Cinemorphosis

Tag: faith

  • The Demon Named Part X

    The Demon Named Part X

    To show my students the power of negative thinking, I tell them how I lost my first girlfriend. Convinced she was dissatisfied, I kept asking every ten minutes, “You’re leaving me, aren’t you?” or “Are you leaving me?” After three days of this, she finally did. My paranoia became prophecy, and I smugly congratulated myself: “Nothing gets past me!”

    In Lessons for Living, therapist Phil Stutz explains how negative thinking snowballs into catastrophe, giving paranoia the illusion of truth. This is the self-fulfilling prophecy, the negative feedback loop. “Your mind is broken,” he writes. “If you bought an appliance that worked this poorly you would be at the store demanding a refund. But there is no return policy for your brain.”

    Repair, Stutz insists, begins by naming your adversary: a virus lodged in your psyche he calls Part X. This “inner demon,” he writes, “is part of your psyche, and it has an agenda all its own.” Its goal is to stop you from living in reality, to trap you in stillness, fixation, and spiritual death. The universe is always in motion; Part X hates that. It wants stagnation, dullness, nihilism.

    Here lies the trap: nihilism flatters you into thinking you’re special—outside the flux of life, aloof from change. You cling to helplessness, self-pity, resentment. The deeper you sink, the more Part X convinces you that your paralysis proves your uniqueness. You become skilled in negative thinking until, as Stutz puts it, “You no longer respond to the world, you merely react to what X tells you about the world. Spiritually blinded, you are totally alone.”

    How to break free? Gratitude. “You must find a force in your soul that is even stronger than the power of negative thinking. The force is gratefulness.” Gratitude anchors you in reality; it cuts through the fever swamp of negativity. Addicts illustrate the opposite: whether it’s cocaine, alcohol, or endless Internet porn, their obsession isolates them from the universe and community. Addiction is the triumph of Part X. Negative thinking itself is a kind of addiction.

    The antidote is connection—to reality, to others, to the larger universe. Gratitude means humility: admitting you’re not an island. Unlike “positive thinking,” which projects fantasies into the future, gratitude keeps you rooted in the present. Stutz urges immediacy: “Try this. For about thirty seconds, think of things for which you’re grateful. Not just the big things; focus on everyday things we often take for granted.”

    I’m grateful for organic coffee beans, for my morning ritual of brewing coffee beside my radio tuned to classical music. I’m grateful I can digest my buckwheat groats and protein powder before my hour-long kettlebell workout, then shower, shave with fragrant cream, eat a clean lunch, and nap before “Part 2” of my day. These are not small things. They are the fabric of a life.

    The more gratitude you practice, the stronger your defenses against Part X. Gratitude trains your mind into motion, aligned with the universe’s own flux. Stutz even calls it prayer: “Independent of your personal spiritual beliefs and practices, you have led the mind beyond itself, making it a bridge into a higher place.”

    Here Stutz blends psychology with the language of religion—gratitude, humility, prayer, liberation from Jonah-like isolation inside the belly of the Leviathan. His message: escape the solitary prison of negative thought by opening yourself to a reality larger than you.

    I write about Stutz with ambivalence. His wisdom feels real, his tools practical. Yet part of me suspects a New Age sleight of hand: a watered-down religion that borrows sin (Part X), prayer, and humility while dodging the harsher demands of faith—judgment, accountability, sacrifice. Is his system merely the good parts of religion without the bite? Or am I letting my own negative thinking sneak in through the back door, looking for reasons to resist his wisdom?

  • From Dopamine to Divinity: The Case for Transmutational Motivation

    From Dopamine to Divinity: The Case for Transmutational Motivation

    In Lessons for Living, Phil Stutz recounts his refusal to prescribe Prozac to a patient. The patient wanted the pill as he wanted everything else—romance, fame, applause, alcohol: all shortcuts to happiness. Stutz wasn’t buying it. He writes:

    “Believing that things outside you will make you happy is a false hope. The Greeks considered it the ‘doubtful gift from the gods.’ In reality, there can only be two outcomes. Either the hoped-for thing does not happen, or it does and its effect quickly wears off. Either way, you are worse off than before because you have trained yourself to fixate on outer results.”

    When the outer world filters through imagination, it becomes a chimera. We don’t pursue things for what they are, but for what we fantasize they’ll be. I feel this pull myself: I’m nearly sixty-four, inching toward retirement, and browsing real estate in Orlando—dreaming of a second life in a faux-tropical paradise. A $600K “mansion” with a community pool, an hour from the beach, safe from hurricanes (mostly). Yet what I imagine as paradise may in fact be a barcalounger-sized sarcophagus—3,000 square feet of embalmed leisure.

