Cinemorphosis

Tag: health

  • Discretionary Use Principle

    Discretionary Use Principle

    The Discretionary Use Principle begins with a simple but demanding claim: tools are not inherently good or bad, but they become harmful when used without judgment, proportion, or purpose. Whether we are talking about food, technology, or media, the decisive factor is not purity but discretion—our ability to choose deliberately rather than reflexively. The principle rejects both absolutism and indulgence. It argues instead for a calibrated life, one that privileges nourishment over stimulation, depth over convenience, while still recognizing that modern life occasionally requires shortcuts. This framework is especially useful when thinking about analog versus digital living, where moralized categories often replace careful thinking.

    It is wise to carve out a large, non-negotiable block of each day in which machines are politely but firmly excluded—no screens glowing like anxious faces, no notifications tugging at your sleeve, no algorithm whispering what to want next. Go hike where the trail refuses to optimize itself. Lift weights in a garage with nothing but an AM radio crackling like a distant campfire. Write dreams and grievances by hand in a clothbound notebook while Bach or Coltrane keeps time. This is the analog world, and it feeds parts of the nervous system that silicon cannot reach. In this sense, analog living resembles whole foods: salmon that still tastes like water and muscle, almonds that require chewing, blueberries that stain your fingers. The more time you spend here, the less bloated your spirit becomes. Digital life, by contrast, often behaves like ultra-processed food: frictionless, hyper-palatable, engineered for compulsive return, and strangely unsatisfying no matter how much you consume.

    That analogy works—until it doesn’t. Not all analog living is virtuous, just as not all “whole foods” are benign when eaten without restraint. A steady diet of eggs, clotted cream, or beef heart can quietly undo you. Likewise, not all digital experience is junk. There are serious conversations on social platforms, lucid Substack essays, and educational YouTube channels that sharpen rather than dull attention. The mistake comes when we moralize categories instead of exercising judgment. Ultra-processed food is not a single moral villain; “processed” names a method, not a fate. Steel-cut oats, frozen berries, tofu, canned beans, and whole-grain bread are processed and still nutritionally intact. Even within the ultra-processed aisle, a minimally sweetened protein bar is not the same organism as a fluorescent snack cake designed to bypass satiety. The real danger is not processing itself but the familiar cartel of refined starches, added sugars, industrial fats, flavor engineering, and low nutritional payoff.

    Seen through the Discretionary Use Principle, the lesson is neither to flee the digital world nor to surrender to it. Eat whole foods most of the time. Live analog for long, uninterrupted stretches. But do not shun all processed foods or digital tools out of misplaced virtue. Use them when discretion, efficiency, and purpose demand it. Health—nutritional or psychological—is not preserved by purity tests. It is preserved by attentiveness, proportion, and the ongoing discipline of choosing nourishment over convenience, again and again, without pretending that the choice will ever be automatic.

  • Algovorous

    Algovorous

    Algovorous
    adjective

    Characterized by habitual consumption of algorithmically curated stimuli that prioritize engagement over nourishment. An algovorous person feeds continuously on feeds, prompts, and recommendations, mistaking stimulation for insight. Attention erodes, resilience weakens, and depth is displaced by endless, low-friction intake.

    ***

    You don’t know any other world because you were born inside the Attention Economy. There was no “before” for you—no baseline against which to compare the glow of screens to a quieter, unmonetized mental life. So let me tell you something grim about the system you’ve inherited: it runs on engagement at all costs. Not truth. Not wisdom. Not even pleasure in any deep sense. Just engagement. As Jaron Lanier warns in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now, the economy works best when it bypasses your higher faculties and plugs directly into the brain’s most primitive circuitry. This is not the part of you that reasons, imagines, or aspires. It’s the reptile brain—the swampy basement where jealousy, envy, FOMO, and schadenfreude slosh around, waiting to be poked with a stick. Stimulate that region long enough and you don’t become thoughtful or fulfilled. You become reactive, agitated, and strangely hungry for more of the same poison.

