Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • Escape from Margaritaville

    Escape from Margaritaville

    I recently dreamed I was in a public park. The grass was cartoonishly green, a kind of chlorophyll utopia, and families sprawled across it as if they’d been carefully arranged for a Chamber of Commerce brochure. My suitcase sat at my side. I felt lost. Like a misplaced airport refugee, I looked up.

    Looming above the park was a billboard—a monstrosity of sun-bleached cheer—featuring a leathery couple in their seventies. They were bronzed like overcooked turkeys, grinning wide, basking in the eternal glow of some Florida condo where “Margaritaville” played on an endless loop.

    The “Margaritaville” billboard—two geriatric smiles frozen in sunlit rapture—reminded me that I’d been meaning to watch Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages, that gargantuan playground for the aged about forty-five miles from Orlando.

    Deep down, I knew I needed to watch this documentary. I was born in Florida, and as my retirement crept closer and closer, I felt an urge to return home. I love the smell of mangos and coconuts at night. Nostalgia is a potent drug. It could cause me to sell my home and buy a condo in Orlando.

    So I watched the documentary. It was the opposite of a travel infomercial. It was a horror movie. It started with synchronized water ballet to Neil Sedaka and margarita-fueled Parrothead parties. The Villages are marketed as heaven with a tiki umbrella on top, but for anyone with taste, patience, or shame, the place looks more like an early-onset hell: a tropical gulag where you pay people to micromanage your leisure until leisure itself becomes a program of infantilization.

    The film’s most disturbing subject is Dennis Dean—an eighty-one-year-old small-time grifter wanted for a DUI in California, living out of a blue van on the edge of The Villages and scheming his way into the bed of a rich widow. He prowls bingo halls and church socials with the persistence of a con man who has practiced charm until it has fossilized. When police finally close in, Dennis slips back into Nancy’s apartment. In a scene that sticks with you, he lies on her bed while she calls from the kitchen: “Lunch!” He finds his new girlfriend, whom he’s leeching off, annoying. He doesn’t move. He stares at the ceiling fan as if it were a slow, merciless clock, and you can see, plain as day, that comfort can become a prison for someone whose last liberty was earned through deceit. As I watched Dennis staring at the ceiling fan, it hit me: He’s in purgatory.

    The director never sneers at his subjects. Pain and longing are shown with a kind of blunt respect. But the portrait of The Villages itself isn’t charitable. It’s a retirement complex caught in mid-regression, a carnival mirror reflecting geriatrics clinging to perpetual adolescence until the spectacle curdles into something queasy and cringe-worthy. The managed fun—shuffleboard courts, themed parties, and scheduled joy—becomes a machine that demands you perform your own amusement. It’s not freedom. It’s occupation by leisure.

    And yes, I realized, sitting there with my pride intact and my Florida fantasies suddenly damp, that watching this must have been my wife’s brilliant little psy-ops operation. For a year, I’d been nagging her about moving the family to Florida—stilt houses, salt air, a hammock with my name on it. She was skeptical about moving to Florida. She mentioned hurricanes and unavailable flood insurance, for starters. Florida also had a reputation for government corruption, contractor fraud, and credit card theft. When her credit card was used fraudulently and she called her bank, the customer service agent asked, “You weren’t in Florida recently, were you?”

    In fact, she was.

    Florida was not paradise. It was a crime syndicate.

    She did not discourage me from watching Some Kind of Heaven. She didn’t have to. The documentary demolished my fantasy of returning to my home state within the first thirty seconds, with its water ballet and sedated margaritas. My obsession evaporated.

    But only for a minute.

    After a quick snack, I was back at my computer looking at luxury condos in Henderson, Nevada.

  • What If Perseverance Is the Disease?

    What If Perseverance Is the Disease?

    In the 1970s, I wanted to become a Major League Baseball player. There was one problem: I sucked.

    I couldn’t hit a curveball. I couldn’t catch up to a high fastball. At third base, I could field a grounder and then launch the throw twenty feet over the first baseman’s head, turning a routine out into an emergency evacuation of the opposing dugout. By thirteen, the scouting reports were conclusive. I quit.

    Next came bodybuilding. I actually showed some promise. In 1981, I took runner-up in Mr. Teenage San Francisco. But that was about as far as the genetics were going to carry me. I could build a respectable mid-level physique, but I wasn’t going to become Sergio Oliva or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those men appeared to have been assembled in a laboratory using replacement parts from livestock. I quit bodybuilding that same year.

    Then I wanted to become a pianist and composer. Unfortunately, reading music and writing compositions on staff paper struck my brain with roughly the same clarity as vector and stochastic calculus. Another dream quietly left the building.

    Next came the Smooth Bachelor.

    This was my plan to become a smooth, smarmy bachelor who knew exactly what to say to women. My life would be full of hot tubs, champagne, water beds, and lava lamps. Unfortunately, I possessed approximately the same romantic smoothness as Richard Lewis after five cups of espresso. The Smooth Bachelor era was brief and catastrophic.

    Then came the big one.

    I would become a novelist.

    This ambition survived longer because I could actually write. I had a quirky, neurotic personality. I could make people laugh in conversation. Surely these qualities meant that somewhere inside me lived a novelist waiting to emerge.

    They didn’t.

    My novels were usually constructed around premises sturdy enough to support a Saturday Night Live sketch. I would then stretch the premise across two hundred pages and wonder why the resulting manuscript felt less like a novel than a short story being held against its will.

    They were reliably unreadable.

    Yet this was the dream I had the greatest difficulty quitting because becoming a novelist wasn’t merely another ambition. I had turned it into redemption.

    The published novel would retroactively make sense of everything. All the neurosis, misanthropy, social awkwardness, failed ambitions, compulsions, humiliations, and self-sabotage would be transformed into literary material. I wouldn’t merely have suffered from my peculiarities. I would have monetized them.

    Even better, people would admire me.

    This was the part I was reluctant to admit.

    Publication had become my Holy Grail of affirmation and vindication. Somewhere in my imagination, people were rising to their feet:

    “Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff McMahon has done it! The failed baseball player, failed bodybuilder, failed pianist, failed composer, and failed Hot Tub Stud has finally fulfilled his destiny. He is a novelist!”