    Stutz warns against such chimeras. They must be replaced by action—behavior that connects us to our true nature: the spiritual self. He writes:

    “We are spiritual beings and can be emotionally healthy only when we are in touch with a higher world. We need higher forces just as we need air. This is not an abstract philosophy, it is a description of our nature.”

    But here’s the rub: staying in touch with higher forces requires constant work, and it’s in our nature to avoid work. Life, then, is a perpetual battle with ourselves. Stutz’s description amounts to the purpose of religion: the angel conquering the demon. Yet in our therapeutic age—where religion is dismissed as a fairy tale—misalignment between spiritual thirst and materialist fixation manifests as depression. Conventional psychiatry treats depression with drugs. Stutz reframes it as a teacher, a reminder that the answer is spiritual life:

    “This awareness is the first step in overcoming depression.”

    His point calls to mind Katie Herzog’s mention of Laura Delano’s memoir Unshrunk, a story of misdiagnosis and drug therapy that deepened rather than cured suffering. It also echoes Philip Rieff’s famous distinction in The Triumph of the Therapeutic:

    “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”

    Stutz insists that pleasing ourselves with material trinkets is a false and destructive path. Real responsibility means behaving in ways that connect us with our spiritual core. Judaism frames this as God meeting us halfway; Pauline Christianity insists we are helpless, depraved, and must be remade entirely. I’d be curious to know where Stutz lands on this divide.

    Either way, his therapy unsettles his patients. A man clinging to Prozac, money, and fame stares at Stutz as though he’s lost his mind. Why? Because society has brainwashed us into believing happiness comes from external outcomes.

    So what’s the alternative? Relentless self-monitoring. Stutz writes:

    “Taking responsibility for how you feel isn’t an intellectual decision. It requires monitoring yourself every moment. This is the most freeing thing a person can do, but also the most tedious. Your connection to the higher world must be won in a series of small moments. Each time you become demoralized, depressed, or inert, you must counteract it right then.”

    This isn’t entirely secular advice. Proverbs tells us to hang wisdom notes around our necks. Today, that might be post-its urging us to choose virtue over distraction. Still, Paul’s lament in Romans—that his darker nature sabotages his noblest intentions—remains apt. If Paul were not a Christian convert, would he be able to successfully use Stutz’s tools to connect with his Higher Powers, or would his dark side undermine the mission over and over? 

    Stutz’s counsel is pragmatic: notice when you sever your connection to the higher world, and fight back. If I’m meant to write or practice piano but instead scroll the Internet’s dopamine-drenched rabbit holes, that’s the moment to act. As Stutz puts it:

    “If your habit is to look outside yourself for stimulation or validation, then each time you fail to get it, you’ll become depressed. But if you assume inner responsibility for your own mood and take action to connect yourself to higher forces at the moment you feel yourself going deep into a hole, you will develop habits that put you on a new level of energy and aliveness.”

    In darkness, we don’t have to surrender. The “inner tools” give us armor. Stutz writes:

    “The only way to achieve this confidence is to take a tool and actually experience how it works. Only then will you be willing to do what is required, which is to use it over and over, sometimes many times within one day.”

    One such tool is “transmutational motivation.” The exercise: picture yourself demoralized after indulging temptation. Then imagine a higher power above you. Visualize yourself taking forward motion—meditation, writing, exercise—and rising into “the jet stream.” Stutz writes:

    “Now you are going to fly straight up into this picture by feeling yourself take action and imagining this feeling causes you to ascend. Tell yourself that nothing else matters except taking the action. As you feel yourself rise, sense the world around you falls away. There is nothing except the action itself. Rise high enough to enter the picture. Once inside, tell yourself that you have a purpose. You will feel a powerful energy. To end the exercise, open your eyes and tell yourself that you are determined to take the pictured action. This time you will feel the picture above you pull you effortlessly up into itself. You will feel expanded and energized.”

    With practice, the ritual takes fifteen seconds. Done daily, it rewires despair into life force.

    But is this just Part X renamed? Steven Pressfield’s Resistance? Pauline sin? Or all of the above? Does Christianity accuse Stutz of diluting prayer into self-help? Do secularists argue his method is religion without the dogma? The questions multiply.

    Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation frames it as neuroscience. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit frames it as cognitive-behavioral reprogramming. Stutz straddles both: science and soul. And looming above it all is the Internet—the Great Temptor of our age. A bottomless pit of pornography, consumerism, and status-chasing, piped directly into our dopamine circuits.