    The platforms know this. A successful YouTuber doesn’t need insight; he needs targets. Hence the booming genre of downfall porn: endless autopsies of other people’s collapses. Take bodybuilding YouTube, a carnival of oiled torsos and moral rot. Greg Doucette, with his two-and-a-half million subscribers, has perfected the form. His brand is not training wisdom so much as public execution. He thrives on predicting the imminent demise of rival influencers, especially Mike Israetel, whose Renaissance Periodization channel—approaching four million subscribers—shows no interest in collapsing on schedule. That hasn’t stopped Doucette from announcing the funeral. He does it in a tank top, veins bulging, traps flared, voice pitched to a squeaky fury, filleting his subjects like a caffeinated fishmonger. The performance is manic, theatrical, and wildly successful. Rage, it turns out, scales beautifully.

    I’m not a psychiatrist, but you don’t need a medical degree to recognize a toxic loop when you see one. Mental health professionals would likely agree: this is dopamine farming. The audience gets a chemical jolt from watching others stumble while doing nothing to improve their own lives. It’s adrenaline for the bored, envy with a subscription button. In the Attention Economy, toxicity isn’t a bug—it’s the feature. The viewer doesn’t flourish; the algorithm does. You sit there, immobilized, a butterfly pinned to corkboard entertainment, while someone else’s revenue graph climbs. That is the deal on offer: your attention in exchange for distraction from the harder work of becoming a person.

  • Breakfast Grains and Other Existential Threats As I Embark Upon a Two-Month Vacation

    Breakfast Grains and Other Existential Threats As I Embark Upon a Two-Month Vacation

    Today is my last day of class before I’m loosed into a two-month intermission—a stretch of time that must be handled like a late-arrival character in a film. This visitor has a history with me, knows my flaws, and demands that I greet him with something better than the usual slouch and shrug.

    Naturally, I’ll rehab the shoulder, write, and play the piano. Exercise will take care of itself; addiction is nothing if not reliable. Food, however, is the saboteur lurking in my blind spot. My emotional attachments to breakfast grains would make a Freudian blush: buckwheat groats, steel-cut oats, rolled oats, vanilla protein powder, cinnamon, berries, nuts. The whole wholesome choir. Trouble is, those virtuous bowls can turn caloric faster than a Hallmark plot twist.

    These cereals, if I’m honest, are less about hunger and more about the psychic umbilical cord. They point back to Mother, the Womb, or—in Phil Stutz’s terms—the Comfort Zone, the Warm Bath. Linger too long in that morning porridge spa, and the scale begins to stage an intervention. Add in my peculiar habit of finding solace in true-crime documentaries—an activity best described as athletic only in its couch commitment—and the trajectory is clear: weight gain, sloth, entropy.

    Fortunately, I do maintain countermeasures. Kettlebells and the Schwinn Airdyne stand ready like loyal foot soldiers. Reading, writing, and piano practice also help stave off the creeping rot. And yes, I’ll continue shaving, if only to avoid becoming the bearded oracle wandering the streets muttering about glycemic index.

    This two-month hiatus is really a dress rehearsal for retirement, which is now only eighteen months and three semesters away. It would be dishonest to pretend the prospect doesn’t rattle me. Maintaining purpose without the scaffolding of a teaching schedule is its own moral test. I’m fortunate to have reached this threshold, but fortune alone won’t keep me from misusing it. All I can do is stay awake, practice discipline, and ask my Maker for the humility to spend the limited time left with intention rather than drift.

  • Diary of a Shoulder That Tried to Kill Me

    Diary of a Shoulder That Tried to Kill Me

    I posted a YouTube video confessing that my torn rotator cuff cured me of my watch addiction. I braced for scolding: “How dare you upload non-watch content?” I imagined angry horology fanatics clutching diver bracelets and pearl-clutching over my betrayal. Instead, the algorithm delivered mercy. The view count was business as usual. The comments, however, were a grim roll call of the maimed.

    They arrived like pilgrims to a shrine of damaged shoulders. Chronic pain veterans, many of them familiar names from the watch trenches, sent dispatches: stalled healing timelines, depression so thick it sits on your chest, isometric training as penance, and farewell notes to heavy lifting. A few newcomers drifted in, summoned by the wretched deltoid-algorithms that sort humanity into suffering tribes.

    Every story hit the same grim notes: rage, dread, self-pity, and nihilism. There it was again, that quiet void whispering, “Nothing matters anymore.” Nihilism is simply the rotator cuff of the soul—an internal tear that immobilizes you far longer than the physical one.

