments of cringe that my egotism produces naturally, without distracting myself with imaginary disasters.

    Ben Robinson, I’m disappointed in you for selfishly messing up those bed sheets, but I can’t judge you. I’ve metaphorically shit the bed too many times in my life to count.

  • The Great Book I Don’t Want to Finish

    The Great Book I Don’t Want to Finish

    I bought the Audiobook American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. I’m several hours into it. This is such a well written book. It is fully realized. It is relevant to our age. It is full of depth and reflects arduous work by a talented author Kai Bird. He has written about an infamous grifter who provided a blueprint for other aspiring grifters in our post-truth, post-shame era. American Scoundrel is surely a book that helps us understand our current condition.

    But I’m having trouble getting through the book. I dread listening to it. Descending into the psyche of Roy Cohn is extremely toxic, abrasive and unbearable. The descent is unrelenting. There are no comic respites. The life of Roy Cohn is so predictably malevolent. He is such a bad actor. Combining this history with the news events of the day is overwhelming me.

    I have nine hours to go and honestly, I’m not sure I want to complete the journey, but I feel I have to. Finishing a book, in written or audio form, because of a sense of obligation is not a place I want to be in. But such are the decisions we make as readers and as part of an audience of performed books.

    I may delude myself and “take a pause” from the book and start listening to the Audiobook Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness by Lars Anderson. I haven’t watched sports in over a decade, but I usually enjoy sports biographies. They provide a pleasant diversion from the brutality of the real world.

    My aversion to Roy Cohn does not mean I’m not averse to reading about dark subjects. In fact, I am gulping with great pleasure the Kindle version of Evan Gershkovich’s memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land, which is about this journalist’s survival in a Russian prison. So there is hope for me. Reading about a Wall Street Journal writer learning how to co-exist with hardened Russian criminals is riveting. Descending into the diabolical mind of Roy Cohn is simply intolerable.

    So I’ve convinced myself to pause American Scoundrel. The problem isn’t that Kai Bird failed. In some sense, he succeeded all too well.

  • The Case for Boring Technology

    The Case for Boring Technology

    As I got older, I began to see consumer products as portals to a world I can describe only as cozy. By cozy, I mean products that give me functionality, tactile pleasure, familiarity, reliability, and control. I increasingly prefer them to products that may be more spectacular and alluring but are prone to falter or persist in feeling alien.

    In the living room, I have a $1,500 4K LG television. Despite its spectacular picture and rich sound, I despise using it. The interface is schizophrenic. One second I’m scrolling through tiles; the next, the television inexplicably switches to an annoying “magic pointer.” It’s not magic. It’s crappy. No one asked for it. It shows up like a smelly uncle at your doorstep. It adds nothing but confusion. The interface also jumps rows without prompting and sometimes kicks me out of the home screen altogether. The LG is decidedly not cozy. It’s so aggravating that I’m buying a Roku device simply to override the interface.

    Speaking of Roku, I own a budget $200 Roku TV in the bedroom. Its picture can’t compete with the LG’s, but using it is effortless. It is direct, simple, and reliable. It does what I ask it to do and then leaves me alone. That is cozy.

    For radios, I use the Tecsun PL-660 in the kitchen because I can play it while it’s plugged into the wall without electrical interference. When my hands are wet from washing dishes, I don’t want to disconnect and reconnect a power cord every time I turn on the radio. For a while, I used the richer-sounding Tecsun PL-880 and PL-990. Their speakers were superior, but using them wasn’t cozy. I was constantly worried about getting the USB plug wet and shorting the radio. Worry is the enemy of cozy. So I returned to the thinner-sounding PL-660. On balance, its dependable performance makes it the cozy choice.

    For shopping, I prefer Trader Joe’s. It is small. Walking from one end to the other isn’t an expedition; it feels like walking from my kitchen to my bedroom. I know the employees. When I’m finished shopping, I walk to the checkout aisle and interact with an actual human being. That is cozy.

    What isn’t cozy is walking into a giant chain supermarket or, worse, Costco, where the building is the size of a football stadium and almost as loud. Often there is no human to check you out. Instead, a scanner admonishes you for failing to place your groceries in the designated area. Sometimes six-foot beeping robots cruise the aisles scanning shelves and managing inventory. This isn’t cozy. It is literally alienating.

    I would never buy a refrigerator with a built-in ice maker because those things are notorious sources of breakdowns and headaches. There is nothing cozy about wondering which complicated mechanism inside your refrigerator will fail next. Give me the basic Whirlpool top-freezer refrigerator recommended by an appliance mechanic. In many cases, the more basic the machine, the cozier it becomes.