    And here’s the meta-question: what’s the point of rewiring your habits without a greater frame of meaning? Is Stutz peddling spirituality without religion—or is he smuggling in a stripped-down religion we secretly crave? Would Sam Harris nod approvingly at this secularized toolkit? Or would Dale Allison, the careful Christian scholar, recoil and insist that while Stutz offers clever strategies for habit change, he misses the essence of true spirituality—the self-giving sacrifice patterned after Christ in Philippians?

    Unanswered questions aside, Stutz’s message is stark: life is high-stakes. We are fighting, every day, between dark and light forces. We don’t just change habits to “optimize” our brains. We change them to keep our souls alive.

  • The Warm Bath and the Higher Forces

    The Warm Bath and the Higher Forces

    Therapist Phil Stutz, in Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You, identifies the most insidious adversity we face daily: the lure of immediate gratification. This dopamine-charged, compulsive, addictive pull consigns us, he says, to “the lower channel,” the “Warm Bath,” the comfort zone. Its source is the inner saboteur he calls Part X.

    In Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, the same force appears as “The Resistance,” the invisible enemy that diverts us from lives of creativity and meaning. Sometimes it takes the form of “unwholesome activities”—scouring the internet for smut or indulging in materialistic temptations that pull us away from hard work. Cal Newport warns that when we return from such addictive detours, our brains are still coated in “lower channel” residue—mental detritus that dulls our clarity and compromises our work.

    Confronting Part X—or the Resistance—is not a one-time victory. We never ascend to a nirvana where the demon vanishes; it is always nearby, waiting for an opening.

    Rejecting the endless circuit of traditional talk therapy, Stutz arms his patients with Tools—practical methods to counter the bad habits born of Part X. His patients are often “either trapped in a past that no longer existed or living in fantasy about a future that hadn’t arrived yet—and might never.” The Tools, he says, “open the door to the infinite wisdom of the present.”

    His therapy hinges on three elements:

    1. Homework—daily exercises outside of sessions.
    2. Forward Motion—steps away from the past and repetitive stagnation toward a new life.
    3. Connection to Higher Forces—a necessary change, not an optional one, to avoid the self-destruction that leads to death.

    “We are only a tiny part of an infinite universe,” he writes. “On our own we can do nothing. But, in a silent miracle, the universe puts its energies at the service of human evolution.” Higher Forces help us escape personal hell and learned helplessness. When his patients connect with them, they find hope and the power to change—here, in the present.

    Before going further, I have to pause and unpack this. First, I believe Stutz’s framework offers a real way out of the wide path to self-destruction and onto the narrow path of meaning. Second, I can’t help but think of Christianity, Judaism, and A.A.

    In Christianity, especially Pauline theology, we are compulsive creatures, helpless before our sinful drives. Only surrendering to Higher Powers—in this case, the cosmic Christ—can break our demonic impulses. Paul spells this out in the Epistle to the Romans.

    Judaism, at least as Rabbi Hyam Maccoby describes it in The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, rejects this helplessness. We do have self-agency. When we cry to God for rescue from our self-destruction and abasement, He meets us halfway—we move toward Him, and He moves toward us.

    In A.A., the principle is stripped to its core. Comedian Marc Maron has spoken about his recovery from substance abuse: every day, he got on his knees and told a Higher Power he could not free himself from addiction alone.

    Across these three traditions, I see more similarities than differences. I’m confident that anyone who sincerely applies these principles will improve.

    But here’s the sticking point: belief in a Higher Power without religious baggage is not the same as belief in a specific deity. The Jewish God—open to debate, vague about the afterlife—is quite different from the Christian God who, under Pauline influence, recasts Judaism into a universal religion for gentiles, condemns Jews as cut off from the vine, and adopts Augustine’s stark vision of eternal paradise or eternal damnation.

    Three notions of deity—each with profound implications.

    As an addict and an agnostic, I wonder: am I letting these theological questions distract me from the urgent need to connect with Higher Powers so I can face my own demons? This question burns in me. Will these Higher Powers help me navigate my dense jungle of doubts? Will they help me find clarity?

    Stutz notes that many of his patients backslide. Why? Because they stop using the Tools. Why stop? Complacency. Or disbelief in the stakes.