    I haven’t officially become a miserablist. Not yet. I still haunt my garage gym like a stubborn ghost. Goblet squats, double-hand swings, straight-leg deadlifts. Russian twists. A triceps exercise called Skull-crushers—named because the kettlebell would slam into your forehead if you lose focus for half a second. I use a twenty-pounder. I’m vain, not suicidal. My push-ups are a sort of prayer: on my knees, arms tucked like a sphinx, rising slowly as if coaxing life back into my triceps.

    This morning I feel a good soreness in my triceps, the soreness that whispers, “You’re still in the game.”

    Yesterday, mid-workout, two revelations hit me like kettlebells to the temple. First, the smoking gun: the injury didn’t come from ordinary training. It came from that medieval torture move known as the “lawnmower row.” You lean over and yank the kettlebell skyward like you’re trying to start a balky Briggs & Stratton. I blocked that memory for weeks—like someone trying to forget a bad romance.

    Second, I realized the injury was gentler in its early days. I know this because I still did “around-the-worlds”: passing a 70-pound kettlebell around my body in clockwise and counterclockwise orbits like a makeshift solar system. Yesterday, with a much lighter bell, I could barely scrape a half-circle before my left shoulder screamed mutiny. I didn’t just injure myself—I worsened it with the zeal of a true believer.

    So this December  of 2025 becomes a tightrope: train enough to fend off atrophy and rigidity, but not so much that the rotator cuff tears in half like wet parchment. This is the gospel of injury: moderation, humility, and the patience of a monk.

    If I were naïve enough to trust the publishing industry, I might dream of spinning this into a 70,000-word memoir. A blockbuster chronicling not only the physical agony but the psychological descent into pain-induced existentialism. The masses would see themselves in it. I might become rich. I might become famous. And yet, between two futures—a healthy shoulder and obscurity, or torn rotator cuff and celebrity cripple memoirist—I’d take the intact tendon every time. I’d rather be an anonymous man in a quiet garage than a limping prophet of pain and book deals.

  • How a Torn Rotator Cuff Tried to Break Me

    How a Torn Rotator Cuff Tried to Break Me

    A rotator cuff injury is an affront to the human desire for control. You follow instructions and protocols to avoid injury and get stronger, but the pain reminds you that you can’t control the trajectory of recovery. Complete rest could be its own disaster. You’re choosing between two bad options.

    Not only do you lose control of your body in ways you never imagined—you can’t optimize.

    If you’re an exercise buff who struggles with weight and is waiting for affordable versions of GLP-1 drugs, as I am, the compromises forced by a shoulder injury are disconcerting.

    My workout on November 29, with kettlebells integrated with shoulder rehab exercises, was not encouraging. My shoulder felt worse afterward. When the Motrin wore off and I woke up at two in the morning, I could tell the training had aggravated it. I began thinking about giving up the Farmer’s Walk with a 45-pound kettlebell in each hand. Perhaps that was too much. My entire training life has been a process of eliminating one exercise after another.

    With my shoulder still aggravated from the workout, on November 30 I decided to try my Schwinn Airdyne again, but this time I wouldn’t use my left arm to row the lever. I would rest my hand on it and rely mostly on my legs. The problem was psychological. Using my arms fully, I had burned 600 calories in about 50 minutes—probably more, since the calorie monitor doesn’t calculate body weight, and several forums claim that an hour on an air bike burns around 1,000 calories. Not using my arms would reduce my output, which, in a gamified world, is demoralizing. Still, even without using my arms, the calorie burn would exceed that of walking the neighborhood for an hour while worrying about stray dogs and car fumes.

    Exactly a week before—on the day my Airdyne workout was followed by nerve pain shooting down my left arm—I burned 600 calories in 52 minutes, which comes to 11.54 calories per minute. A week later, three days after seeing the doctor, I tried the Airdyne again with a significant disadvantage: I couldn’t row with my left hand. During the session, I protected my shoulder with three strategies. I rested my hand on the lever with no pushing or pulling; I gripped my towel with the left hand while my right arm did the rowing; or I grabbed the towel draped over my neck with both hands. Not surprisingly, I didn’t burn as many calories as the week before. I burned 601 in 57 minutes, which was 10.54 calories per minute. My calorie-burn efficiency was down 9.5 percent.