    I could continue through the entire house and garage: cars, watches, computers, fans, vacuum cleaners, toaster ovens, microwaves, tabletop ice makers, electric toothbrushes, double-edged razors. Again and again, I choose reliability over flash. Predictable functionality creates a cozy feeling that expensive, nerve-wracking gadgets often destroy with their hiccups, fussy fits, unnecessary features, and breakdowns.

    As I consider this obsession with coziness, however, I have to remind myself that life’s default setting is the opposite of cozy. Life is uncertainty and conflict. The cozy environments I construct with consumer products are, at best, small consolations against a world that can overwhelm me with its unpredictability. Coziness is the exception, not the rule.

    Sociologist Anthony Giddens would give my quest another name: ontological security, a fundamental sense of continuity, order, and trust in one’s world. Familiar routines and dependable objects help sustain that feeling. My cozy products create miniature islands of ontological security within a life whose default condition remains uncertainty and conflict.

    Let me be clear, however. I am not a Cozy Purist. I know this because perhaps the coziest appliance ever made is one I no longer use: the vintage swan-neck coffee percolator. You can still find them on eBay. The old models with American-made heating elements seem capable of surviving several human generations. Perhaps the most beloved is the GE Immersible, though Farberware, Universal, and Sunbeam made wonderful ones as well. Few appliances are cozier. A percolator makes a soft, rhythmic burbling as heated water rises through the stem and splashes against the glass dome. The sound is mechanical but gentle, as reassuring as rain tapping against a window.

    I enjoyed the percolator’s cozy ritual for several years until I committed the fatal mistake of conducting a taste test. I compared percolated coffee with slow-drip coffee. The slow-drip coffee was far better: richer, more complex, less bitter. It wasn’t close.

    So now I use a modern slow-drip coffee maker. It may last six years. It may last six months. In that respect, it isn’t cozy at all. But the coffee tastes better. I may be a creature who craves cozy comforts, but I have my limits.

  • Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    When you retire, you may imagine the trajectory of your final chapters in Hollywood terms because Hollywood has spent your entire life telling you what life is supposed to look like, regardless of how little its stories resemble reality. You may picture yourself as one of the endearing geriatrics in Cocoon, blissfully swimming with friends in a pool that functions less as a swimming pool than as the Fountain of Youth. Hollywood has been selling you fantasies all your life. Eventually, those fantasies seep inside you and become your own.

    It is therefore imperative to understand the kinds of stories Hollywood tells. Hollywood essentially gives us two: the Centripetal Story and the Centrifugal Story. When I explain these narratives to my students, I draw two diagrams on the board.

    The centripetal diagram consists of circles moving inward, becoming progressively smaller. One arrow points toward the center. I call this Circle A. The centrifugal diagram consists of circles moving outward, becoming progressively larger. One arrow points away from the center. I call this Circle B.

    Without explaining what the circles mean, I ask my students to raise their hands if they want their lives to resemble Circle A or Circle B. The overwhelming majority choose Circle B.

    Hollywood has taught them well.

    The Centrifugal Story dominates Hollywood because it offers what audiences want: transformation, expansion, heroism, and redemption. With notable exceptions, Hollywood has little appetite for the Centripetal Story.

    To explain the difference, I begin with a movie Hollywood rarely makes anymore: Citizen Kane. It is not a traditional Hollywood movie because the protagonist is rotten at the beginning and proceeds to rot more thoroughly. My college fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez called this process centripetal development. The character does not fundamentally change; he becomes an increasingly concentrated version of what he already is. Charles Foster Kane begins as an egotistical, controlling man hungry for love and recognition. Wealth and power magnify these qualities until they consume his relationships and leave him isolated. Kane does not become someone else. He becomes more completely Kane.

    American moviegoers generally don’t want to watch a character rot. They want transformation and redemption. They want the Centrifugal Story. Casablanca provides the classic example. Rick Blaine begins emotionally closed, cynical, and committed to self-protection: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Unlike Kane, whose defects become increasingly concentrated, Rick moves outward from the imprisoned self toward other people, moral responsibility, and sacrifice. His love for Ilsa initially tempts him to retreat further into private desire, but in the end he relinquishes her so she can leave with Victor Laszlo and contribute to something larger than any of them. Rick becomes less enclosed by the ego.

    Rick has undergone the classic Hollywood character arc. His old life is finished, and he enters a new world as a new man. Hollywood did not invent this narrative. It inherited it from the conversion story, most famously Augustine’s Confessions. Meghan O’Gieblyn calls this narrative structure the Autobiography: thoughtful reflection on a former life followed by a new life vastly superior to the old one. The structure is seductively tidy. You were lost. Then you were found. The movement is linear. There is no returning because you are dead to the person you once were. Revelation has compelled you to let go of your wastrel existence.