    Which brings me to the core of my own struggle: faith in a doctrinal God versus a personal God without doctrine. The doctrinal God comes with teachings—eternal perdition, the Virgin Birth, a literal resurrection—that can be difficult to swallow. For a fuller exploration of the problems with doctrine, see Elizabeth Anderson’s essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”

    The personal God without doctrine might be more palatable, but perhaps lacks the high-stakes edge that some people need to stay committed to their daily battle with Part X, the Resistance, or whatever name we give this destructive force.

    So what’s the path forward? Should I call life a nihilistic joke and live recklessly? Certainly not. Even with my doubts, I must press ahead, use the Tools, and seek communion with Higher Powers. I can only hope such a life will yield answers—and remind myself that giving in to immediate gratification only strengthens the lower channel, leading, inevitably, toward darkness, confusion, and death.

  • Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym Tank Top

    Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym Tank Top

    During my junior year of high school, I spent a weeknight cruising East Fourteenth—the gritty artery that runs through San Leandro and Hayward—until one in the morning. I was in the passenger seat of Martino’s tomato red Ranchero, the two of us flexing imaginary muscles and real teenage bravado. Martino was my bodybuilding partner, my brother-in-biceps, and together we patrolled the boulevard like suburban centurions on a mission to kill time. And we succeeded.

    When I finally crept back into my house under the cover of darkness, I wasn’t met by a parent’s scolding. No raised voices. No lectures. Just a deafening moral hangover. A private throb of guilt that came from inside—the inner thermostat dialed to “waste detected.”

    That night, the dissonance hit me hard: I had thrown away hours of my finite life, not with rebellion or passion, but with asphalt apathy. 

    Some people never feel that throb. For them, life is a sandbox without rules. Morality is performative, calculated just enough to avoid arrest or awkward silences. These are the functional nihilists—those for whom nothing is sacred, so nothing is squandered. There are no stakes, no salvation, no damnation. No trembling because there’s nothing to tremble about.

    But Kierkegaard wouldn’t have cruised East Fourteenth. He’d have stayed home, in existential dread, kneeling before the void, trying to work out his salvation with fear and trembling. Not a metaphor. A mandate. A gun-to-the-temple kind of urgency.

    And that gun? I’ve felt it every morning. Not the literal kind, but a cold steel thought pressing behind the eyes: Work or be worthless. Create or decay. Hustle or rot. I didn’t coast through college because I loved knowledge. I ground through it because I feared poverty, failure, and the humiliation of becoming a soft tomato with four toothpicks sticking out—Kierkegaard in a Gold’s Gym tank top.

    Fear built my body. But can fear build a soul?

    That’s the hard part, isn’t it? Muscles are visible. Measurable. The soul, by contrast, is a ghost that flinches from mirrors. What makes a good soul? Is it, as philosopher Elizabeth Anderson suggests, acts of reciprocal kindness—a kind of moral evolution, godless but decent? Or do we still need to shake in our boots, to feel that Kierkegaardian quake that says tend to the soul or become monstrous?

    Then there’s modern self-care, the secular sacrament of our time. Meditation, hydration, positive affirmations—pampering routines dressed up as spiritual growth. But is self-care just aromatherapy for the abyss? What if the soul needs something harder than scented candles?

    And what of the artist, the compulsive maker? Is the act of creating a form of salvation—or just another idol, a beautiful golden calf carved in your own image?

    Forgive me. I’m in my sixties now. The questions don’t resolve; they just echo louder. I know indulgence makes me miserable and discipline brings fleeting peace. But that’s not the kind of salvation Kierkegaard meant. That’s just emotional maintenance.

    So I remain agnostic, trembling not from conviction, but from having more questions than answers. 

  • Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère recounts the strange, fevered period of his life when he became a practicing Catholic—a conversion that lasted three years and hovered somewhere between epiphany and breakdown. During that time, he rose each morning to take meticulous notes on the Gospel of John, scribbling like a man possessed. He now looks back at that period in the early 1990s with bewilderment, even embarrassment. What surprises him most isn’t that he converted—it’s that, years later, while immersed in researching the origins of Christianity, he failed at first to connect that research to his own religious episode. When he finally does, the realization is so jarring he feels compelled to dig out the old notebooks. And yet the thought of reading them fills him with dread.

    The last time he looked at them, in 2005, he was deep in depression and under the care of a psychiatrist. At the height of his religious zeal, Carrère had been suicidal. He was prescribed antidepressants—ones whose warning labels included the possibility of “erroneous beliefs,” a caveat that made him laugh darkly at his own conversion. He’s careful not to reduce religious yearning to a single cause, but it’s hard to miss the pattern: a man desperate to avoid self-destruction turning toward a story of rebirth, redemption, and divine rescue. Perhaps, instead of ending his life, he baptized it into another.

