Cinemorphosis

Tag: books

  • G-Shock Atomic Time Is Too Perfect to Talk About

    G-Shock Atomic Time Is Too Perfect to Talk About

    I’m reluctant to make a video about my G-Shock saga and how atomic time cured me of my restless quest for timekeeping.

    That’s not a boast. It’s a problem.

    In a hobby that runs on dissatisfaction—the faint itch that your mechanical watch is almost right but not quite—content thrives on unrest. There’s always another model to chase, another micro-adjustment to obsess over, another reason to believe the next acquisition will finally close the gap. Discontent is the engine. It powers the reviews, the comparisons, the late-night rationalizations dressed up as research.

    And then along comes atomic time, which does something unforgivable: it removes the gap.

    My G-Shocks are correct. Not “close enough,” not “within spec,” but correct in a way that leaves nothing to argue about. The second hand doesn’t drift. The numbers don’t wander. The watch does its job with a kind of quiet authority that makes further discussion feel like talking to fill the silence.

    That silence is the problem.

    Because what, exactly, am I supposed to say now? I can’t keep making variations of the same video—“I’m still happy,” “Still accurate,” “Nothing has changed except my continued satisfaction.” That’s not content. That’s a man reporting, week after week, that the sun rose on schedule.

    Making such a video would amount to a confession: the story has reached its logical conclusion. The quest for perfect timekeeping—the narrative arc that justified the channel—has ended, not with a triumphant crescendo, but with a polite, digital beep.

    And endings are bad for business.

    The only way forward would be to pivot—to talk about something other than watches. But let’s be honest: people didn’t subscribe for my thoughts on life, philosophy, or the alarming moral implications of oatmeal. They came for watches. Leave the watches behind, and you risk discovering that the audience was never there for you—only for the object you orbited.

    So yes, making such a video is terrifying.

    Not because it’s difficult to make, but because it points, with uncomfortable clarity, to my limitations. It suggests that I’ve solved the very problem that made me interesting to watch. It hints—quietly but persistently—that the channel may have been a story with a natural endpoint all along.

    And I’m not sure I’m ready to film that ending.

  • Purple Toothbrushes and Other Acts of Quiet Genius

    Purple Toothbrushes and Other Acts of Quiet Genius

    I have a student who makes the rest of the room recalibrate. Her essays arrive fully formed—sharp, unshowy, and quietly devastating—and in discussion she does what most people only pretend to do: she thinks out loud with precision. If airtime were currency, she’d hold a majority stake. And the remarkable part is that no one resents it. The other students lean in. They listen. At eighteen, she carries herself with a kind of early-onset professorial clarity, but without the usual symptoms—no grandstanding, no ornamental jargon, no whiff of performance. Just a mind doing its work in public.

    Yesterday she told the class she’s neurodivergent. It landed without ceremony. No one froze, no one fumbled for a response. She simply kept going, threading her way back into our discussion of cruelty as entertainment in The Biggest Loser, dissecting it with the same steady intelligence she brings to everything. The label didn’t explain her; it just named the angle of her vision.

    Later that day, I watched Sheng Wang: Purple on Netflix and had a familiar thought within five minutes: here is another mind that refuses to see the world the way the rest of us have agreed to see it. Sheng Wang doesn’t manufacture jokes so much as he exposes the wiring. He takes the banal—the humble toothbrush aisle—and turns it into a referendum on identity. Faced with a rainbow of options, he chooses purple, not because it cleans better, but because it confers a temporary aura of purpose, as if pigment could rescue a life drifting toward mediocrity. It’s ridiculous, which is why it’s true.

    Wang, born in Taiwan and raised in Houston, delivers all this with a soft Southern cadence that suggests a Baptist sermon delivered by a man who wandered in from a parallel universe. He glides across the stage in flowing purple clothes and white sneakers, looking like a kindly prophet of low-stakes revelation. The dissonance works. His demeanor—gentle, unhurried, almost disarmingly sincere—feels less like an act and more like a refusal to harden into one. You don’t watch him perform; you eavesdrop on how he thinks.

