Cinemorphosis

Tag: love

  • Why I Can’t Let Go of G-Shock’s Chromatic Certainty

    Why I Can’t Let Go of G-Shock’s Chromatic Certainty

    Before the technical specifications, before the discussion of movements, and before the endless debates about quartz versus mechanical watches, something unexpected happened inside my head.

    Six months ago I underwent what now strikes me as a genuine conversion. I almost stopped wearing analog mechanical watches and entered the world of G-Shock Multiband-6 digital watches. To my surprise, a number of my YouTube subscribers later described the very same journey. They had once adored mechanical watches, only to discover that after living with atomically synchronized digital time, they could never comfortably return.

    At first glance, the conversion makes little sense.

    A quality mechanical watch running five seconds fast per day is an astonishing feat of engineering. For every practical purpose, it tells the correct time. It gets you to appointments. It catches flights. It reminds you when class begins. Its error is so small that it almost never matters.

    And yet it no longer feels right.

    That is the mystery.

    Objectively, nothing important has changed. Subjectively, everything has.

    What changes is not the watch but the standard by which the watch is judged.

    Before owning a Multiband-6 G-Shock, my standard was simple: close enough.

    After Multiband-6, my standard became: exactly right.

    Every night my watch quietly synchronizes with the atomic clock. Every morning I wake knowing—not hoping, not estimating, not approximating—that the time on my wrist is identical to the world’s official standard. Five seconds fast, once a badge of mechanical excellence, now feels oddly imprecise.

    I call this Chronometric Certainty: the psychological satisfaction that arises from knowing one’s timepiece is synchronized with an external objective standard, eliminating even trivial uncertainty about its accuracy.

    The difference is not practical.

    It is psychological.

    An analog watch always feels like an interpretation of time. The hands point. They suggest. They approximate.

    A digital display does something altogether different.

    It declares.

    When my G-Shock reads 12:37:42, there is no interpretation. It does not hint at the time. It announces it with unapologetic authority. One of my favorite G-Shocks, the enormous King, reinforces this feeling. Its giant television-shaped display gives me the uncanny impression that I am not wearing a watch at all. It feels like I have strapped a broadcast monitor to my wrist, one that receives the world’s official time directly from reality itself.

    The mechanical watch, by contrast, quietly asks for my participation.

    I know it gains a few seconds.

    I occasionally reset it.

    I mentally compensate.

    None of this requires much effort, but each act reminds me that the watch is only approximating reality.

    The G-Shock abolishes those tiny negotiations.

    It simply tells the truth.

    This realization has convinced me that my conversion was never really about watches.

    It was about certainty.

  • The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

    The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

    I’m almost sixty-five, yet some stubborn part of me remains a man-child, forever scanning the horizon for the next shiny object. There is always another watch to admire, another gadget to research, another purchase that whispers the ancient promise: This one will finally complete you.

    It never does.

    Still, I’m not without hope.

    Lurking beneath my acquisitive instincts is another impulse—one that longs for restraint, clean lines, quiet competence, and the elegant marriage of form and function. I have begun to suspect that growing up is not the abandonment of desire but its refinement.

    The first clue arrived six months ago when it came time to buy a personal desktop computer.

    The younger version of me might have ogled a hulking gaming tower glowing like a radioactive Christmas tree, festooned with RGB lights and fans loud enough to suggest an imminent liftoff. Instead, I bought a Mac Mini with Apple’s M4 chip and 32 gigabytes of RAM. It sits on my desk in near silence, doing exactly what I ask of it without begging for applause. It is the technological equivalent of a competent butler: always present, never theatrical.

    The pattern continued.

    When I think about replacing my car, I don’t fantasize about a German sports sedan or some aggressively sculpted SUV that looks eager to challenge strangers at stoplights. I picture a white or silver Honda Accord Hybrid EX-L.

    It’s boring.

    That is precisely the point.

    It is vanilla and Zen fused into one magnificent state of automotive enlightenment.