    As he flips through the old pages, he’s confronted by a younger self who no longer believed in free will or personal resolve as meaningful paths to goodness. He saw human beings as hopelessly frail and himself as incapable of rescuing his own life. At the time, he clung to God and marriage with equal desperation, hoping both would serve as anchors to prevent him from drifting into the abyss. But the notebooks also reveal a darker truth: his marriage to Helene was deeply unhappy. They loved each other, but they drank too much, blamed each other for their suffering, and fed each other’s neuroses. His writing—once the purpose of his life—had stalled completely. He hadn’t written anything in three years. He was a man sinking.

    Carrère eventually crawled out of that pit, but not through faith. What saved him wasn’t a god, but a set of daily disciplines: yoga, martial arts.

    A spiritual system that promised absolutes had failed him. A life that combined a focus on mind and body resulting in relaxation and clarity of thoughts, helped empty his anxieties and depression. With a strong mind and body, he was able to be productive as a writer. He eventually made lots of money from his craft, and he became the least likely to become religious: He became the rich man for who is about as ripe for salvation as the camel walking through the eye of a needle. 

  • The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère draws a sly, subversive line between Les Revenants—a moody French zombie drama—and the early days of Christianity, when Paul’s disciples waited breathlessly for the world to end and the dead to rise. They were the original doomsday cult: spiritual outcasts and apocalyptic misfits, not unlike the “true believers” Eric Hoffer famously described in The True Believer. What bound them together wasn’t political ideology or economic despair—it was a single cosmic rupture: the Resurrection. One dead man, allegedly not dead anymore, changed the course of Western civilization. It’s not hard to see the resemblance to Les Revenants—a town full of dead people quietly returning, not as ghouls, but as eerily normal people who nonetheless shatter reality.

    Carrère, never content with simple metaphors, brings this comparison to a dinner conversation with his urbane, rationalist friends. One of them, Patrick, accidentally blurts out something true and uncomfortably sharp: millions of otherwise intelligent, educated, and mentally stable people believe in something as outlandish as Christian theology—and no one bats an eye. If someone today claimed Zeus turned into a swan to seduce their cousin, or said they kissed a frog that turned into a prince, we’d laugh or lock them up. But tell a roomful of professionals that a crucified Jewish preacher, born of a virgin, rose from the dead and will someday return to judge the living and the dead—and you’ll be offered wine and a seat at the gala. As Patrick notes, “It’s kind of strange, isn’t it?”

    Carrère is not the first to dwell on this strangeness. Nietzsche, he reminds us, was equally dumbfounded that people who believed in rationality, science, and history could also believe in what is essentially a fairy tale with incense and stained glass. And yet, the tale persists. Presidents still bow to bishops. Cathedrals still echo with sacred music. Maybe it’s not belief that sustains Christianity, but aesthetic inertia—what Carrère calls “pious sentiment.” It’s not that people believe Jesus walked on water. It’s that the stories—and the cultural power they evoke—feel too grand to abandon. You may not believe in Santa Claus, but you still get misty-eyed when the lights go up and the music swells.

    So Carrère offers us a taxonomy of belief: There are the literalists, who treat doctrine as GPS coordinates for their soul. And then there are the sentimentalists—the lukewarm faithful—who love the rituals, the candles, the elevated language, but leave the miracles in quotation marks. For them, religion has become spiritual décor. They still crave spiritual ritual but instead of going to church, they attend yoga classes. The creative power that once summoned cathedrals and crusades now hums gently in the background, just another playlist in the cultural mix. Belief, in this world, doesn’t have to be true—it just has to be beautiful enough to preserve.

  • Eschatology with a Side of Mangoes

    Eschatology with a Side of Mangoes

    Exactly three months from today, I’ll turn 64. Which means I now live in that strange hinterland between actuarial footnote and walking myth. If adolescence introduces a 13-year-old to waves of chemical chaos and operatic feelings, one’s sixties bring their own interior weather system—gusts of existential dread, sudden squalls of nostalgia, and long humid stretches of unnameable longing.

    One thing I’ve learned: I detest cowardice in the face of mortality. I’m not after false bravado or some barrel-chested denial of death. What I want is a middle path—courage without spiritual negligence, composure without cosmic amnesia. My Jewish relatives on my mother’s side don’t see the need for salvation—certainly not in the harrowing Christian sense of eternal stakes. Meanwhile, my Catholic father’s family insists you better not die with your pants down. Meaning: be ready. Eternity, like a TSA agent, does not tolerate surprises.

