Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • Why I Don’t Read Happiness Essays (and Neither Should You)

    Why I Don’t Read Happiness Essays (and Neither Should You)

    Arthur Brooks is a best-selling author, a man of clear intellect, solid decency, and enough charm to disarm even a hardened cynic. I read one of his books, From Strength to Strength, which tackles the subject of happiness with insight, elegance, and more than a few glimmers of genuine wisdom. For a week or so, I even took his ideas seriously—pondering the slow fade of professional relevance, the shift from fluid to crystallized intelligence, and the noble art of growing old with grace.

    And then I moved on with my life.

    What I didn’t move on from, unfortunately, was the onslaught of Brooks’ happiness essays in The Atlantic. They appear like clockwork, regular as a multivitamin—each one another serving of cod liver oil ladled out with the same hopeful insistence: “Here, take this. It’s good for you.” The problem isn’t Arthur Brooks. It’s happiness itself. Or rather, happiness writing—that genre of glossy, over-smoothed, well-meaning counsel that now repels me like a therapy dog that won’t stop licking your face during a panic attack.

    Let me try to explain why.

    1. The Word “Happiness” Is Emotionally Bankrupt

    The term happiness is dead on arrival. It lands with the emotional resonance of a helium balloon tied to a mailbox. It evokes cotton candy, county fairs, and the faded joy of children playing cowboys and Indians—an aesthetic trapped in amber. It feels unserious, childish even. I can’t engage with it as a concept because it doesn’t belong in the adult vocabulary of meaning-making. It’s not that I reject the state of being happy—I’m just allergic to calling it that.

    2. It Feels Like Cod Liver Oil for the Soul

    Brooks’ essays show up with the regularity and charm of a concerned mother armed with a spoonful of something you didn’t ask for. I click through The Atlantic and there it is again: another gentle lecture on how to optimize my inner light. It’s no longer nourishment. It’s over-parenting via prose.

    3. Optimizing Happiness Is a Ridiculous Fantasy

    Some of Brooks’ formulas for increasing happiness start to feel like they were dreamed up by a retired actuary trying to convert existential dread into a spreadsheet. As if flourishing could be reduced to inputs and outputs. As if there’s a number on the dial you can crank up if you just follow the steps. It’s wellness-by-algorithm, joy-by-numbers. I’m not a stock portfolio. I’m a human being. And happiness doesn’t wear a Fitbit.

    4. Satire Has Already Broken the Spell

    Anthony Lane, in his New Yorker essay “Can Happiness Be Taught?,”
    dismantled this whole genre with surgical wit. Once you’ve read a masterful takedown of this kind of earnest life-coaching prose, it’s impossible to take it seriously again. Like seeing the zipper on a mascot costume, the magic disappears. You’re just watching a grown-up in a plush suit tell you to breathe and smile more.

    5. I Like Things That Exist in the World

    I’m interested in things with friction and form—things you can grip, build, question, deconstruct. Music. Technology. Communication tools. Exercise. Love. Psychological self-sabotage. You know, the good stuff. Happiness, as a subject, has all the density of vapor. It’s more slogan than substance, and when I see it trotted out as a destination, I start scanning for exits.

    6. It’s a Hot Tub Full of Bromides

    I have no interest in an adult ed class on happiness led by a relentlessly upbeat instructor talking about “mindfulness” and “centeredness” with the fixed grin of someone who has replaced coffee with optimism. I can already hear the buzzwords echoing off the whiteboard. These classes are group therapy in a coloring book—pastel platitudes spoon-fed to the emotionally dehydrated.

    7. It’s Not Self-Help. It’s Self-Surveillance

    Let’s be honest: a lot of happiness literature feels like a soft form of control. Smile more. Meditate. Adjust your attitude. If you’re not happy, it must be something you’re doing wrong. It’s capitalism’s way of gaslighting your suffering. Don’t look outward—don’t question the system, the politics, the institutions. Just recalibrate your “mindset.” In this sense, the language of happiness is more pacifier than pathfinder.

