Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • The Vulcan Fallacy

    The Vulcan Fallacy

    Emmanuel Carrère praises Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius as “sublime,” calling it “a long, mulling, sumptuous meditation on the art of living.” Seneca’s ambition is not merely to make us happier but to transform us. We are to outlive our vices until our actions naturally align with our highest thoughts.

    Carrère finds striking parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism. Both insist that our fate is shaped by our actions. Both treat gratitude as indispensable to happiness. Most importantly, both reject the notion that happiness arrives by accident. Happiness is a discipline.

    For Seneca, that discipline begins with relentless attention.

    Like physical strength, moral strength must be exercised until it becomes second nature. The Stoics called this exercise meditatio. Carrère’s friend Hervé wonderfully describes it as “the patient and scrupulous espionage of oneself by oneself.” I would call this Self-Espionage: the disciplined practice of observing one’s own motives, habits, and reactions with the detached vigilance of an investigator searching for hidden weaknesses.

    Paul Veyne captures the comic excess of this discipline with characteristic wit: “A Stoic does three things when he eats: he eats, he observes himself eating, and he composes a little poem about it.”

    The joke succeeds because it contains a truth. The Stoic never entirely stops watching himself.

    Eventually, however, the watching becomes unnecessary. Through years of disciplined reflection, thoughts, desires, and actions gradually converge until virtue no longer feels like effort. The mature Stoic—or Buddhist—does not strive to become mindful. He simply is. Seneca expresses this state with extraordinary elegance: “I don’t obey God, I agree with him.”

    This is Virtuous Convergence: the gradual alignment of one’s thoughts, desires, and actions until moral behavior no longer requires constant effort or self-policing.

    If Carrère ended there, The Kingdom would become an eloquent defense of Stoicism.

    He doesn’t.

    He believes something essential is missing.

    Drawing upon Paul Veyne’s introduction to Seneca, Carrère observes that Stoicism ultimately “misses out on what makes life interesting.” Veyne likens the Stoic to a thermostat whose sole purpose is maintaining a constant temperature regardless of changing conditions.

    It is a devastating metaphor.

    Life surely demands more than emotional climate control.

    Carrère presses the point further:

    What is the wisdom that consists in purging life of all novelty, emotion, curiosity, desire? That’s the major objection you can also put to Buddhism: that it considers desire an enemy. Desire and suffering go hand in hand: remove desire, and you also remove suffering. Even if it’s true, is it worth it?

    That question lingers.

    I think of hobbies that border on obsession.

    Some people collect paintings.

    Others collect sculpture or photography.

    I belong to the fraternity of watch enthusiasts, where otherwise sensible adults willingly torment themselves over beautifully engineered objects costing sums that would embarrass a financial planner.

    The obsession is irrational.

    That is precisely why it is enjoyable.

    The endless comparisons, the longing, the research, the anticipation, the occasional disappointment—these are not unfortunate side effects of the hobby.

    They are the hobby.

    A life stripped of every gratuitous passion may indeed become tranquil.

    It also risks becoming flavorless.

    No spice.

    No texture.

    No delightful absurdity.

    It is a world in perfect emotional equilibrium.

    It is also a world inhabited by Dr. Spock.

    The difficulty, of course, is that Spock is a Vulcan.

    We are not.

    This is where I part company with Stoicism.

    Its great weakness is what I call the Vulcan Fallacy: the mistaken belief that the highest form of human flourishing consists in eliminating emotional turbulence, desire, and irrational passions, thereby confusing emotional stability with a fully lived life.

    Human beings are not designed merely to maintain psychological equilibrium.

    We fall in love knowing our hearts may be broken.

    We create art knowing it may fail.

    We raise children knowing they will one day leave us.

    We pursue beauty, excellence, adventure, and impossible ambitions fully aware that desire carries disappointment in its wake.

    The point is not to eliminate suffering.

    The point is to discover which desires make the suffering worthwhile.

    Perfect serenity may produce admirable self-control.

    It has never produced Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

    Nor has it built cathedrals, written great novels, explored unknown oceans, or inspired a father to stay awake all night beside the hospital bed of his sick child.

    The fully human life requires more than a perfectly calibrated thermostat.

  • When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

    When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

    At sixty-five, with retirement approaching, I have aged out of five-thousand-dollar watches.

    Not because I can’t appreciate them.

    Not because they aren’t beautiful.

    Because I no longer have the wrist time.

    Twenty more years—if fortune is generous—is not enough to justify rotating my current collection alongside two additional grail pieces that would spend most of their lives quietly aging in a watch box. I call this Chronological Misalignment: the condition in which a person’s remaining lifetime no longer justifies acquiring possessions intended to be enjoyed over a much longer horizon.

