Cinemorphosis

Tag: faith

  • Your Appetite Has a Billion-Dollar Opponent

    Your Appetite Has a Billion-Dollar Opponent

    You have argued that carrying thirty extra pounds is more than a physical condition. It is the outward symptom of a deeper spiritual disorder you have called Comfort Entrenchment—the gradual surrender of discipline as convenience, abundance, and self-indulgence become so routine that sacrifice begins to feel unnatural. There is truth in that diagnosis, but perhaps you have been a bit too eager to appoint yourself both defendant and judge. Before you sentence yourself to moral failure, remember something you taught your own critical thinking students last semester. Together you examined essays by people who devoted years to losing weight and keeping it off. They were not gluttonous caricatures or spiritually bankrupt weaklings. They were conscientious, intelligent, hardworking people who counted calories, exercised faithfully, and still watched the scale drift stubbornly upward. Their stories complicate the comforting fantasy that every overweight person simply lacks willpower.

    The missing piece is that your struggle does not occur in a vacuum. You are fighting inside an economic system that earns staggering profits by encouraging people to overconsume. The modern food industry has elevated temptation into an applied science. Teams of chemists, food scientists, marketers, and behavioral psychologists labor over formulas that maximize sweetness, saltiness, richness, aroma, and mouthfeel with the precision of engineers tuning a Formula One engine. The goal is not merely to satisfy hunger but to persuade you that one bite deserves another, and another after that. The supermarket is not simply a place where food is sold; it is a battlefield where billions of dollars have been invested in making your restraint less likely to succeed.

    That reality does not absolve you of responsibility, but it does redefine the contest. Your weight is shaped by both an internal struggle and an external one. Internally, you wrestle with Comfort Entrenchment—the habits, rationalizations, and appetites you have cultivated over decades. Externally, you confront an industry that has become astonishingly adept at exploiting precisely those vulnerabilities. Success therefore requires an immense cognitive burden. Every shopping trip, restaurant menu, convenience store, office celebration, and late-night craving demands another conscious decision. It is little wonder that so many intelligent and disciplined people eventually surrender. They are not merely battling themselves; they are competing against an industry that never sleeps and whose annual budget dwarfs their resolve.

    None of this should become an alibi. The last thing you need is a sophisticated excuse for another slice of carrot cake. But neither should you indulge the opposite illusion—that the contest is simple and every failure proves moral bankruptcy. Wisdom lies somewhere between self-exoneration and self-condemnation. Recognize Comfort Entrenchment for the enemy it is, but recognize your other adversary as well: a food culture meticulously designed to keep you consuming. Only by understanding both fronts of the war can you devise effective countermeasures. The first step toward victory is not pretending the battlefield is fair. It is seeing the battlefield clearly.

  • Comfort Entrenchment

    Comfort Entrenchment

    You did not wake up one morning thirty pounds overweight the way you might wake up with the flu. Excess weight is not an event; it is the visible symptom of a long psychological and spiritual decline. For years you cultivated self-indulgence as though it were a birthright, choosing comfort over discipline so consistently that the choices accumulated into a second nature. The result is damage that extends beyond the body. Your appetites have colonized your habits, weakened your resolve, and dulled your capacity to endure hardship. You must therefore confront an uncomfortable truth: you suffer from Comfort Entrenchment—the gradual process by which repeated indulgence in convenience, pleasure, and ease becomes so normalized that discomfort feels intolerable and self-discipline appears unnatural. Over time, luxuries masquerade as necessities, and every sacrifice feels like an injustice.

    If there is consolation, it is that Comfort Entrenchment is hardly your private affliction. It has become one of the defining maladies of modern civilization. Even people of admirable character struggle against it. Consider the journalist Elizabeth Bruenig, a self-described Christian, who remarked during Mike Pesca’s final episode of Not Even Mad that she fears for her soul because each day she falls painfully short of Christ’s command to feed the poor and relinquish worldly comfort. She described herself as “an indoor housecat,” a metaphor of remarkable precision. The indoor housecat is well fed, safe, comfortable, and utterly unequipped for the rigors of the wild. It has traded resilience for security. Comfort Entrenchment performs the same quiet exchange upon us.

    It is no accident, then, that our culture has rediscovered Stoicism with such enthusiasm. Bookstores overflow with translations of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. YouTube channels, podcasts, and newsletters preach voluntary discomfort, discipline, and resilience to audiences hungry for something they can scarcely name. Beneath the fascination with Stoicism lies a widespread intuition that modern life has made us too comfortable for our own good. We sense that our conveniences have become our captors, that the comforts designed to serve us have quietly assumed command. The popularity of Stoicism is therefore not merely an intellectual trend. It is a collective attempt to recover the toughness that Comfort Entrenchment has steadily eroded.

    The good news is that you have correctly diagnosed the disease. Most people never do. The bad news is that diagnosis alone changes nothing. There is no book, podcast, supplement, or inspirational slogan capable of delivering you from this condition. The cure is older and harsher than modern self-help literature cares to admit. You will have to surrender comforts you have mistaken for necessities. You will have to embrace hunger, fatigue, inconvenience, and delayed gratification rather than flee from them. You will have to pass through the fire instead of walking around it. There is no shortcut because the very habits that imprisoned you must be dismantled one sacrifice at a time. Only then will Comfort Entrenchment begin to loosen its grip, allowing you to recover not merely a healthier body but a stronger mind and a more integrated soul.

  • My Friend Leo and the Mystery of the Good Life

    My Friend Leo and the Mystery of the Good Life

    One of my deepest regrets is that I spent too much of my youth believing my life belonged entirely to me. My guiding assumption was simple: no one would tell me how to live. My purpose was to maximize my own pleasure, satisfy my own desires, and remain largely indifferent to everyone else’s concerns. It was the moral logic of consumer culture: pursue your happiness, avoid breaking the law, pay your bills, and you’ve fulfilled your obligations.

    I eventually discovered that this philosophy is far less harmless than it appears.

    A life organized around self-indulgence inevitably spills over onto other people. It makes us impatient with inconvenience, dismissive of others’ needs, and blind to the quiet opportunities for generosity that present themselves every day. We become the center of our own private universe, with everyone else relegated to supporting characters. The damage is often subtle rather than spectacular, but it is damage nonetheless. A narcissistic life does not merely impoverish the self; it leaves everyone around it slightly diminished as well.

    Selfishness is easy because it is our default setting. Left to our own devices, we naturally drift toward comfort, appetite, vanity, and self-justification. That is one reason I find myself drawn to the moral traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Both insist upon a profoundly counterintuitive claim: your life is not your possession. It is a gift entrusted to you for the benefit of others. Meaning is discovered not by gratifying every impulse but by cultivating goodness, practicing service, and accepting the humbling truth that fulfillment arrives only after the ego relinquishes its throne. Paradoxically, by surrendering yourself, you find yourself. By enthroning yourself, you begin the slow process I have elsewhere called Gollumification—the gradual shrinking of the soul under the weight of its own appetites.

    Yet I cannot persuade myself that religion is the only path to such a life.

    Over the years I have known people whose moral seriousness seems almost entirely independent of religious belief. One of my students, originally from Hungary, was raised by atheist parents. Nevertheless, they instilled in their daughter a remarkable sense of integrity, discipline, humility, and social responsibility. She carries herself with a maturity that cannot be reduced either to religious doctrine or to secular ideology. Her character suggests that moral formation can emerge from devoted parents who treat virtue not as theology but as a way of life.

    Then there is my friend Leo, whom I have known for twenty-five years. To my knowledge, he is not religious, yet he embodies many of the virtues that religious traditions hold up as ideals. He loves his wife deeply. He delights in his three children. He never misses one of their games or school events, not out of obligation but because he genuinely wants to be there. He works tirelessly, not to accumulate status or luxury, but to give his family security and opportunity. He does not complain. He does not seem enslaved by addiction or restless consumption. He possesses an enthusiasm for ordinary life that feels almost inexhaustible.

    What impresses me most is that Leo never performs his goodness. He does not advertise his virtues, lecture others about morality, or congratulate himself for living well. His life is his argument. Watching him, I often have the impression that decency is simply woven into the fabric of his character. He seems to have found the narrow road almost instinctively, without theology serving as his guide. That reality leaves me genuinely puzzled. If the narrow road can be discovered apart from religion, then the relationship between faith and virtue is more mysterious than I once believed. Leo remains one of the strongest arguments against any simplistic claim that morality depends entirely upon religious belief.

    I am not built the way Leo appears to be. My own temperament is far more susceptible to vanity, distraction, and what I call Gollumification. Left unexamined, I drift toward self-absorption with alarming ease. That is why spiritual questions continue to exert such power over me. They are not abstract philosophical puzzles but practical necessities. I need habits, disciplines, and ideas that continually pull me away from myself. Perhaps if my instincts naturally inclined toward generosity, as Leo’s seem to, religion would occupy far less space in my imagination. But because I know the creature I am capable of becoming, I cannot stop asking whether there exists a truer way to live than the one my default setting so eagerly proposes.

  • Against the Inner Gollum

    Against the Inner Gollum

    One of the defining songs of my adolescence was Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Devotion.” Like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” it is suffused with the exuberance and spiritual energy of Black Gospel. Listening to these songs hints at the transcendence many people seek in church: the paradox of finding yourself by losing yourself in a purpose greater than your own appetites. This is devotion in its richest sense—not self-expression but self-transcendence.

    That vision stands in stark contrast to the modern creed of radical individualism, which teaches that personal desire is its own moral authority. Under this doctrine, adulthood becomes an endless extension of adolescence, each new appetite demanding satisfaction, each boundary inviting transgression. We congratulate ourselves for “being authentic” while quietly cultivating our inner Gollum—small, ravenous, and consumed by the fantasy that the next indulgence will finally bring contentment. Instead, the result is often loneliness, nihilism, and despair.

    How we resist that inner Gollum, and what it means to devote ourselves to something larger than ourselves, lies at the heart of the human condition. Religion has traditionally answered those questions by directing us toward a pure heart, integrity, reverence, gratitude, and love—love of our Creator, for those who believe, and love of our fellow human beings. Whether one accepts its theological claims or not, religion insists that character is formed not by indulging every desire but by disciplining desire in service of a higher good. The promise that feeding our inner Gollum will make us happy has always been one of civilization’s most seductive—and most enduring—lies.

    The more difficult question concerns the source of that higher good. Does authentic devotion require submission to an orthodox religious tradition, or can spirituality detached from doctrine cultivate the same moral depth? Are we mistaking recreational spirituality for genuine devotion? Is morality grounded in divine command, or does it emerge through human evolution and social cooperation—what atheist philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls “reciprocal claim making,” the process by which societies negotiate mutual obligations and gradually construct moral authority?

    No figure looms larger over that debate than Jesus. Whatever one’s theological commitments, his rhetorical originality and moral imagination have made him one of history’s most enduring voices on the nature of goodness. Nearly two thousand years later, we remain captivated by his life, teachings, and identity. That continuing fascination lies at the center of Adam Gopnik’s essay “We’re Still Not Done With Jesus,” which examines one of the great questions of biblical scholarship: Are the Gospels fundamentally historical memories of an extraordinary teacher, or are they literary creations shaped by the conventions and mythic imagination of the Greco-Roman world?