    So yes, Arthur Brooks writes well. He thinks clearly. He’s probably a better person than I am. But his essays on happiness make me recoil—not because they’re wrong, but because they speak a language I no longer trust. I don’t want to be managed, monitored, or optimized. I want to be awake. I want to be challenged. And if I’m lucky, I’ll get to experience the real stuff of life—anger, beauty, confusion, connection—not just a frictionless simulation of contentment.

    Happiness can keep smiling from the other side of the screen. I’ve got kettlebells to swing.

  • Echo-Chamber Fatigue: When Trusted Media Starts to Sound Like Static

    Echo-Chamber Fatigue: When Trusted Media Starts to Sound Like Static

    For years, I counted The Bulwark and The Atlantic among the few media outlets that seemed to keep their heads above water. Thoughtful, principled, and often sharp in their critique, they offered a sense of clarity during a time when the political center felt like it was collapsing under the weight of tribalism. I read The Atlantic with the same reverence people once reserved for the Sunday paper. I tuned into The Bulwark’s podcasts with eagerness, particularly the sparring matches and tag-team lamentations of Sarah Longwell and JVL.

    But lately, something’s shifted.

    I’ve been struggling to name the feeling exactly—disenchantment, disconnection, even a touch of annoyance. It’s not that they’ve suddenly started publishing bad takes (though no one’s immune to that). It’s more that I’ve come to feel like I’m listening to the same looped monologue. Their arguments are often cogent, yes, but increasingly predictable—a chorus of like-minded voices rehearsing the same concerns, circling the same drain.

    Call it echo-chamber fatigue.

    The Bulwark, once a clarion voice of principled conservatism and a fierce watchdog against authoritarianism, now often feels like a room full of smart people endlessly rehashing the same grim diagnosis: American democracy is circling the drain. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong—it’s that I already see the collapse unfolding in real time. Listening to it dissected again and again isn’t cathartic anymore. It’s just salt in the wound.

    The Atlantic, long celebrated for its intellectual breadth, increasingly feels like it’s scanning for moral alignment before publishing an idea. There’s little friction. Little surprise. Just a gentle stroking of reader confirmation bias.

    Meanwhile, I find myself gravitating to media that feels more alive—podcasts like The Gist with Mike Pesca, Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, The Fifth Column, Ink-Stained Wretches, and even The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg. These shows don’t always align with my politics—and that’s exactly the point. They’re not trying to usher me into ideological safety. They’re wrestling with absurdities across the spectrum. They’re skeptical. Curious. Sometimes contrarian. Always human.

    And that, I think, is the deeper issue: emotional resonance. The Bulwark and The Atlantic haven’t necessarily changed. I have. Or perhaps the times have. I need more than agreement—I need tension, exploration, contradiction. The intellectual monoculture, no matter how principled, starts to feel like a sedative after a while.

    I’ve even considered canceling my subscriptions. But there’s friction there, too: The Atlantic remains a useful classroom resource, and every now and then, The Bulwark sparks a genuinely engaging dialogue that reminds me why I once admired it so much.

    So I stay, for now. But I’ve moved my ears—and increasingly, my attention—toward media that still surprises me. That still thinks out loud, rather than reading from a polished script.

    I’m not rejecting thoughtful media. I’m just bored of watching it slowly turn into liturgy.

  • The future, we’re told, is full of freedom—unless you’re the one still cleaning the mess.

    The future, we’re told, is full of freedom—unless you’re the one still cleaning the mess.

    Last semester, in my college critical thinking class—a room full of bright minds and burnt-out spirits—we were dissecting what feels like a nationwide breakdown in mental health. Students tossed around possible suspects like a crime scene lineup: the psychological hangover of the pandemic, TikTok influencers glamorizing nervous breakdowns with pastel filters and soft piano music, the psychic toll of watching America split like a wishbone down party lines. All plausible. All depressing.

