Cinemorphosis

Tag: love

  • The Day I Refused to Laugh

    The Day I Refused to Laugh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Consumerism Dies Before You Do

    Consumerism Dies Before You Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Cringe That Defines You

    The Cringe That Defines You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • You Can’t Retire from Yourself

    You Can’t Retire from Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Beat the Actuary

    Beat the Actuary

    So, do you want your retirement revenue stream to be as large as possible but stop when you die, leaving your family without that monthly cash injection? Or do you want a significantly smaller amount with the advantage that your spouse and children will continue receiving monthly cash flow after you die?

    If you want the former, you click the Member-Only Option. If you want the latter, you click the Beneficiary Option. Your spouse’s age gets calculated into the equation. Actuarial tables are consulted. You are essentially making a wager on how long you think you will live—and how long you can maintain relatively good brain function while defying dementia—to determine which button you click.

    In my case, other factors came into play. Because of my wife’s relatively young age of fifty, her salary, and the fact that we have already paid off our mortgage, we decided I would click Member-Only.

    After looking coldly at the numbers, the risk factors, and the actuarial tables, I now find myself living in a new dimension. It is not an easy place to inhabit. Because I have never lived here before, I find it difficult to describe. I feel as if my spaceship has crashed on a forbidden planet. I have stepped out of the wreckage to survey the terrain, and everything looks strange and frightening.

    For starters, I’m trying to live as long as possible so my family can receive as much cash flow as possible. Of course, everyone wants to live a long life, but fighting time to maximize monetary rewards makes me feel as if I’m competing on a game show. It’s called Beat the Actuary. The longer I live, the better I game the system.

    Turning my desire for longevity and good health into a form of gamification strikes me as unhealthy, morbid, and deleterious to my spiritual health. Once I start trying to live as long as possible to maximize my family’s cash flow, I am no longer a human being. I am a commodity. The soul takes a back seat. Optimization takes the wheel.

    Optimizing is not living. It’s constantly calculating.

    Cheesecake followed by eggnog at a Christmas party? Tick two months off your life.

    The stress of missing an airline connection from Madrid to New York to Los Angeles? There goes another six months.

    Not taking statins with borderline LDL? Subtract another three years.

    Not embracing the vegan lifestyle? Shave off another five.

    Optimization makes me feel like a fragile egg that must be nestled inside layers of cotton, silk, and cashmere. I am no longer a human being. I am a mausoleum piece inhabiting a glass reliquary, protected from the harsh elements.

    Optimization is not life. It is death.

    So as I walk the terrain of this strange planet and confront these new fears, I am trying to maintain my dignity and live more like a human being and less like a TV game-show contestant.

    But my morbid imagination already gets the better of me. With my birthday coming up in a couple of weeks, I can imagine appearing on Beat the Actuary and being celebrated for surviving another year. The studio audience erupts in applause. Confetti rains down upon me as host Soupy Sales, wearing a banana-yellow blazer, congratulates me for making it through another year.

    At the center of the Beat the Actuary stage stands a twelve-foot-tall hourglass enclosed in a gleaming brass frame, its two enormous glass chambers filled with fine white sand. The sand continues its slow, merciless descent.

    Soupy Sales stares ominously at the giant hourglass. Then he turns toward the camera and fixes the television audience with mock solemnity.

    “Will Jeff McMahon be back next year? Only the hourglass knows for sure.”

  • Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    When I was in my late thirties, I was visiting my wife’s family for a summer barbecue in Long Beach. Her brother and some of his friends were there. We were standing on the front lawn talking about some of my habits and routines: eating dinner no later than five; going to bed no later than ten; eating sufficient fiber; abstaining from alcohol but deriving great pleasure from sipping chilled prune juice, analyzing its complex flavors with the panache of a sommelier; driving to movie theaters an hour early to make sure I get a parking space and a good seat; avoiding long drives because I find them mentally taxing; and buying a car only after scouring the reliability data in Consumer Reports.