    Time eventually becomes the harshest accountant.

    But time is only half the problem.

    The other half is geography.

    Or, more accurately, lifestyle.

    I still admire the Grand Seiko GMT. I still admire the Tudor Pelagos. They remain magnificent objects.

    I simply struggle to imagine wearing one while binge-watching Hulu, pushing a shopping cart through Target, or taking my daughters to YogurtLand for frozen yogurt.

    The watch would be dressed for an expedition to Antarctica.

    I would be buying gummy bears by the ounce.

    The mismatch is almost comic.

    I call this Environmental Misalignment: the condition in which one owns or desires objects whose elegance exceeds the ordinary circumstances of one’s daily life.

    Recognizing these two forms of misalignment is not depressing.

    It is liberating.

    Reality has performed the difficult task of setting my priorities for me.

    The question is no longer whether I can justify another grail watch.

    The question is what deserves that energy instead.

    For decades, watches occupied an astonishing amount of mental real estate. They required research, comparison, speculation, buying, selling, photographing, discussing, and occasionally irrational justification.

    Now that enthusiasm has become available for reassignment.

    It belongs elsewhere.

    It belongs in writing.

    It belongs at the piano.

    It belongs in my kettlebell-filled garage.

    Most of all, it belongs to my health.

    I am still about twenty pounds overweight.

    My physician periodically reminds me that it is time for fasting bloodwork—cholesterol, blood sugar, and the rest of the annual report card. I already know roughly what the results will say. At 230 pounds, everything will probably look respectable except my LDL cholesterol, which has an annoying habit of hovering around the borderline.

    So the mission is obvious.

    Reach 210 pounds.

    Then endure the ritual: skip breakfast, forgo the morning coffee, wait patiently while someone extracts several vials of blood, drive home slightly lightheaded, and receive laboratory numbers worthy of the inconvenience.

    At thirty-five, my grail was a Tudor Pelagos.

    At sixty-five, my grail is different. It’s a total cholesterol below 200 and a blood pressure reading of 120 over 80.

    That is not surrender.

    That is maturity.

    There comes a point in life when we stop negotiating with Father Time.

    He begins issuing instructions.

    He says:

    “You’re not wearing a Grand Seiko to Trader Joe’s.

    You’re not timing your afternoon nap with a luxury GMT.

    Your assignment now is different.

    Become as healthy as possible.

    Remain mentally sharp.

    Write your books.

    Play your piano.

    Stay strong enough that your family never has to carry you through the final chapters of your life.”

    For once, I find myself with no desire to argue.

    His orders make perfect sense.

    The remarkable thing is that they do not diminish my life.

    They simplify it.

    The pursuit of watches has quietly given way to the pursuit of longevity, creativity, and strength. Those ambitions promise far greater returns than another polished titanium case ever could.

    I wrote this little manifesto wearing a G-Shock Frogman.

    It told time just as faithfully as any luxury watch.

    More importantly, it reminded me that I have finally found a grail worthy of the time I have left.

  • Nothing Gets Better

    Nothing Gets Better

    Yesterday my piano tuner, Cecil, came by to work on my upright. He is pushing eighty, has spent a lifetime coaxing reluctant pianos back into harmony, and charges $250 for a tuning. I pay it gladly. When someone has become the best in the business, you stop thinking about the fee and start thinking about the privilege.

    After he finished, we lingered and talked about Southern California.

    I told him that whenever I return to my old stomping grounds in the Bay Area, I leave with the same impression: everything feels more crowded, more hurried, more stressful, and somehow less hospitable than I remember. The roads seem angrier. The neighborhoods seem denser. Even the air feels impatient.

    Without the slightest hesitation, Cecil smiled and delivered a sentence that landed with the force of an ancient proverb.

    “Nothing gets better.”

    The words settled over me like a truth I had always known but kept forgetting.

    Nothing gets better.

    Cecil continued. Torrance, he predicted, will eventually resemble West Los Angeles. Massive apartment complexes are already rising near our neighborhood. Del Amo Fashion Center has become a preview of the future. Try finding a parking space after eleven o’clock on a weekday. On weekends, don’t bother. The future has already begun circling the parking lot.

    Yet Cecil wasn’t complaining.

    That is the crucial distinction.

    His observation was not an invitation to pessimism but to realism.

    Most of our unhappiness comes from quietly assuming that the world ought to become more convenient, more orderly, more civilized, and less crowded as time marches on. When reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate, we conclude that something has gone terribly wrong.

    Perhaps nothing has gone wrong at all.

