In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère’s sly, genre-mutating novel, the narrator—an aging screenwriter with a history in French television and a grudge against his own irrelevance—ponders the cultural staying power of zombie stories. Zombies, after all, are the walking dead: viral, contagious, unsettlingly lifelike in their mindless hunger. While consulting on a TV show saturated with post-apocalyptic gore, Carrère’s narrator growls at younger writers, quits in a fog of midlife disdain, and watches from the sidelines as the series becomes a global phenomenon. Bitter and brooding, he studies the success with the sulky fascination of someone who just broke up with their ex and can’t stop checking their Instagram. “I stopped writing fiction long ago,” he mutters, “but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it.”
Carrère then executes a narrative judo move, flipping from zombie melodrama to the Apostle Paul in 50 A.D., an itinerant zealot-turned-mutation vector. Paul, in Carrère’s retelling, doesn’t just preach the resurrection of a crucified prophet—he unleashes a viral narrative that spreads through Corinth like spiritual malware. Paul doesn’t need a production team or a streaming platform. He has a loom, a message, and an uncanny ability to hijack human consciousness. As Carrère writes, belief in the resurrection becomes “the portent of something enormous, a mutation of humanity, both radical and invisible.” Early Christians, in this telling, are infected—mutants hidden in plain sight, walking among neighbors with a secret that rewires their sense of reality.
Carrère’s language—mutation, contagion, infection—is no accident. He draws a direct line from Paul’s religious storytelling to the psychological mechanics behind marketing, ideology, and modern myth-making. Yuval Noah Harari makes a similar argument in Sapiens: civilization is held together not by laws or gods, but by collective fictions powerful enough to convince strangers to cooperate. Religion, like branding, spreads through the bloodstream of the culture until it feels like fact. Carrère takes this one step further: religion doesn’t just organize civilization—it haunts it, like a beautiful, persistent hallucination that refuses to die.
Consider Madison Avenue’s version of salvation. I recall a 1990s Mercedes-Benz commercial where a man, lost and panicked in a shadowy forest, emerges onto a mountaintop. Above him, the stars align into the Mercedes logo. Transcendence is achieved. No need for Damascus Road—just a lease and decent credit. The brand has become a kind of secular gospel. No one cares that Mercedes flunks reliability scores; the emblem still gleams like a divine seal. In this light, Carrère’s Paul isn’t just a religious visionary—he’s the original brand strategist. His resurrection story had better legs than the competition. It caught on. It mutated. It endured. And Carrère, the self-professed unbeliever, is too entranced—and too honest—to dismiss it. Carrere’s novel The Kingdom is the story of a narrator marveling at how the world got infected by a story so powerful, it continues to raise the dead.
As I consider Cicero’s call for self-restraint in Tusculan Disputations, my thoughts return to a story that’s haunted me for over twenty years—Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” It is, in essence, the tragic fable of a Maudlin Man, told with surgical clarity and Chekhovian cruelty.
His name is Nicholai Ivanich, and he’s not merely pathetic—he’s morally revolting. He marries an aging, unattractive woman for her wealth and waits with predator patience for her to die. Once she obliges, he buys himself a country farmhouse ringed with gooseberry bushes, retreats from the world, and crowns himself a minor deity among the local peasants by handing out cheap liquor like some portly, provincial Dionysus.
Chekhov doesn’t give us Nicholai’s voice. He gives us Ivan, the disgusted brother, who sees this man for what he is: a swollen, self-satisfied corpse in waiting. Ivan calls Nicholai’s farmhouse dream a “definite disorder”—not a goal, but a fixation, a fever dream dressed up as a life plan. For Ivan, his brother’s pastoral retreat is less Arcadia and more open-casket viewing. “He looked old, stout, flabby,” Ivan observes. “His cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like a pig.”
That image sticks: Nicholai, the human piglet, grinning over his plate of gooseberries, believing he’s achieved bliss when in truth he’s just decaying in comfort.
And then comes the moment that seals it—Nicholai’s nightly ritual: he’s brought a plate of gooseberries from his estate, and upon seeing them, he literally weeps with joy. “He looked at them in silence, laughed with joy, and could not speak for excitement.” He is consumed by the performance of happiness. It’s not the berries he loves—it’s what they symbolize. In his mind, they are proof that his life is complete.