    That’s the throughline between my student and Wang. The best comedians aren’t joke machines; they’re cartographers of attention. They map the ordinary at strange angles and invite you to follow. Sometimes they surface thoughts you didn’t know you had—your private negotiations with a toothbrush color, your quiet horror as a friend’s child demolishes a bowl of expensive berries with the appetite of a small animal. Sometimes the thoughts are entirely their own, but the vantage point is so exact you recognize yourself anyway.

    A good comedian, like a good student, doesn’t just entertain or impress. He builds a small porch between minds. You sit there for a while, listening, and realize you’re not being dazzled—you’re being let in. That’s rarer, and far more valuable, than a punchline.

  • Why My G-Shock Saga Refuses to Become a YouTube Video

    Why My G-Shock Saga Refuses to Become a YouTube Video

    What follows is the essay that will serve as the basis for my YouTube video explaining why no such video can, in fact, be made from it.

    Six weeks ago, I received my G-Shock Frogman and promptly lost my mind. Not gradually. Not with dignified hesitation. I went down hard. The more I studied its lopsided, industrial architecture, the more I found myself staring at it the way one stares at brutalist buildings—confused at first, then strangely moved. Black resin, thick as a tire wall, sat on my wrist with the quiet confidence of a machine that does not care if you approve of it. No one told me industrial black resin could look so beautiful. 

    This startled me. I had long filed resin under “gym timer” and “Office Space despair”—the sort of material worn by men who have stopped expecting things from life. What kind of man sidelines a stable of expensive mechanical divers—curated, polished, lovingly rationalized—for a slab of molded polymer that costs a fraction of the least expensive piece in the box? The answer, apparently, is me. Something shifted. I can’t explain it. It may take years, or therapy, or both.

    Naturally, I doubled down.

    Intoxicated by the Frogman, I added the GW-7900 Rescue, a watch that costs about one-fifth as much and delivers five times the daily utility. It is padded, legible, and indifferent to my previous standards. Its numerals are large enough to read without squinting, which, at this stage of life, qualifies as a luxury feature. It became my daily wearer within a week, displacing watches that once required white gloves and a sense of occasion.

    Still unsatisfied, I escalated. The Mudman GW-9500 arrived next, with numerals that resemble municipal signage. If the Rescue was readable, the Mudman is unavoidable. Together, the three form what I have come to call—without irony—the Hero Triad.

    All three are Multiband-6 with Tough Solar, which means they spend their nights quietly consulting the atomic clock in Fort Collins and correcting themselves with a level of discipline I have never achieved in any area of my life. The Frogman and Mudman prefer to be placed carefully—on a desk, or hanging from my T-bar like well-behaved instruments. The Rescue, by contrast, syncs wherever it pleases. It has the personality of a straight-A student who does not need supervision.

    These three watches now consume over ninety percent of my wrist time. My mechanical divers sit in their box like retired generals, decorated but irrelevant. When I told my wife this, she paused and asked, “Wrist time? Who uses that term?”

    I do. We do. We count wrist time the way bodybuilders count macros—with vigilance, denial, and occasional self-deception. And lately, my wrist time has been taken over by G-Shock.

    I’ve written about this infatuation on my blog, but my YouTube audience has made something clear: words are no longer enough. We live in an age where ideas must be performed, not merely stated. If I want to be understood, I must produce a video.

    And yet, I cannot make this video.

    First, the landscape is saturated. There are already hundreds of G-Shock videos—reviews, tutorials, warnings about imminent discontinuations delivered with the urgency of a public safety alert. To add my voice would be to echo the chorus, and I have no desire to hear myself harmonizing with better singers.

    Second, I refuse to become an evangelist. I am not here to declare a holy war against Seiko, Tudor, or Omega. This is not a zero-sum game. I have not betrayed mechanical watches with a Judas Iscariot kiss and fled into the desert with a resin accomplice. I still believe in their beauty. I simply no longer rely on them for giving me accurate time. That distinction is subtle, and subtlety does not perform well on YouTube.