    Perhaps this is simply what civilizations do. They grow denser, noisier, more complicated, and more exhausting. Every technological advance solves one problem while inventing three new ones. Every improvement arrives carrying an invoice.

    I have come to think of this as the Cecil Principle: the recognition that the world rarely becomes simpler, quieter, or more civilized over time, requiring us to cultivate resilience rather than nostalgia or utopian expectation.

    The Cecil Principle reminded me of psychiatrist Phil Stutz, who reduces life to three unavoidable realities: pain, uncertainty, and constant work. According to Stutz, psychological health begins not by escaping these conditions but by accepting them. The fantasy that life should become comfortable is itself the source of much unnecessary suffering.

    Cecil, with considerably fewer words, had arrived at the same destination.

    Nothing gets better.

    Strangely, there is liberation in that sentence. Once I stop expecting history to reward me with perpetual improvement, I become less resentful when it doesn’t. I stop waiting for the perfect city, the perfect traffic pattern, the perfect political climate, or the perfect era. I become more attentive to the quiet pleasures still available: a well-tuned piano, an honest conversation, a competent craftsman who has spent decades mastering his trade.

    Nothing gets better.

    Oddly enough, accepting that fact makes life better.

    The truth, after all, has an unexpected habit of setting us free.

  • The Attention Vultures Descend

    The Attention Vultures Descend

    I watched Netflix’s three-part documentary Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, expecting another true-crime chronicle. Instead, I found a cautionary tale about the moral corrosion of the social media age.

    The murders shattered the illusion of an idyllic college town where doors, friendships, and assumptions of decency had long remained open. Into that atmosphere of trust stepped a doctoral teaching assistant in criminology whose crimes seemed almost grotesquely theatrical: an aspiring expert in criminal behavior who became the very monster he purported to study. The documentary is unsettling not merely because it chronicles an act of staggering brutality, but because it reveals how quickly evil can erupt into places that imagine themselves immune from it.

    Yet the documentary’s most instructive chapter unfolds after the killings, during the long months when investigators had no public suspect. That vacuum of knowledge became oxygen for the internet. Social media influencers rushed to fill the silence, speaking with the confidence of detectives while possessing none of the evidence. Their videos, podcasts, and livestreams transformed ignorance into certainty. Innocent college students—already traumatized by the murders—were publicly identified as suspects, dissected as if they were characters in a murder mystery rather than human beings whose lives could be permanently scarred by reckless speculation.

    These people were not engaged in an earnest search for truth. They were engaged in a hunt for attention. Every accusation, every dramatic thumbnail, every emphatic declaration became another bid for clicks, subscribers, and algorithmic favor. Tragedy had become raw material for personal branding.

    Years ago, Jaron Lanier warned that social media rewards the most primitive parts of our psychology. The platforms appeal less to our reflective minds than to our craving for recognition, outrage, and status. They encourage us to chase attention as if it were oxygen. Watching the documentary, I felt as though Lanier’s warning had escaped the pages of his book and materialized on the screen. The influencers were not simply exploiting a tragedy; they had become creatures shaped by an economy in which visibility matters more than truth and confidence is valued above evidence.

    The documentary left me thinking less about the murderer than about myself. Over the last fifteen years, I have spent enough time on social media to recognize the same impulse in miniature—the subtle desire to post, comment, and share simply because an audience is there. The temptation is rarely malicious, but it springs from the same psychological soil: the hope of being noticed.

    The film made me want to cultivate a new habit. Before posting, I want to pause and ask a simple question: Am I adding light, or am I merely asking strangers to look at me? That brief moment of hesitation may be the smallest possible act of resistance against an attention economy that profits from our worst instincts.

    The documentary’s greatest lesson, then, has little to do with criminology. It is about character. It asks whether we will become citizens who value truth enough to remain silent when we do not know—or whether we will join the growing flock of attention vultures circling every human tragedy, mistaking spectatorship for significance. I know which path I hope to avoid. If that requires changing my relationship with social media, it is a price well worth paying.

  • Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    One morning I sat at the piano while my wife prepared her breakfast—a pot of rolled oats simmering quietly on the stovetop. As the warm, earthy aroma drifted through the house, I was four years old again, carried backward in time to the winter of 1966.

    My brother had not yet been born. It was just my mother, my father, and me driving toward Lake Tahoe. Before we reached our destination, a snowstorm descended with more fury than anyone expected. My father had no tire chains, so we abandoned the journey and took refuge in a small roadside motel, where we remained snowbound for several days while the Sierra disappeared beneath an endless blanket of white.

