Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • Confessions of a Recovering Hot Take Addict

    Confessions of a Recovering Hot Take Addict

    I remember being enamored with the hot take about a decade ago. To post something brief and witty in a spontaneous, explosive response to a news event and create the verbal equivalent of a basketball dunk seemed powerful and elevating, especially in a world that was becoming increasingly chaotic and unrecognizable. Showing rapier wit online could turn a frumpy guy sitting at his mechanical keyboard into the verbal equivalent of prime-time Michael Jordan.

    That wouldn’t be me, though. My ability to deliver hot takes is probably slightly above average. I may be too long-winded or too slow to process things. Whatever the case, I’m no hot take champion. But I sure envied the hot take mavens. For a while, I thought excelling in that realm was a ticket to success and self-worth.

    Over time, however, I came to see the compulsion to deliver hot takes as a sort of disease, the result of Internet Brain Poisoning, a condition in which the brain is short-circuited by a paradox: It’s getting too much dopamine and starving for dopamine at the same time. This paradox results in less thinking and more reptilian outrage, which in turn compounds the poisoning.

    I could see the poisoning all around me. So could Sam Harris. He had to get off Twitter. It was too toxic and time-consuming. I heeded his lesson. I also contemplated my own disenchantment with hot takes, so I deleted my Twitter-X account a couple of years ago. I still have a Threads account, but I don’t post on it. When I see people trying to deliver hot takes, I cringe at the memories of Internet Brain Poisoning.

    It turns out that trying to find self-worth and belonging through parasocial relationships is a false path that leaves you starving for genuine human connection. You end up lonely and poisoned by the Internet’s false promises and intermittent dopamine surges.

    I’m not completely free from such poisoning. On Instagram, I still post photographs of watches, mostly G-Shocks, and sometimes tell a brief story about something I find meaningful or funny. But I don’t deliver hot takes or hunger for attention the way I used to. My relationship with social media, a branch of behavior modification I prefer to call dopamine farms, has changed, probably for the better.

    If spending time on dopamine farms is the equivalent of bingeing on a banana split, I’ve cut down to one banana split a week instead of eating ten a day. I guess learning to stop grazing on the dopamine farms all day and night is a form of small progress. Recognizing what these dopamine farms do to us may be the first step toward freedom.

    Dopamine farms began imprisoning us and poisoning our brains around 2010, roughly when smartphones made these platforms more accessible and addictive. Sixteen years later, our democratic norms seem to be deteriorating. As Sacha Baron Cohen recently told Scott Galloway on the Pivot podcast, it’s doubtful these dopamine farms can coexist with democracy.

    It turns out that immersion in short-form videos and weaponized misinformation can make us angry, paranoid, and increasingly unable to inhabit a shared epistemic world in which we can agree on basic facts and cooperate for the betterment of our species.

    During this period, as shared reality and democratic norms gave way to cultural and political polarization, I started listening to podcasts by thoughtful people who critiqued the excesses of that polarization. I’ll mention three: Blocked & Reported, featuring Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal; Uncomfortable Conversations, featuring Josh Szeps; and The Unspeakeasy, featuring Meghan Daum.

    These podcasters are excellent thinkers who have done a great job dissecting the tribalism and groupthink of our time. However, I wonder what they’ll be doing as society moves forward and perhaps tires of hearing about cultural and political polarization.

    To their credit, they do much more than deliver hot takes about the current moment. They offer long-form analysis and interviews, and their independent thinking is welcome. However, they often interrogate cultural excesses so ridiculous that at times it seems they’re shooting dead fish in a barrel.

    Groupthink and Internet Brain Poisoning bring out the worst in people and turn them into caricatures. These podcasters have plenty of caricatures to poke fun at and criticize, but I suspect they’re growing tired of the exercise. I suspect they want to move on to something else.

    These three podcasts have given me comfort over the last five years, but I sense a sea change. I suspect they’ll either change direction or eventually cease to exist. When it comes to dopamine farms, Internet Brain Poisoning, and groupthink, I suspect I’m not alone in my disenchantment. There may be a mass exodus from these platforms, although I know the learning curve can be slow.

    This exodus may take time. The sooner the better.