    Third, I lack a coherent explanation for my conversion. I cannot tell you whether this shift is driven by age, by proximity to retirement, or by a growing intolerance for approximation in a world already saturated with it. Perhaps I simply escaped Seikotraz—the self-imposed prison of mechanical devotion—and ran toward the first open door. Whatever the cause, I am not yet qualified to narrate it.

    Fourth, my story is not unique. Millions discovered G-Shock long before I arrived, breathless and late, to report that it works. To stand before an audience and announce this would reduce me to a background character—another man discovering electricity and insisting on a press conference.

    Fifth—and most damning—this narrative reads like a watch downgrade. The story people want is ascent: the climb, the conquest, the triumphant pose at the summit. I have done the opposite. I have descended, calmly, into black resin. I have traded filet mignon for a protein bar and now stand before you insisting it is not only sufficient, but superior. This is not a heroic arc. It is a dietary confession. And possibly a sign of a pathology. 

    So no, I cannot make this video. 

    My escape from Seikotraz may or may not be complete. What I can promise is this: when the next chapter reveals itself—and it will—I’ll report back, possibly with less confusion, but no guarantees. Aren’t you glad I didn’t make this video? 

  • The Night the Mechanical Diver Stayed Home

    The Night the Mechanical Diver Stayed Home

    Last night I escorted my family and in-laws to a breezy bistro in Redondo Beach, the kind of place where the ocean air does half the marketing. We sat on the patio while a two-man cover band—guitar and bass, faces cured by sun and time—worked their way through the canon: Gordon Lightfoot, Jim Croce, James Taylor. Their voices had the texture of driftwood. The songs arrived like postcards from a quieter century.

    For twenty years, a restaurant meant ceremony. I would strap on an expensive mechanical diver—the horological equivalent of cufflinks—and let it glint under low lighting as if I were auditioning for a role called “Man of Taste.” Five weeks ago, that instinct died without a funeral. In its place: a $110 Casio G-Shock GW-7900. No romance, no pretense, just a blunt instrument that tells time with the indifference of a wall clock. I wore it and felt, not diminished, but strangely settled. Our server had on a Casio Pro Trek. We exchanged a nod—the quiet recognition of two men who had defected from the same aesthetic regime.

    Two weeks ago, I sold off a pair of mechanical divers. The absence registered as silence, not loss. Five weeks ago, I bought my first Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shock—a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000. It feels like I’ve owned it for a decade. Time has warped, stretched, lost its usual proportions. My working theory is this: when an obsession mutates—when it takes a hard, unexpected turn—the brain lingers over the wreckage and the new terrain at once. Every moment gets over-processed, as if your mind is trying to reconcile two incompatible identities. The result is temporal inflation. Five weeks feel like ten years. Meanwhile, the watches I once coveted sit in their box like artifacts from a civilization I can’t quite remember belonging to.

    I’ve made a few videos documenting this conversion. To my mild alarm, a handful of people have followed suit—buying the GW-7900, aiming their watches toward the Fort Collins signal tower like amateur astronomers chasing a frequency instead of a star. It’s absurd, and yet there it is: evidence that I may have drifted, however briefly, into the low orbit of influence. Not authority. Not expertise. Influence—the most accidental and least deserved of modern currencies.

    The question now hovers: is this a phase or a verdict? Will some future mood—call it nostalgia, call it vanity—dust me with longing and send me back to my mechanical divers? Or have I crossed a line I can’t uncross, sealed inside a G-Shock logic that values precision over poetry? I don’t know. The future, like the tide, refuses to take requests.

    What I do know is this: today I’ll need to punish myself with extra work in the garage gym. Last night I demolished a crispy chicken sandwich on brioche while listening to “If You Could Read My Mind,” and the song’s quiet sorrow did nothing to slow me down. If anything, it provided a soundtrack for excess—the softest possible music for a thoroughly unrestrained appetite.

  • The Tape Tyrant of Postmaster Plus

    The Tape Tyrant of Postmaster Plus

    I went to Postmaster Plus this morning to ship a defective camera back to Kodak—a routine errand, the kind you knock out between coffee and whatever comes next. I’ve been going there for years. The place is run by a family from Bombay, and over the last decade they’ve shipped more of my watches than I care to admit. It’s a familiar, efficient operation. Or at least, it usually is.