    The problem, O’Gieblyn observes, is that “You cannot understand the meaning of your life while you are still living it.” The conversion narrative solves this problem by allowing you to die without actually dying. Once dead to the old life, you can stand outside it, interrogate it, and contrast that decrepit existence with the person you have become. As O’Gieblyn writes, “Augustine is the father of the genre because he is the one who discovered the crucial loophole: die, then go on living.” Renounce the old life, be born again, and you acquire a second life from which to narrate the first.

    The conversion narrative is also the Hollywood narrative, and if you’re retiring, as I am, you want your final chapters to resemble that unmistakable Hollywood circle: centrifugal, with the arrow pointing outward.

    But after struggling with addiction, recovery, and relapse, O’Gieblyn finds this narrative as hollow as it is seductive. She fought like hell to beat her addictions and make her life “a perfect dovetail of conversion and deconversion narratives.” She wanted a trajectory as tidy as Augustine’s. Life refused to cooperate. She fears that instead of moving confidently outward, she may be traveling in circles. “My life has lost its arc,” she writes, “and I fear that it’s become less a narrative than one of those demented children’s songs that goes around in circles.”

    Yet O’Gieblyn is no nihilist. She still burns for understanding. She still feels compelled to write autobiography as a way of making sense of her failures and triumphs. She still hopes to find some form of wholeness within her contradictions.

    Perhaps those contradictions should not discourage her. Perhaps Augustine’s narrative is simply too neatly ordered to be true. Perhaps children crave cozy narratives while adults learn to tolerate the real stuff, even when the real stuff refuses to provide a feel-good ending.

    Dara Horn explores this problem in her provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Jewish literature couldn’t care less about my centripetal and centrifugal circles. Life is too unruly for either trajectory. It is a mishmash of paths. Horn considers our hunger for satisfying endings after a reader complained that her novel The World to Come, centered on the survivor of a pogrom, wasn’t “uplifting” enough. The complaint revealed something curious. Even sophisticated readers want stories to gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We want endings that reassure us that the universe is fundamentally coherent, that every life can finally be rendered as Circle A or Circle B.

    Horn is suspicious of this craving.

    Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolution owes much to Christianity. Christian history moves toward fulfillment. Its central drama is redemption. The scattered fragments of existence are ultimately gathered into a meaningful whole. Jewish storytelling, by contrast, is often more willing to refuse closure. The Hebrew Bible ends not with final resolution but with an unfinished journey. Questions remain unanswered. Promises remain unfulfilled. The story continues beyond the final page.

    That difference fascinates me. Christianity often invites us to see history as one enormous redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it asks us to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it teaches us to inhabit ambiguity with patience and humility. These stories do not pretend that chaos can always be conquered. They suggest that wisdom may consist in remaining faithful while chaos refuses to yield. I wonder whether remaining faithful amid the madness resembles the kind of attention Simone Weil asks us to cultivate as we approach our problems with calm, patience, and perhaps even faith.

    Perhaps that is the more mature vision. Perhaps the Augustinian character arc can infantilize us when we mistake it for a description of how life actually works. Hero stories easily become propaganda because they give us the emotional resolution we crave, whether or not reality warrants it.

    Hollywood has little incentive to tell us otherwise. It traffics in grand mythologies designed to activate our deepest cravings. Consider the 1985 movie Cocoon. It offers a saccharine myth of centrifugal time in which old age becomes an opportunity for expansion rather than contraction. Its elderly characters escape physical decline, rediscover vitality, romance, friendship, and adventure, and ultimately transcend mortality itself by leaving Earth with aliens. Instead of time narrowing their lives toward death, time opens outward toward limitless possibility. Hollywood takes aging, one of life’s great experiences of diminishment, and transforms it into liberation.

    The Centrifugal Story is alive and well.

    The trouble is that it may be more myth than life.

  • You Can’t Retire from Yourself

    You Can’t Retire from Yourself

    When you retire, you wage battles with institutions, time, younger generations, health, and “old age,” but your biggest challenge is yourself. This is the old you that has always plagued you, now acclimating to the fact that, like it or not, your remaining years have been gamified by actuarial tables. The longer you live, the longer your family receives a revenue stream. This strange condition threatens to turn the old you into an even more intense version of yourself.

    In my case, the old me is a worrywart, an obsessive, a malcontent, and a neurotic. Now the final chapters of my life have been gamified, and I fear what this worrying, malcontented self might become. I cannot change him through an act of will. I have to pay attention to him.

    This is the theme of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s memoir Will and Attention. In the book’s opening pages, she quotes a sentence from Simone Weil that she keeps on an index card above her desk: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”

    O’Gieblyn has had ample opportunity to examine the failures of will in her long struggle with alcoholism. She writes that she nearly drank herself to death in her twenties, got sober for more than a decade, and then started drinking again, even while giving AA talks and dispensing a wisdom that could not save her. One of the things that confounds her about the relapse is that during her years of sobriety she was happy. Why give up happiness? To complicate matters further, when her relapse was exposed and she told her AA friends all the right things about needing to do the work and not taking life for granted, the pieties sounded false. Reflecting on that period, she writes, “I can see now that it was a problem of authority. I had lost the privilege of narrative distance. I no longer had an ‘old life’ and a ‘new life’; I had only this muddle of my own making.”