    Then a re-entry student—a nurse with twenty years in the trenches—raised her hand and calmly dropped a depth charge into the conversation. She said she sees more patients than ever staggering into hospitals not just sick, but shattered. Demoralized. Enraged. When I asked her what she thought was behind the surge in mental illness, she didn’t hesitate. “Money,” she said. “No one has any. They’re working themselves into the ground and still can’t cover rent, groceries, and medical bills. They’re burning out and breaking down.”

    And just like that, all our theories—algorithms, influencers, red-vs-blue blood feuds—melted under the furnace heat of economic despair. She was right. She sees the raw pain daily, the kind of pain tech billionaires will never upload into a TED Talk. While they spin futuristic fables about AI liberating humanity for leisure and creativity, my nurse watches the working class crawl into urgent care with nothing left but rage and debt. The promise of Universal Basic Income sounds charming if you’re already lounging in a beanbag chair at Singularity HQ, but out here in the world of late rent and grocery inflation, it’s a pipe dream sold by people who wouldn’t recognize a shift worker if one collapsed on their marble floors. The future, we’re told, is full of freedom—unless you’re the one still cleaning the mess.

  • WordPress: My Kettlebell Gym of the Mind

    WordPress: My Kettlebell Gym of the Mind

    I launched my WordPress blog on March 12, evicting myself from Typepad after it was sold to a company that treats blogs the way landlords treat rent-controlled tenants: with bored disdain. Typepad became a ghost town in a bad neighborhood, so I packed up and moved to the gated community of WordPress—cleaner streets, better lighting, and fewer trolls.

    For the past ten weeks, I’ve treated WordPress like a public journal—a digital sweat lodge where I sweat out my thoughts, confessions, and pedagogical war stories from the frontlines of college teaching. I like the routine, the scaffolding, and the habits of self-control. Blogging gives me something I never got from social media or committee meetings: a sense of order in a culture that’s spun off its axis.

    But let’s not kid ourselves. WordPress isn’t some utopian agora where meaningful discourse flourishes in the shade of civility. It’s still wired into the dopamine economy. The minute I start checking likes, follows, and view counts, I’m no longer a writer—I’m a lab rat pressing the pellet button. Metrics are the new morality. And brother, I’m not immune.

    Case in point: I can craft a thoughtful post, click “Publish,” and watch it sink into the abyss like a message in a bottle tossed into a septic tank. One view. Maybe. Post the same thing on Reddit, and suddenly I’m performing for an arena full of dopamine-addled gladiators. They’ll upvote, sure—but only after the professional insulters have had their turn at bat. Reddit is where clever sociopaths go to sharpen their knives and call it discourse.

    WordPress, by contrast, is a chill café with decent lighting and no one live-tweeting your every existential sigh. It’s a refuge from the snarling hordes of hot-take hustlers and ideological bloodsport. A place where I can escape not only digital toxicity, but the wider derangement of our post-shame, post-truth society—where influencers and elected officials are often the same con artist in two different blazers.

    Instead of doomscrolling or screaming into the algorithmic void, I’ve taken to reading biographies—public intellectuals, athletes who aged with dignity, tech pioneers who are obsessed with taking over the world. Or I’ll go spelunking into gadget rabbit holes to distract myself from the spiritual hangover that comes from living in a country where charisma triumphs over character and truth is whatever sells ad space.

    In therapy-speak, my job on WordPress is to “use the tools,” as Phil Stutz says: to strengthen my relationship with myself, with others, and with the crumbling world around me. It’s a discipline, not a dopamine drip. Writing here won’t make me famous, won’t make me rich, and sure as hell won’t turn me into some cardigan-clad oracle for the digital age.

    What it will do is give me structure. WordPress is where I wrestle with my thoughts the way I wrestle kettlebells in my garage: imperfectly, regularly, and with just enough sweat to keep the madness at bay.