    Applause.

    Someone brings me a chilled beverage.

    Someone else produces a generous slice of carrot cake.

    “Make sure this man feels loved. Make sure he feels special. He has suffered enough.”

    Once I understood that fantasy, perseverance became a much more complicated virtue.

    We are constantly told that perseverance reveals character. Keep going. Never surrender. Follow your dream. Winners never quit.

    But what if perseverance isn’t always strength?

    What if sometimes it is fear wearing a motivational T-shirt?

    A person can keep pursuing a goal because the goal remains worthwhile and attainable. But he can also keep pursuing it because quitting threatens some deeper fantasy about who he needs to become. He isn’t persevering because the work is flourishing. He’s persevering because he has assigned the achievement an impossible psychological task: Make me worthy. Vindicate my life. Make people admire me. Make me feel loved.

    Under those conditions, perseverance stops looking noble.

    It starts looking pathological.

    That is why Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting feels less like another book on my reading list than an intervention. For someone of my temperament, quitting isn’t necessarily evidence that I lack character. Sometimes quitting may require more character than continuing.

    I’ve spent enough of my life chasing various Holy Grails of vindication.

    At this point, I’d like to know which quests are worth finishing—and which ones deserve to be abandoned in the woods.

  • The Salvation Hustle

    The Salvation Hustle

    You reach a point in life when everything feels desperate. Losing weight will save you from dying in your bed at night from sleep apnea. Writing a publishable book or viral essay will save you from being both irrelevant and useless. Making a viral video will do the same. Embarking on a successful podcast will keep you mentally alive and “part of the conversation.” Starting your own restaurant featuring your grandmother’s brisket with gravy made from a secret family recipe will put you on the map and change what it means to enjoy good brisket. Become a yoga instructor and open your own studio to help people reinvent themselves in ways no one could have imagined. You’re special, dammit, and you’re going to prove it. You just need to work harder. So you must do this. You must do that. Make more sacrifices. Get on the true path. Never take your eyes off the prize.

    But a voice breaks through your insanity and tells you that you’re on a fool’s errand. You’re trying to save your life. Deep down, you know you are losing it.

    That same voice says: Let go. Surrender to the things you can’t control. Don’t live out other people’s fantasies of success. Don’t think fame and popularity will make you whole. Don’t confuse fame and popularity with love. It’s not love. It’s desperation.

    So you retire your delusions. You realize that all the time and energy invested in your various mirages were killing you. You were making a bad investment. Take stock. Assess the damage. You become certain that it’s time to abandon your many chimeras and start from scratch. Use your time and energy on projects rooted in sanity, projects that might actually bear fruit.

    The problem is, you don’t have a clue what these new projects will be. You’ve lived in a fever dream for years, perhaps decades. Where do you begin?

    Such is the existential challenge presented in Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting: The Surprise Benefits of Opting Out. She observes that too many of us spend enormous amounts of desperate energy auditioning for the role of superstar—the venerated, successful person who sets records and raises the bar in whatever field we pursue, believing that this prized status will make us whole and happy. We create unrealistic expectations and often head down the wrong path. Then we become so exhausted from pursuing our dreams that we no longer have enough distance to assess whether those dreams are even viable.

    Crouse uses the metaphor of a duck to describe this desperate period of her life: “gliding along on the surface while my legs churned furiously below.” That brief description perfectly captures the life of quiet desperation described by Henry David Thoreau. Always auditioning for some desirable role, we glide along on the surface while below our legs churn furiously in pursuit of some fruitless endeavor.

    Crouse argues that we should take stock of all that furious churning and, when necessary, put an end to it. It’s called quitting. Contrary to society’s condemnation of “the quitter” as someone who lacks perseverance, the real character flaw may be the refusal to quit: cowardice. You need the courage to interrogate the results of your endeavors and ask whether those results merit perseverance. In some cases, quitting can be a good thing. Crouse offers an “alternative definition” of quitter from the Middle French: “to set free.”

    All her life, Crouse confesses, she has been a high achiever, fiercely competitive, always pushing herself to the limit and loath to interrupt her path to glory. When an injury threatened her athletic training, she’d forego the doctor and take an Advil instead. Late-night runs were aided by GPS. When her grandmother died, she didn’t tell her team for fear that it would compromise their performance.

    Looking back at the ways she pushed and punished herself, Crouse questions the wisdom of these often ruthless efforts. Her self-interrogation became serious after she had two children and realized she didn’t want to pass on her “darker types of perseverance” to them. Self-abuse is one thing. Teaching your children the habits of self-abuse crosses the line.

    When the forces of ambition are no longer part of your flourishing but have become a dark pact with fear and desperation, it may be time to abandon ship. It may be time to move on.

  • The Waiting List for Napkin Folders

    The Waiting List for Napkin Folders

    One of the most valuable ideas in Steve Lopez’s retirement memoir Independence Day is that a meditation on retirement eventually becomes a meditation on something much larger: What does it mean to remain fully alive?

    Lopez keeps circling back to an answer that complicates the conventional retirement fantasy. Being fully alive is intimately connected to being useful to someone other than yourself. We don’t flourish merely because we possess freedom, comfort, entertainment, or an empty calendar. We need some evidence that our presence in the world matters.

    Call this the Useful-Self Principle: Human beings have a deep psychological need to exercise their abilities in ways that benefit others. Our inherent worth does not depend upon our productivity, but our sense of vitality often depends upon knowing that something is better because we showed up.

    Lopez considers this idea through the extraordinary example of Hedda Bolgar, a psychologist who continued working until she was 102. She told him, “What I grew up with was, if there’s an unmet need in this world, you try to meet it, and if there’s a problem, you try to solve it.”

    There is an entire philosophy of life packed into those two sentences.

    Bolgar didn’t regard the world as a giant resort constructed for her personal gratification. She looked outward. Where is the need? Where is the problem? What can I do about it?

    Seen this way, retirement is a fairly narrow administrative concept. You retire from a job. You leave the classroom, hospital, office, factory, courtroom, newsroom, or whatever institution employed you for thirty or forty years. You surrender the title, paycheck, meetings, deadlines, performance evaluations, and passwords you can never remember.