    Call it Zen-illa.

    The same instinct explains why I keep gravitating toward a ThinkPad T14 Gen 7. There is nothing glamorous about it. It resembles a laptop designed by accountants who moonlight as structural engineers. It doesn’t seduce you. It reassures you. It quietly announces, “I was built to work, not to pose.”

    Then there is the watch.

    If I buy another G-Shock, it will almost certainly be the GW-5000U—not because it is flashy, but because it isn’t. It is, in many ways, the highest expression of the original Square: understated, overengineered, supremely comfortable, and utterly indifferent to fashion. It doesn’t ask to be admired. It asks to be worn.

    These objects all embody what I call Instrumental Nobility: the quality of an object whose excellence derives from uncompromising function, durability, and thoughtful engineering rather than luxury, prestige, or visual spectacle.

    Increasingly, that is the beauty I find myself pursuing.

    Perhaps this is what maturity looks like.

    Not losing the desire to acquire, but acquiring things that quietly disappear into your life because they perform their task so faithfully that they free your attention for higher pursuits.

    I still have traces of the man-child in me. Every now and then he wakes up and points excitedly at some gleaming bauble, convinced that salvation is only one purchase away.

    The adult has learned to smile politely, pat him on the head, and say, “No. We have a manuscript to finish.”

    If all goes well, by the time I turn seventy, the adult may finally win.

  • 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.

  • The Ghost at the End of My Block

    The Ghost at the End of My Block

    An unkempt, unemployed man in his sixties—I’ll call him D—lives on my street. He is painfully thin, wears a beard that seems less grown than surrendered to, and carries the thousand-yard stare of someone who has spent too many years trapped inside his own mind. He is the neighborhood’s resident ghost, the subject of whispered conversations held over hedges and driveways whenever his name comes up.

    I rarely see him anymore.

    With each passing year he seems to retreat another step from the world. According to my neighbors, he now walks his dog only after dark, as if daylight itself has become an adversary.

    The last time we spoke was more than a decade ago. He told me his mother had emigrated from Ukraine. She was still alive then but has since passed away. He admitted he struggled with clinical depression. Once upon a time he earned his living in real estate. He loved photography. He struck me as intelligent, thoughtful, even pleasant. Nothing about him suggested the caricature of the neighborhood eccentric.

    Depression, however, is not content merely to inhabit a person. Given enough years, it colonizes the landscape around him.

    D’s house looks less like a residence than a psychological self-portrait.

    Weeds have risen high enough to conceal much of the property, swallowing the front yard as if nature were quietly reclaiming it. Enormous rocks lie scattered across the lot—not arranged with the intention of landscaping but dumped haphazardly, as though an avalanche had paused just long enough to empty its pockets. A rusted car sits permanently marooned in the driveway, stripped of its engine, one of those eternal restoration projects that never progresses beyond the fantasy stage.

    Then there is the roof.

    Or rather, the absence of one.

    Instead of shingles, enormous black tarps have been stretched across the house like bandages wrapped around a wound too deep to heal. The place resembles less a home than a disaster site awaiting inspectors who never arrive.

    The neighbors tell me D has owned five yellow Labrador retrievers over the past twenty-five years.

    Each one has had exactly the same name.

    Reggie.

    Perhaps it is sentiment. Perhaps ritual. Or perhaps depression dislikes novelty and prefers the comforting illusion that nothing essential has changed.

    Reggie, unfortunately, is also a source of neighborhood diplomacy. D has a habit of letting him roam unleashed, which periodically inspires shouted exchanges with nearby homeowners who are less enchanted by canine freedom than D appears to be.

    Recently, the family next door began an ambitious renovation. They moved out for a year while contractors demolished and rebuilt much of their home at a cost north of half a million dollars.

    During one conversation, one of the neighbors revealed something I had never considered.

    The tarps.

    They aren’t merely ugly.

    They are loud.

    Every windy night they snap, crack, and whip against the roof structure with relentless fury, sounding less like construction material than a chorus of agitated ghosts auditioning for Poltergeist. Sleep becomes impossible.