  • The Futility of Being Ready

    The Futility of Being Ready

    In December of 2019, my wife and I, both lifelong members of the National Society of Worrywarts, stumbled upon reports of a deadly virus brewing in China. Most people shrugged. We did not. I jumped on eBay and ordered a bulk box of masks the size of a hotel mini-fridge. It felt ridiculous at the time—a paranoid lark, like filling a doomsday bunker because you heard thunder on a Tuesday. But three months later, on March 13, 2020, the world shut down, and that cardboard box of N95s felt less like overreaction and more like prophecy.

    These days, I teach college in what I call the ChatGPT Era—a time when my students and I sit around analyzing how artificial intelligence is rewiring our habits, our thinking, and possibly the scaffolding of our humanity. I don’t dread AI the way I dreaded COVID. It doesn’t make me stock canned beans or disinfect door handles. But it does give me that same uneasy tremor in the gut—the sense that something vast is shifting beneath us, and that whatever emerges will make the present feel quaint and maybe a little foolish.

    It’s like standing on a beach after the earthquake and watching the water disappear from the shore. You can back up your files, rewrite your syllabus, and pretend to adapt, but you know deep down you’re stuck in Prepacolypse Mode—that desperate, irrational phase where you try to outmaneuver the future with your label maker. You prepare for the unpreparable, perform rituals of control that offer all the protection of a paper shield.

    And through it all comes that strange, electric sensation—Dreadrenaline. It’s not just fear. It’s a kind of alertness, a humming, high-voltage awareness that your life is about to be edited at the molecular level. You’re not just anticipating change—you’re bracing for a version of yourself that will be unrecognizable on the other side. You’re watching history draft your name onto the roster and realizing, too late, that you’re not a spectator anymore. You’re in the game.

  • The Beautiful Unwearable

    The Beautiful Unwearable

    Do you own a Beautiful Unwearable? If so, you already know the cruel paradox: the watch that steals your breath every time you look at it, yet somehow never makes it onto your wrist.

    Picture this: you’re hypnotized by a $2,000 Seiko Astron—a stunner whose build quality punches well above its weight class, easily rivaling watches priced four digits higher. Every gleam of that GPS-synced, zirconia ceramic bezel sends a little burst of dopamine through your bloodstream. So you do what any horological romantic would do: you pull the trigger. A week later, it’s in your hands, fresh from Japan, glinting like a Bond villain’s cufflink.

    And then… nothing.

    You stare at it. You admire it. You photograph it from five angles under different lighting conditions. But when it’s time to choose a watch to wear—on a walk, to the store, or even to teach class—it’s always your rugged dive watch that gets the call. The Astron? It’s too dressy, too refined, too… aspirational. Like buying a tuxedo when your calendar is a wasteland of Costco runs and Zoom meetings.

    So it sits. Day after day. In its cushioned little coffin, gorgeous and neglected, whispering, “You’re not worthy of me.” Unlike wall art, it can’t be displayed; unlike a tool watch, it doesn’t beg to be worn. It becomes horological purgatory—a $2,000 museum piece trapped in a drawer.

    Personally? I’ve never bought an Astron. Why? Because I’ve already mentally lived this scenario. I’ve played out the whole Shakespearean arc in my head: love at first sight, the impulsive purchase, the honeymoon glow… followed by guilt, alienation, and silent shame. I don’t need a Beautiful Unwearable in my collection to know it would haunt me like a luxury ghost.

  • Identifying and Coping with Neighborplexity

    Identifying and Coping with Neighborplexity

    My dear, respectable neighbors, the Pattersons have forced me to contend with Neighborplexity. Let me explain. For years, I lived in blissful harmony with these upstanding citizens—the kind of people who proudly displayed their New Yorker subscriptions and NPR tote bags like badges of intellectual honor. We had an unspoken pact, a mutual understanding that we were members of the Smart People’s Society, where the TV was reserved for documentaries, award-winning dramas, and the occasional indie film that required subtitles and a dictionary to understand.