    But you don’t retire from the human condition.

    The deeper obligation remains: escape the gravitational pull of narcissistic indifference, discover what you’re capable of doing, and connect those abilities to something the world needs.

    Bolgar died at 103. Her longevity is remarkable, but the number isn’t the most interesting thing about her life. More important was the fact that she remained engaged with other people almost until the end. Her usefulness gave her an identity that survived the conventional expiration date of a career. She had somewhere to direct herself.

    I think about my grandfather.

    He had been politically active throughout his life. He marched with longshoremen in San Pedro in defense of union rights and participated in similar forms of activism. He had spent decades believing that citizenship required more than sitting in a chair and complaining about the government.

    Then, at eighty, he fell.

    His body never completely recovered. Eventually he entered a senior-care home in Palos Verdes. I visited him at least once a week until he died at eighty-five.

    What tormented him wasn’t merely physical decline.

    He hated feeling useless.

    He looked around at the other residents and recognized the same despair in them. Their meals arrived. Their medications arrived. Their laundry was done. People cleaned their rooms, changed their sheets, pushed their wheelchairs, organized their activities, and watched over them.

    Everything was being done for them.

    That sounds like care, and of course it was. But there was another side to dependency that became increasingly visible to my grandfather: almost nothing was being asked of them.

    Then he discovered a job.

    The cafeteria needed residents to fold napkins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

    Napkins.

    Of all the grand human enterprises—building bridges, teaching children, performing surgery, defending workers, composing symphonies—we are talking about folding pieces of cloth before somebody eats meatloaf.

    And there was a waiting list.

    That waiting list has stayed with me because it reveals the Useful-Self Principle in its most concentrated form. Those residents weren’t desperate for napkins. They were desperate to be needed.

    Give me something to do.

    Let somebody depend upon me.

    Let there be one small corner of this institution that functions differently because I am here.

    When opportunities for usefulness become scarce, even folding a napkin can acquire dignity.

    I remember another moment in that cafeteria. A woman in a wheelchair who appeared to have dementia saw me and suddenly began shouting. She wanted me to rescue her. Take me out of here. Get me away from this godforsaken place.

    I looked at her and tried to reassure her. I told her everything would be okay.

    She knew I was lying.

    She was trapped, and some part of her understood it. What frightened her wasn’t simply the building. Her world had contracted. Other people determined where she lived, when she ate, where she went, and what happened next. She had become dependent upon strangers for the ordinary machinery of existence.

    I don’t know what remained intact inside her mind, and I don’t want to romanticize dementia or pretend that usefulness could have rescued her from neurological decline. But the memory has always represented something larger to me: the terror of becoming entirely acted upon rather than retaining the ability to act upon the world.

    That distinction becomes increasingly important as we age.

    The Useful-Self Principle should never be confused with the cruel proposition that human beings earn their worth through productivity. A bedridden person has no less value than a surgeon. A person with dementia does not become less human because she can no longer contribute as she once did.

    Human worth is unconditional.

    But the experience of usefulness is something different. It is one of the ways we feel our connection to other people. We teach. We repair. We cook. We listen. We volunteer. We write. We mentor. We drive someone to an appointment. We watch a grandchild. We call a lonely friend. We fold the napkins.

    This is why usefulness should not be treated as the broccoli of life—the dreary obligation we endure before finally earning the cheesecake of retirement.

    Usefulness is not the broccoli.

    It is part of the feast.

    The great opportunity of retirement isn’t merely that nobody tells you what to do anymore. It is that you can finally ask a better question:

    What needs doing that I am still capable of doing?

    Hedda Bolgar kept answering that question until she was 102.

    My grandfather understood its importance when he watched elderly people compete for the privilege of folding napkins.

    Perhaps that is one of retirement’s most important lessons. We spend decades dreaming about the day when nobody will need anything from us.

    Then the day arrives.

    And we discover how desperately we want to be needed.

  • No One Wants Your Beautifully Written Blog Post

    No One Wants Your Beautifully Written Blog Post

    As I have continued writing my blog and adapting some of those pieces into video essays for YouTube, I have begun to understand that writing and video are not simply two delivery systems for the same material. They make different demands on an idea, attract radically different audiences, and increasingly occupy different positions in a culture saturated with algorithmic and AI-generated language.

    The first lesson is what I call the Medium Stress Test. An idea that works perfectly well as a blog post may die the moment I imagine myself sitting in front of a camera talking about it for eight minutes. Writing gives an idea certain protections. A reader can stop, reread a sentence, skim a paragraph, or admire an interesting digression. Video is less forgiving. The subject needs momentum. It needs stakes. It needs a reason for someone not to click on a video of a bear breaking into a Subaru.

    This makes the video essay a useful test of my own material. Before I record, I find myself asking harder questions. Is there really an idea here? Is there tension? Does the argument develop? Is there something at the end that wasn’t obvious at the beginning? The camera is a ruthless editor. It stares back at me without encouragement and asks the question every writer would prefer to avoid: Is this actually interesting?

    That pressure is good for me. Video forces me to compress, sharpen, and dramatize ideas that might have survived comfortably on the page in a more leisurely form. In that sense, making videos does not compete with my writing. It interrogates it.

    The second lesson is harder for someone who has spent most of his life teaching writing to accept: people are far more willing to watch than read.

    A blog post that receives twenty or thirty visits over the course of a month can become a video that receives more than a thousand views in twenty-four hours. These numbers are not subtle. They do not require advanced statistical analysis. The audience has voted with its eyeballs.

    I could respond by lamenting the death of reading, shaking my fist at TikTok, and retreating into my study with a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. That might be emotionally satisfying, but it would not alter the numbers. If I want my ideas to travel beyond a small circle of dedicated readers, I have to reckon with the culture that exists rather than the one I would prefer to exist.

    But I don’t think the migration from prose to video can be explained entirely by shrinking attention spans. Something has also happened to written language itself.

    Call it Linguistic Flattening.