    At one point, one of my brother-in-law’s friends, Shane, a tall, Viking-like figure with light blue eyes and shaggy blond hair, casually looked at me and said, “Dude, you’d make a great eighty-five-year-old.”

    I can understand Shane’s comment. I am not a risk-taker. I like predictability and routine. I like reliable outcomes. I am drawn to things that give me assurance and safety.

    Take cars, for example. I am drawn to Honda. I have been buying Hondas for the last four decades. I like the interiors. They are familiar. I know how to use the controls. The ride is smooth. There is no drama. The styling is not too busy. It tends toward vanilla. I even like the word Honda. It sounds angelic, whispery, and soothing. Repeating the word over and over is a form of ASMR.

    My connection to Honda runs so deep that my wife and I both own Honda Accords. Hers is a 2014 with a 2.4-liter naturally aspirated engine, and mine is a 2018 with a 2.0 turbo. When our twins get their driver’s licenses, we plan on buying another Accord, a hybrid that gets around 50 mpg. Or perhaps a Camry Hybrid. Whichever brand is the most reliable when I’m ready to buy. Because I am willing to share my Accord with my daughters, I can hold off on buying my next car. I think I might wait until the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. By then, Accords and Camrys will probably get over 60 miles per gallon.

    Regardless of what I do, I will be anxious because a big purchase entails risk. I am risk-averse. To minimize risk, I seek monotony, routine, and familiarity. I subscribe to the adage that it’s better to be with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

    This does not mean I’m provincial. I’d be just as happy having a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast as I would a bowl of Korean bibimbap. I find both dishes comforting. Both are familiar to me. Both are reliably delicious.

    So I’m a bit riled that in the summer of 2000 Shane said I’d make a great eighty-five-year-old. Actually, I would not. I can lift more weight than most men half my age. I love international food, the spicier the better. I watch daring, often subversive television, movies, and documentaries. I am, in other words, youthful and adventurous when it comes to exercise, eating, and entertainment.

    On the other hand, I am admittedly overly cautious and ridiculously obsessive when it comes to maintaining my routine and making big consumer purchases. But I think my contradictions should be appreciated. Labeling me prematurely old is inaccurate and demonstrates weak analytical skills.

    I love Shane. I wish him the best, and I am eager to locate him, if for no other reason than to discuss his appraisal of me as an exemplar of an eighty-five-year-old on my wife’s family’s lawn that summer day in 2000.

    I might even politely challenge him to an arm wrestle.

  • The Nap of No Return

    The Nap of No Return

    As a lifelong sloth and connoisseur of comfort, routine, and having “everything just so,” I have to be wary of infantilization, the habit of soothing myself by disengaging from the world until I enter long stretches of mindless inertia.

    I am not particularly vulnerable to this dangerous habit in the morning. I write, play the piano, and work out with kettlebells in the garage. But after lunch and my fitful post-workout nap, I am drawn to the couch and my true crime shows. That is where I can become lizard-eyed and begin checking out from life.

    Part of my afternoon retreat is owed to my lifelong inability to sleep well. I haven’t gotten eight straight hours of sleep in more than forty years. I wake from disturbing dreams that are all different and all the same. I’m often traveling in a caravan of people. We are walking or driving along the coast, embarked upon some vague quest. The leader, generally speaking, is not happy with me. I am too grumpy. I am moving too slowly or too quickly. I am going down the wrong path.

    Invariably, I get lost and have to find my way back to the group. I am in a state of great distress. The harder I try to rectify the situation, the worse it becomes. Eventually I wake up and try to process another haunting narrative featuring me as the stray sheep. I go to the bathroom, return to the bed or the couch, where I probably migrated around midnight, put in my earbuds, and hope a podcast will lull me back to sleep.

    My nights of tumultuous, broken, tormented sleep point to the fact that I am a restless, anxious person. Letting go and giving myself over to the moment is difficult, not just when sleeping but in other endeavors.