    So the neighbors arrived at a remarkably practical conclusion.

    Since they were already spending roughly $600,000 rebuilding their own home, they decided to buy D a new roof.

    The cost?

    About $20,000.

    It is an act of generosity, certainly.

    It is also an investment in uninterrupted sleep.

    When you’ve already committed well over half a million dollars to creating your dream home, another twenty thousand begins to look less like charity than an effective noise-canceling device.

    Every neighborhood, it seems, has its own D.

    There is always one house that refuses to cooperate with the local mythology of upward mobility. Every freshly painted facade, every manicured lawn, every luxury SUV in the driveway quietly tells a story of competence, prosperity, and orderly lives. Then there is the one property that interrupts the narrative like an uncomfortable footnote. It reminds everyone that not every life can be renovated with quartz countertops, drought-tolerant landscaping, and a designer front door.

    Some houses broadcast success.

    Others testify to defeat.

    D’s house has become an architectural memoir of prolonged suffering, a place where depression has seeped from the mind into the soil, the weeds, the rusting car, and finally the roof itself.

    Replacing the tarps with shingles will not rewrite that story.

    A new roof cannot cure clinical depression. It cannot restore lost ambition, resurrect old dreams, or persuade a haunted man that tomorrow will be kinder than yesterday.

    But it can silence the ghosts.

  • The Things We Cannot Live Without

    The Things We Cannot Live Without

    As an adolescent, Emmanuel Carrère was unhappy, but he remained buoyant because he believed in the two assets he trusted above all others: his intellect and his identity as a writer. Intelligence served as his life raft. Irony gave him distance from despair. Even misery becomes manageable when you can narrate it with style.

    That strategy collapsed when he turned thirty.

    The faculties that had once sustained him simply stopped working. He could no longer marshal his intelligence against himself. Reflecting on that period, he writes, “I could no longer write, I didn’t know how to love, I knew I wasn’t particularly likable. Just being me became literally unbearable.”

    He had reached what might be called a collapse of competence: the moment when the qualities that once anchored your identity—talent, discipline, intelligence, status, creativity, charm—suddenly fail to hold your weight. The scaffolding of the self buckles. You are forced to search for an entirely different foundation because the old one has become a condemned building.

    When Carrère confessed his misery to his godmother Jacqueline, he expected sympathy. Instead, she was delighted.

    As a devout Catholic, she believed despair was not a catastrophe but a prerequisite. Only when a person finally recognizes that his life has become an uninhabitable ruin is he prepared to hear the Gospel. Pride must first exhaust itself.

    She placed a New Testament in his hands and instructed him to read it without trying to be “too intelligent.”

    That advice carries a sly paradox. Intelligence, the very faculty Carrère had relied upon for survival, had become the obstacle. Jacqueline was asking him to stop treating the Bible as a puzzle to master and instead allow it to master him.

    During that same summer of 1990, Jacqueline introduced Emmanuel to her other godson, Hervé. The two men gradually became close friends.

    Hervé was, by temperament, a philosopher disguised as a journalist. Though professionally successful, he was perpetually haunted by questions that most people manage to outrun. Why are we here? What is life for? Is there some purpose behind our existence, or are we simply decorating a cosmic waiting room until the lights go out?

    Watching Hervé, Carrère concludes that humanity divides rather neatly into two camps.

    The first group rarely loses sleep over metaphysical questions. They pursue promotions, vacations, romance, gossip, consumer pleasures, status games, and the endless sport of comparing themselves to everyone else. Their calendars stay full enough to prevent existential reflection from getting a word in edgewise.

    The second group cannot escape those questions. They are pursued by them like debt collectors. They read philosophy and religion not because such books are fashionable but because they are desperate. They are trying to determine whether existence contains an author or merely an audience.

    Looking back years later, Carrère recognizes that Hervé’s spiritual curiosity had been quietly cultivated by Jacqueline, who gently nudged him toward Christianity. Their religious journeys eventually diverged, but their friendship endured.