But it’s all delusion. Nicholai isn’t fulfilled—he’s embalmed in maudlin sentimentality, drunk on nostalgia for something that never really existed. His joy is cosmetic. He’s not flourishing. He’s fermenting.
And this, I confess, reminds me of myself—and my fellow watch addicts.
We, too, have our gooseberries. Ours just happen to tick.
We post videos of our “grail watches” and glow with reverence as we hold them up to the camera like relics from a sacred shrine. We give breathless soliloquies about our “perfect” collections, our “ultimate” configurations. We praise bezels and dial textures the way Nicholai praises his berries—with trembling hands and watery eyes. And like Nicholai, we’re not convincing anyone but ourselves.
Because deep down, we know: the drama is maudlin. The joy is hollow. The entire pageantry is just a way to distract from the torment our hobby brings us. We spend hours obsessing, comparing, flipping, tweaking, always convinced that this next watch will bring balance and peace, only to find ourselves more anxious than before.
We are men who weep over gooseberries. And worse—we make YouTube thumbnails about them.
If we were honest, we’d admit that one decent, mid-priced watch would offer more peace than any “holy grail” ever could. But that would mean giving up the theater. The drama. The illusion that our fixations have meaning. And that, for the Maudlin Man, is the hardest loss of all.
One of the bitter ironies of the watch addict is that he seeks a “manly watch” with “bold wrist presence,” yet much of his behavior as it pertains to his hobby is similar to that of a thirteen-year-old girl crying effusively as she leafs through her journals and scrapbooks in which she chronicles her “lost loves” and tries to mend her “broken heart” with the excessive self-regard one would expect from a thirteen-year-old. However, the watch addict, a man somewhere between his thirties and sixties, perhaps even older, is going down the same rabbit hole of melodrama as the thirteen-year-old. When he does a watch unboxing on his YouTube channel and trembles with tears running down his cheeks with anticipation, or does a YouTube rant about the regrets for all the prized watches that he “let get away” and left him with irreparable heartbreak, or stands before his YouTube watchers like a five-star-general as he announces with maniacal self-regard his “plans” to create his “ultimate collection,” or agonizes over the black and orange strap on his diver and goes back and forth over and over because he “loves both but can’t decide,” he probably doesn’t know that he is committing an act of colossal folly: He is embodying the Maudlin Man.
To understand the Maudlin Man and the folly he partakes in, we are well advised to consult Jeffrey Rosen’s book The Pursuit of Happiness. Rosen discovers that major American thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin draw their wisdom from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, which state that the soul must be “tranquilized by restraint and consistency.” In such a state, the soul “neither pines away in distress, nor is broken down by fear, nor consumed with a thirst of longing in pursuit of some ambition, nor maudlin in the exuberance of meaningless eagerness–he is the wise man of whom we are in quest, he is the happy man.”
There is much to unpack here. Perhaps the best way to do so is to divide man into two types: Restrained Man and Maudlin Man. Restrained Man is the type we should aspire to be. He is tranquilized by his own restraint, consistency, and self-agency and does not pine after things that cause him distress, anxiety, and FOMO.
Just reading the above words makes the addict inside me rebel. As a watch addict, I enjoy pining after watches and being caught in the melodrama of distress, FOMO, and desire for watches as shiny new objects my greedy little fingers can get a hold of. Wrap your head around that: I’m addicted to the very maudlin drama of my watch hobby. To be the Maudlin Man, therefore, is to be addicted to addiction.
But what Cicero is arguing is this: This melodramatic state that causes us to froth at the mouth for the things we desire is a form of “meaningless eagerness.”
Again, my inner addict rebels. It rages and counterargues, “Cicero, watches are my hobby. The very point of this hobby is that it is a benign and meaningless pastime that gives me enjoyment and relaxation.”
Of course, I am in denial. As I write this, I have a very beautiful diver watch with a wave-blue dial to be delivered from Singapore today from a DHL carrier. I’ve tracked the package six times since five this morning, and I couldn’t sleep last night because I agonized over whether I should keep it on the stock bracelet, put a sedate black Divecore on it, or put a loud orange Divecore on it. The stress is almost causing me to have a nervous breakdown.