    As I reflect on O’Gieblyn’s words, much of her torment seems to come from living in a state of chaos. Having an old life and a new life creates a clean, well-ordered trajectory that appeals to us. But what if the lines become blurred? What if life becomes a mishmash of conflict and ambivalence as we vacillate between our worse and better impulses?

    O’Gieblyn could not will herself off alcohol. At the same time, she observes, she could not will herself to become a Catholic. Having rejected the fundamentalism of her family, she hungered for a return to religion, this time through Catholicism. But this failure dovetailed with her return to alcohol and represented, she writes, “a larger pattern of regression” that defied her intellectual understanding of the dangers of losing one’s spiritual anchoring. “I know a lot of things in theory,” she writes, “and none of it seems to be of much help in the trenches of everyday life.”

    She had written a book about losing her fundamentalist faith while seeking a path toward Catholicism by meeting with a priest and attending Mass. She comes to see both her return to alcoholism and her attraction to institutionalized religion as forms of self-sabotage. In both cases, she is seeking oblivion, a way of losing herself to forces greater than herself. Intellectually, she sees the danger, but emotionally she remains compelled. She must therefore confront compulsion versus will. Did she really choose to return to alcohol or to the certainty of religion? Did she even understand what the words will and choice meant?

    Then she encounters Weil’s argument that we fail to cure ourselves through will but may succeed through attention. The sentence hits her hard, arriving “as the signature of truth, the conviction that you are learning for the first time something you have always known.” But it takes her a long time to grasp what Weil means. At first, she understands only the failure of will because repeated failure has made that part painfully obvious.

    Her book becomes, in large part, a refutation of the will. If human agency exists, the will does not necessarily unlock it. Indeed, the more meaningful the endeavor, the more likely brute effort is to fail us. “The most important things in life completely elude the will,” O’Gieblyn writes. Effort alone cannot summon happiness, piety, faith, seduction, love, productivity, or genius. It is especially futile in the face of addiction. Nor can you simply will yourself into a life of faith, which makes me think of Paul’s admonition to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

    Part of the problem is that the will is an unreliable bedfellow. Is it even pure in its intentions? Do we really want the things the will supposedly guides us toward? O’Gieblyn thinks otherwise. She describes herself as a divided soul whose actions reveal that she does not necessarily want what she tells herself she wants. “My will is scattered, directed toward many contradictory things, and easily distracted.” The will is therefore an untrustworthy character, one Paul warned us about in his famous Epistle to the Romans.

    If the will fails us, what then of attention? What does it mean to apply Weil’s words to our lives? What would it mean to put the will in the back seat and let attention drive?

    First, we have to understand what the will is. Nietzsche believed “that the illusion of willpower rests on our tendency to identify with the part of our soul who commands, not the part who obeys.” But O’Gieblyn observes a contradiction that complicates the idea further. “On one hand,” she writes, “the will is desire (both will and volition come from root words meaning ‘wish’ or ‘desire’). On the other hand, the will is necessary only when you need to act against your desires, or overcome them.” The will therefore “both wants and wants not to want.” To cheat on your diet is not simply a lack of will but an excess of conflicting wills. “The person who breaks his diet wishes for things at once: to eat and to refrain.”

    Her argument is powerful, persuasive, and liberating, almost Pauline in its cogency. No wonder the will fails us. It is a contradictory beast. Its right hand doesn’t know what its left hand is doing. The will is therefore a bad companion. We should stop the car and toss it onto the curb.

    Now that the will is gone, we need a replacement. That replacement is attention. But learning to pay attention to what matters is not a skill acquired overnight. We may first have to unlearn habits accumulated over decades before we can even begin. That unlearning may prove every bit as arduous as the learning that follows. Both will require focus, engagement, and the very faculty we are trying to cultivate: attention.

  • Writing After the Death of Reading

    Writing After the Death of Reading

    When the deep reading of long and complex writing is no longer the fabric of our culture, there will be a vacuum. It will be filled, of course. What fills the vacuum is not pretty. It is chaos, unbridled passions, dopamine, outrage, and a nightmarish phantasmagoria from which there may be no return.