    Adam Gopnik observes that the Gospels are not books written by someone so much as stories told to someone. In discussing Elaine Pagels’ Miracles and Wonder, he places her within the tradition of historical Jesus scholarship, which treats the Gospels not as straightforward biographies but as “palimpsests of lore, legend, and propaganda.” I encountered a similar sensibility in Emmanuel Carrère’s genre-defying The Kingdom, where history, memory, faith, and literary imagination continually overlap. From this perspective, narratives such as the Virgin Birth are understood less as eyewitness reports than as adaptations of familiar Greek and Hellenistic literary motifs.

    Gopnik extends this argument to the Passion and Resurrection. He notes that visions of the risen Jesus resemble what psychologists today might describe as bereavement experiences. The disciples believed they had encountered their crucified teacher after his death, while Paul, who never met Jesus during his lifetime, grounded his apostleship in explicitly visionary encounters. For Gopnik, these experiences need not be dismissed as fraudulent; rather, they belong to recognizable patterns of religious experience that recur throughout history.

    Nor, Gopnik argues, were the Gospel writers simple village storytellers faithfully recording local memories. Drawing on Robyn Faith Walsh’s The Origins of Early Christian Literature, he portrays them as educated authors who belonged to “a small, erudite upper crust.” Their writings reveal literary sophistication, weaving together a rich latticework of Greek rhetorical forms, biblical allusions, and inherited traditions. As Gopnik memorably puts it, “Their writings bear all the marks of that sharp-elbowed circle and none of the gentle gatherings of group memory.”

    Within this literary world, Jesus emerges alongside familiar Hellenistic figures—magi, sages, miracle workers, and wise tricksters. Walsh observes that many of these protagonists defeat their opponents through clever repartee, aphorisms, and parables. Gopnik is not arguing that Jesus is simply another fictional hero. Rather, he suggests that the evangelists employed literary conventions already familiar to their audiences in order to elevate Jesus into a figure of universal significance.

    To illustrate the point, Gopnik offers an unexpected comparison. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, he argues, mythologizes Malcolm in much the same way that the Gospel of Mark mythologizes Jesus. Both works transform historical figures into larger-than-life moral symbols by drawing upon established literary traditions. Mythmaking, in this sense, is not necessarily deception; it is one of humanity’s oldest methods of expressing truth.

    Neither Gopnik nor Pagels reduces Christianity to a cynical fabrication dressed in Greek clothing. On the contrary, both regard it as one of civilization’s greatest imaginative syntheses. Christianity fused Jewish expectation, Greek literary culture, Roman history, and profound moral insight into a vision that continues to resist simple explanation.

    At the heart of that synthesis lies a startling reversal of ordinary assumptions about power. Paul declares, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” The Christian ideal does not glorify domination but humility, sacrifice, service, and love. To embrace weakness voluntarily, to endure insults and suffering while loving one’s enemies, represented, as Gopnik observes, “a way of thinking about power and suffering with little precedent in the ancient world.”

    That inversion has always appeared absurd. Indeed, its apparent absurdity became one of Christianity’s greatest philosophical attractions. Søren Kierkegaard famously argued that faith requires a leap beyond the limits of reason. Gopnik, however, remains skeptical of this move, joking that Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith comes perilously close to George Costanza’s comic principle that something cannot really be true unless it seems impossible to believe.

    Where Gopnik expresses his deepest reservations is over the doctrine of substitutionary atonement—the claim that God’s justice required the sacrificial death of Christ before humanity could be reconciled to Him. He recalls literary critic William Empson’s horror at “a cosmos ruled by an irrational deity whose rage toward humanity can be placated only by his son’s torture and death.” In contemporary Christianity, Gopnik observes, many believers quietly emphasize Jesus’ teachings on compassion, forgiveness, and service while giving comparatively little attention to doctrines such as eternal damnation or substitutionary atonement.

    More literal forms of Christianity, Gopnik suggests, often arise from a longing for certainty in a world defined by ambiguity and historical change. Humanism offers no final authority; it evolves, stumbles, corrects itself, and remains vulnerable to human weakness. Religion promises something different: an authoritative moral order anchored beyond history. Yet, Gopnik argues, every human authority eventually disappoints, producing an endless cycle of certainty, doubt, reform, and renewed certainty.

    Even so, he concludes that Christianity cannot simply be dismissed. The human hunger for love, moral purpose, and certainty has ensured its enduring power. Those who reject its theological claims would do well to understand why millions continue to find within it a compelling account of what it means to be human.

    Perhaps those who cannot embrace Christianity will seek devotion elsewhere—in another religious tradition, in Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning, or in Steven Pressfield’s conviction that disciplined artistic creation is itself an act of service to humanity.

    Whatever path one chooses, one conclusion seems difficult to escape.

    Living for your inner Gollum is not enough.

    Human beings require devotion to something greater than themselves.

  • The Wrinkled Prune

    The Wrinkled Prune

    In 1989, I became infatuated with a Pennsylvania band called The Ocean Blue, especially their haunting song “Drifting, Falling.” Naturally, I needed the CD. For reasons that now escape me, I decided to buy it at one of the strangest retail establishments I have ever entered: a Northern California gift shop called The Wrinkled Prune.

    How do I describe The Wrinkled Prune?

    It would be easier to describe what it didn’t sell.

    The store trafficked in novelty candies, decorative soaps, greeting cards, party supplies, imported chocolates, whimsical knickknacks, coffee mugs with forgettable slogans, scented candles, stuffed animals, and dozens of miscellaneous objects whose sole purpose seemed to be occupying shelf space until someone bought them out of mild confusion.

    But merchandise wasn’t the real mystery.

    The real mystery was this:

    Why did The Wrinkled Prune exist?

    And why on earth would anyone give a store that name?

    The answer begins with the owner.

    I attended high school with him. I’ll call him T. He drifted around the popular crowd, but never as one of its genuine members. He functioned more like its court jester—the lovable mascot whose chief social responsibility was to laugh at himself before everyone else could. Slightly overweight and perpetually goofy, T possessed a remarkable gift for turning his own awkwardness into entertainment. Whenever something struck him as funny—which was often—he erupted into volcanic laughter. His entire body convulsed. His fists clenched. He bounced on the balls of his feet while his thick black hair flopped wildly in every direction like a malfunctioning wind-up toy.

    Most people recoil from ridicule.

    T converted it into currency.

    After graduation, however, he seemed directionless. His father, a successful businessman, apparently decided that if purpose wouldn’t find his son, perhaps purpose could be purchased. So he bought T a gift shop.

    One afternoon I wandered inside. T stood behind the counter surrounded by several employees—all attractive young women in their late teens. I couldn’t help imagining the father’s reasoning. Maybe ownership would transform his son into a businessman. Maybe responsibility would attract confidence. Maybe confidence would attract a girlfriend. Parents have financed stranger dreams.

    In retrospect, The Wrinkled Prune felt like high school extended by other means.

    The name itself was a form of self-parody. A prune occupies an unfortunate place in the cultural imagination. It conjures wrinkles, old age, constipation, nursing homes, and the slow betrayal of the human body. Throughout adolescence T had made himself the punchline. Why stop now? Why not build an entire business around the joke?

    Unfortunately, self-awareness is not a business model.

    The Wrinkled Prune hemorrhaged money. Within a year it vanished, leaving behind little more than an unforgettable name and my copy of The Ocean Blue. I don’t know what became of T. He always struck me as fundamentally decent—a man less interested in success than in being liked. I hope life eventually showed him more kindness than high school had.

    But I have never forgotten that store.

    In fact, I think nearly all of us carry around some version of The Wrinkled Prune.

    What I’m describing is the vanity project: an enterprise undertaken less because the world needs it than because its creator needs the world to notice it. It is a monument to the self disguised as a public service. In the pre-digital age, vanity projects usually belonged to the wealthy. A millionaire financed an independent film no one watched, published an autobiography no one requested, endowed a museum wing bearing his name, or commissioned an oversized oil portrait in which he appeared to possess the moral gravity of Abraham Lincoln. Vanity required substantial capital.

    Today, vanity has been democratized. For the price of a webcam, microphone, and broadband connection, anyone can launch a podcast, livestream for six hours to an audience of twelve, or begin every video with the solemn declaration, “People have been asking me…” when no such people exist. The internet has transformed vanity from a luxury reserved for aristocrats into a subscription service available to anyone with Wi-Fi. Fortunately, not every podcast, YouTube channel, or livestream is a vanity project. Some genuinely educate, entertain, or enrich public life. The defining question is not whether anyone is watching, but whether the creator would continue producing the work if no one were.

    The desire beneath all this is perfectly human. We want to matter. We want to belong. We want to participate in the conversation instead of watching it through the window. But the digital age has turned belonging into branding. We are encouraged to cultivate audiences instead of friendships, niches instead of curiosities, and identities narrow enough for algorithms to categorize. We are constantly reminded to “find our lane,” as though a human being should resemble a freeway exit.

    I am hardly exempt.

    For fifteen years I maintained a YouTube channel devoted primarily to watches. On its best days, it attracted thousands of viewers. Yet over time I noticed an uncomfortable truth: every new video fueled the very obsession I claimed to be examining. At sixty-four, I have reached the stage of life where accumulation should be giving way to simplification. Instead, the algorithm quietly whispered, “Buy another watch. Make another video.”

    Occasionally I wandered away from watches and made videos about other subjects that interested me.

    The algorithm responded with majestic indifference.

    Business was slow.

    No one wandered into The Wrinkled Prune.

    That lesson was difficult but valuable. Unless you possess genuine expertise or offer something distinctive, a channel devoted to miscellaneous fascinations resembles a gift shop selling decorative soaps, imported candy, birthday balloons, and novelty coffee mugs under one bewildering roof. You are not building an audience. You are stocking shelves. Your vanity insists that the world needs one more opinion. The world politely walks past your front window.

    Eventually, The Wrinkled Prune closes.

    Does this mean we should silence ourselves? Stop writing? Abandon every attempt to contribute?

    Not at all.

    Life unfolds in seasons. There are years when your voice resonates widely and years when almost no one hears it. Neither condition should define your worth. During quieter seasons, remain curious. Read deeply. Listen carefully. Accumulate wisdom rather than followers. If, in time, you discover something genuinely worth saying that improves another person’s life, speak. If not, there is dignity in remaining silent.

    Just don’t open The Wrinkled Prune.

  • The Promised Planet

    The Promised Planet

    One afternoon, drifting into a post-workout nap after a particularly glorious kettlebell session, I heard a famous writer tell a popular podcaster that nobody reads books anymore.

    Nobody.

    Not even him.

    He explained that social media had colonized his attention span. Years of feeding his narcissism to the digital machine had apparently consumed whatever brain cells were once responsible for sustained reading. There was something startling about hearing this confession from a public intellectual. It was like hearing a Michelin-starred chef announce that he now survives entirely on vending-machine burritos.

    The timing could not have been worse.