  • The Day I Refused to Laugh

    The Day I Refused to Laugh

    I suspect that had Augustine grown up in Manchester in the 1980s, he would have been a diehard fan of The Smiths. Many of the band’s songs, driven by Morrissey’s forlorn persona, explore feelings of alienation, melancholy, and longing. The narrator of “The Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” sees the world as a forsaken place where estrangement from its relentless barbarism seems inevitable. The narrator of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is broken and restless, aching to find some ultimate source of peace. “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” expresses the raw pain of feeling like an incurable misfit.

    Augustine as a misfit is a powerful theme in Catherine Conybeare’s biography Augustine the African. Conybeare emphasizes that Augustine was African, not Roman in the sense of being a native Italian. He spoke Latin, but he could not hide his accent. He was insecure about his heritage and wrote and thought as an outsider in the Christian world. He never felt at home in Italy, where he spent five years of his life. Most of his life was spent in what is now Algeria and Tunisia. Feeling out of place in a world dominated by Rome had a powerful influence on how he approached his faith and argued with others.

    In modern parlance, we might say Augustine had a chip on his shoulder. Feeling embattled can make us surly and unpleasant, but it can also give us an advantage: We never get too comfortable in the tribe. We never become complacent, drinking the same Kool-Aid as everyone else inside the same silo. We may share some beliefs with these people, but we remain inclined to push back against their conventions.

    In some cases, our perennial identity as the misfit may sharpen our critical thinking skills. We benefit from what might be called Outsider Consciousness: a heightened awareness of society’s assumptions, contradictions, and unwritten rules that develops from living within a culture without feeling fully accepted by it. Belonging can make us feel cozy, but that comfort sometimes comes at the price of conformity and complacency. Estrangement, on the other hand, keeps us uncomfortable enough that our default setting becomes one of scrutiny.

    Feeling like an outsider reminds me of 1973, when I returned to California from Nairobi, Kenya, and attended Earl Warren Junior High. The drinking and pot smoking at Earl Warren were a sharp contrast to my life at Nairobi International School, where I had played with the British version of G.I. Joe dolls, called Action Man.

    One afternoon, four boys approached me, and their leader, Kent Daniels, said he wanted to share a joke. He proceeded to tell a long, tedious story that made no sense, after which he and his friends laughed heartily. I stood there and said, “I don’t get it. It’s not funny to me.”

    Kent patted me on the back and said, “You passed the test. We wanted to see if you’d laugh just to go along with the group. We wanted to make sure you weren’t a chump.”

    By refusing to laugh at something I didn’t find funny, I had established credibility. I was accepted by the group precisely because I hadn’t tried too hard to please them. Kent and his friends were smart. They didn’t want just anyone in their fold. A person had to be intelligent, adhere to an honor code, and perhaps bring something of value through his Outsider Consciousness.

    To this day, I remain fascinated that Kent and his friends had devised a way of testing another person’s authenticity. That I passed their test remains a badge of pride. I suppose Morrissey would have appreciated the occasion, though he might have found something more tragic in it than I did. After all, I was simply a twelve-year-old boy who refused to laugh at a joke that wasn’t funny. Never was. Never would be.

  • The Consumer Shangri-La

    The Consumer Shangri-La

    Much to my chagrin and consternation, I have been on a quest for the Consumer Shangri-La, a tiny world in which I surround myself with products that are not only the best in their category but somehow elevate me to a state of transcendence. I’ve become obsessed with coffee rankings involving the seven brands of dark roast sitting on my kitchen counter; fortified soy milk and the way it symbolizes virtue and health in Trader Joe’s recyclable, Edenic green-and-white carton; Greek yogurt and kefir with their magical, life-renewing probiotic properties; oatmeal and buckwheat groats mixed with hemp seeds, promising fiber and a nutritional bonanza; creatine with its supposed power to ward off depression and grant me eternal youth; my half dozen solar Multiband 6 G-Shocks and the comfort of reliable atomic time; my stable of Brooks Ghost Max walking shoes, which make me feel as though I’m floating on clouds while commiserating with the gods; and padded noise-canceling headphones that transport me into the paradise of Baroque oboe concertos, soothing the savage beast inside me.