    For decades they have gathered regularly in the Swiss village of Le Levron, spending time together in a chalet that Carrère calls his querencia.

    The Spanish word comes from bullfighting. A querencia is the part of the arena where the bull instinctively retreats because it feels secure there. It is the place from which the animal regains its strength before reentering the fight.

    For Carrère, the metaphor is perfect. He arrives troubled and leaves restored.

    Everyone should have a reliable querencia.

    Mine, during the 1970s, was Walt’s Gym, a converted chicken coop perfumed with ancient sweat, rust, and enough menthol muscle ointment to fumigate a county. Men joyfully abused their bodies in pursuit of impossible physiques while punctuating every set with gossip, insults, bad jokes, and elaborate storytelling. It was less a fitness center than a monastery dedicated to testosterone and nonsense. The barbells built muscle. The banter built men.

    Then the corporate gyms arrived.

    The chicken coop gave way to chrome, televisions, smoothie bars, biometric scanners, and motivational slogans printed by people who had clearly never deadlifted anything heavier than a marketing proposal. By 2005 I had had enough. I quit.

    For the past twenty years my querencia has been my garage.

    There I swing kettlebells, flood my brain with an hour’s worth of endorphins, keep company with favorite podcasters, and temporarily escape the increasingly exhausting experience of being myself. I enter carrying the accumulated static of the world. I leave feeling that someone has quietly reset my nervous system.

    I envy Carrère because his querencia involves another human being.

    Mine is solitary.

    There was a time when it wasn’t.

    During the late 1980s a group of us played basketball at a Berkeley community center before heading out for dinner. Those evenings stitched together a sense of belonging that no amount of solitary reflection could duplicate.

    Later, after moving from the Bay Area to the California desert for my first teaching job, loneliness became my regular companion. Once each week I would spend two-hour marathons on the telephone with old friends. By the end my ear literally hurt from holding the receiver.

    Those conversations nourished me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Someone had willingly given me two hours of his life. That simple fact quietly testified that I mattered.

    Then phone conversations disappeared in the early 2000s.

    Texting replaced talking. Social media replaced lingering conversation. We became experts at remaining connected while carefully avoiding communion.

    So today my querencia is almost entirely solitary.

    Yet I continue to experience what I think of as the Querencia Effect: the restorative power of a place, ritual, or recurring practice that allows someone to arrive emotionally depleted and leave psychologically renewed. It is the sanctuary where a fractured self is quietly reassembled before returning to the arena.

    Still, I worry.

    As I approach sixty-five, my refuge depends almost entirely upon a body that grows older every year. One day it may no longer tolerate sixty-minute kettlebell sessions or long rides that leave me happily awash in endorphins.

    I think of a bodybuilder I once read in a muscle magazine. His ambition was beautifully uncomplicated. He wanted only one thing from God: the privilege of lifting weights for as long as he remained alive.

    Then I think of Ronnie Coleman.

    No professional bodybuilder punished himself more ferociously. His reward has been dozens of back surgeries and chronic pain that would persuade most people never to enter another gym.

    Yet there he is, sometimes maneuvering through the weight room in a wheelchair because, pain or no pain, he still needs to touch the iron.

    Some dependencies are pathological.

    Others are redemptive.

    The difficulty is that the line between them often becomes visible only after it has been crossed.

    Years ago I had a colleague who was, in his own eccentric way, a genius. He ignored lesson plans, dismissed required evaluations with cheerful contempt, wore the same uniform of white T-shirt and blue jeans, and simply walked into class and talked. Students adored him. Passing me on campus, he would grin and greet me with a sarcastic profanity, as though the world’s absurdity deserved nothing more sophisticated.

    I attended his retirement party in 2004.

    A few years later I learned he had taken his own life.

    Cannabis had become his querencia. When a medical diagnosis made it impossible for him to continue using it, the refuge disappeared. Without it, life became intolerable. His wife found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    That story has haunted me for years because it exposes an uncomfortable truth.