    I had recently completed writing a collection of fifteen stories. I had spent years dragging them through countless revisions, rescuing them from weaker incarnations, sanding rough edges, amputating dead passages, and rebuilding them sentence by sentence until they finally resembled what they were supposed to become. I was absurdly proud of them. I glowed with satisfaction. My pecs still felt inflated from kettlebell presses, and my literary vanity was enjoying a similar state of expansion.

    Then reality barged into the room.

    Nobody reads anymore.

    A bestselling author now sells perhaps ten thousand copies and celebrates as though he has conquered Gaul. An obscure author such as myself sells precisely zero. The arithmetic was not encouraging. My glow dimmed. My pumped-up ego suffered a rapid deflation.

    That evening I climbed into bed feeling mildly bereaved. I instructed my smart speaker to play classical music. It responded by offering business reports. I asked again. It played ZZ Top. I asked a third time. More ZZ Top. By the tenth attempt, after what felt like a hostage negotiation, it finally surrendered and delivered Johann Sebastian Bach.

    As the music drifted through the room, I picked up several books.

    I didn’t care about any of them.

    I tried another.

    Nothing.

    I opened my Amazon wishlist and scrolled through hundreds of titles accumulated over years of optimism. History. Biography. Philosophy. Literature. Politics. Books I had once believed would transform my life.

    I wanted none of them.

    It wasn’t exactly boredom. It wasn’t exactly depression. It was something murkier—a kind of spiritual flatness. An intellectual anemia.

    Part of my mood may have stemmed from guilt. My wife and twin daughters were exploring London and Paris. I had stayed behind. The long flights felt intolerable, and if I was honest, my curiosity about Europe had faded. I had wandered its streets decades earlier. Returning now felt like rereading a novel whose plot I already knew. The enchantment was gone.

    I comforted myself with thoughts of an upcoming family trip to Miami. A five-hour flight I could survive. Noise-canceling headphones would seal me off from humanity, and I could retreat into the biography of some legendary athlete. Sports biographies had become my literary comfort food. They soothed me while jet engines roared and the earth drifted by thirty thousand feet below.

    Seeking rescue from my malaise, I purchased a discounted book for a dollar.

    A dollar.

    Even at that price I felt overcharged.

    The subject was humanity’s search for belonging and meaning. On paper this sounded promising. In practice it felt like an essay stretched onto a medieval torture rack until it reached book length. Every chapter seemed padded with repetition and filler. The author’s central insight could have fit comfortably on a cocktail napkin.

    I abandoned it after a few pages.

    Disgusted with both the book and myself, I opened YouTube.

    Then salvation arrived.

    The algorithm presented a kettlebell instructor demonstrating an exercise called thrusters.

    The movement was brutal: a clean, followed by a squat, followed by an overhead press. It looked demanding, athletic, and slightly insane.

    My ennui evaporated instantly.

    I wrote the word “thrusters” into my Google Docs notebook.

    One word.

    That was all it took.

    Suddenly I was excited about tomorrow. I could picture myself waking before dawn, walking into the garage, and attempting this new movement. The anticipation generated more enthusiasm than hundreds of books, dozens of streaming shows, and an entire internet overflowing with content.

    This realization disturbed me.

    I was sixty-four years old. By all cultural expectations, I should have been entering the season of deep reading and contemplation. I should have been savoring great books the way aristocrats savor caviar. Instead, I was ricocheting around the house like a Labrador retriever waiting for someone to throw a tennis ball.

    The truth was difficult to deny. At this stage of my life, only a handful of things reliably pierced the fog. Discovering a beautiful chord progression on the piano. Finding a new kettlebell movement. Learning some technique that made me eager to wake up the next morning.

    Had YouTube not delivered that single word to me—thrusts—I might have spent the entire day wandering through a desert of boredom.

    That is what unsettled me most.

    Not that I couldn’t find a book I wanted to read.

    Not that Europe no longer called to me.

    Not even that writers themselves were abandoning books.

    What unsettled me was how little it took to reignite my enthusiasm. One word on a screen. One exercise. One tiny challenge awaiting me at dawn.

    At sixty-four, after all my reading, writing, teaching, traveling, and philosophizing, the thing that saved the day was not Bach, literature, or civilization.

    It was a kettlebell.

    A simple piece of iron kept me anchored to the tangible world of effort, fatigue, and discipline. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my mental health depended on thousands of kettlebell swings, goblet squats, cleans, and presses performed each week in the garage. That modest space had become my monastery, my therapist’s office, and my refuge. There, amid the clank of iron and the rhythm of controlled exertion, I could process the absurdities, anxieties, and distractions of modern life. The garage was the one place where the noise of the world receded and reality reasserted itself.

    The next day while enjoying the small thrill of introducing new kettlebell movements into my workout—single- and double-handed thrusters, reverse-lunge thrusters, and offset cleans—I had a podcast murmuring in the background, as I usually do. Few pleasures rival the discovery of a new exercise. It is like finding a hidden room in a house you thought you knew by heart.

    The podcast featured Bill Maher interviewing Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria. Levinson spoke candidly about addiction, explaining that his own began at age eleven with pharmaceuticals. Addiction, he said, would be a central theme in Euphoria’s final season because it had become one of the defining forces of modern life.

    Levinson then turned to OnlyFans. He described an industry generating revenues comparable to major entertainment sectors while gradually degrading many of the people who participate in it. The descent, he suggested, is often incremental. A few suggestive photos become a stream of content. The stream becomes a livelihood. The livelihood becomes an identity. Before long, the dream of escaping the drudgery of a conventional job transforms into something more unsettling. You become both entrepreneur and product. You begin exploiting yourself for an audience whose appetite is never fully satisfied. The result is a kind of spiritual erosion. The person becomes hollowed out, exhibiting many of the same compulsive traits associated with addiction.

    Maher agreed and argued that most people fail to grasp how profound a cultural shift OnlyFans represents. He said we now live in a “masturbation economy.”

    As I worked through a set of offset cleans, his observation lingered in my mind.

    I have spent the past several years reading about declining rates of dating, sex, marriage, and face-to-face social interaction among younger generations. Increasingly, many people appear content to retreat into simulations of intimacy that deliver pleasure without requiring vulnerability, compromise, rejection, or genuine connection.

    I was reminded of a stand-up routine by Chris Rock. Reflecting on his divorce, infidelity, and pornography addiction, Rock explained that therapy helped him recognize the damage pornography had done to his ability to connect with other people. His provocative way of describing it was that pornography had made him “autistic”—not in the clinical sense, but in the sense that he had become trapped inside his own head, detached from the emotional realities of those around him.

    Listening to Maher and Levinson, I found myself wondering whether this condition had escaped the boundaries of individual pathology and become cultural.

    What if the isolated, screen-mediated existence once associated with addiction is becoming normal?

    What if more and more people prefer substitutes to relationships, simulations to experiences, and curated fantasy to the friction of actual human life?

    What if the dystopia is not approaching but has already arrived?

    As someone who teaches critical thinking and spends an unhealthy amount of time searching for the defining themes of modern culture, I immediately began thinking about how I might frame this discussion in a classroom.

    Maher’s terminology, “the masturbation economy,” works perfectly on television. It grabs attention. It provokes. It entertains.

    But in a college classroom, I would probably use a different phrase.

    I might call it the Solitary Consumption Economy or the Self-Gratification Marketplace.

    Students could then examine the argument that platforms like OnlyFans are not merely examples of personal empowerment but symptoms of a larger cultural shift toward self-exploitation, alienation, dopamine dependency, and emotional isolation.

    Viewed this way, OnlyFans is not an anomaly. It is the logical extension of several trends that have been developing for decades.

    One precursor is the modern obsession with optimization.

    Why endure the messiness of courtship when technology can deliver a carefully curated fantasy tailored to your preferences?

    Why invest time in building a relationship when digital alternatives can be scheduled conveniently between deadlifts and protein shakes?

    Why risk rejection when algorithms offer endless affirmation?

    Optimization culture promises efficiency in every domain of life. The problem is that many of life’s most meaningful experiences are inherently inefficient. Friendship, romance, family, and community require patience, sacrifice, awkwardness, misunderstanding, and compromise. Remove those elements and you often remove the humanity as well.

    A second precursor is the social conditioning produced by the pandemic.

    Many people discovered that life could be organized around isolation. Work from home. Food delivered. Entertainment streamed. Social interaction filtered through screens. For some, this arrangement felt less like an emergency measure than a permanent upgrade. Why drive across town? Why spend money on gas? Why risk discomfort when one can remain safely cocooned inside a personalized digital environment?

    The result is a culture increasingly comfortable with substitutes.

    And the phenomenon extends far beyond sexuality.

    Today people seek fitness coaching, nutritional guidance, therapy, cooking instruction, financial advice, and life direction through screens. Entire industries now exist to provide virtual versions of activities once rooted in face-to-face relationships and local communities.

    As I thought about all this, I was reminded of an episode of Lost in Space that haunted me as a child.

    The episode, “The Promised Planet,” aired in 1968.

    The Robinson family arrives on a planet populated by perpetual teenagers. The inhabitants speak in fashionable slang, dance compulsively, and embrace a culture of endless stimulation. New arrivals are placed in individual booths where a machine bombards them with loud music and psychological conditioning until they become compliant members of the tribe.

    One of the victims is Penny Robinson.

    After undergoing the process, she stands on a platform, swaying mindlessly to the music while parroting clichés about being “with it” and “cool.” Her father watches in horror. He sees that his daughter has not merely adopted new habits. She has surrendered her individuality. She has become a consumer of slogans and sensations.

    The scene terrified me as a child.

    Watching it today is even more unsettling.

    Written nearly sixty years ago, the episode feels less like science fiction than prophecy. Its creators anticipated a world in which overstimulation, conformity, and technological manipulation would become normal features of everyday life. They imagined a generation pacified not by force but by pleasure.

    The frightening possibility is that they were not predicting some distant future.

    They were describing us.

    The Solitary Consumption Economy may simply be the latest chapter in a story that began long ago—a story in which technology gradually teaches us to prefer stimulation over connection, convenience over community, and fantasy over reality.

    The question is not whether a culture of solitary consumption can generate wealth.

    Clearly it can.

    The question is whether a civilization can flourish when increasing numbers of its citizens spend their lives alone inside their heads, consuming experiences engineered to feel more vivid while becoming steadily more detached from reality itself.

    I was hardly immune to the condition. I felt myself being slowly absorbed into a culture that inflamed the passions with dazzling digital spectacles while leaving the spirit flattened, restless, and curiously numb. At times I felt like Penny Robinson in Lost in Space, trapped inside the conditioning booth on The Promised Planet. The machine bombarded her with stimulation until she surrendered her individuality and emerged smiling, dancing, and repeating fashionable clichés. The horror of the episode was not that Penny was physically imprisoned. It was that she no longer wanted to leave. I sometimes wondered whether the same process was happening to me, only with algorithms instead of loud music, screens instead of booths, and an endless stream of digital amusements replacing the hypnotic dance floor.

    Fortunately, I had a few anchors that kept me from drifting into the hypnotic current.

    The first was kettlebells.