    I keep coming back to Childish Gambino and his music video “This Is America,” in which cars are aflame, people are dancing amid the violence, chaos, and rubble, and the young generation is perched above the hellscape, distracted by their smartphones. The singer refers to the phones as “tools.” These tools can capture the chaos but cannot make sense of it. They can also serve another function: hijacking the brain. As the fires rage and the chaos intensifies, the mind is soothed by a new dance or cat video. Or one becomes engaged with a conspiracy and feels special for having the mindfulness to give credence to something the dumb masses have dismissed. Meanwhile, the hellscape gets worse as ordered reality recedes into the distance.

    Becoming untethered from reality, losing civic order, becoming addicted to screen-fueled dopamine, and living in ever-growing chaos is not the hellscape of the future. It is now. James Marriott sees this hellscape as the direct result of our loss of reading. In his book The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, his central argument is that literacy is essential to maintaining civilization. As he writes in his introduction: “I believe much of the disorder and unreason of the twenty-first century is a direct consequence of the fading of the written word and colonisation of our culture by addictive screens. As reading declines, the result, evident all around us, is the intellectual hollowing out of our society. Without reading, the world is going to become less rational and more disordered.” His book argues that we have not yet “fully grasped the consequences of this transformation” from reading books to gazing at content on screens.

    The way we absorb information as a result of technology presents a moral dilemma in the way I communicate with others. Do I stop writing and make “content” that is accessible to people acclimated to a world in which reading has been replaced by digital content? To be more specific, do I abandon the project of my blog and replace it with video essays meant for publication on YouTube? If I do so, am I part of the problem, kowtowing to a digital world of frictionless rewards, or am I simply being reasonable by communicating with people in the way they are most likely to receive ideas?

    I do have a blog. I enjoy keeping it active and posting almost every day, but if I write an essay on the blog and don’t post the link to my YouTube channel, only about five people will read it. If I post the link, I might get thirty visitors. On the other hand, if I take the same content, sit in front of a video camera for twelve minutes, and post the video essay on YouTube, I can get a few thousand views over the course of a few days. There is no contest. The evidence has made it clear. People don’t want to read my content. They would rather watch me sit with my ebony Yamaha piano behind me and talk about a subject for ten to fifteen minutes.

    So I have to make a choice. I can post something on my blog and be the tree that falls in the forest and makes no noise, or I can deliver a video presentation in which I try to make my personal challenges relevant to others and have a voice that actually gets heard.

    To clarify the situation even further, I have a hundred subscribers to my blog. I have over eleven thousand subscribers to my YouTube channel. I can see the communication landscape clearly. You go to work where the job is. There isn’t much opportunity to spread my ideas in the blog market. There are more opportunities on YouTube.

    I don’t take YouTube for granted either. I tell my viewers that, as a middling presence on YouTube, I view my channel like a restaurant. It stays open as long as the customers show up. It took a long time to get a substantial audience. For a decade, I talked about my watch obsession, did “State of the Watch Collection” videos, and interrogated my watch-related madness. Fellow watch enthusiasts could relate. We took solace in knowing we weren’t alone. We understood each other.

    But eventually, this path presented some challenges. I could only talk about my watch addiction for so long before I began repeating myself. As other YouTubers created more and more polished and highly edited watch videos, I found myself feeling redundant and technologically backward in that world. I had to make a lane change.

    My subject matter broadened to include my personal life challenges, such as living in my sixties and preparing financially and emotionally for retirement. Sometimes I’d throw in some watch talk, most noticeably my pivot from expensive mechanical diver watches to more affordable G-Shocks. The older I got, the less I wanted to deal with owning and servicing mechanical watches and the more I was comforted by the atomic accuracy and solar power of my G-Shocks.

    To my surprise, a sit-down video essay can perform better than a video featuring a watch close-up. I think I know why. YouTube viewers have become sophisticated enough to know that I don’t have anything special to offer in delivering watch eye candy. My strength is the video essay. I will lean into it and keep it going. I retire the channel when the customers stop showing up.

    Of course, I lament our post-reading world, the one James Marriott has described with such sharp insight and clarity. Of course, I am disappointed that I am not a published writer with a significant following. But I’m reminded of when I play Yahtzee. My daughter and I use a common expression when we’re aiming for a high score, such as getting a large straight, and end up having to settle for a small straight. Instead of complaining about the lot given to us, we say, “I’ll take what I can get.”

    If there is an audience out there that hungers for authentic ideas in a ten-minute video, then I will use that hunger as a toehold, stick my foot into it, and try to leverage myself up the mountain. I’ll keep ascending that world of ideas until I can no longer find footing and the unforgiving landscape demands that I stop climbing.

  • I Lived in the Before Times

    I Lived in the Before Times

    The Boomer shaking his fist at the television while denouncing the stupidity of the world—or standing on his lawn, arms akimbo, broadcasting his bitter displeasure with the neighborhood’s rapid decline—is an archetype of a particular kind of pathetic old-timer. He cannot accept his growing misalignment with the world. His rage is fundamentally rooted in fear: he is living in a world he no longer understands and increasingly lacks the ability to navigate. Unable to adapt, he acts out. He is a man sinking in quicksand with no rope within reach.