    My parents bought provisions from a nearby market. Every morning we ate bowls of Quaker Oats sweetened with brown sugar and cooled with milk. To my four-year-old self, it was paradise. Even today, no gourmet breakfast can rival the comfort contained in those humble bowls of oatmeal.

    Yet the smell of those oats carried an unexpected paradox. They meant warmth, safety, and home, but they also became permanently entwined with something altogether stranger. We were isolated in a tiny motel, surrounded by a landscape so white and silent that it seemed the world itself had vanished. We were a single glowing window in an infinite universe of snow.

    The motel television only deepened the feeling that we had crossed into another reality. Alongside familiar cartoons appeared programs I had never imagined could exist. There was Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt. Stranger still was a British science-fiction serial called Fireball XL5, whose cast consisted entirely of marionettes speaking with impeccable British accents.

    To my four-year-old mind, Fireball XL5 felt less like a television show than a fever dream accidentally transmitted from another galaxy. Nothing obeyed the ordinary rules of childhood. The marionettes smiled with unsettling serenity, their painted faces suspended somewhere between fearless astronauts and department-store mannequins that had wandered off after closing time. Their rocket streaked through glittering constellations that looked as though someone had punched tiny holes into black velvet with an ice pick. The dialogue carried the solemn authority of Shakespeare performed by sleepwalkers, while the eerie electronic score suggested that outer space was inhabited not by extraterrestrials but by ghosts.

    At four years old, I lacked the vocabulary to call it surreal. I only knew that I loved it because it made no sense. Fireball XL5 occupied that peculiar territory where wonder and nightmare shake hands, leaving a child convinced that television, like dreams, had uncovered a hidden dimension adults somehow accepted without question.

    Those three snowbound days fused together two emotional worlds that have never since separated. The comforting smell of oatmeal became permanently married to the delicious strangeness of Fireball XL5. This is what I call The Cozy Uncanny: the emotional condition in which domestic comfort becomes inseparable from profound otherness, producing memories that remain both reassuring and dreamlike.

    When my wife’s oatmeal filled our kitchen this morning, it carried me effortlessly back to that motel near Lake Tahoe. A single scent collapsed sixty years. Suddenly I was once again that little boy sitting safely indoors while an unknowable universe waited just beyond the frosted window.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite smells remain the smells of breakfast: rolled oats, French toast, pancakes browning on a griddle, maple syrup warming in the air. These aromas do more than remind me of childhood. They reassure me that no matter how strange the surrounding world becomes, there remains a path back home. I sometimes think that if I were suddenly transported into the bizarre universe of Fireball XL5, the smell of oatmeal alone would give me enough confidence to believe I could find my way back.

    People often predict that religion will eventually disappear, that modernity will finally outgrow humanity’s longing for transcendence. I doubt it. Our deepest desires are not arguments but homesickness. We are creatures who instinctively seek warmth, belonging, and a place where the strange finally becomes familiar. The smell of rolled oats, French toast, or pancakes does not merely awaken nostalgia. It awakens the ancient conviction that somewhere there exists a home we have not entirely forgotten.

    Perhaps our religious impulse is nothing more—and nothing less—than that incurable longing to return there.

  • The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    Jeremy lives in Louisiana, but over the past decade he and I have shared the peculiar fraternity that develops among people who have spent far too much time thinking about watches. He has followed my YouTube channel long enough to witness my latest affliction unfold in real time.

    It began six months ago with a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    Then came the Rescue GW-7900.

    Soon afterward I was fully initiated into the cult of Multiband-6. Every night while I slept, invisible radio signals synchronized my watches to atomic clocks, and every morning I awoke to the intoxicating certainty that the digits on my wrist displayed the exact time—not approximately, not close enough, but the precise time.

    Jeremy watched this transformation with sympathy until he made the fatal mistake of buying a few Multiband-6 G-Shocks himself.

    Recently he wrote to confess that his own hobby had entered a state of upheaval.

    Not ruined.

    Upended.

    He had contracted the same addiction.

    Like me, he had become enslaved to the quiet pleasure of glancing at a digital display that never needed correction. Like me, he found himself staring at mechanical divers worth several thousand dollars and struggling to justify putting them on his wrist. His collection, like mine, had suffered what I call The Great Divide.

    Mine is specifically the G-Shock–Seiko Divide.

    Jeremy’s divide is somewhat different. His luxury mechanical pieces wear both Swiss passports and Japanese ones, but the conflict is identical.

    Two incompatible ideas of what a watch should be now compete for the same wrist.

    Ironically, this essay began as something far more trivial.