    Reading can be a challenge, especially when I find myself getting irritated because a book seems padded with fluff. It should have been an essay or a short story, but instead it has been inflated into a 300-page monstrosity of repetition and tedium.

    Sitting through a two-hour movie can prove almost impossible. If the movie features a detective wearing a turtleneck sweater in a balmy climate, I experience vicarious heat exhaustion and have to turn off the television or flee the theater before I suffer a nervous breakdown. When characters eat at a dinner table during a TV show or movie, I lose interest in the plot and start wondering what they’re eating. Soon I am getting an apple from the refrigerator.

    I can relax in certain circumstances. I can sit down at the piano for twenty minutes. Piano is a reliable source of anxiety release, especially when I play for an imaginary audience in which I am the hero. There is something wonderfully relaxing about playing a sonata before imaginary admirers who are being lulled into the same state of relaxation by my piano playing that I am.

    Another reliable source of relaxation is the afternoon consumption of television droning in the background while I descend into a blissful half-sleep condition I call the Womb State.

    An African animal documentary narrated by my trusty guide David Attenborough can put me into the Womb State. A true crime series in which detectives are waiting to learn whether ballistic evidence matches the casings used by their suspect can lull me into the Womb State.

    My deepest, most blissful descent into the Womb State in recent memory occurred when I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, opened Netflix on my phone, and listened to The Big Picture podcast. Listening to the gregarious Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins speculate for two hours about which movies might produce the year’s Best Actor was a euphoric state of relaxation more potent than Xanax or Valium.

    As I am only a few weeks from turning sixty-five and know that my sleep will probably become lighter and lighter, I realize I may depend increasingly on these Womb State pastimes. Opening a streaming app on my phone, putting on my noise-cancelling headphones, and listening to animal documentaries, crime shows, and movie-review podcasts may add fifteen years to my life.

    The problem, of course, is overdoing it.

    When I like something, I tend to overdo it, and the relentless pursuit of the Womb State can result in infantilization.

    As someone whose anxious personality denies him a good night’s sleep, I crave the Womb State as a counterbalance. I crave the soothing sounds of a podcast or documentary while giant cushioned headphone cones surround my ears and I lie on a Beautyrest with diamond-infused memory foam and microcontouring pocketed nano-coils while a Tempur-Pedic pillow cradles my neck. In the proper dose, this afternoon ritual gives me the rest I need.

    Taken to extremes, however, the ritual becomes part of the dark arts.

    The nap with headphones is no longer about rejuvenation. It is about extinction.

    Think of the 1973 movie Soylent Green, a dystopian nightmare in which citizens can choose voluntary euthanasia. They listen to soothing music while immersed in wraparound projections of beautiful landscapes. The government controls these citizens in part through the power of infantilization. There is a fine line between wanting to let go and becoming a helpless, malleable citizen whose self-agency has disappeared forever.

    I therefore need to remain wary of the temptations of infantilization. Napping may provide necessary rest for a man who can’t get a good night’s sleep, or it could be the precursor to the Nap of No Return.

    Just as David Attenborough adds extra gravitas and poignancy to his voice while describing an old alpha lion leaving its pride to die in isolated dignity, I can imagine the fabled naturalist shifting his commentary to me:

    “And here lies a man for whom the nap crept up on him and would not let go. Here in the suburbs, the greatest threat is not a natural predator. It is infantilization.”

  • Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    My fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez told our class in the early 1980s that we had to write our short stories over and over until they reached a pristine state in which we no longer had to apologize for anything in them. The stories had to stand on their own, beyond reproach.

    I thought of Gonzalez’s words when I came across a section of The Good Life Method in which the authors present a writing exercise: You have to write an apologia, or apology, for your own life. Apology in this context doesn’t mean saying you’re sorry. It means “speaking in one’s defense.” Your philosophical core, and the actions that grow from it, should be things you can defend on philosophical grounds.