    Understood this way, retirement and old age are partly about misalignment and the primal terror of becoming isolated by it.

    It is tempting to dismiss the Boomer accordingly. He is simply curdling in old age and knows there is nothing he can do about it. Like the Wicked Witch screaming, “I’m melting!” he is slowly disappearing from the world.

    But we oversimplify the Boomer’s demise at our own peril. Two seemingly contradictory things can be true. On one hand, the Boomer really is misaligned with the world and may lack some of the adaptive skills necessary to flourish in it. On the other hand, some of his roots in the past point toward a superior way of being.

    I’m talking about reading.

    I’m talking about reading a paragraph containing complex ideas and understanding it.

    Not just a paragraph, either. A long essay. Even a book.

    The Boomer has lived in the Before and After Times. In the Before Times, his brain was trained for sustained reading. He processed the world through text, made sense of his place in it, and constructed a worldview by reading enormous amounts of material. Through reading, he learned to identify patterns, cycles, sophistry, trickery, deception, charlatanism, and occasionally authenticity.

    He was literate.

    The After Times are considerably less hospitable to literacy. We now spend large portions of our lives inside engagement farms, euphemistically called “social media platforms,” where fragmented attention is not a design flaw but the business model. The platforms compete to keep us clicking, swiping, gawking, raging, desiring, and returning. Sustained thought must compete against an industrial apparatus designed to interrupt it.

    The Boomer terrified by his misalignment therefore confronts an uncomfortable paradox. He legitimately fears his own growing ineptitude while also witnessing a different kind of ineptitude spreading around him: people losing their tolerance for sustained attention.

    Living in a post-reading society and knowing the difference because you lived in the Before Times is a peculiar privilege of age. I have students who were in sixth grade when the pandemic denied them anything resembling normal schooling for nearly two years. They spent much of their adolescence with TikTok, Instagram Reels, Snapchat, YouTube, and Roblox. Reading rarely occupied the center of this world. When assigned, it could feel less like intellectual discovery than community service for toilet-papering somebody’s house.

    Short video clips engineered to deliver immediate stimulation became the staple product of the engagement farms young people carried everywhere in their slender glass bricks. Childish Gambino captured something about this condition in “This Is America.” Violence and social breakdown erupt throughout the video while dancing, spectacle, and entertainment continually hijack our attention. The catastrophe is happening right in front of us, but something more stimulating keeps wandering into the foreground.

    If someone as young and culturally fluent as Childish Gambino can suggest that we are losing ourselves inside spectacle and distraction, the old Boomer ranting on his lawn suddenly deserves another hearing.

    There really was a Before Times when sustained literacy occupied a larger place in ordinary intellectual life, and its erosion has consequences. This is the subject of James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. As part of his research, Marriott contacted senior academics who told him that it was becoming increasingly difficult to assign a novel and expect students to read it within a week.

    I can attest to the larger problem. Assign long books and many students won’t read them. Some will drop the class. Eventually word spreads that you assign books, and students may avoid your section unless circumstances force them into it. You can assign one short book and give students the entire semester to read it. Even that is no longer a surefire proposition.

    I saw the accelerated decline of books in my own classrooms around 2012, almost exactly when smartphones reached critical mass and became mandatory accessories. Around that time, the lavish visits from textbook representatives began disappearing. No more kiosks and catered food. No more giant boxes of composition readers, essay collections, and grammar books arriving at our offices for inspection. The hundred-dollar composition textbook began its long march toward extinction. Even the used-book buyers vanished—the cheerful scavengers who once wandered into our offices and handed us cash for unwanted textbooks gathering dust on our shelves.

    College is a business. The business model had changed.

    Students were finding cheaper alternatives to outrageously priced textbooks, which was often a welcome development. But something larger was changing at the same time. We were increasingly creating classroom content for students living inside an information environment that competed directly against sustained reading.

    To my credit, I have adapted. I now break reading and writing assignments into shorter visual components using Google Slides. I make the concepts visible. I map arguments. I isolate terms. I provide examples.

    But sometimes I wonder whether adaptation has quietly become accommodation.

    I find myself hand-feeding information more than I did in the past. Instead of asking students to wrestle with a difficult text until they extract its argument, I increasingly extract the argument, put it on a slide, define the terms, provide the mapping components, and lead them through the analysis. The very skills I want reading to develop are sometimes the skills students need before they can tolerate the reading.

    There is the trap.

    So yes, I am misaligned.

    I am the aging man standing on the lawn wondering what happened to the neighborhood. I lived in the Before Times, and part of me will always remain there.

    But misalignment does not necessarily mean error.

    Sometimes the old man yelling from the lawn really is yelling at a fire.