    These opposing legacies leave me bouncing between Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Pascal’s cold-blooded Wager. What if belief is a cosmic bet and I’m holding a busted flush? The writer Jerry L. Walls offers a possible lifeline with his arguments for post-mortem salvation—but only if you squint hard enough and don’t mind a theological gray zone. Still, I’m annoyed—and I mean truly annoyed—that I remain agnostic on the most important question of all. 

    But let’s leave eschatology for now and talk about something far more pressing: my inexplicable, almost primal desire to move to the tropics.

    More specifically, Florida. Yes, that Florida—the state of my birth, the national punchline. But in my dreams, it’s not today’s meth-and-misrule Florida. It’s a mythic, fragrant Eden—a sensual vision of coconut palms, mango air, tropical rain falling like music, and an ocean that feels more like the Mother’s Womb than a giant salty death trap. It’s not a real place. It’s Jung’s beach resort.

    Unfortunately, my wife refuses to move there. Too many reasons to name. So I’ve drafted a respectable Plan B: South Carolina. Still sticky, still green, still filled with those sweet tropical mangoes that perfume your skin. Close enough to my psychic homeland. Good enough for the myth to survive.

    And while we’re speaking of myths—let’s talk about the one in my mirror.

    I want to look like the teenage Adonis I once was. Not in some delusional “Silver Sneakers” sort of way, but with genuine conviction. I hit the garage gym, slam down protein and fish oil, and pop creatine like I’m prepping for Mr. Olympia 2089. Deep down, I know my aging joints and erratic hormones are staging a quiet rebellion. But I lift anyway, as if my Mythical Self must match the Mythical Seascape. Call it folly, call it denial—but when reality stings, myth becomes the better moisturizer.

    Then there are The Big Questions, hovering like philosophical fruit flies:
    Does life have meaning?
    Is ennui a moral failure or simply being awake in a stupid world?
    Is anhedonia just a side effect of broadband internet?
    Are our souls sculpted by divine intention or evolutionary leftovers?
    Why are the most sincere believers often either morally wholesome or the most toxic people alive?
    And why is sincerity—God help us—no guarantee of goodness?

    I should care about these questions. But honestly, I care more about my morning bowl of buckwheat groats slathered with mango slices and a French-press tsunami of dark roast. I care about losing ten pounds before my doctor lectures me about cholesterol. I care about making it to 64 with most of my joints intact and my mind still more interested in Kierkegaard than clickbait.

    And I suppose that’s the final humility: I’ve lived long enough to know I don’t have the answers. Like any person, I wish I could be comforted by certainty and absolutes. The only certainty and absolute I have is to be humble in the face of my skepticism and doubts. 

  • Wristwatches and “Gooseberries”: A Case Study in Self-Deception

    Wristwatches and “Gooseberries”: A Case Study in Self-Deception

    As I consider Cicero’s call for self-restraint in Tusculan Disputations, my thoughts return to a story that’s haunted me for over twenty years—Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” It is, in essence, the tragic fable of a Maudlin Man, told with surgical clarity and Chekhovian cruelty.

    His name is Nicholai Ivanich, and he’s not merely pathetic—he’s morally revolting. He marries an aging, unattractive woman for her wealth and waits with predator patience for her to die. Once she obliges, he buys himself a country farmhouse ringed with gooseberry bushes, retreats from the world, and crowns himself a minor deity among the local peasants by handing out cheap liquor like some portly, provincial Dionysus.

    Chekhov doesn’t give us Nicholai’s voice. He gives us Ivan, the disgusted brother, who sees this man for what he is: a swollen, self-satisfied corpse in waiting. Ivan calls Nicholai’s farmhouse dream a “definite disorder”—not a goal, but a fixation, a fever dream dressed up as a life plan. For Ivan, his brother’s pastoral retreat is less Arcadia and more open-casket viewing. “He looked old, stout, flabby,” Ivan observes. “His cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like a pig.”

    That image sticks: Nicholai, the human piglet, grinning over his plate of gooseberries, believing he’s achieved bliss when in truth he’s just decaying in comfort.

    And then comes the moment that seals it—Nicholai’s nightly ritual: he’s brought a plate of gooseberries from his estate, and upon seeing them, he literally weeps with joy. “He looked at them in silence, laughed with joy, and could not speak for excitement.” He is consumed by the performance of happiness. It’s not the berries he loves—it’s what they symbolize. In his mind, they are proof that his life is complete.