    We eventually become dependent upon the very things that rescue us.

    If tomorrow my body informed me that I could never exercise again, I don’t believe I would follow my colleague’s path.

    The first reason is simple: I love my wife and daughters more than I love my own comfort. The collateral damage would be unforgivable.

    The second reason is considerably less noble.

    I am a coward.

    Cowardice, on occasion, has surprising moral utility. It keeps a person from making irreversible decisions during temporary despair.

    Besides, the last thing I want is to arrive before God having chosen the emergency exit, only to be asked why I abandoned the arena before the fight was over. There are many questions I would like to avoid on Judgment Day.

    That is certainly one of them.

  • When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    Emmanuel Carrère writes that in 1990 he was “touched by grace.” For the next three years he attended Mass every day, immersed himself in the Gospel of John, and filled some twenty notebooks with commentaries. Looking back, he remembers remarkably little of that period and has made no effort to recover it. His amnesia suggests that grace, at least in its fanatical form, can be exhausting enough to become something one prefers to leave buried.

    I underwent my own conversion in 1976.

    I was touched not by grace but by the bodybuilding bug.

    Like every true conversion, it demanded far more than outward behavior. It required a new vocabulary, new authorities, new rituals, and a new vision of salvation. My sacred texts were Iron Man, Strength & Health, Muscle Builder, and MuscleMag International. My saints were Ron Teufel, Frank Zane, Robbie Robinson, Mike Mentzer, and Tom Platz. Their routines were studied with the seriousness medieval monks reserved for Augustine.

    Every afternoon I retreated to my father’s office and sat before his IBM Selectric typewriter. Carrère filled notebooks with reflections on John’s Gospel. I filled page after page with workouts.

    The process bordered on liturgical.

    KSFX drifted through the room, playing the O’Jays, the Four Tops, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Miracles while I stared at the page like a theologian confronting an elusive doctrine. I would type a routine, scrutinize it, decide that my split routine lacked perfection, tear it from the machine, crumple it into a ball, and begin again. Sets became sentences. Repetitions became revisions. Every workout was a rough draft of the body I believed I was destined to become.

    What I sought was not merely a better pump.

    I was searching for the Platonic Workout, the one perfect arrangement of exercises that would lift me beyond ordinary muscular development into something approaching spiritual transcendence.

    It was absurd.

    It was also glorious.

    The ritual calmed me, excited me, and filled me with hope all at once. Every newly typed workout promised that next week, finally, I would become the person I had imagined myself to be.

    The conversion had other liturgical requirements.

    On more than one occasion I composed these workouts wearing nothing but a Speedo because it somehow placed me in the proper state of mind. Serious theological work demanded proper vestments.

    One afternoon, after an hour of merciless calf raises, I sat typing when I noticed that my calves were exquisitely tender to the touch. The soreness delighted me.

    My mother walked into the office.

    “Dinner’s ready,” she said. Then she paused.

    “Why are you so happy?”

    I reached down and squeezed my calf.

    “My calves,” I said. “They’re sore.”

    She looked puzzled.

    “Why does that make you happy?”

    I smiled with the serene certainty of a man who had glimpsed the kingdom.

    “They’re growing, Mom.”

    A pause.

    “They’re growing.”

  • Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    In the documentary Queen of Chess, Judit Polgár recounts how she became a grandmaster at the age of fifteen, shattering one of the oldest gender barriers in competitive chess. She entered a world where many male players regarded women not merely as underdogs but as biological impossibilities. Looking back on her extraordinary rise, she credits her parents with many gifts, but one towers above the rest: they taught her always to believe in herself.