    All of this is nonsense, of course. To my credit, I’m trying to break free from my consumer obsessions and make room in my brain for heavier intellectual pursuits, such as tackling the newest biography of Augustine, an irascible chap with little tolerance for anyone who deviated from his orthodoxy. I’m also two-thirds finished with my book, but for the last forty-eight hours, I’ve had difficulty writing. I wrote a chapter for my book and a blog post two days ago, but since then, my consumer obsessions have gotten the better of me.

    The good news is that I haven’t been spending time on social media, a hellish place I refer to as the dopamine farms. Unfortunately, abandoning those farms has not diminished my consumer obsessions, as I had hoped. I suspect these preoccupations are distracting me from the emotional challenges of turning sixty-five two days ago and watching so many friends develop cancer and other serious ailments. I wonder whether these late-life chapters generate an anxiety that compels me to retreat into a consumer bubble.

    This retreat may be explained by something that afflicts many of us as we grow older: Terror Management Theory. As the reality of our inevitable death becomes more immediate, we seek refuge in systems that promise certainty, permanence, and protection against the chaos of existence. By elevating our beliefs, values, and possessions into seemingly unquestionable sources of security, we construct psychological bulwarks against the terrifying realization that our bodies will deteriorate, our lives will end, and much of what we cherish lies beyond our control.

    I’m sixty-five, and more and more of my friends are developing serious illnesses or passing to the other side. Yet there I was this morning, standing at my kitchen counter, listening to my Ninja coffee maker make its final gurgling sounds before beeping to announce that my dark roast was ready. I poured it into my giant cream-colored mug, added a generous splash of fortified organic soy milk, and contemplated whether I had finally found the perfect coffee. I knew, of course, that none of these products could protect me from the indignities of aging or the certainty of death. But for the next fifteen minutes, I had a perfect cup of coffee, and that seemed to be enough.

  • The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    Because I’ve been absorbing television commercials since the 1960s, I’ve internalized the belief that suffering is a bad thing. To suffer means there’s a glitch in the system, if you will. Television has always told me: “You’re doing it all wrong. You can buy your way into enough pleasure, comfort, and convenience to iron away those ugly wrinkles of human suffering.”

    To internalize the idea that consumerism can overcome human suffering is to undergo a kind of infantilization. Here’s a case in point: I spent over twenty years obsessing over watches, creating a cozy ecosystem to buffer myself from the anxiety and restlessness arising from an existential vacuum. But creating that buffer only allowed those problems to grow and fester. I was in a strange state. I was hyper-focused on watches, but I wasn’t engaged with the real world or with myself. I was both engaged and disengaged at the same time. My life was full of intense mental activity without meaningful psychological engagement.

    This contradiction points to something we might call Disengaged Hyperfixation: a condition in which intense concentration on a narrow interest creates the illusion of meaningful engagement while the individual becomes increasingly disconnected from relationships, responsibilities, and self-examination. I was deeply engaged in the minutiae of watches but disengaged from the emotional problems that required my attention.

    Disengaged Hyperfixation seems to be central to the business model of the Attention Economy. Create undemanding videos in which you repeat the same thing over and over about how amazing this or that watch is. Tell car enthusiasts how superior their favorite brand is to the competition. Talk about a high-protein diet for the millionth time to high-protein disciples. The brutal fact about the Attention Economy and Disengaged Hyperfixation is that you can get lost in these dopamine farms and piss your life away, only to discover too late that you were never meaningfully engaged with the precious, short time you have here on Earth. That realization brings a despair and anguish no YouTube influencer can cure.

  • The United States of Memory Foam

    The United States of Memory Foam

    Last night I dreamed I was working out with kettlebells in my garage. Overcome by a sudden restlessness, I decided to venture away from home by doing a long Farmer’s Walk, an exercise in which you hold a heavy kettlebell in each hand and walk a significant distance as if carrying two suitcases. I decided to take a walk across the entire country.

    As I journeyed through America, I discovered that everyone was an aspiring influencer. The product everyone was advertising on social media was mattresses, the kind that arrive at your doorstep compressed into a box and then inflate before your eyes. Everywhere I went, people were pretending to sleep, wearing fake, blissful smiles while recording video selfies. Living rooms, bedrooms, and other areas of the house had been transformed into home studios. People were so absorbed in their influencer activities that they no longer spoke to one another. Conversation had died. People lived alongside one another but were psychologically worlds apart.