I’m acting just like Maudlin Man. I’m experiencing effulgent emotions over something that is basically meaningless. As a result, I’m investing way too much energy and emotion toward my “watch situation,” and as a result, I am showing a lack of contact with reality.
Cicero’s point is that when we lack self-possession because we are in the maudlin state, we cannot be happy. Happiness is the byproduct of having self-agency and self-control.
I wince at Cicero’s words. Do I even want self-control? Do I not enjoy the drama of a watch strap “dilemma”? Do I not enjoy being an exuberant man-child?
Cicero would argue otherwise. He would argue that the “pleasures” I experience from my maudlin indulgences are at the root of my unhappiness. To understand Cicero’s argument better, let us look at the entire quotation:
Therefore the man, whoever he is, whose soul is tranquilized by restraint and consistency and who is at peace with himself, so that he neither pines away in distress, nor is broken down by fear, nor consumed with a thirst of longing in pursuit of some ambition, nor maudlin in the exuberance of meaningless eagerness–he is the wise man of whom we are in quest, he is the happy man.
My inner pessimist, which I call Glum, scoffs at Cicero’s words of wisdom and gives me a litany of my failures, which prove me unworthy of Cicero’s portrait of a happy man. Glum says to me the following:
“Regarding restraint, your appetites for tacos, spaghetti, garlic bread, homemade sourdough loaves stuffed with kalamata olives, semi-sweet chocolate chunk peanut butter cookies, chocolate cake, and pineapple cheesecake are so monstrous, you don’t have a chance in hell of exercising restraint when it comes to your appetites. Your very self is defined by your excesses, so good luck talking about restraint and moderation. You’re doomed.”
“Regarding ambition, it is only repeated failure of many decades, not humility, that abates your grandiose designs and fantasies of being famous and ubiquitous on television as a talking head whose opinions everyone greedily consumes as if your every word is a delicious morsel to be savored. So don’t go around bragging about your modesty and humble aspirations. Old age and an eye for the inevitability of your failure are your only salves, so you have no bragging rights.”
“Regarding maudlin exuberance and meaningless eagerness, you are the worst violator of these infractions, gushing with lame euphoria as you curate your watch collection to your YouTube viewers. Your entire enterprise of incorporating the wisdom of the Stoics and other classical thinkers is the biggest joke I’ve ever heard of and may qualify you for a life in comedy.”
My rebuttal to Glum is this. “With your keen insight into my wretched being, you have helped me see the very depth of my pathology. So thank you, Glum, you have helped me with an unflinching diagnosis of my spiritual dissolution, and thanks to you, this accurate diagnosis marks the beginning of my long road to recovery.”
I am grateful that I am both honest and smart enough to offer rebuttals to Glum, but having an intellectual grasp of what I should do and actually doing it are two vastly different things. For now, I have a clear grasp of Cicero’s notion of Maudlin Man. The seeds have been planted. I now hope that with those seeds, a counter self can grow that will put the Maudlin Man inside of me out of business.
In the early 90s, my brother managed a spa restaurant at the Grand Wailea in Maui—a temple of eucalyptus steam and $18 cucumber water. His girlfriend, the head chef, ruled the kitchen with the calm authority of a health-conscious empress. I visited one summer and found myself one morning alone at breakfast, sipping coffee and trying to look like a man deep in thought rather than a tourist waiting on papaya boats.
At the table next to mine sat a striking brunette with the kind of diamond on her finger that doubles as a paperweight. She started talking. To me. Boldly, intimately, as if we were two old conspirators.
She was thirty-five, married, and bored. Grew up in Santa Monica. Modeled a little. Dabbled in chaos. Now she was married to a man forty years her senior—a retired Navy officer turned business tycoon currently swimming laps in the resort pool while his wife flirted with the help. She pointed out one of the servers, a freckled boy in his early twenties pouring her orange juice with the dreamy smile of a man about to be devoured.
“I’m sleeping with him,” she said, as casually as if she were announcing she’d tried the papaya last time and found it too sweet.
She spoke of her marriage like a real estate deal: mutually beneficial, emotionally vacant, and efficiently managed. Her husband financed her yoga retreats. She provided him with public companionship and discreet absence. After breakfast, she was off to a vegetarian cooking class to learn how to live forever.