  • How to Age Without Ruining Everyone Else’s Day

    How to Age Without Ruining Everyone Else’s Day

    I was sixty-four when I attended my cousin Pete’s seventy-fifth birthday party at his home in Studio City. The place teemed with cousins and their friends, ninety percent of them over seventy, including the members of the Beatles-and-Stones cover band.

    When twilight arrived—salmon sky, ninety degrees—dozens of people in their seventies stripped down and leapt into the swimming pool like aging dolphins. They splashed, laughed, floated on their backs, and generally behaved as though the actuarial tables had been suspended for the evening. I remained beneath the canopy in long pants, swatting mosquitoes and sulking.

    I sat with a plate of hummus, feta, figs, and baba ghanoush and talked with Jim, my cousin Diane’s husband, a seventy-eight-year-old retired ophthalmologist.

    I told him about some of the challenges I was encountering as I entered my mid-sixties: early bedtimes, bladder-draining night patrols, and my growing terror of driving after dark.

    Jim leaned toward me, lowered his voice, and delivered a sentence that should probably be etched on my tombstone.

    “The hardest part of aging is becoming invisible. You still take up space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture.”

    I immediately thought of Dostoevsky—or rather a sentiment I associate with his darkly comic vision of human nature. After a certain age, merely continuing to exist begins to seem vaguely impolite. Forty is acceptable. Fifty is pushing your luck. Seventy-five? Now you’re abusing the hospitality. Mind your manners and die already.

    “Exactly my point,” Jim said.

    I was joking, but the joke contains an unpleasant truth. Call it The Mortality Courtesy: the tacit social expectation that aging people should manage their decline in ways that minimize discomfort and inconvenience to everyone else.

    Stay healthy. Stay attractive. Stay mobile. Stay independent. Don’t complain. Don’t smell strange. Don’t require assistance getting out of the car. Don’t hold up the line while searching for your credit card. Keep your hearing aids charged. Maintain bladder control. And above all, don’t become one of those frightening old people whose visible deterioration reminds everyone else where this carnival ride is heading.

    If you absolutely must age and die, please have the decency not to make it awkward.

    Tolstoy understood The Mortality Courtesy perfectly. In the wonderfully cruel opening of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, employees at a prominent law court learn that Ivan Ilyich has died. Almost immediately, they begin wondering what promotions and personnel changes his death might make available to them.

    Ivan is dead. Someone may be getting a better office.

    They are also secretly relieved by the most fundamental fact of the situation: death happened to Ivan and not to them. One person’s catastrophe becomes another person’s reassurance.

    Then comes the funeral, which presents its own set of irritations. Death requires scheduling adjustments. There must be displays of grief, solemn expressions, uncomfortable clothing, flowers, condolences, and perhaps an afternoon sacrificed to standing around a coffin when everyone has other things to do.

    The dead can be terribly inconsiderate.

    But Ivan’s greatest breach of etiquette is more serious. His death reminds everyone that they are fools for living as though they will live forever.

    That is the real violation of The Mortality Courtesy.

    We spend much of our lives climbing ladders of pleasure, status, acquisition, accomplishment, and recognition, always imagining that happiness waits on the next rung. Better house. Better job. Better body. Better vacation. Better restaurant reservation. Better retirement portfolio. Keep climbing and eventually you will arrive at the radiant platform where everything finally makes sense.

    Then some inconsiderate bastard dies.

    Suddenly the entire enterprise looks suspicious.

    This may explain why visible aging can make younger people uncomfortable. The old person isn’t merely old. He is carrying information. His stooped posture, hearing aids, liver spots, pill organizer, orthopedic shoes, and careful descent down a staircase are little dispatches from the future.

    Nobody asked for these updates.

    Wouldn’t it be more polite to remain eternally youthful and salubrious? Stay lean. Keep your teeth. Maintain excellent posture. Swim laps at seventy-five. Wear tasteful linen. Post photographs from Tuscany. Inspire everyone with your vitality.

    This is the kind of aging society can tolerate because it doesn’t look sufficiently like aging.

    Perhaps that is what fascinated me about Pete’s birthday party. The septuagenarians launching themselves into the pool were performing the acceptable version of old age. They were vigorous, social, musical, suntanned, drinking wine, singing Beatles songs, and behaving as though seventy-five were merely fifty with a better retirement account.

  • My Inner Buzzkill Has Tenure

    My Inner Buzzkill Has Tenure

    You don’t really understand the adage “you are your own worst enemy” until you hit your mid-sixties. A dark voice inside you grows louder, casts its shadow over the proceedings, and begins offering unsolicited commentary on your future. You can “stay active,” “think good thoughts,” exercise, and hit your daily nutrient macros, but the voice remains unimpressed.