    I decided to walk a considerable distance to Influencer City, where a woman who presided over all the influencers lived at a luxurious resort. She was known as the Influencer Queen. When I arrived, she was having tea and biscuits with her associates beside a swimming pool.

    They regarded me with some curiosity, a man in his sixties carrying two kettlebells. I could see the Queen’s concern, so I assured her that the kettlebells weren’t weighing me down. Something else was crushing me, I explained. I was discouraged by the fragmentation of society. Everyone had devoted themselves to the futile mission of selling dubious mattresses.

    Surrounded by her entourage, the Influencer Queen listened intently, as though my words had affected her deeply. But just as I was reaching the heart of my criticism, someone whispered in her ear that the swimming pool needed renovations, and she immediately lost interest. She turned to her entourage and began discussing the renovations as though I were no longer standing there.

    Realizing that she had no interest in my concerns, I walked away. Forlorn, I tried to make my way home, but I had no idea where I was. I spotted a neighborhood in the distant sunset and decided to try my luck in that direction. The kettlebells remained surprisingly light, but my heart was heavy. In the distance, I heard an aspiring influencer discussing coil count and gel-infused memory foam.

    I sighed in despair. Americans knew everything about memory foam but had forgotten how to talk to one another.

  • The Man Who Would Be Watch

    The Man Who Would Be Watch

    For over ten years, I had a YouTube channel mostly dedicated to my tormented relationship with watches. If you wanted to watch a man losing his mind as he travailed inside the fever swamp of watch addiction, you had come to the right place. Perhaps the algorithms encouraged me to become even crazier for the sake of audience capture. Or perhaps I didn’t need the algorithms. I was doing an excellent job of becoming unhinged by my watch obsession all by myself. Just pause on that for a moment. I didn’t need the algorithms to go crazy. I had done it the natural way. Give me a round of applause.

    But like all good things, that particular kind of crazy came to an end. As I entered my sixties, my bandwidth for dealing with that kind of stress diminished, and new priorities took its place: staying healthy, planning for retirement, and recognizing that I had very little time left to worry about rotating watches on my wrist. As a result, my watch obsession lost much of its intensity. My relationship with watches is vastly different today from what it was even five years ago.

    How much I’ve changed became apparent yesterday when I was cleaning out my office at work. I found a notebook from several years ago in which I had written dozens of what were supposed to be my Master Lists of the Ultimate Watch Collection. In my attempt to arrive at a definitive Master List, I had revised it over and over. Some lists contained only five premium watches. Others had a dozen. Still others fell somewhere in between. I recognized the frenzied handwriting of a man trying to save himself from drowning in quicksand.

    When I opened the notebook and examined those lists, I was overcome with pain. I could see a man dealing with enormous anxiety, using his watch obsession as a diversion from confronting its real causes. Of course, the real causes of anxiety could never have been about watches or the Great Watch Questions: Is my Holy Grail a Tudor, an Omega, or a Grand Seiko? The true causes surely had more to do with love, connection, and mortality.

    But the man who made those lists was oblivious to that fact. He believed that arriving at the Ultimate Master Watch List would somehow bring him peace. He was clearly delusional.

    As I studied those lists, I saw a man struggling with unresolved personal torment. Reading them was painful because they gave me a window into someone I barely recognized. At the same time, I did recognize him, but only from a great distance.

    I was reminded of the terrible scene in The Man Who Would Be King when Peachy Carnehan, played by Michael Caine, holds the crowned head of Daniel Dravot, played by Sean Connery. The crowned head was the end result of a man’s misguided quest to become a god.

    My story was the same but slightly different. In the movie version of my past life, there was no crowned head. Instead, there was a severed forearm with an eight-inch wrist adorned with a luxury timepiece. I was the star of a movie titled The Man Who Would Be Watch.

    Because I’m no longer that man, my YouTube channel has changed. I talk more about the challenges of being in my sixties, retirement, and my misalignment with a world I barely recognize. By charting the course of my actual life, I am violating the principles of social media branding. I’ve deviated from my previous watch obsession, which means I’ve abandoned what business strategists call my content pillars and content buckets.

    A business strategist would shake his finger at me and say, “Do not abandon those content pillars and content buckets. Those are the tools that give audiences recognizable themes, comfort, and familiarity. Those are the tools that keep your audience coming back for more.”

    I would like to offer that business consultant a rebuttal.