    Kettlebells transported me to a world before algorithms, influencers, and engagement metrics. The moment I gripped the handle, I ceased being a sixty-four-year-old college instructor and became a caveman engaged in urgent labor. I was shoving boulders aside to widen the entrance of my cave before a storm arrived. I was lifting the twelve-foot wing of a dying pterodactyl so I could retrieve the spear I had hurled moments earlier to save my life. There was no room for existential angst while trying not to drop fifty pounds of cast iron on your foot.

    Then there was the piano.

    If kettlebells connected me to my inner caveman, the piano connected me to my inner funeral director.

    Whenever I sat at the keyboard, I found myself composing the same melancholy piece over and over again. At least that is what my family claims.

    “Dad, all your songs sound the same.”

    Of course they do.

    I am not composing individual songs. I am contributing to the great collective symphony of human sadness known in German as Weltschmerz—the sorrow that comes from recognizing the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.

    Some people spend thousands of dollars each year discussing their Weltschmerz with therapists. I process mine through an ebony Yamaha upright. It is considerably cheaper, and unlike a therapist, the piano never asks me how that makes me feel.

    The piano allowed me to grieve.

    Not merely for myself, but for the world.

    For all its absurdities, vanities, and self-inflicted wounds.

    Then there was my exercise bike.

    Technically, it is called a Schwinn Airdyne AD7.

    I prefer its proper name:

    The Misery Machine.

    The Misery Machine operates according to a simple principle: the harder you work, the more enthusiastically it punishes you for your ambition.

    Most cardio equipment is cooperative. You pedal. It politely accepts your effort.

    The AD7 is different.

    The AD7 takes your effort as a personal insult.

    Its giant fan wheel generates wind resistance proportional to your exertion, creating a relationship that feels less like exercise and more like a blood feud.

    The machine seems to say:

    “Oh, you think you’re in shape? You think you’re going to dominate this workout? Let’s investigate that claim.”

    Pedaling is only the beginning.

    Your arms must simultaneously push and pull large moving levers, transforming the experience into a full-body interrogation. Before long your legs are burning, your shoulders are aching, and your lungs are negotiating surrender terms.

    The machine possesses an almost supernatural ability to match your suffering dollar for dollar. Every attempt to overpower it simply persuades it to become more difficult.

    After a hard session, I stagger away drenched in sweat, humbled, exhausted, and oddly grateful, as though I have survived a mugging administered by a highly competent physical therapist.

    I have considered quitting the AD7 many times.

    It consumes an alarming amount of energy.

    Its location does not help.

    Wedged between the living-room wall and the sofa, it places me on public display for my family. There I sit shirtless, wearing gym shorts, with a towel wrapped around my head to prevent sweat from pouring into my eyes. I look less like a disciplined athlete than a man experiencing a minor psychological crisis.

    The real embarrassment, however, lies in the elaborate fantasies I invent to motivate myself.

    My goal is always the same: burn at least seven hundred calories in under an hour.

    To achieve this, my brain constructs increasingly ridiculous scenarios.

    Suppose I reach four hundred calories by the thirty-minute mark.

    In that case, all my colleagues receive half a million dollars tax-free.

    Naturally, they are watching me on a giant monitor.

    A scrolling ticker beneath the screen provides real-time analytics:

    Calories Per Hour: 842

    Fatigue Level: Severe

    Probability of Reaching 400 Calories at 30 Minutes: 98%

    Probability of Reaching 770 Calories at 60 Minutes: 89%

    Butt Fatigue: Catastrophic

    Confidence Level: Medium

    My colleagues watch nervously from their homes.

    “If he hits the target,” one exclaims, “I’ll finally be able to buy a house!”

    Another is already browsing beachfront property.

    A third is planning an early retirement.

    Meanwhile, I continue pedaling through escalating misery, carrying the financial hopes and dreams of people who do not know they are participating in my delusion.

    This, I suppose, is my version of mental gamification.

    Some people use productivity apps.

    Some use motivational speakers.

    I imagine an audience of financially desperate coworkers depending on my ability to survive a torture device disguised as an exercise bike.

    And somehow, absurd as it is, it works.

    Another reason I can’t quit the AD7 is that a part of me craves the punishment.

    It is difficult to overstate humanity’s appetite for self-inflicted suffering. Pain, like pleasure, has a way of making us feel intensely alive. In a culture that anesthetizes us with endless consumption, relentless marketing, algorithmic manipulation, and data mining, punishment can feel strangely restorative. At least it cuts through the fog.

    To put it more simply, without the punishment administered by my exercise bike, I would be bored.

    And boredom is no trivial enemy.

    It reminds me of Father John Misty’s song “Bored in the USA.” The narrator is a weary casualty of consumer culture, a man who has purchased so many products that he has gradually become one himself. Somewhere along the way, he misplaced the larger ambitions and romantic ideals of his youth. The life he was promised never arrived. In its place he received subscriptions, pharmaceuticals, and a collection of possessions that stare back at him with perfect indifference.

    He feels cheated.

    He wants a refund on the Faustian bargain he signed decades earlier, but he suspects the return policy has expired. To cope, he medicates himself. The pills help him endure the boredom, depression, and low-grade despair of modern life, but they cannot cure them. He is a man drowning in ennui, anhedonia, and spiritual exhaustion.

    I recognize those enemies.

    I can hear them rattling the doorknob.

    They arrive disguised as apathy, distraction, and the temptation to stop caring. They whisper that effort is pointless, that curiosity is overrated, that another hour of scrolling might somehow satisfy the hunger that scrolling itself created.

    So I fight back.

    I sit at the piano and pound out another melancholy composition dedicated to the great human tradition of Weltschmerz. I swing kettlebells until my lungs burn and my forearms ache. I climb aboard the AD7 and pedal through fresh layers of misery.

    I do these things with a mixture of fear and fury, hoping that boredom, anhedonia, and despair will decide there are easier victims elsewhere and leave me in peace for another day.

  • Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (a short story)

    Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (a short story)

    When I was five years old and living at the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose, one of my favorite television shows was Daniel Boone. I was fascinated by Boone’s coonskin cap, especially the raccoon tail dangling from the back. To my young mind, it was the height of frontier elegance. Any man bold enough to wear a dead raccoon as a fashion accessory had to possess uncommon wisdom and imagination. Surely such a man knew secrets unavailable to ordinary people.

    One episode lodged itself permanently in my memory. In it, a destitute man lived alone in the wilderness, gaunt with hunger and desperation. A passerby took pity on him and handed him a loaf of bread. The starving man stood beneath a tree and immediately tore into it. He chewed with the ferocity of a man rescued from the edge of extinction. As he ate, he repeated a single word over and over:

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    The word became a prayer, a hymn, a declaration of gratitude. Watching him, I was struck by a revelation that only a child could find astonishing: this man’s happiness came from something as simple as a loaf of bread.

    The next day, life provided me with an opportunity for field research.

    My mother and I had gone shopping at a local plaza. Returning to the car, we loaded our groceries into the back seat, including a fresh loaf of sourdough bread. Before we left, my mother remembered seeing some white divinity and black licorice in a candy store and decided to run back inside.

    “I’ll wait in the car,” I said.

    The moment she disappeared, I launched my experiment.

    I reached into the grocery bag, tore off a chunk of sourdough, and stuffed it into my mouth. Then I began repeating the sacred word from Daniel Boone.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    I was trying to recreate the miracle I had witnessed on television. I wanted to understand what it felt like to be so hungry that a loaf of bread seemed like heaven itself. I wanted to know what true satisfaction felt like.

    Nearly sixty years later, I still remember that moment.

    Something about the image continues to haunt me: the idea of profound hunger meeting simple nourishment. No luxury. No extravagance. No abundance. Just an honest need met by an honest gift.

    The proposition remains irresistible.

    The older I get, the more I understand that the episode was never really about bread.

    It was about hunger.

    The famous biblical phrase tells us that “man does not live by bread alone.” Physical hunger is only one of our appetites. Even when our stomachs are full, our mortgages paid, our homes comfortable, and our refrigerators stocked, we remain restless creatures. We hunger for purpose. We hunger for belonging. We hunger for love, friendship, meaning, beauty, and transcendence.

    We hunger for forms of bread that cannot be purchased at a bakery.

    Music is one of those forms.

    I think of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,“ one of The Smiths’ most beautiful songs. The narrator is starving for connection. Home does not feel like home. It feels confining, lonely, and emotionally barren. He longs to escape into the world and find kindred souls who possess the warmth and vitality missing from his life. He dreams of a surrogate family, a tribe of fellow travelers who might finally make him feel understood.

    He does not know where such people are.

    He only knows he needs them.

    His longing saturates every line of the song. Beneath the wit and melancholy is a desperate appetite for belonging. He is emotionally famished.

    In that sense, he is not so different from the starving man beneath the tree in Daniel Boone.

    Both are hungry.

    Both are waiting.

    Both are searching for the thing that will finally satisfy them.

    The difference is that one seeks a loaf of bread while the other seeks companionship, love, and meaning.

    Yet the emotional experience is remarkably similar.

    A starving man dreams of bread.

    A lonely man dreams of friendship.

    And when either finally receives what he has been seeking, the response is the same. Gratitude. Relief. Fullness.

    For a brief and precious moment, the hunger stops.

    Solitude is another form of hunger.

    My mother, who struggled with clinical depression throughout her life, would sometimes disappear from the world for days at a time. She would retreat to her bedroom, pull the covers around herself, and consume novels with the same urgency that the starving man in Daniel Boone consumed his loaf of bread. Page after page disappeared into her imagination. The stories fed something that ordinary life could not. Friends would call. Invitations would come and go. My mother often chose the company of books instead. She possessed a strong reclusive streak.

    I inherited some of it.

    At times, I feel the same longing for friendship and belonging that animates “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” I understand the desire to find kindred spirits and become part of something larger than oneself. Yet I also understand the opposite impulse. Like my mother, there are days when I want nothing more than to be left alone with my podcasts, my kettlebell workouts, and my piano compositions. A quiet room can feel as nourishing as a crowded gathering. Solitude, when freely chosen, can be its own loaf of bread.

    Hunger takes many forms. Some people ache for companionship. Others ache for silence. Most of us spend our lives moving back and forth between the two, never fully satisfied by either and always searching for the proper measure of both.

    Perhaps religious hunger is the greatest hunger of all.

    I experienced it while watching the 1978 Superman movie. I was a teenage bodybuilder then, full of grandiose dreams and the conviction that I was destined for some undefined greatness. Sitting alone in a dark theater, I watched Superman’s father prepare his son for his mission on Earth. He explained that humanity was a lost and fallen people, wandering in confusion and ignorance. Then came the line that pierced me:

    “They only lack the light to show the way.”

    As those words echoed through the theater, something happened to me. A wave of emotion surged through my body. It felt as if a bright light had been switched on somewhere deep inside me. I began to shake. Tears streamed down my face. I was overwhelmed by a feeling I could neither explain nor resist.

    What moved me was not Superman’s strength. It was his purpose.

    For the first time, I recognized a hunger that had been living inside me all along. I wanted to be a light in the world. I wanted my life to matter. I wanted to help people find their way through confusion, loneliness, and despair. I had no idea how such a calling could be fulfilled. I only knew that the desire burned within me with an intensity I had never experienced before.