    I have heard those words my entire life. Believe in yourself. They are stitched onto graduation speeches, embroidered across motivational posters, and recited by well-meaning adults with the mechanical confidence of people reading assembly instructions. The phrase has always struck me as strangely hollow, a verbal vitamin whose label promises transformation while omitting the active ingredient. Yet when Judit Polgár uttered those same words, they landed differently. Here was someone who had walked into hostile rooms, defeated the world’s strongest players, and emerged victorious. Her confidence had survived contact with reality. That gave the cliché a gravity it had never possessed before.

    Over the months since watching the documentary, I have tried to understand what believing in yourself actually means. It is not wishful thinking, nor is it chanting affirmations in the bathroom mirror before work. It is trust. It is the confidence that your conscious intentions and your unconscious habits are allies rather than enemies. It is the quiet expectation that when difficulty arrives, you will respond with discipline instead of sabotage. Believing in yourself also means possessing the assurance that you belong in rooms where others doubt your right to enter. It is the conviction that closed doors are obstacles to overcome rather than verdicts to accept.

    The difficulty, at least in my case, is that I have accumulated decades of evidence against myself. My adversary has never been an unsympathetic chess establishment. It has been the unruly republic inside my own skull. I resolve to become more patient, then lose my temper over some trivial irritation before lunchtime. I promise to eat sensibly, only to find myself negotiating peace treaties with pizza and signing unconditional surrender documents to apple pie crowned with vanilla ice cream. I announce noble intentions with presidential confidence, while my appetites quietly stage a coup before dinner. After enough of these episodes, self-doubt ceases to be a philosophical problem and becomes a statistical conclusion.

    Then there is vanity, perhaps the most elegant form of self-deception ever invented. Blaise Pascal observed that we expend more effort creating the appearance of virtue than acquiring virtue itself. I have often found that observation painfully accurate. It is easier to curate the image of a disciplined life than to endure the discipline required to build one. Vanity offers applause without achievement, while laziness quietly pockets the bill. Together they form a conspiracy against genuine confidence. You cannot consistently admire a person who repeatedly breaks promises to himself, even when that person happens to be you.

    Of course, recognizing these flaws carries its own danger. Honest self-examination can quickly mutate into sophisticated excuse-making. One can become so fascinated by one’s defects that they begin functioning as permanent alibis. “This is simply who I am,” the inner defense attorney argues, as though diagnosis absolves responsibility. It does not. Accurate self-knowledge should produce accountability, not acquittal.

    That is why I admire Judit Polgár. Her confidence does not appear theatrical or narcissistic. It rests upon competence, discipline, and years of keeping promises to herself. I suspect her parents did more than encourage her to believe in herself. They taught her to become the sort of person who deserved her own trust.

    For those of us who did not inherit that gift so naturally, there is another path. We cannot manufacture self-belief through slogans. We must earn it the old-fashioned way, by repeatedly choosing character over compulsion, humility over vanity, discipline over appetite, and substance over performance. Confidence is not bestowed by motivational speeches. It is accumulated, one kept promise at a time.

  • The Museum of Youth

    The Museum of Youth

    The Getty Museum has a way of conspiring with beautiful weather to make mortality feel especially impolite. Today, the sky possessed the crystalline blue one imagines hovering over ancient Pompeii before Vesuvius interrupted everyone’s plans. The museum’s travertine terraces glowed in the California sun, and everywhere I looked were couples in their twenties, impossibly attractive and strolling with the unselfconscious confidence that only youth can afford. Watching them, I found myself seized by an irrational envy. They seemed to possess not merely smooth skin and stronger knees but entire decades still waiting to unfold before them. Their lives resembled gleaming new luxury cars rolling effortlessly off the showroom floor. Mine, by comparison, felt like an old jalopy whose owner had begun listening nervously for unfamiliar noises under the hood.

    I envied what they represented more than who they were. They still possessed unopened chapters, careers not yet exhausted, friendships not yet mourned, dreams still wrapped in factory packaging. Youth carries with it the intoxicating illusion that time is an inexhaustible natural resource rather than a rapidly depreciating asset. Standing among them, I felt like someone who had arrived late to a party only to discover that everyone else was just beginning. I attempted the usual remedies. I reminded myself how fortunate I have been, how much joy my life has contained, how many blessings I scarcely deserved. None of it helped. Self-awareness is an ineffective antidepressant. Instead, I found myself scolding my own melancholy, accusing myself of being simultaneously ungrateful, petty, and embarrassingly sentimental—as though shame were somehow an antidote to longing.