    First, I’m all for content pillars and content buckets. I chronicled my watch addiction with honesty and due diligence, but the addiction was like a riverboat on a fast-moving river. It was bound to slow down and enter a tributary. In my case, the tributary was this small matter of age and mortality. I can’t pretend that the riverboat is still at the beginning of its journey. It’s nearing the end. No amount of business strategy, or tossing around terms like content pillars and content buckets, is going to stop that.

    My YouTube channel was always about chronicling my obsessions. If those obsessions were reconfigured by life events beyond my control, such as growing older, then the moral thing to do was to comment on those changes. In that regard, I’ve done nothing to abandon my channel’s mission or brand. I’ve stayed true to it.

    For many years, I was The Man Who Would Be Watch. But now I’m more like Peachy Carnehan. I’m the storyteller. I may be broken and half-crazed, but at least I’m still alive.

    What good is maintaining your content pillars and content buckets if you’re no longer around to deliver them?

  • Consumerism Dies Before You Do

    Consumerism Dies Before You Do

    As you get older, the pangs of consumerism recede until you reach a state of materialistic ennui. Many of the things that once possessed your imagination lose their potency and luster. Stripped of their power, they appear like a heap of gray ash. Their very existence seems to mock the idea of consumerism itself. A false religion, you now call it. But it was a very real religion in your youth, when certain consumer goods had the power to transform you into the kind of person you aspired to be.

    But all of that is gone now. You notice that the objects you once valued are dead to you. You may drive past a car that in your youth overwhelmed you with frisson and longing, but now it has all the emotional power of reaching into the back of your pantry and finding a lonely, slightly moldy Idaho potato.

    Driving to my daughters’ high school yesterday afternoon to pick them up, I stopped at a red light beside a white BMW coupe with impossibly large wheels adorned with sport spokes. The wheels alone probably cost close to ten grand. I felt nothing. This complete lack of emotional connection to the BMW made me think of the 90s, when a BMW was a talisman of masculinity, power, and success. Now I regarded it the way I would a small fly on my windshield, a mild visual cue requiring no response.

    The BMW made me think of the box containing four mechanical diver watches that sits near my desk. For the last year, I’ve opened the box only out of obligation, occasionally winding one of the watches to make sure it still works. Wearing one of these beautiful divers does nothing for me anymore. I don’t feel elevated in any way. I feel nothing. I have died to these watches. I have considered selling them or giving them away, but I’m content to leave them in the box as a reminder of who I once was. I am not that person anymore.

    I could not will myself to love those mechanical divers any more than I could will myself to love an eighty-thousand-dollar BMW. The signs are strong enough that I can definitively say I have entered a new realm: the condition of consumerist lassitude. I suppose I could tell you how liberating all this is, how I feel free from the idols that once possessed me, but that would suggest I have been blessed with joy. Such is not the case. This boredom with luxurious things is accompanied more by weariness and malaise.

    My state of languor reminds me of a conversation I had with a colleague at the college over a decade ago. We were talking about happiness, and I remember exactly what I told him: “Happiness is not an abundance of things. It’s the absence of bullshit.” This remark strikes me as more true today than it did ten years ago. Nearly sixty-five, I am grateful that I have no dire health problems requiring me to visit clinics and endure the rigors and tedium of invasive tests. I have reached a new realm in which, every day I wake up relatively healthy and discover that I have lived to see another day, gratitude asserts itself so strongly that there is little room in my brain for materialistic idolatry.

    I woke up this morning, made coffee, sat at my computer, did some writing, and glowed with the anticipation that in a couple of hours I would enter my garage, turn on a podcast, and experience the bliss of an hour of kettlebells. No BMW or mechanical watch can do that for me. Those things no longer have the incandescence they once had. The infatuation is gone. I can’t say they have died. It’s the other way around. I have died. I am dead to those things. The more I cling to health and life as I enter life’s final chapters, the more I die to the status symbols that once captivated my imagination.

    This is not wisdom or virtue. It’s closer to bandwidth. I simply don’t have enough room in my brain to muster the emotional pageantry and hype over things that don’t contribute to my health and well-being. That I have died to fussy, high-maintenance luxury watches and sexy sports cars, and in their place desire more reliable things, makes me boring and practical. And that is a good thing. It brings me back to the words I shared with my colleague. Life is not about being surrounded by opulence. It’s about being unfettered by unnecessary complications. With so little time left, I find myself purging those complications with methodical ruthlessness. I am in a new landscape now, with new duties and obligations. Dying to luxury items was one of those obligations, and I didn’t die to these things by an act of will. It seems nature did it for me.