    The authors provide several examples. I’ll mention three. Socrates defended his pursuit of the good life, a quest that embarrassed and antagonized the elite class. Augustine defended his religious conversion. Nietzsche defended his rejection of Christian morality and his vision of the Übermensch, or superman, a figure capable of overcoming inherited values and creating new ones rather than obediently accepting the old moral structure.

    Your personal apologia contains three building blocks. The first is a story that raises the question of what constitutes the good life and suggests a possible answer. The second is an argument for your goal, or higher purpose. The third is the method—the means by which you intend to achieve your goal of living the good life.

    The authors make it clear that having the correct conception of the good life isn’t enough. You have to act in accordance with your ideal. To make their case, they cite Aristotle, who warned about the chasm between belief and action. He compares people who philosophize without changing their lives to patients who listen attentively to their doctors and then ignore every instruction. The patients won’t become healthy, and neither will the philosophers. In religious terms, faith without works is dead.

    As I consider the personal apologia and its three building blocks, it occurs to me that this exercise is essentially a Life Syllabus complete with Enduring Understandings. You identify the good life, establish the philosophical basis for it, and create a plan of action for living it.

    That is your syllabus.

    It seems reasonable to me that a young person should have such a Life Syllabus. Having one is surely more profitable than not having one. Living every day as if you’re making everything up as you go along strikes me as both depressing and futile.

    I’m reminded of a friend who waited tables in Denver in the early 1980s. Eventually the job depressed him because, as he explained it, every day he was starting from scratch. The job gave him nothing to build upon. Every shift he constructed a tower of blocks, and by the next shift the tower had collapsed. He had to start all over again.

    A syllabus, with its building blocks, promises the opposite. It gives you a journey in which one action builds upon the previous one. You are making something of yourself. You are flourishing. You are moving closer to the good life and, presumably, becoming a good person along the way.

    For a young person, such a journey seems profitable. If you are in your mid-sixties, as I am, it isn’t too late. In fact, the matter has become considerably more urgent.

    So with this in mind, I return to the apologia and its first building block: a personal story that gave me some glimpse of an answer to the question of how to live a good life.

    The first story that comes to mind happened in 1981. I was a nineteen-year-old bodybuilder attending college in Northern California. Preparing for the late-summer Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest at Mission High School, I ate a high-protein, low-carb diet and tanned every day. In the weeks leading up to the contest, my clothes began hanging from my 180-pound, perfectly tanned physique like a bad costume. This necessitated an entirely new wardrobe, which brought me to a fitting room in a Pleasanton shopping mall.

    While I tried on pants behind gauzy curtains, two attractive young women standing outside began arguing over which one should ask me out. Their voices grew louder and louder, which I interpreted as compelling evidence that I was a highly valued commodity.

    This was my golden opportunity. My moment to shine.

    And what did I do?

    I froze.

    I threw up an aloof facade so potent that it was like scattering banana peels under their feet and sending them sliding away from my presence. I appeared stuck-up, full of myself, and out of reach when, in reality, I was a frightened imbecile hiding behind a fortress of muscle.

    In spite of my perfect tan and ripped physique, I was useless because I possessed the social skills of a wilted houseplant. All that bodybuilding had caused me to neglect more important matters: soul-building, social-skill building, mind-building. I was essentially a cipher. My chiseled body had done nothing to put me on the path toward the good life.

    Disillusioned with bodybuilding, I hit the books in college and tried to develop my mind with the same intensity I had applied to my body. I read Nabokov, Bellow, Kafka, and Dostoevsky. I learned to play piano works by Chopin, Schubert, and Brahms.

    And I became an annoying pseudo-intellectual snob.

    Intellectual pride, it turned out, didn’t put me on the path toward the good life either. My existence vacillated between the despair of believing I was a misfit while listening to The Smiths and the arrogance of believing I was superior to “the masses” while affecting the pomposity of Vladimir Nabokov. I had traded one costume for another. Instead of hiding behind muscles, I was hiding behind books, classical music, and intellectual affectation.

    I was a poseur, someone who didn’t know how to be real with himself or anyone else.