    Looking back, I think I was discovering another form of bread.

    Not the bread that fills the stomach, but the bread that nourishes the soul.

    Perhaps this is what people mean by the bread of life: the longing to serve something greater than oneself, to become useful to others, and in that act of service to discover who one truly is. The deepest hunger is not merely to consume. It is to contribute. It is to find a purpose worthy of devotion and, in pursuing it, become fully alive.

    This is not the bread I was raised on.

    I grew up on an entirely different diet of the soul. The culture around me taught that hunger was not a condition to be understood or disciplined but celebrated. Desire was treated as a virtue. Appetite was regarded as a compass. If you wanted something intensely enough, pursuing it was assumed to be an act of authenticity.

    The lesson was repeated everywhere—in movies, television, music, magazines, and the casual conversations of adults. Fulfillment lay just beyond the next indulgence. The good life consisted of feeding every craving and treating restraint as a form of deprivation.

    In that world, desire itself became the bread.

    Longing was not something to transcend but something to obey. Hunger was not a signal pointing toward a deeper need; it was the need. The object of desire mattered less than the pursuit itself. We were taught to trust our appetites, follow our impulses, and regard self-denial with suspicion.

    Most of all, I was taught that carnal desire was the bread of life—that somewhere in the pursuit of pleasure, admiration, conquest, and sensual gratification lay the secret to happiness.

    It took me many years to discover that some forms of bread fill you only long enough to make you hungry again.

    This is not the bread I grew up on. I grew up on a different kind of bread entirely. I was taught that hunger was a good thing and that satisfying that hunger was even better. I was taught that desire itself was the bread. I was taught that carnal lust was the bread of life. 

    I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, an era that treated recreational sex not merely as pleasure but as a pathway to transcendence. Television, movies, music, magazines, and bestselling novels all sang from the same hymnal. Liberation was the new gospel. Desire was the new sacrament. Happiness, we were told, awaited those bold enough to cast aside restraint and pursue every appetite without apology.

    The adults around me absorbed the message. My parents and their friends attended parties where alcohol flowed freely, clothes disappeared, and the soundtrack from Hair supplied the liturgy. Men’s magazines sat openly on living room coffee tables like decorative centerpieces. Nobody hid them. Nobody seemed embarrassed. They were advertisements for a particular vision of the good life.

    As a teenage boy with raging hormones and a vivid imagination, I absorbed the lesson completely.

    The images and stories convinced me that fulfillment lay in becoming a brazen sexual adventurer. I wanted the muscular body, the effortless charm, the magnetic confidence. I wanted admiration. I wanted conquest. What I did not understand was love. I knew little about devotion, sacrifice, responsibility, or the quiet dignity of caring for another person. Society’s vision of transcendence involved acquiring experiences, not serving people. Other human beings existed primarily as supporting characters in the drama of one’s own desires.

    The consequences of such a worldview are predictable. When people become instruments for self-gratification, hurt feelings, disappointment, alienation, and moral confusion inevitably follow. The bill always arrives, even if it arrives years later.

    Yet even after I grew older and recognized the folly of that outlook, a small part of that younger self remained alive inside me. The fantasy did not simply disappear. It lingered like an old song whose melody still occasionally drifts through the mind. The grand vision of endless Bacchanalian delights never entirely surrendered the stage.

    The challenge became learning not to romanticize it.

    There is a temptation to keep looking backward, to imagine that fulfillment was hiding somewhere in those abandoned fantasies. But looking backward can become its own form of captivity. The story of Lot’s wife endures because it captures a permanent human weakness. We long for the places we have outgrown. We become attached to identities that no longer serve us. We mistake fixation for vitality.

    In reality, selfishness, entitlement, and obsession are forms of death. They narrow the soul. They reduce the world to a mirror.

    I suspect this realization is familiar to anyone who has spent time in an addiction recovery program. Every day counselors sit across from people trying to understand the forces that shaped them decades earlier. The challenge is not simply breaking a habit. It is excavating an entire philosophy of life. Somewhere beneath the addiction lies a vision of happiness that proved incapable of delivering what it promised.

    The task of replacing that vision must be overwhelming.

    I cannot speak for addiction counselors. I can only speak from experience.

    A life devoted to unrestrained hedonism eventually exhausts itself. Chaos has a seductive glamour when viewed from a distance, but living inside it is another matter entirely. The endless pursuit of stimulation becomes tiring. The pursuit of novelty becomes repetitive. What initially feels like freedom gradually resembles bondage.

    Eventually reality intervenes.

    You have a career.

    You have a spouse.

    You have children.

    You have obligations and people who depend on you.

    Maintaining a double life becomes increasingly difficult. You cannot simultaneously inhabit the stable world of family and responsibility while pursuing the perpetual turbulence of adolescent fantasy. Domesticity and satyrhood occupy different planets.

    The older I became, the more I understood that fear has its proper place. Not fear of pleasure itself, but fear of the destruction that follows when pleasure becomes life’s highest value. The consequences are not merely moral. They are practical. Relationships fracture. Finances collapse. Trust evaporates. Even those fortunate enough to avoid financial ruin often leave behind a trail of emotional wreckage.

    Such people are not role models.

    They are cautionary tales.

    The challenge, then, is not merely abandoning an old identity. It is discovering a new one.

    The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that hope is like finding a new garment. I have always loved that image. A garment shapes how we present ourselves to the world. It signals who we believe ourselves to be.

    When the costume of the satyr no longer fits, something else must take its place.

    That search becomes the next great adventure.

    Not the search for another thrill.

    Not the search for another conquest.

    The search for a life worth inhabiting.

    Sometimes we are too blind, too impatient, or too preoccupied with our ambitions to recognize that the heavenly garment is already draped across our shoulders. We spend years searching for a destiny, an identity, a purpose, convinced that fulfillment lies somewhere beyond the next horizon. Only much later, looking back across the decades, do we realize that we were already wearing the very garment we sought. We simply lacked the wisdom to recognize it.

    I am one of those people.

    As I write this at sixty-four, I find myself looking back to the age of twenty-seven. The year was 1989. It was my final week in Oakland. My belongings were packed into boxes. My future hovered before me in a haze of excitement and uncertainty. I was preparing to leave Northern California for the desert, where I had accepted a full-time position teaching college writing. The move felt momentous, as though I were crossing not merely a few hundred miles of highway but an invisible border between one life and another.

    Before making the four-hour drive through the furnace heat of an August afternoon, I took my car in for service. While mechanics disappeared beneath the hood, I wandered through the loose ends of my final days in Oakland. I had no idea I was standing on the threshold of the life I was meant to live. At twenty-seven, I believed my real story had not yet begun. Looking back now, I can see that it already had.

    This is the story of a day when I was exactly the person I was supposed to be and was too oblivious to recognize it.

    Hungry for lunch while my car was being repaired, I walked to a nearby food court. It occupied an industrial corner of Oakland where the landscape seemed engineered to extinguish hope. Warehouses, loading docks, chain-link fences, and cracked asphalt stretched toward the horizon. The building itself looked less like a place to eat than an aircraft hangar awaiting condemnation.

    Inside, a dozen small eateries lined the walls beneath humming fluorescent lights that washed everything in a pale, exhausted glow. The air smelled of frying oil, grilled meat, bleach, and diesel exhaust. Most of the customers were laborers in reflective vests and steel-toed boots. They sat alone at scarred tables, staring into burritos, chow mein, and paper cups of coffee with the vacant gaze of people whose workday was only half over. No one lingered. No one laughed. The entire place felt like a refueling station for the worn-down and overworked—a temporary shelter before they returned to the machinery, noise, and concrete waiting outside.

    I ordered a combo plate. I no longer remember what it was exactly—chicken and rice perhaps, or some equally forgettable meal. While waiting for my order, I bought a large glass of cold orange juice.

    I was about to take my first sip when a commotion near one of the counters caught my attention.

    A young man, about my age, was struggling to remain upright. He was tall and painfully thin, dressed in faded jeans and a blue T-shirt. His face was pale. His legs trembled beneath him. He explained that he had just sold blood so he could afford something to eat and now felt as though he might pass out.

    An older man behind a Greek food counter looked at me and said, “Give him your orange juice.”

    Without hesitation, I carried the glass over.

    The young man began to sink toward the floor. I slipped an arm around him and held him as he dropped to one knee. With my other hand, I lifted the orange juice to his lips.

    He drank.

    I can still see his eyes.

    Nearly thirty-eight years later, I remember them with startling clarity.

    What struck me was not merely hunger. I had seen hungry people before. What I saw in that moment was a profound loneliness, a depth of sadness and wanting that went far beyond the need for food. This was a man who needed more than calories. He needed kindness. He needed dignity. He needed someone—anyone—to care whether he existed.

    As I held him, I knew instantly that the combo plate I had ordered would never be mine.

    It belonged to him.

    What I did not know at the time was that I was wearing the garment I had been searching for all along.

    I did not know that fulfillment had arrived quietly and without fanfare.

    I did not know that for a brief moment I was exactly the person I was meant to become.

    At twenty-seven, I still believed happiness would arrive through achievement, adventure, romance, status, or some future version of myself that was stronger, wiser, and more accomplished. Yet in that forgotten food court, surrounded by tired workers and fluorescent lights, none of those things mattered.

    What mattered was lowering myself to help another person.

    What mattered was service.

    What mattered was love.

    The bread we hunger for most is rarely the bread we imagine. We spend years chasing appetites, ambitions, pleasures, and identities, believing they will finally satisfy us. All the while, the deeper hunger waits patiently beneath them.

    The daily bread is not merely what sustains the body.

    It is what enlarges the soul.

    Whenever I hear the words, “Give us this day our daily bread,” I do not think of loaves, bakeries, or even hunger.

    I think of the sadness in that young man’s eyes.

    And I remember the afternoon when, without realizing it, I found the nourishment I had been seeking all along.

  • There Is a Bread That Never Goes Out

    There Is a Bread That Never Goes Out

    When I was five years old and living at the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose, one of my favorite television shows was Daniel Boone. I was fascinated by Boone’s coonskin cap, especially the raccoon tail dangling from the back. To my young mind, it was the height of frontier elegance. Any man bold enough to wear a dead raccoon as a fashion accessory had to possess uncommon wisdom and imagination. Surely such a man knew secrets unavailable to ordinary people.

    One episode lodged itself permanently in my memory. In it, a destitute man lived alone in the wilderness, gaunt with hunger and desperation. A passerby took pity on him and handed him a loaf of bread. The starving man stood beneath a tree and immediately tore into it. He chewed with the ferocity of a man rescued from the edge of extinction. As he ate, he repeated a single word over and over:

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    The word became a prayer, a hymn, a declaration of gratitude. Watching him, I was struck by a revelation that only a child could find astonishing: this man’s happiness came from something as simple as a loaf of bread.

    The next day, life provided me with an opportunity for field research.

    My mother and I had gone shopping at a local plaza. Returning to the car, we loaded our groceries into the back seat, including a fresh loaf of sourdough bread. Before we left, my mother remembered seeing some white divinity and black licorice in a candy store and decided to run back inside.