    I intended to make a YouTube video reviewing my Seiko divers on Divecore Waffle straps made from Hydrogenated Nitrile Butadiene Rubber. Three of my twenty-millimeter Divecore Waffles currently adorn my Seiko SLA055, SLA051, and SLA023. My SBDC203 remains on its original Seiko “Chocolate Bar” rubber strap, while my Seiko Tuna SBBN049 wears a twenty-two-millimeter Divecore Waffle.

    I genuinely miss my Divecore FKM HP straps. They were magnificent. Yet the lingering discussion surrounding PFAS—the so-called “forever chemicals” associated with fluorinated materials—finally persuaded me that they were an unnecessary source of anxiety. My suspicion is that the straps are probably harmless. But “probably harmless” is an awkward companion for something strapped to your skin every day. Why carry even a hypothetical worry when the Divecore Waffles are every bit as handsome?

    I had planned to spend twenty minutes discussing rubber straps.

    Then I stopped myself.

    Who cares about straps?

    I already made peace with abandoning steel bracelets years ago.

    The straps weren’t the story.

    The story was that I had reached a point where every glance at my watch box required choosing between two entirely different philosophies.

    My Seikos are objects of astonishing beauty.

    Their dials possess depth, warmth, texture, and craftsmanship that industrial resin can never hope to imitate. On today’s used market my five Seiko divers are probably worth around nine thousand dollars. They are miniature works of art.

    My G-Shocks, by contrast, are worth perhaps a thousand dollars altogether.

    They are molded from industrial resin.

    They resemble equipment more than jewelry.

    They synchronize themselves every night.

    They weigh almost nothing.

    They display the exact time in large, unapologetic digits.

    They ask nothing of me.

    The Seikos appeal to my aesthetic imagination.

    The G-Shocks satisfy my practical mind.

    Guess which one wins about ninety percent of the time.

    It would be easy to write one of those tiresome minimalist sermons declaring that I should have skipped expensive mechanical watches altogether and bought only affordable G-Shocks. Such hindsight is wonderfully economical because it edits out the actual life that was lived.

    For more than twenty years I sowed my horological oats among mechanical watches.

    There was obsession.

    There was ecstasy.

    There was irrationality.

    There was financial excess.

    There was genuine beauty.

    There was hard-earned knowledge.

    Without those decades, I would never appreciate the peculiar satisfaction of glancing at a Mudman GW-9500 and knowing that the time displayed is as accurate as physics presently allows.

    Counterfactual histories are comforting fantasies. They allow us to imagine that wisdom could have arrived without tuition.

    It cannot.

    An hour before writing this, I was wearing my beloved Seiko Uemura. I admired its magnificent dial, then found myself squinting to determine the approximate time.

    Approximate.

    A few moments later I quietly removed it and fastened the Mudman to my wrist.

    Jeremy understands exactly why.

    My suspicion is that thousands of other watch enthusiasts do as well. Once you’ve crossed the Great Divide, you never entirely return. The two worlds continue to coexist, each beautiful in its own way, while your wrist quietly votes for only one.

  • The Young and the Larval

    The Young and the Larval

    A year ago, I attended a family birthday party in Studio City. Hundreds of cheerful, talkative guests wandered around a lavish backyard pool shaded by thick stands of trees. The setting felt less like Los Angeles than a country estate in Provence. Beneath a canopy, guests feasted on fragrant Middle Eastern food while a white-haired band by the deep end of the pool played one boomer anthem after another. It was a celebration of long lives, old friendships, and accumulated memories.

    Most of the guests were in their seventies.

    While eating lunch, I spoke with my cousin’s husband, a retired ophthalmologist and former hospital administrator. A man who had once occupied positions of enormous responsibility, he told me the greatest surprise of old age wasn’t aching joints or declining stamina.

    It was invisibility.

    “People look right through you,” he said.

    His remark landed with the force of an unwelcome prophecy. Your accomplishments, reputation, expertise, and decades of experience quietly evaporate. Whatever authority once entered the room ahead of you no longer accompanies you through the door. You undergo what I call Aura Expiration: the quiet disappearance of the prestige, authority, and social recognition accumulated over a lifetime once age strips away the culture’s fascination with achievement and status.

    Yesterday’s distinguished physician becomes today’s anonymous old man standing patiently in line at Trader Joe’s.

    Aura Expiration ushers you into something even stranger. You enter what I think of as Social Hades: the peculiar stage of life in which a person remains physically present while gradually disappearing from society’s field of vision. You are neither fully among the living nor entirely absent. You become ghostlike—a witness rather than a participant—despite possessing more knowledge and experience than many of those who unconsciously dismiss you.

    Your very existence reminds younger people of the one truth they spend enormous energy avoiding: they, too, are running out of time.