  • The Cringe That Defines You

    The Cringe That Defines You

    Cringe television refers to those comedies that bypass sentimentality altogether and go straight for the jugular by creating socially awkward situations–the equivalent of a social car crash–that are almost unbearable to watch. You squirm, gasp, cover your eyes, tell yourself you can’t believe what’s happening, and insist that you need to watch something less distressing. Yet you remain glued to the television, watching in spite of yourself. The Larry Sanders Show, the British and American versions of The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and You’re the Worst mercilessly floor the pedal, taking you to the golden nougat of cringe, that horrific center where fallen social graces, eviscerated decorum, spectacular embarrassment, and irrevocable humiliation achieve a ripeness and potency you never dreamed possible.

    We watch cringe television for complex reasons. There is the perverse enjoyment of it, which almost defies psychological analysis, except to acknowledge that we harbor a streak of cruelty that enjoys watching others lose their dignity. But there is also the survivor inside us who wants to learn from these humiliating spectacles so that we won’t follow in these hapless people’s footsteps and suffer their ostracism and disgrace.

    One lesson we learn from cringe television is that the more swollen our egos become, the more stupid and socially unaware we are likely to be. The more aggressively we assert our egotism in social situations, the more we alienate others, often without the slightest awareness that we’re being perceived as pompous, overbearing, bullying, obnoxious, and just plain boring.

    Offering an abundance of cringe is the reality show Below Deck in all its variations. My wife and I were recently watching the Down Under version when chef Ben Robinson decided he deserved to sleep in the more spacious guest quarters for one night to catch up on his sleep. The chief stew explicitly told him not to do so because the bed had been made with clean linens for guests arriving the next day. But Ben, having an inglorious hissy fit, marched into the luxurious guest quarters, messed up the bed, and refused to leave, even after his co-worker, second officer João Franco, urged him to get out.

    Ben Robinson is a talented, intelligent, well-read, articulate chef, but thanks to cringe television, those are not the qualities I will remember. I will remember a broken forty-five-year-old man selfishly violating every rule of decorum so he could indulge himself in the forbidden guest quarters. That episode taught me a painful lesson: A single moment of cringe can be so potent that it obliterates your finer qualities and reduces you to your lowest common denominator in the eyes of others. Whatever Ben does with the rest of his life, I will always see him throwing an infantile tantrum in the guest quarters, clinging to the sheets while João begs him to leave for the chief stew’s sake.

    Regardless of how generous I want to be toward Ben, I cannot erase the image of him behaving like a five-year-old. This is an example of the Reverse-Halo Effect, also known as the Horn Effect, in which one conspicuous negative action contaminates our overall judgment of a person, regardless of that person’s other admirable qualities.

    We all fear becoming victims of the Reverse-Halo Effect. Perhaps that’s one reason we watch cringe television: We hope to immunize ourselves against a similar fate.

    Because my own ego has gotten the better of me on more occasions than I care to count, I’m sure I’ve suffered from the Reverse-Halo Effect myself. I’m therefore in no position to judge Ben Robinson. Like him, I’ve dished up more cringe than is healthy for a lifetime.

    One potential source of cringe I’ve been imagining lately involves telling my co-workers that I’m retiring within a year and then changing my mind. The cat is already out of the bag. Everyone in my department knows I’m retiring. On several occasions, I’ve told colleagues that I’m hanging it up, only to have them interrupt me with, “I know. The word is out.” They’ve been treating me with the warmth and kindness people instinctively extend to someone approaching retirement. It’s a sentimental occasion, after all—the twilight of a career, a time for reflection and appreciation of the good years.

    But after twenty years of watching cringe television, I found myself entertaining a perverse thought: What if I changed my mind? What if, after announcing my retirement to everyone, perhaps even enjoying a retirement party, I decided I wasn’t ready to make the leap? I needed the money. I needed the work routine. I needed human interaction. I needed to be needed. God, how awkward it would be to show up at the fall department meeting the following year when everyone thought I was gone. I could imagine being about as welcome as a bride who wakes up on her wedding day with a boil in the center of her forehead.