    “I’ll wait in the car,” I said.

    The moment she disappeared, I launched my experiment.

    I reached into the grocery bag, tore off a chunk of sourdough, and stuffed it into my mouth. Then I began repeating the sacred word from Daniel Boone.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    I was trying to recreate the miracle I had witnessed on television. I wanted to understand what it felt like to be so hungry that a loaf of bread seemed like heaven itself. I wanted to know what true satisfaction felt like.

    Nearly sixty years later, I still remember that moment.

    Something about the image continues to haunt me: the idea of profound hunger meeting simple nourishment. No luxury. No extravagance. No abundance. Just an honest need met by an honest gift.

    The proposition remains irresistible.

    The older I get, the more I understand that the episode was never really about bread.

    It was about hunger.

    The famous biblical phrase tells us that “man does not live by bread alone.” Physical hunger is only one of our appetites. Even when our stomachs are full, our mortgages paid, our homes comfortable, and our refrigerators stocked, we remain restless creatures. We hunger for purpose. We hunger for belonging. We hunger for love, friendship, meaning, beauty, and transcendence.

    We hunger for forms of bread that cannot be purchased at a bakery.

    Music is one of those forms.

    I think of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,“ one of The Smiths’ most beautiful songs. The narrator is starving for connection. Home does not feel like home. It feels confining, lonely, and emotionally barren. He longs to escape into the world and find kindred souls who possess the warmth and vitality missing from his life. He dreams of a surrogate family, a tribe of fellow travelers who might finally make him feel understood.

    He does not know where such people are.

    He only knows he needs them.

    His longing saturates every line of the song. Beneath the wit and melancholy is a desperate appetite for belonging. He is emotionally famished.

    In that sense, he is not so different from the starving man beneath the tree in Daniel Boone.

    Both are hungry.

    Both are waiting.

    Both are searching for the thing that will finally satisfy them.

    The difference is that one seeks a loaf of bread while the other seeks companionship, love, and meaning.

    Yet the emotional experience is remarkably similar.

    A starving man dreams of bread.

    A lonely man dreams of friendship.

    And when either finally receives what he has been seeking, the response is the same. Gratitude. Relief. Fullness.

    For a brief and precious moment, the hunger stops.

    Solitude is another form of hunger.

    My mother, who struggled with clinical depression throughout her life, would sometimes disappear from the world for days at a time. She would retreat to her bedroom, pull the covers around herself, and consume novels with the same urgency that the starving man in Daniel Boone consumed his loaf of bread. Page after page disappeared into her imagination. The stories fed something that ordinary life could not. Friends would call. Invitations would come and go. My mother often chose the company of books instead. She possessed a strong reclusive streak.

    I inherited some of it.

    At times, I feel the same longing for friendship and belonging that animates “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” I understand the desire to find kindred spirits and become part of something larger than oneself. Yet I also understand the opposite impulse. Like my mother, there are days when I want nothing more than to be left alone with my podcasts, my kettlebell workouts, and my piano compositions. A quiet room can feel as nourishing as a crowded gathering. Solitude, when freely chosen, can be its own loaf of bread.

    Hunger takes many forms. Some people ache for companionship. Others ache for silence. Most of us spend our lives moving back and forth between the two, never fully satisfied by either and always searching for the proper measure of both.

    Perhaps religious hunger is the greatest hunger of all.

    I experienced it while watching the 1978 Superman movie. I was a teenage bodybuilder then, full of grandiose dreams and the conviction that I was destined for some undefined greatness. Sitting alone in a dark theater, I watched Superman’s father prepare his son for his mission on Earth. He explained that humanity was a lost and fallen people, wandering in confusion and ignorance. Then came the line that pierced me:

    “They only lack the light to show the way.”

    As those words echoed through the theater, something happened to me. A wave of emotion surged through my body. It felt as if a bright light had been switched on somewhere deep inside me. I began to shake. Tears streamed down my face. I was overwhelmed by a feeling I could neither explain nor resist.

    What moved me was not Superman’s strength. It was his purpose.

    For the first time, I recognized a hunger that had been living inside me all along. I wanted to be a light in the world. I wanted my life to matter. I wanted to help people find their way through confusion, loneliness, and despair. I had no idea how such a calling could be fulfilled. I only knew that the desire burned within me with an intensity I had never experienced before.

    Looking back, I think I was discovering another form of bread.

    Not the bread that fills the stomach, but the bread that nourishes the soul.

    Perhaps this is what people mean by the bread of life: the longing to serve something greater than oneself, to become useful to others, and in that act of service to discover who one truly is. The deepest hunger is not merely to consume. It is to contribute. It is to find a purpose worthy of devotion and, in pursuing it, become fully alive.

  • Gollumification (a short story)

    Gollumification (a short story)

    I remain haunted by three men I attended high school with. More than four decades later, they are still gnashing their teeth over a missed romantic opportunity so catastrophic in their minds that it has become the organizing principle of their existence.

    The event occurred during the summer after their senior year, that magical season when testosterone, optimism, and stupidity join forces to create lifelong consequences.

    The three friends were driving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to attend a Dodgers game when they found themselves winding through the Grapevine. There, on the side of the highway, destiny appeared: four young women wearing tie-dye bikinis.

    An aging Volkswagen van, baked by the California sun into a shade best described as “burnt pumpkin regret,” had overheated and died. Standing beside it were four beautiful Grateful Dead devotees fresh from a concert and still drifting through the atmosphere on a cloud of music, freedom, and whatever else had been circulating at Dead shows in those years.

    These were not merely attractive women. In the mythology my friends later constructed, they became supernatural beings. They were road-worn muses, desert sirens, barefoot priestesses of possibility. They smelled of patchouli, sunscreen, and poor judgment. Their laughter floated through the air like wind chimes. Their sun-bronzed shoulders glistened beneath the California light. They waved their bikini tops and spaghetti-strap shirts overhead like flags announcing the arrival of a new religion.

    My friends, mechanically gifted but cosmically clueless, leaped into action.

    With grease-stained heroism, they diagnosed the problem, coaxed the van back to life, and restored order to the universe. The women were grateful. Very grateful.

    Then came the invitation.

    Forget the Dodgers game, they said. Come with us to the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival.

    To appreciate the magnitude of this offer, imagine being handed a winning lottery ticket, a backstage pass, and the keys to paradise simultaneously.

    My friends declined.

    They were committed to the Dodgers game.

    Even now, recounting the story causes physical pain.

    Armed with baseball tickets and the situational awareness of ornamental shrubbery, they thanked the women, climbed back into their car, and drove away. Behind them, the hippies disappeared into the California horizon, presumably continuing their lives completely unaware that they had become the central tragedy in three future divorces.

    My friends remember almost nothing about the baseball game.

    Not a single play.

    Not a single pitch.

    Not a single inning.

    But they can describe, with forensic precision, the exact moment they drove away from those women. They remember the sunlight, the smell of the road, the angle of the van, the sound of the laughter, and the fluttering of tie-dye fabric in the wind.

    Mention the incident today and they transform.

    Reason departs.

    Perspective evaporates.

    They begin snapping at one another like feral animals fighting over a scrap of meat. Each insists the others were responsible. Each argues that his entire life would have unfolded differently had they accepted the invitation.

    Their present lives barely register. Their former wives, their careers, their accomplishments, and their friendships all fade into the background. Spiritually speaking, they remain stranded on that highway, staring at those women as if they represented the entrance to a lost kingdom.

    The story would be funny if it were not so sad.

    The obsession has consumed them.

    They are bitter. They are divorced. They are trapped.

    They have spent decades worshipping a fantasy.

    What they believe they lost was not a romantic encounter. It was transcendence itself. They have convinced themselves that heaven briefly opened a window on a sunny California afternoon and that they foolishly chose baseball instead.

    This is what I call Gollumification: the process by which a person becomes spiritually deformed through obsessive attachment to a lost opportunity, fantasy, or object of desire, sacrificing present reality in worship of an imagined transcendence.

    The tragedy is not that they missed an opportunity.

    The tragedy is that they never stopped missing it.

    Their humanity has slowly curdled around a single idea: that fulfillment existed on the other side of that decision. Like Gollum clutching the Ring, they have spent decades staring at a false treasure while life continued to unfold around them.

    The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson warned that human beings frequently seek false transcendence through sex, alcohol, drugs, crowds, and ecstatic experiences. These pursuits promise elevation but often produce degradation. We imagine we are ascending toward something divine when in fact we are becoming diminished versions of ourselves.

    My friends illustrate this principle perfectly. They mistook a fleeting moment of possibility for ultimate meaning. They sought transcendence in the wrong place and became enslaved to the memory.

    To be human is not merely to desire transcendence. It is to recognize when that desire has attached itself to the wrong object. It is to notice the onset of Gollumification, slam on the brakes, and reverse the process before obsession calcifies into identity.

    Few people accomplish this.

    Most continue worshipping the lost opportunity, the former lover, the abandoned dream, the imagined paradise. Year after year, they become less flexible, less grateful, less alive. They harden around their regrets until they resemble pillars of salt, forever staring backward at the kingdom they believe should have been theirs.

    The missed opportunity did not ruin their lives.

    Their refusal to stop worshipping it did.

    I can worry about many things. I can worry about politics, the economy, my health, the future, and whether humanity is collectively losing its mind. But is there anything more important than waking up each morning prepared for my daily arm-wrestling match with Gollum?

    There he sits across the table waiting for me.

    He smiles with the confidence of an undefeated champion. He knows my weaknesses better than I do. He knows exactly where the cracks are in the foundation. He knows which temptations still sparkle in my imagination and which regrets still ache when I press on them.

    “Go ahead,” he says. “Try to beat me. Win today if you can. I’ll even let you enjoy the victory. But remember, I have thousands more opportunities. Tomorrow morning. This afternoon. Ten minutes from now. Next week. Next year. I can wait.”

    Then Gollum leans back in his chair and laughs.

    Unlike me, he never gets tired.

    Don’t feel sorry for me. My predicament is not unique. Like millions of others, I suffer from an addiction to shiny objects promising transcendence. What am I addicted to? That is the wrong question. The better question is: what am I not addicted to?

    Human beings have always been vulnerable to false promises of salvation. Some chase money. Others chase status, romance, sex, drugs, fame, luxury, political power, youth, beauty, watches, social media followers, or the approval of strangers. The particulars vary, but the underlying temptation remains the same. We convince ourselves that one more acquisition, one more achievement, one more experience, one more dopamine hit will finally complete us.

    There are tens of millions of us. I am not special.

    My life, like theirs, is defined by the constant struggle against vice, corruption, vanity, and the habits that threaten to reduce me to a lesser version of myself.

    Yet there is another danger.

    It is true that I am flawed. It is true that I have made mistakes. It is true that I possess an impressive talent for disappointing myself. But endlessly dwelling on my failures is simply another addiction wearing a different costume.

    I think of the writer and commentator Ana Marie Cox, who once observed that she struggled with many addictions, but the worst was picking up the bottle of self-loathing and drinking from it all day long.

    What a perfect image.