    When I walked in, the rhythm was off.

    At the counter stood a couple in their mid-sixties, locked in some elaborate transaction with M, the family patriarch, a man in his seventies who has the calm of someone who has seen everything and survived it. Behind the couple stood a woman clutching a stack of flattened cardboard, her face arranged in a quiet expression of despair. She looked at me as if to say, You’re seeing this too, right?

    I was.

    The woman at the counter—a redhead with severe bifocals and a face that seemed permanently braced against disappointment—had taken possession of M’s tape roller and was using it with the zeal of someone preparing artifacts for burial. Her husband hovered nearby, a classic Palm Springs Q-Tip: white hair under a baseball cap, mouth slightly open, limbs thin as dowels, torso betraying a fondness for buffets. He contributed nothing except presence.

    “I’ve seen these packages break before,” the redhead announced, as she wrapped the parcels in what could only be described as a second skin of tape. Not a practical layer—no, this was ceremonial. A kind of adhesive exorcism. When the tape ran out, she didn’t pause, didn’t apologize. She demanded another roll with the urgency of a field commander low on ammunition.

    The woman behind them caught my eye again. This time the look was unmistakable: We are both trapped here. I returned the glance with equal solemnity. Yes, we were sharing this moment. No, there was no escape.

    Then came the breaking point. The cardboard woman asked M when his son W would return from break.

    “Twenty minutes or so,” M replied.

    She nodded, made a decision, and fled. A wise woman. She chose freedom.

    I stayed.

    The redhead, now fully committed to her role as High Priestess of Packaging Integrity, began lecturing the room about the fragility of parcels and the absolute necessity of excessive tape. She spoke as if we were all negligent amateurs, one poorly wrapped box away from societal collapse.

    I opted out.

    I pulled out my phone, photographed my Casio G-Shock GW-7900, and posted it to Instagram. If I was going to be held hostage, I might as well document something worthwhile.

    Eventually—mercifully—the couple completed their transaction. Eighty dollars later, their packages were no longer parcels but laminated relics, ready to withstand not just shipping, but geological time. I stepped forward, paid for my own shipment, and shared a brief, knowing laugh with M about the spectacle we had just endured.

    We thought it was over.

    It wasn’t.

    The door opened. The couple returned.

    The redhead, unsatisfied with her previous efforts, declared that a third layer of tape was necessary for her “peace of mind.” At this point, the packages were less shipments and more mummies awaiting a sarcophagus.

    I gave M a look—the kind of look that conveys sympathy, disbelief, and resignation all at once. He nodded, the stoic veteran of countless such encounters.

    I left.

    As I walked out, I knew two things. First, those packages would survive anything short of a volcanic eruption. Second, I had just acquired a story—one that would be waiting patiently for me to tell my wife the moment I got home.

  • Escape from Seikotraz: Starring Jeff McMahon

    Escape from Seikotraz: Starring Jeff McMahon

    This morning I woke up with a small, undeserved victory. My second shingles shot had not flattened me into a feverish heap of aches and regret. No vaccine hangover. No sack-of-muscle soreness. Just a functioning body and a clear head. I glanced down at my Casio G-Shock GW-7900 before swinging my legs out of bed, and as I reached for the coffee ritual, a thought crept in—quiet at first, then strangely intoxicating:

    What if I owned only G-Shocks?

    What if I were free of my Seiko divers?

    Free from what, exactly? That part remains stubbornly undefined.

    Three years ago, the fracture began. I developed an aversion to bracelets—not a mild preference, but a full-blown irritation, as if every metal link were conspiring against my wrist. I moved my Seiko divers onto straps, experimenting like a man searching for ergonomic salvation, until I discovered Divecore FKM. Suddenly, everything clicked. The watches felt right—balanced, secure, almost inevitable. For a brief moment, I thought I had solved the problem.

    Then came the contamination.

    August 2025. A message. A study. PFAS—“forever chemicals”—lurking in FKM. The phrase alone sounded like a villain in a low-budget sci-fi film. Dutifully, almost piously, I removed the straps. The watches went back onto inferior substitutes, and with that small act, something essential drained out of them. They were no longer “just right.” They were tolerable.