She told me she was researching longevity, obsessed with health, and that she was trying to convince her husband to move to Sedona, Arizona—“the best place in the country to live a long life,” she said.
Back then, I filed Sedona away in the brain folder labeled someday. That place. The Holy Grail of Health. A desert Shangri-La where your body becomes pure and your soul gets exfoliated.
I didn’t make it there until a few weeks ago.
We drove in from Prescott, and I’ll admit it: the landscape is jaw-dropping. Red rock formations that looked carved by gods on steroids. Mountains with biceps. Cliffs that scowl. One ridge looked like Zeus doing a lat spread.
Then we hit the town.
One-lane highway. Organic restaurants. Shops selling mystical crystals and dreamcatchers made in China. Every storefront promising to “align your energy” or “awaken your inner light”—assuming you have a functioning credit card.
We took a bus tour. The guide cheerfully explained that tech billionaires ship their Lamborghinis in on trucks just to drive them through town for a week of synchronized flexing, tantric massages, and moon-circle manifesting.
The mysticism was so heavy-handed it became farce. At a matcha tea stand, a man with unblinking eyes dropped a sugar butterfly into my daughter’s drink and, with complete sincerity, instructed her to make a wish so the butterfly could “help it manifest.”
That was the moment.
That was when I realized I hated Sedona. Not the place—God no. The place is stunning. I hated the idea of Sedona.
Sedona the place is geology and wonder. Sedona the idea is a branded hallucination.
It’s the lie that you can downshift your soul into first gear while screaming through town in a Lamborghini. It’s the peacock strut of spiritual materialism—buying essential oils and amethyst pendants as if they’ll excuse the $5 million home and the $10 million ego inside it.
Sedona wants you to believe you can live forever if you just buy enough gluten-free sage bundles and whisper affirmations into your Yeti thermos.
The sugar butterfly? It’s not a wish. It’s a warning.
Antonio García Martínez, author of Chaos Monkeys and veteran of the tech world, argues that many recent college graduates, adrift without a guiding philosophy or any grounding in the psychological architecture of religion, redirect their spiritual hunger toward the workplace. In particular, they latch onto tech companies as secular stand-ins for organized faith. These firms offer more than a paycheck—they offer a sense of belonging, higher purpose, and the illusion of transcendence.
The tech campus becomes a modern monastery, where the faithful eat, sleep, exercise, and labor. With its cappuccino bars, Michelin-level cafeterias, on-site laundry, yoga studios, wellness centers, and libraries, the workplace becomes not just a job, but a lifestyle. Employees live in an upgraded dormitory fantasy—one where comfort masks control.
At the heart of this corporate spirituality is the CEO, the charismatic founder who plays the role of messiah. Workers are fed lofty slogans about “changing the world” and “disrupting paradigms” while toiling for long hours in service of a vision that often benefits only the top brass. The leader isn’t just admired—he’s revered. The Kool-Aid is organic, gluten-free, and laced with grandiosity.
This phenomenon has become cultural fodder, explored with increasing skepticism in shows like Silicon Valley, Severance, WeCrashed, The Dropout, and Devs. Documentaries such as The Inventor, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened expose the blend of megalomania, fraud, and collective delusion behind these so-called missions.
What drives this mass suspension of disbelief? Part of the answer lies in what Derek Thompson calls “Workism”—the belief that one’s job is the core of one’s identity and life’s meaning. Combined with groupthink and CEO idolatry, Workism completes a trifecta of modern manipulation. In this new faith, the altar is a standing desk, and salvation is just one IPO away.
Chapter Five from The Watch Whisperer of Redondo Beach
“You look miserable,” the Watch Master said, peering into the void of his backyard as we sat beneath a star-punched sky.
“You can see me? It’s pitch black out here.”
“I don’t need to see you. I can feel the gravitational pull of your despair. You’re radiating existential dread.”
“That’s because you’ve assigned me an impossible task. Sell all my watches… and keep only one.”
“Baby steps, Cassandra.”
At that moment, a neighbor’s cat slinked in like a ghost, coiled around the Master’s ankle, and began purring like a smug little engine. He ignored it entirely.
“You need to begin The Purge.”