    We now inhabit an environment in which algorithms reward familiar forms of expression while generative AI can manufacture competent prose in industrial quantities. Certain words, rhythms, transitions, metaphors, and argumentative structures circulate so widely that they begin to lose their fingerprints. The writing may be polished. It may be grammatically impeccable. It may even be clever. Yet increasingly it produces the eerie sensation that you’ve read it before.

    Social media accelerates the process. A successful phrase gets repeated, imitated, parodied, optimized, and reproduced until language that once seemed fresh acquires the smoothness of a pebble handled by ten thousand people. Generative AI adds another machine to this process. It absorbs rhetorical patterns and reproduces variations of them at enormous scale. What begins as voice becomes mannerism; mannerism becomes formula; formula becomes cliché.

    This does not mean great writing will disappear. A writer such as Helen Lewis can still attract a large readership because readers recognize a particular intelligence behind the prose. But even a writer of her stature can reach vastly more people by appearing on a popular podcast that subsequently circulates on YouTube. The contemporary audience increasingly wants not merely the argument but the person making the argument.

    This leads to the third lesson, and perhaps the most important one for me: the Embodied-Fingerprint Principle.

    When I write a blog post, readers encounter my language. When I make a video, they encounter me.

    My voice enters the argument. So do my cadence, facial expressions, pauses, gestures, irritations, hesitations, and improvisations. I may begin with a script, but I inevitably depart from it. A sentence occurs to me in the moment. I emphasize a word differently than I expected. I become amused by my own example. Something happens between the prepared language and the person speaking it.

    That something is difficult to reproduce.

    Generative AI can imitate prose styles. Algorithms can identify successful formats. Other writers can borrow rhetorical devices. But the peculiar combination of a person’s face, voice, timing, vocabulary, temperament, physical presence, and spontaneous thought constitutes something closer to an individual fingerprint.

    This may become increasingly important as artificial intelligence makes polished language cheap. For most of human history, a well-written essay provided reasonably strong evidence that someone had sat alone and struggled to produce it. That assumption is disappearing. A perfectly competent thousand-word essay can now materialize in seconds.

    Video changes the evidentiary equation. There is a human being sitting in front of you, inhabiting the language.

    The Embodied-Fingerprint Principle therefore suggests that the apparent limitation of video is actually its advantage. Ideas cannot be separated cleanly from the imperfect human creature delivering them. The body becomes part of the authorship.

    This realization changes the way I think about my YouTube videos. I originally regarded them as adaptations of my writing, a secondary format for people who would rather watch something than read it. I now think that hierarchy may be wrong. The video essay is its own form, and it allows me to do something the blog cannot fully accomplish: combine written language with embodied presence.

    The Medium Stress Test makes the ideas stronger. Linguistic Flattening makes distinctive written language harder to preserve. The Embodied-Fingerprint Principle gives me a way to resist that flattening by putting the person back inside the prose.

    So I will continue writing. I need writing to discover what I think.

    But increasingly, I may need video to prove that someone is still there doing the thinking.

  • Humanity Falls from Too Much Ambition

    Humanity Falls from Too Much Ambition

    Last night I dreamed that several friends and I entered a peculiar store whose employees were apparently required to be geniuses. Nothing was sold. You went there to discuss history with exceptionally intelligent people, which strikes me as the sort of retail concept that would survive approximately eleven minutes in the American marketplace.

    We began discussing 9/11. But because dreams have no obligation to respect architecture, history, or basic proportionality, the Twin Towers had been replaced by twelve yoga blocks. I began stacking them, one on top of another, until I had constructed a precarious foam monument to civilization.

    I studied my creation and announced, with the confidence available only to prophets and sleeping people, “Humanity falls from too much ambition.”

    Everyone seemed impressed.

    Apparently, I had solved history with yoga equipment.

    The conversation turned melancholy. We commiserated over tragedy and began exchanging memories. I told everyone about having lived in Africa. This was technically true: I lived in Nairobi when I was young. But Dream Me found those actual memories insufficiently interesting. Instead, I began describing African countries that did not exist, places I had visited only in other dreams several years earlier.

    Nobody challenged me.

    Quite the opposite. My African past conferred enormous prestige. The room seemed to interpret my stories as evidence that I possessed some rare combination of worldliness, political sophistication, moral seriousness, and international cachet. I was no longer merely a man who had lived in Nairobi as a boy. I had become Africa Man, seasoned traveler of nonexistent republics, bearer of mysterious geopolitical wisdom.

    Among those impressed was the podcaster Josh Szeps.

    Szeps decided that a man of my obvious stature could not simply be allowed to return home. He invited me to stay at his mansion-apartment in New York.

    The dream version of Josh Szeps had achieved success on a scale that would embarrass a Russian oligarch. His apartment building had an enormous green elevator—not merely painted green but glowing with some supernatural emerald radiance. Stepping inside filled me with childish exhilaration. This was not an elevator designed to transport residents between floors. This was an elevator announcing that you had ascended into another caste.

    When the doors opened, we entered an immense atrium where Szeps was entertaining the global elect. Diplomats circulated among the guests. Relatives of former presidents lounged around an enormous swimming pool. Beautiful people floated in the water with the effortless tans of people who apparently had assistants responsible for ultraviolet exposure.

    I prepared to join them.

    Then I removed my shirt.

    I looked down.

    My pale torso confronted me with brutal democratic clarity.

    Everyone else seemed bronzed, sleek, and organically adapted to wealth. I looked like a man who had accidentally wandered out of Costco carrying a rotisserie chicken.

    Suddenly I wasn’t sure I belonged in the pool.

    Yet what struck me most strongly wasn’t embarrassment. It was desire.

    I looked around at the atrium, the pool, the diplomats, the presidential relatives, the magical elevator, the impossible dimensions of the apartment, and discovered something about myself I might have preferred not to know.

    I loved it.

    “This is really for me,” I thought.

    The realization was almost obscene.

    I had apparently spent decades cultivating the identity of a reasonably skeptical intellectual while concealing somewhere inside myself a minor Bourbon monarch waiting for suitable accommodations.

    But this wasn’t ordinary wealth. Dreams don’t bother with granite countertops and favorable mortgage rates. The opulence had been elevated into myth. Everything glowed. Wealth had become majesty. Privilege had become transcendence. I wasn’t merely visiting a luxurious apartment. I had been admitted into Olympus.