    Fortunately, despair has an enemy that rarely receives the credit it deserves: usefulness. Later that afternoon, my teenage daughter and I sat in the museum café eating burgers while the conversation drifted toward her latest fascination—the pop music of the 1970s. Suddenly I was no longer competing with twenty-five-year-olds for possession of the future. I was explaining why certain songs endure, introducing artists she had not yet discovered, and watching her curiosity gather momentum. In that ordinary exchange, something quietly shifted. My value no longer depended upon having decades ahead of me. It depended upon having decades behind me that were worth sharing.

    That afternoon reminded me that envy is often a failure of perspective. I had mistaken youth for significance when significance had been sitting across the table all along. The young couples wandering the Getty possessed one kind of wealth: possibility. I possessed another: memory, experience, hard-earned judgment, and a daughter who still found those things worth hearing. The museum’s masterpieces had survived centuries because they continued to speak across generations. Perhaps that is the better aspiration. We eventually stop being the newest exhibit in the gallery. Our task then is to become one of the paintings that still rewards anyone willing to stop, look closely, and listen.

  • The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    My video production is on hold because I find myself interrogating my place in the watch world. I have little appetite for another “State of the Collection” video. That genre has become the YouTube equivalent of a sitcom reunion special: everyone knows the script before the opening credits roll. Likewise, I am convinced I have exhausted the lexicon of watch addiction. I have dissected acquisition syndrome, rationalization, buyer’s remorse, dopamine hits, grail watches, collection pruning, and every psychological contortion a watch enthusiast performs while pretending another purchase is somehow “different this time.” At some point, the commentary begins recycling itself, and I have no desire to become an echo of my former self.

    The irony is that none of this means I love watches any less. They remain as captivating—and as capable of hijacking my imagination—as they were twenty years ago. Two pieces continue to haunt me. The first is the Grand Seiko SBGP009, whose champagne-silver dial possesses the quiet authority of vintage elegance while its quartz movement drifts no more than ten seconds in an entire year. The second is the Orient Star M42 Diver 1964 Recreation (RE-AU0503N), a watch that somehow manages to look both nostalgic and purposeful without descending into retro cosplay. My greatest misfortune is that neither watch is outrageously expensive. The Grand Seiko costs only about three thousand dollars, and the Orient Star about one thousand. I almost wish they were twice as expensive. Overpriced luxury has an odd virtue: it occasionally protects us from ourselves.

    Meanwhile, most of my creative energy has migrated to my blog. There I can pursue ideas that would suffocate inside a fifteen-minute YouTube video. I can move from watches to literature, from moral philosophy to true crime, from AI to theology without asking whether the algorithm will punish me for changing lanes. The writing feels richer, stranger, and ultimately more meaningful. Unfortunately, blogs occupy the cultural equivalent of a deserted side street while YouTube resembles Times Square. One offers freedom without an audience; the other offers an audience that constantly demands the familiar. Whether I can remain content scribbling thoughtful essays into relative obscurity is a question I have not yet answered.

    One conclusion, however, no longer requires interrogation. I am an incurable watch enthusiast. There is no treatment, no twelve-step program, no miraculous cure. I have accepted that reality. My task is not to extinguish the fascination but to discipline it. I must keep reminding myself that admiring a watch is not the same thing as needing to own it. Beauty can be appreciated without becoming another possession. In fact, the older I become, the more I suspect that an overcrowded collection diminishes rather than enriches the experience, spreading affection so thinly that no single watch receives the attention it deserves. Perhaps the highest form of collecting is learning that appreciation sometimes reaches its fullest expression the moment you decide to walk away.

    Happy Fourth, everyone.