    In my case, the voice sounds disturbingly like Glum, the slump-shouldered, pessimistic Lilliputian sad sack from the childhood cartoon The Adventures of Gulliver. Glum was famous for expecting catastrophe. His entire philosophy could be reduced to one sentence: “We’ll never make it.”

    My Glum has updated the script.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    I can be minding my own business, driving across town to run an errand, swinging kettlebells in my garage, preparing overnight buckwheat groats while NPR murmurs from the kitchen radio, or reading the amino-acid profile on the back of a five-pound tub of protein powder when the voice crawls out of some dark crevice in my soul.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    I’ve heard the expression all my life but never paid much attention to it. Now I understand its appeal. It is an efficient little package of doom. Bad days ahead. Imminent disaster. Catastrophe. Loneliness. Helplessness. Hopelessness. Futility.

    Thank you, Glum. I was just trying to make breakfast.

    You have to take this voice seriously, not because its predictions contain great wisdom, but because the voice can make the genuine difficulties of aging worse than they need to be.

    Challenges are baked into the human condition. They should be accepted, perhaps even embraced, rather than rehearsed in advance. Suppose you buy a brand-new car. There is much to enjoy: the pride of ownership, the satisfaction of having researched every model within your budget, the latest safety technology, the quiet cabin, the sleek contours announcing to the neighbors that you remain a person of impeccable judgment.

    You just spent forty thousand dollars. You would like twenty minutes to enjoy yourself.

    Glum appears in the passenger seat.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    There will be repairs. Recalls. Door dings. Insurance increases. Next year’s model will look better and get four more miles per gallon. Eventually the transmission will fail, and one day the entire magnificent machine will be crushed into a metallic cube.

    Enjoy your new car.

    Glum doesn’t help you prepare for life’s difficulties. He simply makes you suffer from them twice: once before they happen and again when they actually arrive. He is your inner buzzkill.

    Some people have a louder inner buzzkill than others. The source could be biology, culture, trauma, temperament, or some cocktail of all four. What matters is developing a strategy for dealing with him.

    First, identify the voice.

    In my case, Glum is a cognitive distortion—a mental event generated by fear and masquerading as prophecy. To understand him, I have to recognize that he is rooted in the primal fear of loss and death. The fear itself is real. Loss is real. Death is real. But Glum’s prognosis of my remaining life is not reality. It is fear pretending to be an oracle.

    Second, recognize the self-fulfilling prophecy.

    If I allow fear to curdle my ability to participate in the present, I will squander the very life I’m frightened of losing. I will have surrendered my power to Glum, and the resulting misery will appear to vindicate him.

    “See?” Glum will say. “Told you.”

    Of course he told me. He helped cause it.

    Third, recognize that Glum is the master of pre-suffering.

    Aging guarantees losses, frustrations, illness, uncertainty, and eventually death. Glum’s trick is making you experience these events before they happen. A future car repair becomes today’s anxiety. Future physical decline contaminates today’s workout. Eventual death ruins today’s oatmeal.

    You don’t need to deny future suffering. You need to refuse advance billing.

    When something bad happens, deal with the actual problem. Don’t pay interest on misery that hasn’t arrived. Otherwise you won’t be able to play the piano, work out, write, enjoy your breakfast, or do much of anything except rehearse catastrophes.

    Fourth, answer Glum by living.

    Glum says, “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    Your response doesn’t need to be, “Everything will be wonderful.” That is merely Glum wearing a motivational-speaker costume.

    A better response is: “Perhaps. What can I do today?”

    Exercise. Write. Practice piano. Call someone. Eat well. Grade the essays. Take the walk.

    Agency doesn’t refute mortality. It prevents mortality from colonizing the present.

    Fifth, accept that you will never terminate Glum.

    He is with you. He has always been with you.

    Looking back, I realize Glum didn’t suddenly appear in my sixties. He was there during childhood. He was there during young adulthood. He has accompanied me through most of my life, providing an unwanted running commentary on the possibility that everything might go horribly wrong.

    I’ve even lost friends over the years because they consciously or unconsciously recognized my inner pessimist and went running for the hills.

    I don’t blame them.

    Some comedians have managed to turn Glum into a career. Richard Lewis comes to mind. He took the internal voice of catastrophe, dragged it onto a stage, put a microphone in front of it, and made people laugh.

    That may be one of the better ways of managing Glum.

    Mock him.

    Glum is an idiot worthy of ridicule, but he remains an idiot with tenure.

    And there is another uncomfortable truth. Glum is part of you. You’ve grown attached to him. You hate him, but you also love him. After decades together, you have developed one of those poisonous relationships neither party has the courage to end.

    Glum is your internal frenemy.

    So recognize him. Understand where he comes from. Laugh at his absurdity. Accept that he may never leave.

    But do not take orders from him.