    But then, one evening, as I casually glanced out my window—just a harmless peek, really—I saw something so grotesque, so utterly incomprehensible, that it shook me to my core. There, through the open window of my once-revered neighbors, I saw them glued to the screen—not just any screen, but one streaming a TV show so mind-numbingly lowbrow it made reality itself seem like a parody. My brain went into full-blown meltdown. Could it be? Were they actually watching Love Island?

    I blinked, hoping I’d misinterpreted the scene, but no—the horror was all too real. My neighbors, those paragons of taste and intellect, were indulging in what could only be described as televised garbage. I was struck down by a case of Neighborplexity: that gut-wrenching, mind-twisting moment when you realize you might not know the people next door at all. Suddenly, my world was flipped upside down. Had they always been this way? Were those book club meetings just a ruse, a clever cover-up for their secret love affair with trash TV? I felt like I’d just discovered that the Michelin-starred chef who lived down the block actually preferred dining on Spam straight out of the can.

    I thought we were united in our disdain for anything that wasn’t at least 95% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. But now? Now, I wasn’t so sure. How could they betray me like this? Was every dinner party, every casual chat about the latest literary masterpiece, just a well-orchestrated charade? My mind spun as I tried to reconcile the image of these seemingly cultured, well-spoken people with the reality of them willingly watching—gasp—that show.

    What do I do now? How do I move forward? Can I ever look them in the eye again, or will I be forever haunted by this dark revelation, this unraveling of the fabric of my once-idyllic neighborhood? All because of one dreadful, unforgivable act of poor taste on TV. Love Island, of all things. The horror! The betrayal! The absolute audacity! 

    To get through this ordeal, I must have a clear definition of Neighborplexity and study the coping mechanisms to help me deal with this. So here we go.

    Neighborplexity (n.): The psychological whiplash that occurs when your carefully curated perception of your neighbors—those tote-bag-wielding, podcast-quoting, fair-trade-coffee-brewing intellectuals—is shattered by the revelation that they voluntarily watch garbage television. One moment you’re nodding in mutual disdain over a New Yorker cartoon; the next, you’re watching them binge Love Island with the hungry intensity of someone decoding the Dead Sea Scrolls. Neighborplexity induces spiritual vertigo, trust erosion, and the overwhelming sense that the social fabric of your ZIP code has been irreparably torn by sequins, fake tans, and manufactured drama. It is, in essence, a full-blown existential crisis brought on by a neighbor’s taste in television.

    7 Coping Mechanisms for Surviving Neighborplexity:

    1. Curated Amnesia – Tell yourself you didn’t see it. What open window? What TV screen? As far as you’re concerned, they were watching a Ken Burns documentary about soil.
    2. Projection Therapy – Assume it was ironic. They’re studying Love Island for a sociological thesis titled The Semiotics of Spray Tan.
    3. NPR Overdose – Immediately listen to four consecutive episodes of Fresh Air to flush out any lingering trash-TV toxins.
    4. Visual Recalibration – Replace your neighbor’s face with Tilda Swinton’s. At all times. It helps.
    5. Sarcastic Enlightenment – Convince yourself this is actually a deeper form of taste. Maybe Love Island is postmodern performance art and you’re the unsophisticated one.
    6. Emergency Sumatra Deployment – Brew the darkest, most self-righteous coffee you can find and sip it slowly while rereading Proust. This reminds you who you really are.
    7. Petty Book Club Coup – At the next meeting, accidentally bring up Love Island as a joke and watch their faces. Gauge their guilt. Proceed accordingly with social sanctions or passive-aggressive charcuterie.
  • Perkatory: My Caffeinated Descent into Madness

    Perkatory: My Caffeinated Descent into Madness

    Sumatra coffee is my bad boy of the coffee world—dark, mysterious, and utterly unapologetic. It doesn’t just wake me up; it smacks me across the face, throws me out of bed, and chases me down the street while I’m still in my pajamas. Imagine if a tropical thunderstorm decided to moonlight as a barista, bottling up its fury in a cup. That’s Sumatra—every sip as intense as being caught in a downpour while you’re half-asleep and regretting every life choice that led you to this point.