    Naturally, there are ways to resist. You can dye your hair, chase fashion, cultivate the illusion of perpetual youth, or loudly insist that you are “still relevant.” But there is something tragic about watching a person wage war against chronology. The struggle itself often accelerates the indignity. Better to heed the biblical warning against kicking against the goads. Some losses are not defeats but transitions.

    Reading Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, I was struck by his observation that the Greeks imagined the afterlife as Hades, “an underworld where men’s shadows lead a sort of half-life: slow, comatose, larva-like, hardly aware.”

    I cannot help wondering whether this image grew partly from ordinary observation. Perhaps Hades resembled the fate awaiting the elderly in every civilization: still alive, yet treated as shadows; still capable of thought, yet gently ushered to the margins where they could cease interrupting youth’s fantasy of immortality.

    I have little interest in fighting that social reality. At best, younger people will treat me with courteous indifference. At worst, they will regard me as an inconvenient reminder that every fashionable face eventually wrinkles and every energetic stride slows.

    There is, however, one form of aging against which I intend to fight with all the stubbornness I possess.

    I refuse to let my mind become larval.

    I intend to keep reading difficult books, pursuing arguments, changing my mind when evidence demands it, writing essays, asking inconvenient questions, and remaining incurably curious. I would like to live forever, if only because I desperately want to know what happens next.

    Besides, history has a wicked sense of irony.

    Many young people imagine themselves to be in the thick of life merely because they inhabit the latest trends, wear the correct clothes, speak the approved vocabulary, and faithfully repeat the fashionable opinions of their tribe. Yet conformity has a way of anesthetizing curiosity. The mind quietly hardens while the body remains young.

    That is the true danger.

    Such people suffer from what I call The Larval Mind: a state of intellectual dormancy in which curiosity, skepticism, and independent judgment have withered away, leaving a person easily manipulated by fashion, ideology, algorithms, or tribal consensus. Their bodies pulse with youthful energy while their minds drift through life half-asleep.

    An eighty-year-old wrestling with Paul, Carrère, Darwin, artificial intelligence, and the future of civilization may be far younger than a twenty-five-year-old who has surrendered his thinking to TikTok, political orthodoxy, influencer culture, or whatever intellectual narcotic happens to dominate the moment.

    Perhaps youth has less to do with birthdays than with curiosity.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is not youth at all.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is refusing to become larval.

  • When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    If I were the sort of watch enthusiast content with half a dozen Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shocks—a collection stretching from the hulking, superheroic Frogman to the modest, bespectacled GW-5000U—I would admire that collection for reasons having little to do with the watches themselves. Certainly, it would cover every practical need I could imagine. More important, however, it would signify that I had become an entirely different species of collector.

    My former self collected from a place of addiction, neediness, and what I have elsewhere called Gollumification. Every few months I required another gleaming mechanical diver, preferably one costing a few thousand dollars, to jolt me awake from the deadening fog of boredom. The ritual reminded me of suburban mothers in the late 1960s making their regular pilgrimage to the beauty salon to “get their hair done.” As a child, I watched them return transformed—not merely coiffed, but spiritually refurbished, buoyed by the conviction that a new hairstyle had somehow renewed the self beneath it.

    Waiting for FedEx to deliver an expensive Seiko diver is the masculine version of the same liturgy.

    Both rituals whisper the same seductive lie: This time you’ll feel complete.

    The object itself scarcely matters. Hair today. Watches tomorrow. Kitchen remodels, sports cars, cosmetic procedures, luxury vacations, religious conversions, career promotions, perfectly optimized bodies—the props change, but the script remains stubbornly familiar. We keep staging ceremonies of self-renewal, hoping the next acquisition will accomplish what none of its predecessors could.

    The collector I wish I were inhabits a different emotional universe. He still loves watches, perhaps loves them even more, but he no longer requires them to rescue him from himself. He can appreciate a beautifully engineered timepiece without recruiting it into a desperate campaign against boredom. His contentment is not the result of finally finding the perfect watch; it is the reason he no longer needs to keep looking for one.

    His most remarkable quality is not restraint but peace.

    He no longer hungers to be “energized” because boredom has ceased to function as an existential emergency. He no longer imagines that the next purchase will repair some invisible crack running through his identity. He is already whole before the courier rings the doorbell.

    Of course, I recognize this as a fantasy.

    I call it The Fantasy of the Whole Man: the dream that one final purchase, one decisive achievement, one dramatic conversion, or one perfectly timed life adjustment will usher us into permanent inner completion, rendering future craving obsolete. It imagines a version of ourselves so psychologically integrated that desire finally relinquishes its grip.

    No watch can perform that miracle.