    Many of us stagger through life intoxicated by our own self-contempt. We nurse old embarrassments. We replay old failures. We rehearse our shortcomings with the diligence of scholars preserving sacred texts. We imagine this habit is a form of honesty or moral seriousness. In reality, it is often another form of self-absorption.

    The person addicted to self-loathing is no less trapped than the person addicted to alcohol, gambling, or pornography.

    Both are attempting to escape reality.

    And both find themselves drifting deeper into captivity.

    This compulsive consumption of self-hatred makes self-forgiveness nearly impossible. Yet self-forgiveness is one of the essential weapons in the fight against Gollumification.

    How can I forgive myself?

    The question sounds simple but feels impossible.

    After all, I know my failures better than anyone. I know the selfishness, vanity, cowardice, and foolishness that inhabit my history. I know the person I have been. Some days I find it nearly impossible to forgive myself for being such a wretched creature.

    But forgive myself I must.

    Forgiveness is not an act of indulgence. It is not a declaration that my failures never happened. It is not permission to continue living badly.

    Forgiveness is the first step in refusing to let my worst moments define me.

    It is the decision to stop worshipping my failures and start transcending them.

    Forgiveness is the commitment to become someone different from the stubborn sinner who generated so much regret in the first place. It is the refusal to spend the rest of my life drinking from the bottle of self-loathing while Gollum grins across the table.

    Because Gollum does not care whether I worship a lost opportunity or a past mistake.

    Either way, he wins.

    The only victory available to me is to stand up from the table, forgive myself, and continue the long work of becoming fully human.

    Once I understood that life is a continual test of character, and the struggle against Gollumification, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

    To be honest, however, there is something discouraging about viewing life as a daily battle against Gollum. I cannot always defeat him in an arm-wrestling match. Even on my best days, victory is incomplete. If I overcome Gollum half the time, I still fail the other half. The prospect can feel exhausting. How can I forgive myself if I remain locked in a struggle I never fully win? How can I live with peace if temptation is always waiting and I never know whether I will emerge victorious?

    The answer may be that the object of forgiveness is not perfection but perseverance. The purpose of self-forgiveness is not to transform me into a flawless person. It is to transform me into a person who continues striving toward the good despite repeated failures. The measure of my character is not whether temptation disappears, but whether I continue returning to the fight. Forgiveness allows me to rise after every fall rather than define myself by the fall itself. The truly unforgivable life is not the life marked by failure. It is the life that abandons the struggle altogether.

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily effective at razzle-dazzling you with objects of false transcendence and getting you to surrender.

    You can retreat into a climate-controlled cocoon furnished with streaming services, snack foods, delivery apps, and algorithmically engineered distractions. You can spend years drifting from one dopamine hit to the next while the world applauds your consumption and politely asks if you would like another. Temptation no longer lurks in dark alleys. It arrives in bright packaging and offers free shipping.

    The world will not object if you quit the struggle. On the contrary, it will happily assist you. Fresh temptations will appear on your phone, your television, your computer, and eventually your doorstep. At some point, however, a terrible realization emerges. You are no longer directing your life. Your cravings are directing it for you. As a result, you are becoming Gollum. 

    At that moment, you cease to be the protagonist of your own story. You become a supporting character in a drama written by your appetites, a bit player taking orders from every craving that wanders onto the stage. Perhaps you will grow numb to this reality and drift into a comfortable spiritual death, cushioned by convenience, entertained into submission, and surrounded by enough snacks and streaming content to dull any remaining sense of alarm. Or perhaps the discomfort will refuse to leave. Perhaps it will linger like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps it will haunt you until the life you have built begins to resemble a horror movie disguised as a luxury resort.

    That haunting may prove to be a gift. It may force you to confront the fact that you have been living in your own version of the Sunken Place, sinking ever deeper into passivity while your impulses seize control of the steering wheel. The tragedy is not that temptation exists. The tragedy is that you have mistaken indulgence for freedom and captivity for comfort. At some point, if you are fortunate, a voice will break through the fog. It will not whisper. It will not negotiate. It will issue a command as urgent as any ever spoken in a Jordan Peele horror film:

    Get out.

    The process of emancipating yourself from whatever hell you have wandered into is one of life’s essential tasks. Whether the prison is addiction, vanity, resentment, consumerism, or some other self-inflicted captivity, freedom rarely arrives on its own. 

    It helps to have role models—people who have somehow escaped the Sunken Place while the rest of us continue orbiting the same destructive habits.

    I have such a role model. His name is The Lonely Collector.

    I met him on the watch forums and social-media platforms where watch enthusiasts gather to discuss their latest acquisitions, compare collections, and reassure one another that purchasing yet another timepiece is not a symptom of a deeper problem. These communities often resemble support groups designed by the addiction itself. They are places where people seek solace and commiseration but rarely recovery. Imagine a convention of alcoholics held inside a liquor store. The attendees nod sympathetically as one another describes their struggles, then recommend a particularly excellent bottle that just arrived from Scotland.

    The watch world can be like that.

    Yet somehow The Lonely Collector moved among us untouched. While the rest of us disappeared down the timepiece rabbit hole, emerging weeks later clutching limited editions and obscure Japanese-market references, he remained curiously immune. He could admire a watch without needing to own it. He could discuss a new release without calculating how quickly he could justify purchasing it. He possessed a form of psychological insulation that bordered on the supernatural.

    I often imagined him wearing some kind of invisible protective suit, the sort of flame-retardant gear stuntmen wear before walking through walls of fire on Hollywood movie sets. Around him, collectors were exploding into fits of acquisition fever, setting their wallets ablaze in pursuit of the next grail watch, while he calmly strolled through the inferno without so much as singeing an eyebrow. He seemed to understand something the rest of us did not: that collecting a watch and being possessed by the desire to collect watches are two entirely different things.

    I met the Lonely Watch Collector about six years ago in the digital bazaar of watch enthusiasts, where grown men gather to convince one another that a slightly different arrangement of steel, sapphire, and gears constitutes a life-changing event. We became friends across several watch forums and social-media platforms. His Americanized name was Peter. He was a Vietnamese immigrant who worked in the tech industry and lived in the Dallas area.

    One day he sent me a message that immediately distinguished him from the usual crowd of enablers and acquisition evangelists. He confessed that he was, like me, a watch addict. Not a casual enthusiast. Not a collector. An addict. His condition had become so severe that he eventually sold every watch he owned, including pieces that cost nearly ten thousand dollars. In their place he bought a twenty-dollar Casio F91.

    The move struck me as both absurd and profound. Imagine a man abandoning a wine cellar filled with rare vintages only to drink tap water for the rest of his life.

    Peter explained that the Casio served a purpose beyond telling time. It was a daily reminder of how thoroughly the hobby had colonized his mind. Every glance at its tiny digital display reminded him of the sharp jaws of the addiction from which he had escaped. The humble plastic watch became a form of self-discipline, a wearable warning label. He never wanted to return to those feverish days when every waking hour was spent chasing the next purchase, the next dopamine hit, the next fantasy of completion that vanished the moment the package arrived.

    At the time he was in his mid-thirties, married, and raising a newborn child. He had decided that his attention was a finite resource. Every ounce of mental energy spent obsessing over watches was energy unavailable to his wife, his son, and the life unfolding directly in front of him. He chose his family over watches.

    Over the years he would occasionally contact me. He would compliment one of my latest acquisitions, mention that he had watched another video from my YouTube channel, where I often explored the psychology of watch addiction, and then close with the same refrain.

    He was still wearing the Casio.

    The statement was never delivered with judgment. He never lectured me. Never told me to sell my collection. Never suggested I quit the hobby. Yet I could feel the unspoken message beneath his words. It radiated from the quiet contentment he seemed to have found. He had escaped a maze that many of us were still wandering. Without saying so directly, he wanted me to find the exit as well.

    Then, about a year ago, I noticed that he had vanished.

    Not from my life specifically. From the platforms themselves.

    His accounts disappeared. No dramatic farewell. No manifesto. No final post announcing his liberation from the algorithmic plantation. He simply left.

    I found myself oddly moved by his disappearance. He had already been a hero of mine for replacing a small fortune in luxury watches with a twenty-dollar Casio. But abandoning social media entirely elevated him to an even higher category. Even more important than escaping the watch addiction, he had escaped from the social media platforms. 

    Most of us treat these platforms as public squares. However, they are closer to dopamine troughs—vast digital feedlots where human attention is harvested, processed, and sold. Every notification is a pellet tossed into the cage. Every scroll promises stimulation and delivers restlessness instead.

    Peter walked away from all of it.

    I have experienced watch-related FOMO countless times. I have watched men on YouTube peel the protective plastic from a new Panerai, Omega, or Tudor with the reverence of archaeologists uncovering a sacred relic. For a moment, I would feel the familiar pang—that small stab of desire convincing me that happiness was apparently one purchase away.

    But that feeling was insignificant compared to the FOMO I felt when I thought about Peter.

    I did not envy his watches. He no longer had any.

    I envied his freedom.

    He had escaped not only the watch fever dream but also the sprawling digital carnival that feeds it. He had walked away from the endless cycle of acquisition, validation, comparison, and display. No wrist shots. No watch forums. No YouTube rabbit holes. No dopamine pellets dispensed by algorithms disguised as communities.

    Sometimes I imagined becoming like him.

    Of course, being afflicted with a healthy case of vanity, I never imagined quietly disappearing the way Peter did. No. In my fantasy, I would announce my departure with a bombastic YouTube video worthy of a retiring televangelist, a defeated Roman emperor, and a recovering addict all rolled into one.

    The thumbnail would feature me staring solemnly into the camera beneath giant yellow letters:

    I AM LEAVING THE WATCH HOBBY.

    The video would begin with a dramatic pause.

    “God has told me to quit collecting watches.”

    Another pause.

    “I do not wish to quit collecting watches. Quite frankly, I would prefer to buy several more. But this is no longer a matter of my will. It is a matter of God’s will.”

    At this point I would lean toward the camera as if preparing to reveal the final secret of existence.

    “Today, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to discuss freedom. Not the freedom we celebrate, but the freedom we counterfeit. We tell ourselves that every indulgence is an act of self-expression. We call surrendering to our impulses freedom. We call compulsive consumption freedom. We call addiction freedom.”

    Then I would hold up a luxury watch.

    “This is not freedom.”

    A dramatic pause.

    “This is jewelry for Gollum.”

    I would continue.

    “We are undergoing a process I call Gollumification. We clutch our precious possessions with trembling fingers and then congratulate ourselves for being independent thinkers. We mistake obedience to our appetites for self-mastery. We chain ourselves to desires and then celebrate the length of the chain.”

    By this point the comments section would be in flames.

    Half the audience would accuse me of having a nervous breakdown. The other half would demand to know whether I was selling my collection.

    Meanwhile, Peter would be sitting somewhere in Dallas wearing his twenty-dollar Casio, helping his kid with homework, blissfully unaware that I had just uploaded a forty-five-minute philosophical monologue about the spiritual dangers of luxury watches.

    And that contrast is precisely why he won.

    I needed an audience to imagine my liberation.

    Peter simply liberated himself.