    And admission was the crucial part.

    The dream wasn’t really about money. It was about tribal membership.

    My stories about Africa—an Africa partly real and partly manufactured by my unconscious—had functioned as my entrance credential. I possessed the correct experiences. I understood the correct things. I had traveled through the correct worlds. Therefore, the tribe had recognized me.

    Come in.

    You’re one of us.

    Ride the green elevator.

    Meet the diplomats.

    Get in the pool.

    For a few magnificent minutes, my existence had been externally certified. I was sophisticated. Interesting. Cosmopolitan. Important. People wanted me there. I belonged among the beautiful and consequential.

    And apparently my unconscious wasn’t content with mere belonging. It threw in staggering wealth as part of the benefits package.

    I got moral prestige, intellectual prestige, social prestige, friendship, acceptance, a New York mansion, international dignitaries, a swimming pool, and a magical green elevator.

    My unconscious has extremely reasonable expectations.

    The source of this extravaganza was considerably less mysterious than the dream itself. I had fallen asleep listening to Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps. The episode was “Just Josh: The Unlearned Lesson of 9/11.” His voice apparently slipped past the guards at the entrance to my sleeping brain, commandeered the production department, and spent the night directing a surreal pageant about 9/11, Africa, ambition, wealth, status, tribalism, and my insufficiently tanned stomach.

    I’ve had these dreams before. A podcast continues playing while I sleep, and its host crosses the membrane between audio and consciousness. Suddenly we are friends. We travel together. We undertake adventures. The voice coming through my earbud becomes a character inhabiting an elaborate world assembled from memories, anxieties, vanity, and whatever psychological contraband happens to be lying around.

    This time, however, the dream exposed something wonderfully embarrassing.

    I began the evening listening to a serious discussion about the lessons of 9/11.

    By morning, my unconscious had transformed it into a fantasy in which my profound connection to imaginary African nations earned me admission to an international aristocracy.

    Humanity falls from too much ambition, I had solemnly declared while stacking yoga blocks.

    Then I got on the magic elevator because apparently I wanted the penthouse.

  • Father Time Would Like to See Your Receipts

    Father Time Would Like to See Your Receipts

    Retirement changes your relationship with time because retirement changes your proximity to death.

    For most of your life, mortality resembles a dark castle somewhere beyond the horizon. You know it exists. You have seen illustrations. You have read stories about people who unfortunately arrived there. But the castle remains pleasantly obscured behind enormous banks of cumulus clouds, and you have been granted the psychological luxury of assuming that several mountain ranges, a river, and perhaps a small European principality stand between you and its front gate.

    You have time.

    At thirty-five, this belief requires almost no effort. At forty-five, you may occasionally notice one of the turrets poking through the clouds, particularly when a parent becomes ill or an old friend dies. Then work intervenes. There are classes to teach, children to raise, bills to pay, meetings to attend, groceries to buy. The clouds roll back in.

    Then you retire.

    Or, more precisely, you press Submit on the retirement application.

    The clouds vanish.

    There is the castle.

    Good God.

    It’s much closer than advertised.

    This is the Castle-Proximity Principle: the closer you move toward the visible end of life, the harder it becomes to experience time as an inexhaustible resource. The castle has not suddenly moved toward you. You have simply reached the point in the journey where atmospheric conditions no longer conceal its location.

    Retirement is particularly effective at clearing the weather because work has served for decades as a kind of chronological camouflage. As long as another semester waits in the future, you remain inside the machinery of ordinary adult life. There will be another fall schedule, another spring semester, another opening-day meeting, another batch of freshman essays, another argument about Student Learning Outcomes. The repetition itself creates the illusion of permanence.

    Then you announce your final semester.

    Suddenly every event acquires the word last.

    Last fall semester.

    Last opening-day meeting.

    Last final exam.

    Last student who submits six pages of AI-generated oatmeal and looks wounded when you ask whether he participated in its manufacture.

    The castle emerges from the mist.

    And standing at the entrance is someone you recognize from childhood illustrations.

    Father Time.

    Unfortunately, he isn’t carrying a birthday cake.

    He is holding a ledger.

    This is the Kronos Audit: the late-life reckoning in which finite time forces you to examine not merely how long you have lived but what you have done with the life you were given.

    The audit is comprehensive.

    Father Time is apparently unconcerned with privacy.

    He wants the public records and the private ones. The work you completed and the work you avoided. The people you helped and the people you neglected. The books you wrote and the books you merely announced you were going to write. The hours spent exercising, creating, loving, teaching, reading, listening, and paying attention.

    He also wants the screen-time report.

    This is where things become uncomfortable.

    Psychiatrist Phil Stutz gives a name to the force that makes the Kronos Audit such an unpleasant prospect. He calls it Part X. Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art, calls a similar force Resistance. Different terminology, same infernal sales representative.

    Part X does not generally appear in your living room with horns and sulfurous breath. That would make him too easy to identify. He appears as convenience.

    Skip the workout.

    Start the writing tomorrow.

    Don’t make the telephone call.

    Stay angry.

    Buy something.

    Watch another episode.

    Scroll for twenty minutes.

    Have another snack.

    You deserve it.

    Part X specializes in transforming the squandered life into a series of perfectly reasonable afternoons.

    Resistance operates much the same way. It rarely commands you to abandon your life’s work forever. That would sound suspicious. It merely suggests that you postpone it until tomorrow, preferably after you have checked your email, researched a laptop, watched several YouTube reviews of the laptop, compared processors, investigated whether 64GB of RAM might provide useful “future-proofing,” and discovered that somehow it is lunchtime.

    No single offense looks particularly damning.

    That is the genius of the operation.

    A wasted life is rarely wasted dramatically. You don’t wake one morning and announce, “Beginning today, I shall squander my remaining years on trivia, consumerism, resentment, and short-term gratification.”

    You lose the life ten minutes at a time.

    That is why the Kronos Audit becomes more severe as the castle approaches. At twenty-five, wasting an afternoon seems almost mathematically insignificant. You possess what feels like an industrial supply of afternoons. At sixty-five, the inventory has become visible.