    Divecore, to their credit, pivoted—hydrogenated rubber, safer materials, a new Waffle strap on the way. I’m waiting for it now, like a man waiting for a repaired marriage.

    But in that interim, I did something careless. Or revealing.

    On a lark, I bought a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    And I didn’t just like it. I fell for it immediately.

    Its design wasn’t elegant—it was aggressively industrial, almost defiant. Its timekeeping wasn’t approximate—it was absolute. Atomic. Unquestionable. It didn’t ask for attention; it delivered certainty. One watch became three. The Rescue. The incoming Casio G-Shock GW-9500 Mudman. A quiet shift became a migration.

    This morning, still basking in my vaccine survival, I entertained a more radical thought: eliminate the Seikos entirely. Replace them with two final pieces—the sapphire Frogman D1000 and the GW-5000U Square, my so-called “dress watch,” a term that feels almost satirical in this context.

    At what point does a preference become a slide?

    Was it the PFAS scare that loosened the foundation? Or something deeper? Do the Seiko divers now carry the residue of an older obsession—one tied to acquisition, to the promise that the next watch would finally complete the picture? And if so, what exactly is this new G-Shock phase? Liberation? Or simply addiction in a more utilitarian costume?

    There are a few things I can say with certainty. I prefer atomic time to mechanical approximation. I prefer digital clarity to analog interpretation. Yes, the digital display demands a slight tilt of the wrist, a negotiation with the light, but I’ve made peace with that. It’s a small concession in exchange for precision.

    Maybe there is no grand psychological drama here. Maybe I’ve grown lazy in the most practical sense. I like convenience. I like certainty. I like not having to set the time like a monk tending to a ceremonial clock. Perhaps this is not a crisis of identity but a simple shift toward ease.

    But then I hear from others.

    Men who made this transition years ago. Men who, after watching my videos, bought a G-Shock out of curiosity and quietly abandoned their mechanical collections. No fanfare. No farewell. Just a gradual, almost polite disappearance.

    It suggests something larger. A quiet exodus.

    You could make a documentary about it: aging watch obsessives laying down their expensive mechanical relics and walking into the sunset wearing Squares and Mudmans, relieved, unburdened, and slightly confused about how it happened.

    Meanwhile, my own collection sits in a kind of purgatory. The Seiko divers wait, their fate undecided. Two have already been sold—the Captain Willard Ice Diver and the 62MAS—and their absence has not registered as loss. That’s the unsettling part. Watches that once felt essential have vanished without leaving a dent.

    And here I was, thinking of myself as a careful curator, a man assembling a coherent, meaningful collection.

    The truth is less flattering.

    My hobby is governed not by principle, but by impulse. By shifting preferences, passing anxieties, and the occasional well-timed scare about “forever chemicals.” I would prefer to believe in a deeper logic, a narrative of refinement and evolution.

    But honesty requires a different conclusion.

    I am not curating.

    I am drifting.

    I look into the mirror. “Oh my God,” I scream. “I am a capricious watch collector.”

    Meanwhile, my YouTube subscribers are making cogent remarks in the comment section. A gentleman who goes by the name of MDchaz recently wrote: “Coming to a theater near you “Escape from Seikotraz” starring Jeff McMahon.” I wrote back, “I’ll have to steal your idea for my next YouTube video.”

    And this blog post. 

  • When “Your Truth” Stops Being Believable

    When “Your Truth” Stops Being Believable

    Helen Lewis’ Atlantic essay “The Death of Millennial Feminism” observes that Lindy West “is the most successful feminist writer of her (and my) generation,” propelled by raw, often self-deprecating confessionals and “viral takedowns.” She had the ears of women everywhere. She became the loudest evangelist for feminism and a tireless promoter of “fat positivity.” Then she wrote a memoir that brought it all to a halt. Adult Braces reverses many of the feminine ideals she once championed.