    The good news is that I have no doubts about retiring. I will not show up like an unwanted boil next fall. I will be retired. But years of watching cringe television have instilled in me the crazed desire to imagine scenarios that would put me in socially awkward situations. This is surely a terrible use of my time. I would be better off concentrating on avoiding the very real moments of cringe that my egotism produces naturally, without distracting myself with imaginary disasters.

    Ben Robinson, I’m disappointed in you for selfishly messing up those bed sheets, but I can’t judge you. I’ve metaphorically shit the bed too many times in my life to count.

  • You Can’t Take the 403(b) With You

    You Can’t Take the 403(b) With You

    Jean Chatzky is concerned about retired money hoarders, people who have amassed a considerable sum and are terrified of watching it dwindle. They have spent decades baking a magnificent chocolate cake. Why eat it when it looks so beautiful sitting untouched in the windowsill?

    But this is folly. The money was saved for a reason: to enjoy life, fulfill bucket lists, and eventually circulate back into the economy. Citing the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study in her essay “Americans Aren’t Spending Their Retirement Savings,” Chatzky identifies a “retirement consumption gap”: many retirees spend considerably less than they could while remaining financially secure for the rest of their lives. She puts the gap at about 8 percent for middle-income retirees and as high as 53 percent for the wealthy. The result is an enormous reservoir of money sitting in retirement accounts rather than being used by the people who spent their lives accumulating it.

    This reluctance to spend isn’t merely bad for the economy. It can be bad for the spirit. Chatzky argues that retirees may be better off spending more of their assets in exchange for a higher quality of life. The goal, after all, was never to die with the largest possible account balance. The money was supposed to finance the life.

    Her argument is persuasive, but it doesn’t fully address one deep psychological reason for hoarding money: a large portfolio can sustain the fantasy that we aren’t going to die. The money becomes a chimera of immortality. It whispers, “Look how big I am. As long as I remain intact, I will protect you. But let my numbers dwindle, and perhaps your remaining years will dwindle with them.”

    This condition has a name: Symbolic Immortality. Accumulated wealth becomes something that psychologically transcends mortality, and the retiree begins treating the endurance of the portfolio as evidence for the endurance of the self. More broadly, symbolic immortality appears whenever we invest an object, achievement, institution, or legacy with the hope that some representation of us will survive our biological death. Ernest Becker’s work and later Terror Management Theory explore this human impulse. We live through our children, our art and writing, our careers, buildings bearing our names, and, of course, our money. We dignify these things with grand words such as “legacy,” but lurking underneath the grandeur is something more primitive: we are terrified of disappearing.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with leaving something behind. Children, books, charitable gifts, institutions, and inheritances can extend our influence beyond our lifetimes. The trouble begins when the symbol stops serving life and life begins serving the symbol. The portfolio that was supposed to provide freedom becomes something its owner must protect. The chocolate cake was baked to be eaten, but eating it now feels like destroying it.

    That is why we should take Chatzky’s warning seriously. A large retirement balance can represent prudence and security, but hoarding money merely because spending it makes mortality feel more real is something else entirely. At that point, preserving the money has become more important than living the life the money was accumulated to support.

    Eat the cake.

  • You Can’t Retire from Yourself

    You Can’t Retire from Yourself

    When you retire, you wage battles with institutions, time, younger generations, health, and “old age,” but your biggest challenge is yourself. This is the old you that has always plagued you, now acclimating to the fact that, like it or not, your remaining years have been gamified by actuarial tables. The longer you live, the longer your family receives a revenue stream. This strange condition threatens to turn the old you into an even more intense version of yourself.

    In my case, the old me is a worrywart, an obsessive, a malcontent, and a neurotic. Now the final chapters of my life have been gamified, and I fear what this worrying, malcontented self might become. I cannot change him through an act of will. I have to pay attention to him.