    Could I ever forgive myself for not possessing Peter’s strength? For lacking his discipline? For remaining vulnerable to the vanity and compulsions that he had managed to escape?

    I did not know.

    But I knew I had to try.

    In many ways, that is the reason for telling this story. Not to celebrate Peter as some flawless saint, nor to condemn myself as uniquely weak, but to confront a question that lurks beneath every addiction and every act of self-deception: What would it mean to become a little more free than I am now?

    Peter answered that question by quietly walking away.

    I didn’t hear from Peter for about a year, but one day he commented on my YouTube channel that he and his wife were visiting family in Los Angeles, and he suggested we meet for coffee at a local cafe. 

    The coffee shop possessed the warm, cultivated coziness that modern cafés seem to manufacture with scientific precision. Sunlight spilled through tall front windows and settled across weathered wooden tables polished smooth by years of elbows, laptops, and lingering conversations. The air carried a mingled perfume of freshly ground coffee beans, toasted pastries, steamed milk, and cinnamon. A low murmur of conversation drifted through the room, punctuated by the occasional hiss of the espresso machine and the clatter of ceramic cups meeting saucers.

    Peter sat at a corner table with his wife and two young children. I had expected to find him alone, but instead I found a scene of quiet domestic happiness. The children, perhaps two and four years old, sat absorbed in coloring books spread across the table. They worked with the intense concentration that only young children can summon for such endeavors. One would occasionally hold up a page for parental approval while the other remained determined to keep every crayon stroke inside the lines.

    Peter’s wife, Pam, an attractive redhead in her mid-thirties, watched over them with an easy smile, alternating between conversation and gentle supervision. Both she and Peter had their arms covered in an impressive collection of tattoos. Yet whatever rebellious or edgy associations I once attached to tattoos evaporated almost immediately. The two of them radiated warmth, kindness, and ease with one another. They possessed that unmistakable quality found in genuinely happy couples: a relaxed affection that requires no performance and no explanation. Watching them interact with their children, it became clear that the tattoos were merely decoration. The deeper story was written in their patience, their attentiveness, and the quiet contentment they shared as a family.

    Around them, the coffee shop’s usual cast of characters carried on with their rituals. Young professionals peered into glowing laptops. Students hunched over textbooks as though preparing for oral examinations before a medieval tribunal. A retired couple shared a muffin and the morning’s gossip. Yet the scene at Peter’s table seemed somehow untouched by the surrounding bustle. The children colored. The parents relaxed. The aroma of coffee drifted through the air. It was the sort of ordinary family moment that often passes unnoticed while it is happening but later returns in memory with surprising clarity and affection.

    Peter introduced me to his wife as his “YouTube hero.”

    I immediately objected.

    “I can’t be your hero,” I said. “You’re my hero.”

    After all, Peter had accomplished something I had not. He had escaped. He had walked away from the watch addiction, abandoned social media, and returned to the land of the living. While the rest of us were still debating the merits of sapphire crystals and limited editions, Peter had slipped out of the casino and gone home.

    Pam laughed.

    As a therapist, she had developed a dim view of social media. What had once seemed novel now struck her as tacky—a vast digital theater in which people carefully curated evidence that their lives were perpetually delightful. The result was a form of psychological vandalism. People scrolled through these highlight reels and concluded that everyone else was happier, prettier, wealthier, more successful, and more fulfilled than they were.

    “People think we’re perfect,” Pam said. “But we have our struggles.”

    The statement caught me off guard.

    From where I sat, they looked like the cover photo for a family counseling brochure. Two adorable children. A happy marriage. Meaningful careers. The sort of family that made you assume the universe had quietly decided to be generous.

    Then Pam explained that she suffered from clinical depression.

    There were periods, she said, when the depression became so severe that she could go months without being emotionally available to her husband or children. I found this difficult to reconcile with the woman sitting across from me. She appeared warm, attentive, thoughtful, and fully engaged. She looked like the last person who would disappear behind a wall of emotional darkness.

    Yet there she was describing a battle that remained invisible to everyone except those closest to her.

    The irony was striking. Here was a therapist who attended therapy herself. Here was a mental-health professional who required help from other mental-health professionals. After years of trial and error, she had finally found the proper balance of medication—enough to keep the depression from swallowing her whole but not so much that it dulled her emotions and left her disconnected from the people she loved.

    The conversation reminded me how deceptive appearances can be. Social media trains us to judge lives from the outside, but real life operates differently. Everyone is carrying something. Some burdens are simply hidden beneath better lighting, flattering camera angles, and carefully edited captions.

    The family sitting before me was not perfect.

    They were something far more impressive.

    They were real.

    I sat there taking in the scene before me. The children colored quietly. Peter and Pam exchanged the effortless glances of people who genuinely liked each other. The entire family radiated a warmth that was difficult to describe and impossible to fake. To my surprise, I felt myself getting emotional. I wanted so badly for them to be happy that my eyes began to sting.

    To distract myself, I pointed at the small Casio on Peter’s wrist.

    “Peter,” I asked, “how did you do it? How did you walk away from the watch addiction?”

    He didn’t hesitate.

    “It’s like this,” he said. “I think of addiction as a hot stove. You touch it and it burns like hell. After a while, you stop romanticizing the stove. You stop admiring the stove. You stop writing poems about the stove. You realize the stove can hurt you. Once you see it for what it is, it becomes easier to stay away.”

    I laughed.

    “But you still watch my YouTube channel. That’s like an alcoholic hanging around a liquor store. Every week some lost soul gets on camera, complains about his watch addiction, and then spends twenty minutes showing off shiny watches.”

    Peter laughed.

    Tall and slender, with short dark hair, sharp features, and glasses that gave him the appearance of a thoughtful professor, he seemed amused by the accusation.

    “I watch cooking competition shows,” he said. “I enjoy the craftsmanship, the attention to detail, the incredible food. But I know I’m not going to spend twelve hours making those dishes. It’s entertainment. Your videos are the same thing. I can enjoy watching them without feeling compelled to live that life.”

    “I’m a cautionary tale,” I said.

    That earned a laugh from both him and Pam.

    The two of them shared a piece of banana bread while looking at me with the kind of affection usually reserved for eccentric relatives.

    “You see me for what I am,” I continued. “But you don’t glorify my life. You understand there is no transcendence in watches.”

    Peter smiled.

    “There’s no transcendence,” he repeated.

    The sentence hung in the air for a moment.

    “You have your family,” I said. “You have real things to take care of.”

    Peter reached for Pam’s hand and squeezed it.

    Then he smiled at her.

    “I have no time for fantasies.”

    The simplicity of the statement struck me harder than any self-help book ever could.

    I found myself thinking about the three men from my high school days. I told Peter and Pam the entire story: the broken-down Volkswagen van, the Grateful Dead girls, the invitation to the Summer Solstice Festival, and the decades of regret that followed. I explained how the men had become consumed by what might have been, how they had transformed a brief encounter into a lost Eden, and how they had spent years undergoing the process I call Gollumification.

    As I spoke, I could see that Peter and Pam were enjoying the story.

    “What happened to them?” Pam finally asked.

    “Where are they now?” Peter added.

    I told them.

    They lived alone in modest apartments. They drifted from paycheck to paycheck. Their lives felt provisional, as though they were still waiting for the real story to begin. They possessed no grand purpose, only old grievances. Their conversations revolved around disappointments, regrets, and imagined alternate timelines in which everything had gone right.

    They had become caretakers of a fantasy.

    And that fantasy had slowly devoured them.

    As I spoke, I realized why the story continued to haunt me.

    It wasn’t because of the hippie girls.

    It wasn’t because of the missed opportunity.

    It was because I understood how easily their fate could become mine.

    Every day I struggle not to become one of those men. Every day I fight the temptation to believe that fulfillment lies somewhere else: in another watch, another achievement, another fantasy, another version of my life that never existed.

    Every day I struggle against Gollumification.

    And sitting there across from Peter and Pam, watching their children color pictures while they shared a piece of banana bread, I was struck by a thought so obvious that it felt profound.

    Perhaps transcendence had never been hiding in the Volkswagen van.

    Perhaps it had been sitting quietly at this coffee-shop table all along.

  • Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every day it feels as though I wake up to an arm-wrestling match with sin. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m an addict. What am I addicted to? That’s a stupid question. The better question is what am I not addicted to? In any event, that’s not the point of the story just yet. The point is that there are tens of millions of us. I know I’m not special. My life is defined by the constant challenge to overcome vice, corruption, and the habits that make it nearly impossible for me to forgive myself for being the wretched and loathsome individual that I am. 

    But forgive myself I must. Forgiveness is the only way I can mend my broken self. Forgiveness is a commitment to become someone different from the recalcitrant sinner that fills my life with regret. 

    Some say I am too hard on myself, but they are mistaken because once I understood that life is a continual test of character, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

    To be honest, however, there is something discouraging about viewing life as a daily battle against temptation. I cannot always defeat sin in an arm-wrestling match. Even on my best days, victory is incomplete. If I overcome temptation half the time, I still fail the other half. The prospect can feel exhausting. How can I forgive myself if I remain locked in a struggle I never fully win? How can I live with peace if temptation is always waiting and I never know whether I will emerge victorious?

    The answer may be that the object of forgiveness is not perfection but perseverance. The purpose of self-forgiveness is not to transform me into a flawless person. It is to transform me into a person who continues striving toward the good despite repeated failures. The measure of my character is not whether temptation disappears, but whether I continue returning to the fight. Forgiveness allows me to rise after every fall rather than define myself by the fall itself. The truly unforgivable life is not the life marked by failure. It is the life that abandons the struggle altogether.

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily efficient at encouraging surrender.

    You can retreat into a climate-controlled cocoon furnished with streaming services, snack foods, delivery apps, and algorithmically engineered distractions. You can spend years drifting from one dopamine hit to the next while the world applauds your consumption and politely asks if you would like another. Temptation no longer lurks in dark alleys. It arrives in bright packaging and offers free shipping.

    The world will not object if you quit the struggle. On the contrary, it will happily assist you. Fresh temptations will appear on your phone, your television, your computer, and eventually your doorstep. At some point, however, a terrible realization emerges. You are no longer directing your life. Your cravings are directing it for you.

    At that moment, you cease to be the protagonist of your own story. You become a supporting character in a drama written by your appetites, a bit player taking orders from every craving that wanders onto the stage. Perhaps you will grow numb to this reality and drift into a comfortable spiritual death, cushioned by convenience, entertained into submission, and surrounded by enough snacks and streaming content to dull any remaining sense of alarm. Or perhaps the discomfort will refuse to leave. Perhaps it will linger like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps it will haunt you until the life you have built begins to resemble a horror movie disguised as a luxury resort.

    That haunting may prove to be a gift. It may force you to confront the fact that you have been living in your own version of the Sunken Place, sinking ever deeper into passivity while your impulses seize control of the steering wheel. The tragedy is not that temptation exists. The tragedy is that you have mistaken indulgence for freedom and captivity for comfort. At some point, if you are fortunate, a voice will break through the fog. It will not whisper. It will not negotiate. It will issue a command as urgent as any ever spoken in a Jordan Peele horror film:

    Get out.