    Sure, I’m probably guzzling more Sumatra dark roast than is recommended by anyone with a functioning heart, but let’s be real: I’m an overworked college writing professor, buried under an Everest of student assignments that multiply like rabbits on caffeine. Add to that the never-ending demands of an irrational writing obsession with a book titled The Absurdictionary: A Compendium of Comical Curiosities. The result? I keep churning out content until my fingers bleed.”

    But let’s not get ahead of ourselves with the self-pity party. I could give you a long-winded lecture about how the digital age was supposed to bring us more convenience and free time, only to morph into a merciless sociopath that steals our time faster than you can say “work-life balance.” But instead, let me talk about a condition I have from loving coffee too much. 

    Every morning at 6 sharp, like some deranged caffeinated monk, I stagger to the kitchen, where the sacred rite of coffee-making begins. This isn’t just a routine—it’s a holy sacrament that grants me the powers of focus, confidence, and the kind of superhuman alertness that helps me work on one of my best-selling coffee table humor books or grade college essays. The taste of that bitter coffee kissed with a hint of milk and a drop of liquid stevia, is nothing short of ambrosia. By 7 a.m., after downing two 18-ounce cups, I’ve ascended to a higher plane—a realm where I’m not just a man, but a writing, essay-grading, piano-playing, kettlebell-swinging demigod. I go through my day, shower, lunch, nap—rinse and repeat—like a well-oiled machine of productivity, albeit one lugging around a trunkful of neuroses and the social skills of a startled raccoon.

    But there’s this nagging little itch I can’t quite scratch: coffee. It’s more than just a drink at this point; it’s an obsession. Do I love coffee too much? Maybe. Do I worship the ritual a bit too fervently? Definitely. Throughout the day, this thought keeps tiptoeing into my mind like a ninja with a vendetta: “I can’t wait till tomorrow morning when I can make coffee again.” And then, the existential kicker: “Is my life just one endless loop of killing time between coffee sessions?”

    Pat myself on the back: I’ve crossed into a special kind of hell—a hell I’ve christened Perkatory. It’s not quite purgatory, but it’s close. It’s that torturous stretch of time where I’m just existing, dragging myself through the mind-numbing hours between one glorious cup of coffee and the next. It’s a slow-burning obsession that has taken over my life, turning everything else into the dull, gray filler content I’d skip if life had a fast-forward button.

    I remember those bleak, pre-coffee days of my youth—days when Perkatory wasn’t even a thing. Back then, life was simpler, more innocent, and tragically devoid of the caffeinated highs I now chase with the zeal of a junkie trying to recapture that first, glorious hit. But let’s be honest: there’s no going back. Perkatory is here to stay, like that annoying roommate who never does the dishes and steals your leftovers. I’m stuck in this never-ending cycle of waiting, longing, and counting down the hours until I can get my next hit of that sweet, sweet java.

    If you want to suffer like I do, study carefully the meaning of my chosen condition:

    Perkatory (n.): That jittery limbo between your first and fourth cup of coffee, where you’re too caffeinated to sit still but too mentally deranged to function. In Perkatory, time dilates, emails multiply like rabbits, and your heart taps out Morse code against your ribcage while your brain drafts a screenplay, solves climate change, and forgets your Wi-Fi password—simultaneously. It’s a state of spiritual unrest fueled by dark roast and delusion, where productivity feels imminent but never actually arrives. You’re not in hell, exactly—you’re just in line for another cup.

  • A College Professor in Search of Flexecutivewear

    A College Professor in Search of Flexecutivewear

    I, for one, am eternally grateful for the fashion revolution that finally told tight loafers and itchy tweed to take a long walk off a short runway. Gone are the days when professionalism meant strangling your thighs in wool trousers and embalming your torso in starched cotton. Now, thanks to society’s blessed surrender to performancewear, I can be a fully functioning member of the information economy without developing trench foot or sweating through my pancreas. At long last, it’s possible to look like I’m closing deals while feeling like I’m on my way to foam roll my glutes. So yes, it’s time for a wardrobe overhaul—one built not on thread count but on strategic stretch and moisture management. We’ll call this divine aesthetic what it truly is: Flexecutivewear—because nothing says power move like a blazer with hidden ventilation panels and joggers that whisper synergy.