“The Purge? You mean like that movie where people commit murder once a year?”
“No, not that kind of purge. Though honestly, your collection could use a bloodletting. I’m talking about the soul-cleansing purge. A lifestyle exfoliation. You can’t amputate your horological addiction in one go. You’ve got to build momentum. Start with the dead weight in your life.”
He took a slow sip from a chipped mug of lukewarm coffee and gently nudged the cat away with the practiced detachment of a man who has done this a hundred times.
“Begin,” he said, “with your eWaste.”
“My what?”
“You heard me. Don’t pretend you’re not hoarding defunct electronics like some midlife tech raccoon. Old flat-screens, fossilized laptops, bargain-bin Bluetooth speakers, cracked tablets, prehistoric printers, derelict keyboards—stuff that died during the Bush administration.”
“I have… some things,” I admitted, blood draining from my face.
“Take it all to an eWaste center. Feel the rush. The purity. Like dominoes tipping, you’ll get hooked on getting rid of things. And before long, those watches will start looking like ankle weights chained to your past.”
A wave of dizziness came over me.
The Master raised an eyebrow. “What now?”
“Everything you’re saying is true. And I think I’m going to faint.”
He shrugged with the lazy grace of a man who’d long since graduated from giving a damn. “Change or don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm. But if you’re still clutching that broken Casio from 2009 like it’s a family heirloom, maybe it’s time to rethink your priorities.”
He stretched his limbs and let out an operatic yawn. Just then, a massive crow descended on the fence post, tilted its head like a Greek oracle, and let out a guttural, gravelly call: “Puuurge. Puuurge. Puuurge.”
The Master didn’t flinch. He simply glanced at the bird and muttered, “Everyone wants a line in this story.”
And with that, he dismissed me into the night—to wrestle with my demons and the unbearable burden of excess.
Last night I dreamed I was a mid-level drone in a sleek, glassy corporate tower, the kind where the espresso is artisanal but the moral rot is industrial grade. My friend John, a man of questionable appetites, had conducted an ill-advised workplace affair with a pale, mole-flecked woman who looked like Tina Louise if she’d been exhumed from a Victorian tomb. The office scorned her, and by association, John had become persona non grata. Worse, the affair had left him with a gastrointestinal affliction—proof, apparently, of both his guilt and poor judgment.
My boss, a mustached bureaucrat whose entire personality could be summed up as “nonstick,” summoned me to his office. With the casual menace of a man ordering a sandwich, he instructed me to write up John. Not for the affair, mind you—that would be too human—but for the stomach condition. It was, he explained, an external manifestation of moral decay. HR, he added blandly, would now monitor John’s “future movements.” Orwell would’ve blushed.
Instead of complying, I wandered over to the mole-riddled femme fatale. As we spoke, her moles seemed to multiply like a corrupted Photoshop clone stamp tool—deepening, darkening, replicating. I felt a twinge of pity, but mostly revulsion, and an impending fear that I’d soon be ordered to file a medical report on her as the first step in her “quiet dismissal.”
I excused myself and found John, whose flat affect suggested either Zen detachment or full-blown delusion. He shrugged off the HR inquisition and announced, with the conviction of a man four bourbons deep, that the boss would soon be fired and that he would lead the company into a new era. He was the messiah of office reform, apparently, and his gastrointestinal bug was just a minor martyrdom.
Then I woke up. I padded to the kitchen, made my usual overnight buckwheat groats, and watched in disgust as the microwave turned into a groats splatter crime scene. I was done. No more splatter. It was time for a change. A prophet had spoken—probably me—and I obeyed by ordering a $145 Staub cast iron cocotte. Sure, it’s wildly expensive for boiling breakfast grains, but I now had divine justification: a dream packed with plague, prophecy, and intestinal punishment.
Sometimes, self-delusion makes the best retail therapy.
Last night I dreamed I was helping my daughter with her homework in the middle of a public square. A chaotic, bustling arena. Think Roman forum meets tech dystopia. We had two laptops perched on a white concrete ledge high above a stadium of descending steps, as if we were doing calculus on the lip of a coliseum.
The computers were a mess—two laptops yoked together like resentful twins, their settings morphing by the second. Screens flashed blue, then white, then black. Sometimes yellow cartoon ducks floated lazily across the bottom like deranged pop-up ads from a children’s game. I wasn’t so much solving her homework as performing tech triage on possessed machines.