    You begin counting.

    How many healthy years?

    How many trips?

    How many books?

    How many summers with your family?

    How many mornings when your mind remains sufficiently sharp to write something worth reading?

    How many miles can your legs still carry you?

    The questions can become morbid if you allow them to. The objective is not to turn retirement into a death vigil in which you sit beside an hourglass watching grains of sand fall while whispering, “There goes another one.”

    The point is accountability.

    Stutz argues that Part X seduces us with the fantasy of exemption. Other people may have to obey the laws governing effort, discipline, sacrifice, consequences, aging, and time, but somehow we imagine that special accommodations have been made for us. Tomorrow will always be available. Our bodies will tolerate neglect. Relationships will survive inattention. Talent will remain indefinitely on standby until we finally decide to use it.

    Father Time has reviewed the exemption request.

    Denied.

    This is the moral force behind the Kronos Audit. Your life is not merely a possession you were issued for private amusement. Time creates responsibility precisely because it is finite. If you possess capacities for love, thought, creation, service, friendship, physical effort, curiosity, and attention, repeatedly surrendering those capacities to trivial gratification eventually becomes more than a scheduling problem.

    It becomes a way of disappearing before you are dead.

    And perhaps that is what makes Part X genuinely frightening. Death will eventually take your life regardless of what you do. Part X offers to take it earlier, in installments.

    An hour here.

    An afternoon there.

    A year spent waiting to begin.

    The castle will eventually receive all of us. No exercise program, spiritual practice, writing regimen, retirement strategy, or Mediterranean diet has yet defeated that particular zoning ordinance.

    But there is a considerable difference between arriving at the castle after having lived and arriving after having spent decades hiding from life in increasingly comfortable rooms.

    Which brings us, inevitably, to the eggshell-white Honda Accord Hybrid.

    Father Time opens the ledger.

    “Forty years of teaching.”

    “Yes.”

    “Writing?”

    “Every morning.”

    “Family?”

    “My center.”

    “Exercise?”

    “I suffer voluntarily on an Airdyne.”

    He nods approvingly.

    Then he turns the page.

    “Explain the new Honda.”

    “I needed better gas mileage.”

    “How far do you drive?”

    “Well, Costco is two miles away.”

    Father Time looks over his glasses.

    I clear my throat.

    “It gets almost fifty miles per gallon.”

    Silence.

    Somewhere behind me, Part X smiles.

  • The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    Popular psychology has taken Carl Jung’s sprawling ideas about psychological development and compressed them into a tidy Four Stages of Life paradigm. The scheme is probably too neat to be Jung, but it is useful nonetheless, especially if you are approaching retirement and wondering whether the final decades of life will produce wisdom or merely better lumbar support.

    In the first stage, adolescence, you are supposedly the Athlete. You are acutely conscious of your body, appearance, appetites, and sexual power. Self-awareness remains under construction. You occupy the center of the universe and assume everyone else has been assigned supporting roles. You fantasize about dominance, dislike being challenged, and naturally prefer the company of people who recognize your magnificence. If invited to someone else’s birthday party, some primitive corner of your psyche wonders why your name isn’t on the cake. “Athlete” seems far too charitable. I prefer Imperial Narcissist.

    Then adulthood throws you into competition. You acquire a career, make money, take action, climb hierarchies, accumulate trophies, and cultivate a reputation as “a force to be reckoned with.” Hugh Hefner supplied the operating philosophy: Work hard, play hard. You want money, sexual success, professional status, and that most intoxicating commodity of all—respect. The popular Jungian formulation calls this figure the Warrior. I prefer Status Gladiator. He experiences adulthood as an arena with an invisible scoreboard hanging over it, and he checks the standings constantly to make sure his name hasn’t slipped.

    If life goes reasonably well, however, the trophies eventually lose some of their phosphorescence. The expensive car becomes a car. The promotion becomes another job with more email. Sexual conquest begins to resemble an exhausting administrative project. You start wondering whether the purpose of existence might involve something beyond accumulating evidence that you have defeated other people. The Jungian term attributed to this stage is Statesman. I prefer The Man Tired of the Bullshit. He has not necessarily become a saint. He has simply developed enough pattern recognition to notice that status, ambition, possessions, and applause make lousy gods.

    Finally comes the stage usually called Spirit. Here you stop looking for transcendence in a Mercedes and begin looking for the genuine article: love, generosity, service, connection, perhaps God. “Spirit,” however, feels too vaporous for me. My mind goes instead to the famous 1971 “Hilltop” Coca-Cola commercial, with people from around the world standing on an Italian hillside holding bottles of Coke and singing about peace and harmony. They practically glow. This is Radiant Man. He has undergone a metamorphosis. He no longer needs to dominate the room because he is no longer terrified of disappearing inside it. His strength has become generosity. He beams outward.

    The graceful trajectory of aging, then, is to move through these stages rather than establish permanent residency in one of them. Shed the old skins. Outgrow the Imperial Narcissist. Survive the Status Gladiator. Become tired of the bullshit. With luck, arrive at retirement age radiating enough benevolence that other people do not instinctively flee when they see you approaching.

    Unfortunately, modern culture has constructed an enormous industrial complex devoted to preventing this development. It does not particularly want Radiant Man. Radiant Man is bad for business. He already has enough. He doesn’t need another trophy, another grievance, another sexual conquest, another luxury object, another algorithm telling him how important he is. Consumer culture has much greater use for the Imperial Narcissist: the adolescent who refuses to vacate adolescence and possesses enough adult money to finance the occupation.

    Such a man spends his life constructing what I call an Adolescent Fortress. Every purchase, possession, sycophant, grievance narrative, algorithm, and carefully selected media source becomes another brick in the wall protecting him from reality. Eventually he suffers from Adolescent Fortress Syndrome: the lifelong construction of a psychological kingdom into which adult correction cannot penetrate. From inside, the fortress looks like sovereignty. From outside, it looks like a sixty-five-year-old man wearing the costume of a king while hiding from anyone willing to tell him the truth.