    This is the theme of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s memoir Will and Attention. In the book’s opening pages, she quotes a sentence from Simone Weil that she keeps on an index card above her desk: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”

    O’Gieblyn has had ample opportunity to examine the failures of will in her long struggle with alcoholism. She writes that she nearly drank herself to death in her twenties, got sober for more than a decade, and then started drinking again, even while giving AA talks and dispensing a wisdom that could not save her. One of the things that confounds her about the relapse is that during her years of sobriety she was happy. Why give up happiness? To complicate matters further, when her relapse was exposed and she told her AA friends all the right things about needing to do the work and not taking life for granted, the pieties sounded false. Reflecting on that period, she writes, “I can see now that it was a problem of authority. I had lost the privilege of narrative distance. I no longer had an ‘old life’ and a ‘new life’; I had only this muddle of my own making.”

    As I reflect on O’Gieblyn’s words, much of her torment seems to come from living in a state of chaos. Having an old life and a new life creates a clean, well-ordered trajectory that appeals to us. But what if the lines become blurred? What if life becomes a mishmash of conflict and ambivalence as we vacillate between our worse and better impulses?

    O’Gieblyn could not will herself off alcohol. At the same time, she observes, she could not will herself to become a Catholic. Having rejected the fundamentalism of her family, she hungered for a return to religion, this time through Catholicism. But this failure dovetailed with her return to alcohol and represented, she writes, “a larger pattern of regression” that defied her intellectual understanding of the dangers of losing one’s spiritual anchoring. “I know a lot of things in theory,” she writes, “and none of it seems to be of much help in the trenches of everyday life.”

    She had written a book about losing her fundamentalist faith while seeking a path toward Catholicism by meeting with a priest and attending Mass. She comes to see both her return to alcoholism and her attraction to institutionalized religion as forms of self-sabotage. In both cases, she is seeking oblivion, a way of losing herself to forces greater than herself. Intellectually, she sees the danger, but emotionally she remains compelled. She must therefore confront compulsion versus will. Did she really choose to return to alcohol or to the certainty of religion? Did she even understand what the words will and choice meant?

    Then she encounters Weil’s argument that we fail to cure ourselves through will but may succeed through attention. The sentence hits her hard, arriving “as the signature of truth, the conviction that you are learning for the first time something you have always known.” But it takes her a long time to grasp what Weil means. At first, she understands only the failure of will because repeated failure has made that part painfully obvious.

    Her book becomes, in large part, a refutation of the will. If human agency exists, the will does not necessarily unlock it. Indeed, the more meaningful the endeavor, the more likely brute effort is to fail us. “The most important things in life completely elude the will,” O’Gieblyn writes. Effort alone cannot summon happiness, piety, faith, seduction, love, productivity, or genius. It is especially futile in the face of addiction. Nor can you simply will yourself into a life of faith, which makes me think of Paul’s admonition to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

    Part of the problem is that the will is an unreliable bedfellow. Is it even pure in its intentions? Do we really want the things the will supposedly guides us toward? O’Gieblyn thinks otherwise. She describes herself as a divided soul whose actions reveal that she does not necessarily want what she tells herself she wants. “My will is scattered, directed toward many contradictory things, and easily distracted.” The will is therefore an untrustworthy character, one Paul warned us about in his famous Epistle to the Romans.

    If the will fails us, what then of attention? What does it mean to apply Weil’s words to our lives? What would it mean to put the will in the back seat and let attention drive?

    First, we have to understand what the will is. Nietzsche believed “that the illusion of willpower rests on our tendency to identify with the part of our soul who commands, not the part who obeys.” But O’Gieblyn observes a contradiction that complicates the idea further. “On one hand,” she writes, “the will is desire (both will and volition come from root words meaning ‘wish’ or ‘desire’). On the other hand, the will is necessary only when you need to act against your desires, or overcome them.” The will therefore “both wants and wants not to want.” To cheat on your diet is not simply a lack of will but an excess of conflicting wills. “The person who breaks his diet wishes for things at once: to eat and to refrain.”

    Her argument is powerful, persuasive, and liberating, almost Pauline in its cogency. No wonder the will fails us. It is a contradictory beast. Its right hand doesn’t know what its left hand is doing. The will is therefore a bad companion. We should stop the car and toss it onto the curb.

    Now that the will is gone, we need a replacement. That replacement is attention. But learning to pay attention to what matters is not a skill acquired overnight. We may first have to unlearn habits accumulated over decades before we can even begin. That unlearning may prove every bit as arduous as the learning that follows. Both will require focus, engagement, and the very faculty we are trying to cultivate: attention.