    Yet the fantasy reveals something profoundly true about watch enthusiasts—and, indeed, about human beings generally. Beneath our fascination with polished titanium, Zaratsu finishing, Swiss escapements, or atomic timekeeping lies a quieter longing. We are not merely searching for the next beautiful object. We are searching for a version of ourselves that no longer requires beautiful objects to feel sufficient.

    That is the collection we never quite manage to complete.

  • The Great Social Media Deconversion

    The Great Social Media Deconversion

    In 2008 I was doing power yoga in my office while listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy, on KFI 640. In the middle of discussing routers, spyware, and the eternal misery of Windows Vista, he casually remarked, “This Facebook thing is a big deal.”

    I had no idea what he meant.

    I wasn’t the sort of person who chased the latest technological revolution. I listened to Leo for a different reason. I loved hearing retirees call in with computers so old they belonged in an archaeological dig. They would ask whether they should keep a desktop that required thirty minutes to boot, wheezed like an emphysema patient opening Microsoft Word, and treated email as an Olympic event, or whether it was finally time to buy “one of these new computers.”

    Facebook barely registered on my radar.

    Then, in the summer of 2009, my wife was pregnant with our twin daughters. It occurred to me that Facebook might be a convenient way to share photos and updates with family and friends. So I created an account.

    Within weeks my friend list exploded like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

    I was enchanted.

    Perhaps this was the medium I had been waiting for all my life.

    Unfortunately, Facebook did not merely connect me to other people. It connected me to the most embarrassing parts of myself. My ego, which until then had lived quietly in the basement, burst upstairs carrying champagne.

    People would discover me.

    I would become famous.

    How many friends could I accumulate?

    How many likes?

    How many followers?

    Would humanity finally recognize my genius now that history had invented the proper delivery system?

    The intoxication was exquisite.

    That was seventeen years ago.

    Looking back, my relationship with Facebook has all the emotional contours of a failed marriage. There was the honeymoon, the infatuation, the passionate commitment, the slow accumulation of grievances, the disappointment, the resentment, and now something even colder than resentment.

    Contempt.

    Or perhaps futility.

    The old expression comes to mind: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

    Another comes from the Book of Acts, where the risen Christ asks Saul, “Why are you kicking against the goads?” Stop exhausting yourself fighting reality.

    That is how social media feels now.

    Not tragic.

    Pointless.

    Because the marriage was built on lies.

    The lies sounded persuasive enough.

    Metrics measure significance.

    Engagement proves value.

    Visibility creates influence.

    Influence creates meaning.

    If enough strangers notice you, your life has somehow become larger.

    It took me years to realize that every one of those propositions was counterfeit.

    The pursuit of attention slowly teaches us to manipulate others.

    Eventually it teaches us to manipulate ourselves.

    The more desperately we chase attention, the more anxious we become.

    The anxiety metastasizes into resentment.

    Soon we are no longer expressing ourselves.

    We are auditioning for an algorithm.

    Attention capture is not meaning.

    Attention capture is not love.

    Attention capture is not flourishing.

    One can dominate the internet and still become another version of Gollum, clutching a glowing ring instead of a precious one.

    A few days ago I watched a fitness YouTuber whose work I normally admire upload one of those interchangeable “What I Eat in a Day” videos. He microwaved leftovers. He poured cereal into a bowl. He assembled a few perfectly ordinary meals to reassure viewers that he was just like them.

    The video felt less like communication than contractual obligation.

    He looked exhausted.

    Not physically.

    Spiritually.

    As though the algorithm had shown up at his front door demanding another sacrifice.

    I watched perhaps thirty seconds before closing the window.

    I did it for his dignity.

    And for mine.

    Now I don’t know what to do with Facebook, Instagram, or my fifteen-year-old YouTube channel.

    They feel less like hobbies than reminders of a marriage that should have ended years ago.

    I still write on my blog.

    Almost nobody reads it.

    Wonderful.

    Obscurity has become strangely liberating.

    I write what genuinely interests me instead of what might seduce an algorithm into distributing me like digital fertilizer across the internet. I no longer feel compelled to manufacture outrage, optimize thumbnails, or package my thoughts into bite-sized dopamine pellets.

    The work belongs to me again.

    People often wonder what comes after divorce.

    The honest answer is that nobody knows.

    You spend a long time discovering who you are after years spent becoming someone else.

    I suspect millions of us are undergoing that same process with social media.

    We experienced the honeymoon.

    We believed the promises.

    We invested our identities.

    We discovered the betrayal.

    Now we are wandering through the emotional wreckage trying to remember who we were before engagement statistics became a measure of our worth.

    We are all, in one way or another, losing our religion.