    Much in the book makes Lewis cringe, but one detail stands out: West allows her partner to enter a throuple with another woman—someone significantly thinner than West. She concedes that her once-admired feminist life was, in Lewis’s words, “a buffed-up version of the truth.” She describes feeling alienated from like-minded writers in editorial spaces. The online scorn she endured was more debilitating than she had admitted. And her body-positivity project falters under the weight of her own confession: “I am at my biggest when I am at my saddest.”

    West’s self-mythologizing of her past undermines the credibility of her present claims. Lewis is therefore skeptical of West’s assertion that she finds fulfillment in a polyamorous relationship in which her partner pursues other women, while West herself undergoes cosmetic dentistry—perhaps to remain competitive in these newly charged dynamics. 

    Equally dubious is West’s claim that she is rejecting monogamy, framed as “a system of ownership,” partly to please her mixed-race partner. The reliance on progressive clichés to justify what appears to be a self-abasing arrangement lends her argument an air of strained rationalization. It also reflects the same intellectual evasiveness that helped fuel her rise in the 2010s, when social media rewarded this kind of performative certainty.

    If Lewis finds any consolation in her irritation, it is that “basically no one else believes” West’s claims of polyamorous happiness. The book has not landed as intended.

    Lewis is at her sharpest when she expresses a dry, almost surgical pity for West’s disbelief that readers are unconvinced. She writes: “Nonetheless, I do feel great sympathy for West. How was she to know that the great omerta of Millennial Feminism—that we had to take whatever people said about their life stories at face value—had broken?”

    As Lewis pulls back the curtain on West’s method, she arrives at a harsher conclusion: feminism was never the central principle. The organizing force was a highly curated self, elevated by moral certainty and insulated from critique. West’s work encouraged others—teenagers included—to treat intense emotion as authoritative truth, to equate feeling with reality.

    Lewis argues that this elevation of emotion was not liberating but coercive. “Perhaps the greatest hallmark of Millennial Feminism was how harshly it treated women,” she writes. “We were the ones who were supposed to give up our boundaries, rewrite our sexualities, and defenestrate our heroines.” Doubt became a liability. Fallibility, a form of shame. In reality, both are conditions of sanity.

    For that reason, many women—including Lewis—walked away. To remain required submission to groupthink and to a mythology that, as she puts it, “required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy.”

    Meanwhile, as this strain of feminism frayed, countervailing forces emerged on the right—forces often just as reductive, just as intellectually numbing. The result is not correction but polarization: competing orthodoxies shouting past one another, while common sense and moral clarity struggle to regain a foothold.

  • The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

    The Cruel Question Every Writer Must Answer

    When you pitch a book, the publisher asks a question that feels less like business and more like interrogation: Why must this exist? Why this book, now, and not another? What justifies its presence in a world already swollen with print? The question has teeth. It strips away the soft fog of aspiration and leaves you standing with nothing but purpose—or the absence of it.

    A book is not a monument to your desire to “be published.” It is not your name in lights, your moment on the marquee. That impulse—vanity dressed as vocation—is the surest path to creative mediocrity. Purpose is the only defense. Without it, the work collapses under its own self-importance.

    The same cross-examination applies to everything else we produce. A blog post, a video, a channel—why does it exist? To collect attention? To be applauded by a tribe? To monetize a persona? To assemble the vague scaffolding of a “brand”? These are not answers; they are evasions.

    What, then, is my brand? Nothing coherent. I wander. I collect. I react. I move through the culture like a flâneur with a notebook, jotting down whatever strikes the nerves—ideas, trends, obsessions—and trying to distill some fragment of meaning from the debris. This is not a brand. It is a habit of attention. It resists consolidation. It refuses to become a product.

    I did write a book recently—a real one, nearly seventy thousand words. But even that resisted form. It wasn’t a narrative or an argument so much as a catalog of compulsions about watch enthusiasts: short, sharp definitions of obsessive behavior. A lexicon of affliction. Did it need to exist? I can argue that it did. The market delivered a quieter verdict. A few dozen copies moved. Meanwhile, a fifteen-minute video built from the same material drew thousands. The idea survived in video form. The book format did not.