    But it’s all delusion. Nicholai isn’t fulfilled—he’s embalmed in maudlin sentimentality, drunk on nostalgia for something that never really existed. His joy is cosmetic. He’s not flourishing. He’s fermenting.

    And this, I confess, reminds me of myself—and my fellow watch addicts.

    We, too, have our gooseberries. Ours just happen to tick.

    We post videos of our “grail watches” and glow with reverence as we hold them up to the camera like relics from a sacred shrine. We give breathless soliloquies about our “perfect” collections, our “ultimate” configurations. We praise bezels and dial textures the way Nicholai praises his berries—with trembling hands and watery eyes. And like Nicholai, we’re not convincing anyone but ourselves.

    Because deep down, we know: the drama is maudlin. The joy is hollow. The entire pageantry is just a way to distract from the torment our hobby brings us. We spend hours obsessing, comparing, flipping, tweaking, always convinced that this next watch will bring balance and peace, only to find ourselves more anxious than before.

    We are men who weep over gooseberries. And worse—we make YouTube thumbnails about them.

    If we were honest, we’d admit that one decent, mid-priced watch would offer more peace than any “holy grail” ever could. But that would mean giving up the theater. The drama. The illusion that our fixations have meaning. And that, for the Maudlin Man, is the hardest loss of all.

  • The Maudlin Man: Wristwatches, Weeping, and the War Within

    The Maudlin Man: Wristwatches, Weeping, and the War Within

    One of the bitter ironies of the watch addict is that he seeks a “manly watch” with “bold wrist presence,” yet much of his behavior as it pertains to his hobby is similar to that of a thirteen-year-old girl crying effusively as she leafs through her journals and scrapbooks in which she chronicles her “lost loves” and tries to mend her “broken heart”  with the excessive self-regard one would expect from a thirteen-year-old. However, the watch addict, a man somewhere between his thirties and sixties, perhaps even older, is going down the same rabbit hole of melodrama as the thirteen-year-old. When he does a watch unboxing on his YouTube channel and trembles with tears running down his cheeks with anticipation, or does a YouTube rant about the regrets for all the prized watches that he “let get away” and left him with irreparable heartbreak, or stands before his YouTube watchers like a five-star-general as he announces with maniacal self-regard his “plans” to create his “ultimate collection,” or agonizes over the black and orange strap on his diver and goes back and forth over and over because he “loves both but can’t decide,” he probably doesn’t know that he is committing an act of colossal folly: He is embodying the Maudlin Man.

    To understand the Maudlin Man and the folly he partakes in, we are well advised to consult Jeffrey Rosen’s book The Pursuit of Happiness. Rosen discovers that major American thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin draw their wisdom from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, which state that the soul must be “tranquilized by restraint and consistency.” In such a state, the soul “neither pines away in distress, nor is broken down by fear, nor consumed with a thirst of longing in pursuit of some ambition, nor maudlin in the exuberance of meaningless eagerness–he is the wise man of whom we are in quest, he is the happy man.”

    There is much to unpack here. Perhaps the best way to do so is to divide man into two types: Restrained Man and Maudlin Man. Restrained Man is the type we should aspire to be. He is tranquilized by his own restraint, consistency, and self-agency and does not pine after things that cause him distress, anxiety, and FOMO. 

    Just reading the above words makes the addict inside me rebel. As a watch addict, I enjoy pining after watches and being caught in the melodrama of distress, FOMO, and desire for watches as shiny new objects my greedy little fingers can get a hold of. Wrap your head around that: I’m addicted to the very maudlin drama of my watch hobby. To be the Maudlin Man, therefore, is to be addicted to addiction. 

    But what Cicero is arguing is this: This melodramatic state that causes us to froth at the mouth for the things we desire is a form of “meaningless eagerness.” 

    Again, my inner addict rebels. It rages and counterargues, “Cicero, watches are my hobby. The very point of this hobby is that it is a benign and meaningless pastime that gives me enjoyment and relaxation.” 

    Of course, I am in denial. As I write this, I have a very beautiful diver watch with a wave-blue dial to be delivered from Singapore today from a DHL carrier. I’ve tracked the package six times since five this morning, and I couldn’t sleep last night because I agonized over whether I should keep it on the stock bracelet, put a sedate black Divecore on it, or put a loud orange Divecore on it. The stress is almost causing me to have a nervous breakdown. 

    I’m acting just like Maudlin Man. I’m experiencing effulgent emotions over something that is basically meaningless. As a result, I’m investing way too much energy and emotion toward my “watch situation,” and as a result, I am showing a lack of contact with reality. 