    Jon Ronson introduces an astonishing specimen of this condition in The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men: Christopher Mark, owner of a Gothic castle in Woodstock, Connecticut. Mark, approaching his mid-sixties, inhabits a medieval fantasy world of elaborate clothing, exotic animals, darkened rooms, and women who address him as “My lord.” His guard dog is named Cerberus, after the multiheaded hound guarding the gates of Hades. Camels wander the grounds. The drapes remain closed. Hugh Hefner is his North Star. The Playboy Mansion has been reincarnated as a Gothic fortress, as if Dracula had purchased a subscription to Maxim.

    Ronson first visits the castle after his son encounters the place under the pretense of attending a party. What they discover is considerably darker: a wealthy man in his sixties attempting to convert an adolescent harem fantasy into a reality television show called 101 Princesses. The number itself contains the pathology. Why one princess when you can have 101? And why 101 when, if the experiment somehow succeeded, the appetite would inevitably demand 1,001?

    Thomas Aquinas had a word for this: concupiscence, the disordered appetite that grows hungrier as you feed it. The promise is satisfaction; the mechanism guarantees dissatisfaction. You keep adding women, possessions, attention, status, spectacle, and power, expecting the next acquisition to fill the void. Instead, the void develops an appetite of its own. Psychiatrist Phil Stutz describes a related condition as living in the “lower channel,” where existence contracts around immediate gratification rather than purpose. Whatever terminology you prefer, the destination looks much the same: entropy. Or, to borrow Ronson’s word, unraveling.

    What makes Mark particularly useful to someone contemplating retirement is his conspicuous absence of guardrails. An heir to a fortune, he never had to build his adult life around employment. No boss expected him at nine. No colleagues depended on him. No students awaited him. No HR department required him to sit through sexual-harassment training. No professional code periodically forced his ego to accommodate the irritating existence of other people. What sounds like magnificent freedom begins to resemble the Guardrail Deficit: the absence of work, schedules, bosses, deadlines, colleagues, and professional expectations that periodically force us into contact with reality.

    We complain bitterly about these constraints while quietly benefiting from them. Work makes us shower. Deadlines make us finish things. Colleagues make us compromise. Students make us explain ourselves. Institutions routinely irritate us, but irritation is sometimes the friction that prevents psychological free fall. Remove enough guardrails and the Imperial Narcissist can drive wherever his appetites point him.

    Mark therefore embodies what I call the Never-Employed Retiree Paradox. He has reached retirement age with nothing to retire from. The ordinary retiree loses the external structures of employment at sixty-five. Mark never acquired them. In that sense, he has been retired since adolescence, with no workplace, career, professional standards, or institutional obligations separating youthful fantasy from late-life reality. He possesses radical freedom and uses it to dress like medieval royalty while planning a reality show about acquiring 101 princesses. Apparently freedom without maturation does not produce Marcus Aurelius. Sometimes it produces The Bachelor with camels.

    This brings me uncomfortably close to home.

    Most men cannot afford Gothic castles, exotic animals, and harems, but we have developed a more economical version of the Adolescent Fortress: the Man Cave. We carve out little kingdoms where reality agrees to leave us alone for a while. There is the football den with the enormous television, recliner, pizza, nachos, and master remote. On Married… with Children, Peggy Bundy understands that her husband Al’s deepest erotic fantasy is not another woman but a remote capable of controlling every television in the house. Absolute power, apparently, requires batteries.

    Watch enthusiasts have their own castles. I have spent embarrassing quantities of time watching YouTube videos in which grown men gather around expensive watches, conduct ceremonial unboxings, discuss “wrist presence,” and deliver solemn State of the Collection addresses as though NATO were awaiting their conclusions. The watch community becomes a tiny sovereign ecosystem with its own language, hierarchies, rituals, grails, and moat. The outside world may be collapsing, but inside the fortress we urgently need to determine whether forty-four millimeters is too large for a seven-and-a-quarter-inch wrist.

    And then there is my couch.

    Because the ordinary cushions proved inadequate for my 230-pound retired-linebacker chassis, I fortified the couch with a four-inch self-inflating camping mattress, stacked pillows, and a throw blanket. My daughters call it Dad’s Homeless Encampment. In the late afternoon, it exerts a gravitational pull. I lie there watching true-crime documentaries while eating red grapes, hummus, and Wheat Thins, observing homicide detectives restore order to a universe temporarily disrupted by murder.

    The documentaries are disturbing, but they are also strangely comforting. Chaos occurs. Detectives arrive. Evidence accumulates. The suspect lies. The detective catches the lie. Handcuffs appear. Order is restored. The narrative offers precisely what real life refuses to provide: control. Al Bundy has his master remote. The watch collector has his gleaming collection. The football fan has his nacho bunker. Christopher Mark has his Gothic castle and Cerberus. I have my padded couch and a homicide detective explaining why the suspect’s timeline makes no sense.

    None of these refuges is inherently pathological. Everyone needs respite. The danger begins when respite becomes habitat—when the place where you occasionally retreat from life becomes the place from which you conduct it. The fortress gets more comfortable. The moat gets wider. The drawbridge comes up more often. Eventually, freedom from irritation becomes freedom from challenge, freedom from obligation, freedom from other people, and finally freedom from reality itself.

    That is what makes Christopher Mark more than an eccentric character in someone else’s book. For a man approaching retirement, he is a warning. Employment has spent forty years dragging me out of the house, making demands upon me, exposing me to people I did not choose, and preventing my padded couch from becoming the geographical center of my existence. Soon those guardrails will disappear.

    So when late afternoon arrives and I lower myself onto four inches of premium camping foam, arrange my pillows, pull the blanket across my legs, open the Wheat Thins, and watch a homicide detective interrogate a suspect while Cerberus sleeps safely several states away, I do not feel myself approaching the incandescence of Radiant Man.

    I feel like I may already be retired.

  • The Last Man Requires Four Inches of Extra Cushioning

    The Last Man Requires Four Inches of Extra Cushioning

    Before reading Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men, I decided I should conduct an inventory of my own unraveling. I was sixty-four years and ten months old, retirement was approaching, and I had already developed habits suggesting that the institution employing me had been providing more adult supervision than I cared to admit.