    Despite the significant drop in efficiency, the experiment was half successful: I still reached my goal of 600 calories.

    The real test remained: an hour after the workout, how would my shoulder feel?

    I showered, ate lunch, did some mild isometrics for my shoulder, and did not experience the shooting nerve pain I had a week earlier, so perhaps I was in the clear with the Airdyne provided I don’t row with my injured side.

    I would take this minor victory. The last three months I felt insulted by the difficulty in wrapping a towel around my waist, taking off a sweat-soaked tank top, putting on a belt, closing the driver-side car door, reaching for something in the back of the fridge, and using my left hand to soap my right armpit. Being able to burn 600 calories on the Airdyne was a sweet morsel of consolation. 

    In this war with a rotator cuff injury, I was willing to take whatever tiny victories I could get. 

    A small expression of gratitude might help my morose disposition and the self-pity that I had indulged in over the last three months. If I ever were to write and publish a book on my ordeal, I would probably title it Shoulder, Interrupted: How a Torn Rotator Cuff Tried to Break Me. 

  • Hope in the Form of a Lab Coat

    Hope in the Form of a Lab Coat

    For three months I slogged through shoulder pain armed with nothing but a self-diagnosis and stubborn pride. I refused to see a doctor. Why submit myself to some exhausted clinician who’d never lifted a kettlebell in his life and would prescribe the usual pablum—ice, rest, and advice I could have gotten from the comments section of Wikipedia?

    Then something happened that forced a reckoning. To compensate for the kettlebell exile, I doubled down on the Schwinn Airdyne—hour-long sessions of fan-bike misery that combine pedaling with lever rowing. I felt no pain… until a week before Thanksgiving. After a brutally satisfying session, a nerve fired down my arm like a live wire. The message was unmistakable: I had graduated from “irritation” to “we’re-squeezing-your-spinal-cord-for-fun.” Something was pinched, something was furious, and it was no longer optional.

    I made a YouTube video to announce the cosmic irony: my watch addiction was cured, but the cure was a torn rotator cuff. The floodgates opened. Dozens of comments poured in from people who had endured surgeries, magnets, injections, cortisone cocktails, or endless physical therapy. One old friend emailed: ten years of chronic pain, zero recovery, restricted motion for life. The road, it turns out, is paved with hope and ends in a ditch.

    It was clear: I didn’t need more voices, I needed data. I called Kaiser and booked an appointment. Someone would see me the day before Thanksgiving.

    That afternoon I met Dr. Cherukuri, a woman in her late thirties with the energy of someone who actually likes her profession. She examined my shoulder, commented that the bulge was visible even through my T-shirt, pressed around the joint, put me through a series of movements, and diagnosed left rotator cuff syndrome with left biceps tendinopathy. She ordered X-rays and an ultrasound and, pending results, believed three months of rehab could put me back together.

    She put me on Motrin three times a day for two weeks to bring the inflammation down—enough to make rehab possible. She also agreed I should continue kettlebell work for muscle maintenance. A doctor who understands the importance of preserving muscle mass? I nearly wept. The catch was predictable: no chest or shoulder presses, no biceps curls. My hypertrophy would be confined to legs, glutes, traps—maybe some trickle-down gains from rehab exercises if the gods were kind.

    She handed me a list of movements, which I combined with ones I learned from YouTube: cow-cat yoga pose, broomstick flexion, wall push-ups, wall flexion, forearm planks, plank shoulder taps, narrow-position knee push-ups, light dumbbell rotations, and more. Anything that required me to lift my arms overhead or behind me felt like sticking my shoulder into a hornet nest.

    The mandate was fifteen minutes of rehab every day. On kettlebell days, I’d slip the movements between lifts three days a week. The other four days were rehabilitation only—an entire week built around mending the wounded joint.

    Psychologically, the appointment was a relief. First, the diagnosis proved I wasn’t a lunatic or some melodramatic malingerer. Second, I needed structure. I needed a plan, a weapon—something to push against instead of drifting through pain, anxiety, and the unknowable. When I’m saddled with a problem, I don’t need platitudes; I need targets and artillery. Seeing the doctor was the moment I picked up a rifle instead of a white flag.