    A definition is in order:

    Flexecutivewear (n.): A genre of athleisure engineered for men who want to appear as though they’ve just wrapped a high-stakes boardroom negotiation and a punishing HIIT session—without actually doing either. It’s business-casual for the delusional alpha male: moisture-wicking fabrics, tailored joggers, and compression hoodies that whisper “venture-backed” while screaming “please validate me.” Flexecutivewear exists at the tragic intersection of performance and performance art, where every outfit is a pitch deck and every stretch is a soft launch.

    No Flexecutivewear ensemble is complete without the obligatory diver watch on an orange strap—a bold timepiece that screams “I could be 200 meters underwater right now, but I’m actually just waiting for my cold brew.” The orange strap is crucial: it’s the high-visibility beacon of masculine daring, suggesting a rugged, adventurous spirit who might rappel down a cliff between Zoom calls. Never mind that the watch has never tasted saltwater and its nearest brush with danger was a CrossFit box opening. In the Flexecutive ecosystem, the diver watch is less tool and more talisman—a waterproof monument to imagined peril and aspirational virility.

  • Waiting for the Angels to Descend and Hand Me the Perfect Book Title on a Velvet Pillow

    Waiting for the Angels to Descend and Hand Me the Perfect Book Title on a Velvet Pillow

    After reading Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga—a meandering, self-lacerating spiral of spiritual ambition, narcissism, and depressive collapse—I’ve found myself inspired, if not outright possessed, by the urge to write my own autobiographical novel. Not about yoga, of course. I have the flexibility of a rusted lawn chair. Mine would be about my lifelong addiction to exercise. Working title: Kettlebell.

    It has a certain Zen austerity to it. One word. Heavy. Spherical. Monastic. A blunt object and a metaphor all in one. A symbol of focus in a world engineered for entropy. While others turn to wine, weed, or weaponized mindfulness apps, I have turned to iron. Cold, unyielding, mildly concussive iron.

    Of course, I could flirt with cleverness—titles like The Church of Sweat or The Temple of Gains—but those reek of Instagram influencers and overpriced gym merch. Kettlebell is purer. But then again, Dumbbell tugs at me. It’s honest. It’s humiliating. It suggests what I secretly suspect: that I’ve spent a lifetime mistaking pain for virtue and resistance training for redemption. I am a Dumb Bell. A heavy object being swung around in circles, hoping to find peace through repetition.

    Still, perhaps I’m playing into the oldest self-help trap of them all—masquerading self-deprecation as enlightenment. Perhaps the search for the perfect title is simply a glorified avoidance ritual, a form of literary procrastination wrapped in velvet. Because deep down, I know the book isn’t just about fitness. It’s about how I’ve used discipline as anesthesia, reps as prayer beads, and physical exhaustion as a form of epistemology. I don’t know what God looks like, but I suspect He smells like workout chalk and vanilla protein shakes.

    Some mornings I feel like a garage-dwelling mystic, swinging kettlebells under flickering LED light, muttering mantras between sets. Other days I feel like an absurd parody of Sisyphus—except instead of rolling a boulder up a hill, I’m performing goblet squats in my tattered gym shorts, chasing transcendence in 30-second rest intervals.

    And now, on the brink of another workout, I’m wasting precious calories spiraling into a metaphysical title crisis. Maybe the perfect name will descend from the sky, borne aloft by angels in sweatbands and Lululemon, whispering, “This is it. This is your brand.” They will hand me the title on a velvet pillow. Or maybe I’ll figure it out in the middle of a brutal set, when my soul finally detaches from my body like a spent shell casing and whispers, “Just call it Garage Monk and be done with it.”

    One way or another, the iron awaits. And it does not care what the book is called.