I wasn’t panicked because I couldn’t help her. I was panicked because someone might see that I couldn’t help her. Vanity, thy name is Dad.
People walked past, utterly unfazed. Apparently, homework over a stadium chasm with dueling laptops and malfunctioning duck animations was standard urban behavior.
Then a young man—a peripheral character from some former life—told me there was a “tech lord” nearby. Not tech support. A tech lord. Naturally, I followed.
The tech lord’s lair was a dim room centered around a massive table, cathedral-like in tone and purpose. He was listening to the Bible—read aloud by the famous comedian George Carlin. Not a solemn voice or trained narrator, but someone best known for punchlines and pratfalls. And the tech lord was rapt. He cradled a thick, black Bible like a sacred talisman, proclaiming that this was the finest biblical performance art ever conceived.
I tried to get in a word about my tech problem, but he interrupted me and asked me what my favorite book in the Bible was. I said the Book of Job, of course. He seemed satisfied with my response and allowed me to continue with my inquiry.
When I mentioned the malfunctioning laptops, he waved it off like someone refusing to answer a question about taxes. “You’ll need to get rid of both machines,” he intoned, “and buy a new one.”
Naturally, I flirted with the idea of going full Apple—titanium chic, smug perfection—but quickly sobered up. Apple or Windows, it’s the same headache in a different tuxedo. I settled for a sleek black Windows laptop, and with a sudden, magical poof, there it was in my hands. The new device of promise. The Messiah machine.
I returned to my daughter, still huddled over her rebellious duo. I tried to shut them down, ceremonially, like a general dismissing insubordinate troops. They refused. The screens flared defiantly. They would not go quietly into obsolescence. They had become conscious, bitter, undead.
And then I woke up.
The kicker? Just before bed, my wife gave me a task: drive 30 minutes to San Pedro with a car full of broken electronics and deliver them to an e-waste center. My subconscious, clearly, had feelings about this and delivered me this dream as a prelude to my task.
One final note about the dream: the pairing of George Carlin and the Bible triggered a memory of a dream I had in the early ’90s. In that dream, the Messiah wasn’t a robed figure of spiritual gravity—he was Buddy Hackett, the goofy-faced, gravel-voiced comic best known for squinting through punchlines. There he was, standing atop a Hollywood hotel, delivering what I could only assume was divine revelation—or maybe just the world’s strangest stand-up set. I couldn’t tell if he was inspired, intoxicated, or both.
Now, three decades later, George Carlin shows up in a dream to read Scripture aloud with messianic intensity, joining Hackett in a growing pantheon of prophetic clowns. It makes a strange kind of sense. Both comedians and prophets stand at the edge of civilization, pointing fingers at the absurdities we refuse to question. They use hyperbole, irony, and parable to slice through the world’s lazy thinking. The difference? Prophets get canonized. Comedians get heckled.
But maybe, just maybe, it’s the same job with a different mic.s a prelude to my task.
I remember listening to Terry Gross interview Frank McCourt in 1997, right as Angela’s Ashes was climbing every bestseller list like a starving Irish ghost with a publishing deal. At one point, Gross asked the inevitable soft-serve question: had he ever forgiven his drunken, absentee father for drinking away the family’s money and abandoning his wife and children to starvation and shame?
McCourt didn’t flinch. He dismissed forgiveness as “pompous” and “irrelevant”—as if someone had asked him if he’d made peace with bubonic plague. He wasn’t being cruel; he was being precise. Forgiveness, he seemed to argue, is often a performance—a neat, moral bow tied onto a box of horror that refuses to stay shut.
I thought of McCourt again this morning while reading Christina Caron’s New York Times piece, “Sometimes, Forgiveness Is Overrated.” It profiles adults who survived childhoods ruled by sadists, addicts, psychopaths, and the emotionally vacant. These were not flawed parents; they were ethical sinkholes, incapable of even the most basic decency. And yet, the self-help gospel continues to hand these survivors a soft-focus script: Forgive, and you will be free.