    But I was still blind. I had no idea how severe the tear was, whether rehab would work, whether I could heal without surgery, or how to navigate the distress of shoulder pain so sharp that turning my steering wheel wrong or sliding a backpack strap across my arm sent shockwaves that lingered for minutes.

    Going to a doctor was a necessary first step. But I still knew nothing. All I understood was how much I still needed to know if I hoped to climb out of this hole. The thirst for clarity, for diagnostic certainty, became my new obsession—one that bulldozed my watch addiction.

    My YouTube followers were devastated.
    “We need you back, bro. We need you to commiserate with us about the watch madness.”

    God bless them. They needed me to get better—not only for me, but for them, so we could suffer together in peace.

  • A Cure Worse Than the Disease

    A Cure Worse Than the Disease

    Be careful what you wish for. I spent twenty years begging the universe to cure my watch obsession, one that caused me to blow several thousand dollars a year on diver watches I’d unbox for my YouTube followers, flip, rebuy, and then sell again—a watch-obsessive’s fever dream. For twenty years, I tried to get off the hamster wheel of crazy, but the powers of social media and diver-watch eye candy kept pulling me back in.

    I finally got my cure: a torn rotator cuff. In late August of 2025, I remember lying on my back and doing single-arm, 50-pound kettlebell presses. I didn’t feel anything severe, just a tightness in my left shoulder.

    The next day, my left shoulder felt like a disgruntled rental car—everything squeaked, nothing moved smoothly, and I dreaded putting my arm through a sleeve.

    I knew what a torn rotator cuff felt like. I’d had them in both shoulders three times in my life. The first was when I was a thirteen-year-old Olympic weightlifter. On a rainy day in PE, the teacher, Mr. Bishop, had us play “volleyball” with a giant 72-inch Earth Ball, and when I tried to hit it with my right arm, the arm went backward and I was out of weightlifting for nine months.

    In the mid-nineties and early two-thousands, it happened twice more during heavy bench presses. Both occurrences took about nine months to heal.

    So I knew what I was dealing with. Usually, I’d need nine months.

    Of course, I had to modify my workouts into physical therapy sessions where I stare at resistance bands as if they’re punishment devices from a Stalin-era prison camp.

    The pain seemed to be more intense after workouts. I thought of ditching them altogether, but I read that no activity could lead to muscular atrophy and render the shoulder frozen and immobile. I wasn’t sure, though. How big and deep was the tear? Was my age—now 64—a factor working against me? Why did the rehab exercises performed by medical doctors on YouTube make my shoulder feel worse?

    These questions took up all my mental bandwidth, rendering my watch obsession nil. Wanting a healthy shoulder, I would gladly trade every diver, every limited edition, every bracelet and waffle strap for a shoulder that didn’t scream like a violin in a garbage disposal. So yes—my addiction was cured. Unfortunately, the cure was worse than the disease.

  • Anatomy of a Rotator Cuff Meltdown

    Anatomy of a Rotator Cuff Meltdown

    A torn rotator cuff doesn’t just hurt—it becomes the project manager of your mood swings and mental health. Every everyday gesture gets interrogated like a crime scene: How high can I raise this arm? Which angle is the assassin? When will the orthopedic surgeon enter stage left and demand a sacrificial tendon? You find yourself mentally policing every muscle fiber in the chest, shoulders, and biceps—formerly your prized territories, now embargoed like Cold War no-man’s lands. And then comes the flashback reel: Was it the single-arm kettlebell press? The swing? The curl? Maybe it wasn’t a heroic injury at all, just the slow, bureaucratic decay of connective tissue over time—aging’s signature insult.

    The constant vigilance is corrosive. Shoulder injuries have support groups because sufferers eventually learn the catastrophic secret: it’s not the rotator cuff that breaks first—it’s the psyche. The shoulder, like the back and knees, is a psychological choke point. When it fails, it takes your mood, your sleep, and your sense of invincibility hostage. Physical rehab becomes inseparable from emotional rehab. The body limps, and the mind limps with it, muttering under its breath.

    It’s been three months and I’m starting to resent the job of being my own orthopedic babysitter. I’m grateful I can still sleep without feeling like someone is driving a railroad spike through my scapula. I have enough forward and lateral mobility to get dressed without a prayer circle. I can still train legs, glutes, and abs like a functioning primate. But the lesson is brutal: a torn rotator cuff grants no mercy, no sanctuary from overthinking, and no reprieve from the quieter forms of psychological sabotage.