    Cicero’s point is that when we lack self-possession because we are in the maudlin state, we cannot be happy. Happiness is the byproduct of having self-agency and self-control. 

    I wince at Cicero’s words. Do I even want self-control? Do I not enjoy the drama of a watch strap “dilemma”? Do I not enjoy being an exuberant man-child? 

    Cicero would argue otherwise. He would argue that the “pleasures” I experience from my maudlin indulgences are at the root of my unhappiness. To understand Cicero’s argument better, let us look at the entire quotation:

    Therefore the man, whoever he is, whose soul is tranquilized by restraint and consistency and who is at peace with himself, so that he neither pines away in distress, nor is broken down by fear, nor consumed with a thirst of longing in pursuit of some ambition, nor maudlin in the exuberance of meaningless eagerness–he is the wise man of whom we are in quest, he is the happy man. 

    My inner pessimist, which I call Glum, scoffs at Cicero’s words of wisdom and gives me a litany of my failures, which prove me unworthy of Cicero’s portrait of a happy man. Glum says to me the following:

    “Regarding restraint, your appetites for tacos, spaghetti, garlic bread, homemade sourdough loaves stuffed with kalamata olives, semi-sweet chocolate chunk peanut butter cookies, chocolate cake, and pineapple cheesecake are so monstrous, you don’t have a chance in hell of exercising restraint when it comes to your appetites. Your very self is defined by your excesses, so good luck talking about restraint and moderation. You’re doomed.”

    “Regarding ambition, it is only repeated failure of many decades, not humility, that abates your grandiose designs and fantasies of being famous and ubiquitous on television as a talking head whose opinions everyone greedily consumes as if your every word is a delicious morsel to be savored. So don’t go around bragging about your modesty and humble aspirations. Old age and an eye for the inevitability of your failure are your only salves, so you have no bragging rights.”

    “Regarding maudlin exuberance and meaningless eagerness, you are the worst violator of these infractions, gushing with lame euphoria as you curate your watch collection to your YouTube viewers. Your entire enterprise of incorporating the wisdom of the Stoics and other classical thinkers is the biggest joke I’ve ever heard of and may qualify you for a life in comedy.”

    My rebuttal to Glum is this. “With your keen insight into my wretched being, you have helped me see the very depth of my pathology. So thank you, Glum, you have helped me with an unflinching diagnosis of my spiritual dissolution, and thanks to you, this accurate diagnosis marks the beginning of my long road to recovery.”

    I am grateful that I am both honest and smart enough to offer rebuttals to Glum, but having an intellectual grasp of what I should do and actually doing it are two vastly different things. For now, I have a clear grasp of Cicero’s notion of Maudlin Man. The seeds have been planted. I now hope that with those seeds, a counter self can grow that will put the Maudlin Man inside of me out of business. 

  • Lost at the Light: A Dream of Unfinished Witness

    Lost at the Light: A Dream of Unfinished Witness

    Last night I dreamed I was flung through time to witness the Crucifixion—not once, but over and over again, as if history were caught in an eternal loop. It wasn’t a single event but a kaleidoscope of perspectives: I viewed it from the ground, from a hillside, even from above. The landscape shifted with each new angle—sometimes the sky was slate gray, sometimes scorched bronze, sometimes bruised with orange light like an eternal dusk.

    I was obsessed with seeing it clearly, as though clarity itself were salvation. But the method of execution began to morph. The Cross, once tall and stark on a mountaintop, gave way to a giant catapult. I watched as faceless figures were hurled skyward like rag dolls flung by fate. I couldn’t tell if they were victims, martyrs, or simply vanishing into the void.

    There was mention—or maybe just a sensation—of a third method of sacrifice, one hidden, unnamed, and deeply unsettling. Its very vagueness gnawed at me, filling me with a dread I couldn’t explain.

    Realizing that perfect understanding was impossible—that I would never grasp the full shape of this cosmic agony—I finally surrendered. The moment I did, I was somewhere else.

    Now I was behind the wheel of a car, trying to follow a caravan of friends along an unfamiliar road. They all made it through a green light; I didn’t. I was left behind, lost beneath a concrete overpass, disoriented and doubting whether these friends were friends at all.

    Eventually, I caught up. We arrived at our destination: a picnic by the sea. No one spoke of what had happened. We passed around barbecued trout and fresh fruit, relieved more than joyful. We were just glad to be there, to eat together in silence. The chaos of the journey was forgiven in the quiet rhythm of chewing and the sound of waves.