    R.E.M. accidentally wrote the soundtrack for the algorithmic age.

    I have become convinced that social media has diminished us personally, culturally, politically, and spiritually. It rewarded vanity, monetized outrage, industrialized narcissism, and trained us to confuse visibility with virtue.

    But I have also become convinced that this era is ending.

    People are tiring of the performance.

    The masks have grown heavy.

    The applause no longer sounds convincing.

    Something new is approaching.

    Whether it will be better or merely different, I cannot say.

    I only know that the old marriage is over.

    And, for the first time in years, that feels less like a loss than a beginning.

  • The Dishwasher and the Soul

    The Dishwasher and the Soul

    People love to narrate themselves into virtue. They announce that they are resilient, compassionate, emotionally intelligent, enlightened. Fine. But character is not established by autobiography. It is established by collateral damage. The verdict is rendered not by the stories we tell about ourselves but by the people who must live with us.

    By that standard, I don’t receive flattering marks.

    I alienate people. Friendships wither. Members of my own family find me exhausting. I do not know how to repair whatever defect keeps reproducing these outcomes. Self-loathing only deepens the rut. It is like trying to escape quicksand by thrashing harder.

    For years my wife has insisted that I have Asperger’s, though I have never received a formal diagnosis. In 2013, I saw a psychiatrist who concluded that I had escaped my mother’s severe depression and bipolar disorder only to inherit a milder companion: dysthymia, a chronic, low-grade depression that rarely knocks you flat but seldom lets you stand fully upright. I eventually stopped seeing him after realizing that I seemed to be providing more entertainment than receiving treatment. I would leave his office lighter in wallet but not in spirit. The experience merely reinforced my suspicion that therapy, at least in my case, was proving more theatrical than therapeutic.

    So I became my own maintenance department.

    Routine is my antidepressant. I cling to it with the desperation of a fish clinging to water. Remove it, and anxiety rushes in to occupy the vacuum. Home becomes less a residence than a fortified monastery whose sacred relics are my kettlebells, exercise bike, piano, protein powder, creatine, and carefully arranged supplements. Every object reassures me that the machinery of the day can continue without surprise.

    Leaving this sanctuary, even for something as benign as a vacation, often feels less like recreation than exile.

    While other people return from holidays refreshed, carrying photographs and amusing anecdotes, I return as though I have survived a natural disaster. Friends ask, “How was your vacation?” I usually shrug because I honestly cannot answer. It dissolves into a hazy montage of disrupted routines, low-grade dread, and the relief of finally coming home. Rather than becoming more engaged with life, I retreat inward. I regress. I become emotionally unavailable. Sometimes I stay home to spare my family the burden of dragging me through another reluctant excursion. They enjoy themselves more, but they miss me all the same.

    That realization hurts.

    I often feel as though I am the heaviest burden my family carries. I bought us a home in a beautiful coastal suburb. The mortgage is gone. We enjoy financial security and enough discretionary income to live comfortably. Yet I cannot escape Christ’s unsettling question, slightly rewritten for my own circumstances: What does it profit a family to live in a lovely house if the husband and father carries conspicuous gaps in his emotional life?

    If there were a genuine cure, I would pursue it tomorrow.

    A retreat deep in the woods. An ayahuasca ceremony promising psychic rebirth. A religious conversion dramatic enough to rearrange the furniture of my soul. If someone could convincingly promise to transform me from an anxious, melancholy recluse into a man whose presence naturally enlarged the lives of others, I would sign the consent form before they finished explaining the side effects.

    Instead, the dishwasher beeps.

    In half an hour I’ll empty it, wipe down the counters, and make salmon, rice, and salad for my family. It is not redemption, but it is dinner.

    Perhaps this is where real life usually unfolds—not in miraculous transformations but in ordinary competence. I can contribute. I can keep the kitchen running. I can exercise. I can stay away from alcohol. I can show up for the responsibilities that lie directly before me, even if I stumble over the emotional ones that lie beyond them.

    There is an old wisdom about staying in your lane. It is not a cure, but it prevents unnecessary collisions.

    Good physical health is not salvation, but it helps. Financial stability is not happiness, but it removes many unnecessary sorrows. A clean kitchen does not heal the mind, but it gives tomorrow one less disorder to inherit.

    So, for now, gratitude remains my most reliable therapy—not because it erases my defects, but because it keeps them from becoming the only facts I recognize. It reminds me that a life can be imperfect without being worthless, that a man can remain unfinished without being beyond repair, and that sometimes the most meaningful victories are measured not in dramatic breakthroughs but in quietly making dinner when your mind insists you’ve accomplished nothing at all.