    A torn rotator cuff is no country for sniveling, navel-gazing men. The challenge now is to un-snivel, un-navel-gaze, and rebuild myself without the luxury of denial.

  • How a Tetanus Shot Turned Me Into Hamlet

    How a Tetanus Shot Turned Me Into Hamlet

    Chronic injuries make cowards of us all. The moment something snaps, pinches, or throbs, we become amateur radiologists, WebMD addicts, and midnight correspondents to our favorite AI oracle. Two days ago, I was diagnosed with left rotator cuff syndrome and left biceps tendinopathy. The ultrasound is five weeks away, a kind of orthopedic oracle reading, to determine whether the gods demand surgery. I followed the physical therapist’s rehab routine like a monk honoring scripture, only to feel soreness not just in the injured shoulder, but the good one as well. Suddenly, I was a man with two defective meat hooks, staring down the possibility of losing the ability to open a jar or button a shirt. Too little rehab, my shoulder would ossify into frozen stone; too much rehab, the tendons would “retract,” that satanic verb whispered in dark orthopedic circles—also leading to surgery. The tightrope was killing me. I imagined myself as a doomed invalid, a useless patriarch who had to ask his teenage daughters to help him put on socks.

    This morning I drove to the Honda dealership, handed over the keys, and walked home for my “workout,” earbuds piping KCRW’s Left, Right & Center into my ears. As I trudged past the familiar storefronts on Hawthorne Boulevard and spotted that the Chinese restaurant had been replaced by an IHOP, a revelation struck: the soreness in my right shoulder wasn’t from rehab. It was from the tetanus shot I’d gotten the same day as my diagnosis. The universe wasn’t collapsing—just my sense of proportion. In an instant I went from doomed cripple to idiot hypochondriac, humbled by the absurdity of my own catastrophizing.

    To add insult to ego, I’d been treating this like a heroic ordeal. At Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law mentioned his own rotator cuff—65% torn, surgery, sling, brutal rehab—and he endured it without turning it into a Greek tragedy. Meanwhile, I recorded a video describing my plight and dozens of fellow sufferers flooded the comments with horror stories of two-year recoveries, cortisone injections, and pain that made sleep a myth. So now I’m trying to regain perspective, to tighten my armor and “gird up thy loins like a man,” as the biblical thunderbolt commands.

    Easier said than done.

  • How to Shut Up a Yacht Critic: Feed Them Into Oblivion

    How to Shut Up a Yacht Critic: Feed Them Into Oblivion


    My wife and I have been watching the current season of Below Deck Mediterranean and have been impressed with the consistent food preparation of the eccentric chef Josh Bingham. He stormed off the boat when one of the charter guests, Carlos, lectured Josh on his inferior vegan fare. Too much starch, not enough creativity, not enough this, not enough that. One of the excruciating pleasures of this show is watching people whose expectations run so high that they become obnoxious. They spent so much money, they feel entitled to push the chef and other crew members to extremes in order to justify the price of a premium yacht adventure. 

    Josh’s food on this charter looked disappointing, a melange of mediocrity. The meals had no identity. He was trying to please too many palates. 

    One thing occurred to me: There are always a few vegans who charter these yachts. Some are more fake than others. They want the vegan halo but not the vegan austerity. In other words, they want rich, decadent meals, just as inviting as steak and lobster. They crave butter-rich sauces, glazed proteins, and seductive textures, only delivered via tofu and oat milk so their consciences remain stainless.

    Therefore, if I were Josh or any chef on one of these luxury yachts, I would have an emergency toolkit of go-to rich and decadent vegan meals. One that immediately comes to mind would be Thai peanut Satay with fried tofu and white rice. Serve it with Sichuan green beans and broccoli lacquered in sesame oil, give them some fresh sesame rolls dipped in olive oil and garlic, and that would surely shut them up and induce them into a long, satisfying nap. 

    If I were a chef on this show, I would want to create food so luxurious, decadent, and soothing, it would induce the charters into a deep sleep and thereby allow me and my fellow crew members to take a well-deserved break.