    This is the final insult: even if you can construct an airtight case for a book’s existence, the audience may still decline to care. You can formulate the perfect product—nutrient-rich, elegantly packaged—but if no one consumes it, it sits on the shelf like expensive dog food no dog will eat. And its silence asks the only question that matters, the one you thought you had already answered:

    Why does this exist?

  • Life Inside the Chronophage

    Life Inside the Chronophage

    You can still read, technically. The eyes move. The words register. But something essential has thinned out. Years inside the chronophage—the great time-eating machine—have rewired the circuitry. You no longer take in ideas; you absorb fragments. You skim life the way you skim a feed. You prefer voices at 1.25 speed, ideas pre-chewed, narratives delivered in twelve-minute installments with thumbnails that promise revelation and deliver stimulation.

    You know what it is. The Internet is not a library—it’s a galactic food court, a neon sprawl of drive-through kiosks serving intellectual fast food. Ninety-nine percent of it is forgettable at best, corrosive at worst. You try to manage your intake. You play the piano. You lift weights. You show up for your family. You perform the rituals of a grounded life. But the residue remains. The machine has had its way with you.

    And then comes the quieter poison: self-pity. No one reads anymore, you tell yourself. Everyone is grazing from the same algorithmic trough. You feel stranded, a refugee from a literate past. You invoke the phrase “post-literate society” not as analysis but as lament. And yet, the only reason you can even diagnose the condition is because you remember something else—an earlier version of attention, slower, deeper, less contaminated. You carry that memory like a fading photograph and call it protection.

    You came across a word last week: chronophage—a system that feeds on your time while convincing you it is nourishing you. It fits too well. The system is not broken; it is functioning perfectly. Its purpose is to consume time, and it does so with industrial efficiency. In the attention economy, attention is not honored—it is harvested. Your mind is not engaged; it is extracted from. There is no mercy in this design. The only consolation is a thin, uneasy solidarity: your mind is not uniquely damaged. It is simply part of a mass casualty you are lucid enough to witness.

  • The Loneliness Hypothesis: Is Social Isolation Making America Mean? (college essay prompt)

    The Loneliness Hypothesis: Is Social Isolation Making America Mean? (college essay prompt)

    Read “How America Got Mean” by David Brooks and “The Anti-Social Century” by Derek Thompson. Then watch the comedy special Lonely Flowers by Roy Wood Jr..

    In Lonely Flowers, Roy Wood Jr. argues that increasing loneliness and social disconnection are contributing to a rise in anger, hostility, and violence in American society. Brooks and Thompson also describe a culture that is becoming more fragmented, isolated, and socially brittle.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay that develops a thesis responding to Roy Wood Jr.’s claim. Using the ideas from Brooks and Thompson, argue whether social isolation is a convincing explanation for the rise in cultural hostility and violence. Your essay may support, refute, or complicate Wood’s claim.

    Thesis + Mapping Requirement

    Your introduction must include a thesis that does two things:

    1. Takes a clear position on Wood’s claim about loneliness and violence.
    2. Maps the major reasons that will organize your body paragraphs.

    Example thesis with mapping

    Roy Wood Jr.’s claim that loneliness is fueling violence in America is persuasive because, as David Brooks and Derek Thompson show, the collapse of community institutions, the rise of hyper-individualism, and the retreat into private digital life have produced a society that is increasingly disconnected and emotionally volatile.

    In this thesis, the mapping components are:

    • collapse of community institutions 
    • retreat into private digital life
    • loss of meaningful language
    • loss of intuition to connect with others

    Each of those becomes a body paragraph.

    Essay Requirements

    Your essay should include:

    • a clear thesis with mapping components
    • analysis of key ideas from Brooks and Thompson
    • references to Roy Wood Jr.’s argument in Lonely Flowers
    • a counterargument that challenges your thesis
    • a rebuttal defending your position
    • a concluding paragraph that reflects on what these ideas suggest about modern American culture

    Possible directions for your argument

    You might argue that:

    • loneliness and isolation are making Americans angrier and more volatile
    • loneliness explains some hostility but not actual violence
    • digital life is replacing real community and increasing resentment
    • other forces (economic anxiety, media outrage, politics) are stronger causes of violence