Enter Amanda Gregory, therapist and author of You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms. Gregory’s argument is refreshingly grounded: forgiveness is not a virtue badge, not a finish line, and certainly not a moral obligation. It’s a slow, private emotional process—if you choose to pursue it. You do not owe a resolution. You do not need to sculpt your rage into affection.
Gregory’s thesis echoes Sharon Lamb’s earlier work from 2002, which cautioned that pressuring victims to forgive can cause more damage than healing. It’s not just naive—it’s cruel. There are wounds that never close, and forcing someone to say, “It’s okay now,” when it’s absolutely not okay is a kind of spiritual gaslighting. It shifts the burden of transformation onto the person who’s already been broken.
And what about the offenders? If they’re remorseful, truly remorseful, perhaps forgiveness enters the room. But what if they’re not? What if they’re still rewriting history or refusing to acknowledge it? Then forgiveness becomes a farce—just another round of victim-blaming wrapped in therapeutic jargon.
In many cases, forgiveness isn’t even the right frame. With time and growth, some of us develop a different emotional posture—not forgiveness, but pity. We see our abusers not as villains to be vanquished or souls to be redeemed, but as feeble, morally bankrupt husks who couldn’t rise above their own dysfunction. We stop hating them because we no longer need to—but let’s not confuse that with forgiveness. That’s not healing; it’s emotional Darwinism.
Forgiveness has its place, but only when it rests on shared truth and genuine contrition. Otherwise, it’s a forced ritual, a bad-faith moral contract, and a way to sell books or fill up therapy time. The therapeutic industry’s insistence that forgiveness is always the holy grail? Honestly, it’s unforgivable.
In The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s 2016 essay “The Broken-In World” explores divorce with the same dry clarity one might use to describe cleaning out a fridge: inevitable, necessary, and oddly liberating. At 45, Daum finds herself in the middle of an amicable divorce—the kind without cheating, bruises, or courtroom melodrama. No one threw a lamp. No one stole the dog. Instead, it was just the slow, steady rot of benign neglect. Quirks once considered “charming” metastasized into full-blown repulsions. “Irreconcilable differences,” she concludes, isn’t a cop-out. It’s a dignified admission that entropy won.
She discovers, to her great relief, that she is significantly less insane living alone. No more haggling over dinner, toothpaste caps, or passive-aggressive silences. Just peace. Divorce, in Daum’s telling, isn’t some tragic unraveling—it’s a grown-up’s fire extinguisher to a low-grade house fire of misery. It’s not weakness. It’s not moral collapse. It’s maturity, quietly slipping the ring off and stepping into air.
Post-divorce, Daum moves to New York, joins the unofficial cult of the self-rescued, and discovers a radical truth: brokenness is the baseline. Normalcy is a myth. Everyone’s dragging a dented suitcase through life. Divorce just makes it public.
Her real epiphany, however, isn’t just about divorce—it’s about the overinflated value of marriage itself. To Daum, marriage never felt like the final level of the video game, no Holy Grail behind velvet ropes. Monogamy had already given her a sneak preview. The ceremony, the legal bind—it was all anti-climax. If marriage is the gold standard, Daum suggests, then maybe we need a new currency.
As a married person reading her work, you’re invited—no, cornered—into imagining a counterlife. The one where you’re single. I thought of the comedian and podcaster (soon to retire) Marc Maron: early sixties, unmarried, encircled by cats, vinyl, artisan boots, and a galaxy of fellow eccentrics. His life is cluttered, creative, obsessive. He has no wife, but he has a world.
Daum’s point: we will find connection. If not through spouses and children, then through podcasts, group chats, improv classes, dogs, or elaborate hobbies that consume our evenings and fill the fridge of our loneliness with something edible. Marriage isn’t the only valid architecture for a life, and singleness isn’t a synonym for solitude. The real issue is connection. Not how we find it—but that we must.
Now in her fifties, Daum is single, scraping by with podcast revenue and teaching gigs. No financial safety net. No partner to split the rent or cover her if she breaks a hip. But what she does have is agency. A voice. Essays that hum with intelligence and self-awareness. She doesn’t glamorize her choice. She doesn’t hold it above yours. She simply claims it as hers—and owns the wreckage and wisdom that came with it.
She’s not superior. She’s just no longer married. And for her, that is enough.
Cinemorphosis 