    For one thing, I had gone Full Hawaii. Over the previous few years, I had transplanted the dress code of Maui, Kauai, and Oahu into suburban Torrance. Regardless of weather, I wandered around the house and made Costco runs in flip-flops, gray gym shorts, and tank tops advertising Aloha, North Shore, Lahaina, Kona, Kaanapali, Koloa Surf Co., or Maui, usually accompanied by a sunset, surfer, or sea turtle. My wife and daughters mocked my year-round resort wear, but I defended it on physiological grounds. I operated at a higher temperature than ordinary humans, I explained, and my armpits required open air and unrestricted mobility. Confining them inside sleeves could produce claustrophobia, perhaps madness. I was not dressing like a tourist. I was managing a medical condition.

    I had succumbed to what I call the Recreational Domestication Principle: the gradual transplantation of vacation behavior into ordinary domestic life. Habits once reserved for a week at a Hawaiian resort migrate home and establish permanent residency. The flip-flops remain. The tank top remains. The relaxed posture remains. Eventually, Tuesday morning in Torrance begins to resemble day four at the Kaanapali Beach Hotel, except there is no ocean and you are taking out the recycling.

    My daughters had identified another stage of my decline. When watching true-crime documentaries, I sprawled across the living-room couch with my hands clasped behind my head and my legs extended while studying police interrogations with the concentration of a homicide detective. Unfortunately, the couch did not provide sufficient cushioning for my 230-pound, retired-linebacker chassis, so I purchased a four-inch self-inflating sleeping pad and placed it on top. Add stacked pillows and a throw blanket, and I had created a small but highly functional residential compound. My daughters christened it “Dad’s homeless encampment.”

    There I would lie in my Hawaiian tank top, magnificently supported, watching a detective dismantle a murder suspect’s alibi while becoming increasingly convinced that Nietzsche had predicted me.

    I was becoming the Last Man.

    Nietzsche’s Last Man abandons difficult aspirations in favor of comfort, security, consumption, and the avoidance of unpleasantness. I had developed my own household expression for this condition: “This is not a premium experience.” If one of my daughters erupted into shrieking laughter while I was eating my wife’s banana-nut French toast, I would look across the table and say, “Child, please stop that.”

    “Why?”

    “Because your screaming is interfering with my premium experience.”

    The joke was funny because it contained evidence.

    But as I prepared to enter Ronson’s world of unraveling men, I realized that becoming the Last Man was not a binary condition. You did not go to bed as Marcus Aurelius and awaken the next morning demanding lumbar support and climate control. There were stages. There were gradations. There was a Last-Man Gradient.

    You moved along it slowly. First, you preferred comfort. Perfectly reasonable. Then you began arranging your environment to eliminate minor discomforts. Still reasonable. Eventually, however, inconvenience itself started feeling like an affront. The couch required augmentation. The pits required liberation. Breakfast required appropriate noise levels. Life was increasingly evaluated according to the standards of a luxury resort: Was I comfortable? Was I entertained? Was the temperature correct? Was anyone interfering with my experience?

    This was what made Ronson’s book feel less like recreational reading than reconnaissance. I was about to retire from an institution that, for all its meetings, protocols, deadlines, passwords, administrators, and Student Learning Outcomes, had forced me to remain engaged with a world that did not exist for my comfort. I had to get dressed. I had to leave the house. I had to teach people. I had to solve problems. I had to accommodate other human beings.

    Soon, many of those constraints would disappear.

    And there I would be: a free man in a Hawaiian tank top, lying atop four inches of premium inflatable cushioning, remote control in hand, with nobody from Human Resources coming to save me.

    Retirement was not the beginning of the Last-Man Gradient.

    It was the level I was afraid might unlock the rest of the game.

  • The Metamorphosis Watch

    The Metamorphosis Watch

    If you are a watch enthusiast, sooner or later you will encounter your Metamorphosis Watch.

    You will not find it through careful deliberation. You cannot summon it with spreadsheets, YouTube reviews, wrist shots, specification charts, or forty-seven browser tabs comparing lug-to-lug measurements. It simply appears, unannounced, like a baby delivered by a mythical stork.

    Price is irrelevant. Your Metamorphosis Watch might cost $80 or $15,000. I know a man whose watch addiction was effectively subdued by the $90 G-Shock Mudman G9000—the so-called “Mission Impossible” Mudman. Another man found salvation in a $5,000 Tudor Black Bay 58. Horological enlightenment, apparently, has no MSRP.

    By “cure,” I don’t mean the watch noise disappears completely. Your Metamorphosis Watch is not a GLP-1. New releases will still catch your eye. You will still inspect photographs, read reviews, and occasionally experience the familiar neurological disturbance produced by the phrase “limited edition.”

    But the hierarchy has changed.

    You have found your leading man.

    Everything else in the watch box has become supporting cast.

    The Metamorphosis Watch does something peculiar when you strap it on. You become Billy Batson shouting “Shazam!” The transformation is instantaneous. Dead weight falls away. Extraneous worries lose their jurisdiction. You have somewhere to go, something to accomplish, perhaps an innocent civilian to rescue from a burning building.

    My Metamorphosis Watch arrived seven months ago.

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

    I had no idea what I had done.

    The Frogman became my daily mascot in much the same way the “Monkee pants” I wore in first grade allowed me to channel my childhood hero, Micky Dolenz. Apparently, the sixty-year interval between these two events produced less psychological development than one might hope.

    I strap on the Frogman and something happens.

    Deep beneath the Earth’s crust, I awaken.

    I explode upward through magma and volcanic rock, blast through the surface of the planet, and emerge in a cloud of smoke and pulverized granite. Somewhere nearby, an automobile has lost control and is hurtling toward pedestrians at a crowded intersection.

    I spring into action.

    Seconds before impact, I seize the vehicle, lift it above my head, and carry it several blocks to the nearest police station.

    The crowd erupts.

    I climb onto the roof of the disabled automobile. My Frogman gleams on my wrist. I survey the citizens below me with the grave composure of a superhero who has once again restored civilization to its proper equilibrium.

    “I am Frogman,” I announce.

    “Chaos has been subdued.”

    The crowd prepares to applaud.

    Too late.

    I am already gone.

    Somewhere, another mission awaits.