    So what was the good life?

    A life of authenticity, for starters. A life of humility in which I rejected both the hidden pride of despair and the more flamboyant pride of snobbery.

    But I can’t pretend the road toward authenticity was a straight line. There were starts and stops, loops and detours, concentric circles and occasional ascents. I did become more authentic over time, but not because I possessed a clear philosophy or followed a carefully constructed syllabus. Life challenges and conflicts with actual human beings forced me to surrender some of the facade and BS and learn to respect other people.

    Being respectful required being authentic.

    This was a long, gradual process. It didn’t happen because I read this philosopher or that one. No single book cracked open the heavens and handed me the operating manual.

    In the end, no philosopher was my teacher.

    Life was the teacher.

    And this brings me to a problem I have with The Good Life Method. I understand its impulse very clearly. Like these sharp, talented, well-intentioned Notre Dame professors, I love writing a course syllabus, which can easily double as a Life Syllabus. I love the idea of a plan, an outline, a sequence of building blocks, and a path toward the good life.

    But perhaps it is too pat. Too tidy. Too much like a pretty package with a ribbon tied neatly on top.

    Life may be too messy for the course outline. It may be too messy for resolution and absolute answers. As someone who struggles with my Jewish and Catholic background and remains agnostic about several enormous religious questions, I’m reminded of something Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Herman Melville’s inability to achieve religious clarity: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief.”

    I know that territory.

    I remain sympathetic to the goals of The Good Life Method. I want the Life Syllabus. I want the Enduring Understandings. I want the building blocks, the method, the telos, and the reassuring sense that one assignment leads logically to the next.

    I’m just not convinced that life has read the syllabus.

    And I have serious doubts that this method, or any method, provides a surefire path to the promised land.

  • How to Age Without Ruining Everyone Else’s Day

    How to Age Without Ruining Everyone Else’s Day

    I was sixty-four when I attended my cousin Pete’s seventy-fifth birthday party at his home in Studio City. The place teemed with cousins and their friends, ninety percent of them over seventy, including the members of the Beatles-and-Stones cover band.

    When twilight arrived—salmon sky, ninety degrees—dozens of people in their seventies stripped down and leapt into the swimming pool like aging dolphins. They splashed, laughed, floated on their backs, and generally behaved as though the actuarial tables had been suspended for the evening. I remained beneath the canopy in long pants, swatting mosquitoes and sulking.

    I sat with a plate of hummus, feta, figs, and baba ghanoush and talked with Jim, my cousin Diane’s husband, a seventy-eight-year-old retired ophthalmologist.

    I told him about some of the challenges I was encountering as I entered my mid-sixties: early bedtimes, bladder-draining night patrols, and my growing terror of driving after dark.

    Jim leaned toward me, lowered his voice, and delivered a sentence that should probably be etched on my tombstone.

    “The hardest part of aging is becoming invisible. You still take up space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture.”

    I immediately thought of Dostoevsky—or rather a sentiment I associate with his darkly comic vision of human nature. After a certain age, merely continuing to exist begins to seem vaguely impolite. Forty is acceptable. Fifty is pushing your luck. Seventy-five? Now you’re abusing the hospitality. Mind your manners and die already.

    “Exactly my point,” Jim said.

    I was joking, but the joke contains an unpleasant truth. Call it The Mortality Courtesy: the tacit social expectation that aging people should manage their decline in ways that minimize discomfort and inconvenience to everyone else.

    Stay healthy. Stay attractive. Stay mobile. Stay independent. Don’t complain. Don’t smell strange. Don’t require assistance getting out of the car. Don’t hold up the line while searching for your credit card. Keep your hearing aids charged. Maintain bladder control. And above all, don’t become one of those frightening old people whose visible deterioration reminds everyone else where this carnival ride is heading.

    If you absolutely must age and die, please have the decency not to make it awkward.

    Tolstoy understood The Mortality Courtesy perfectly. In the wonderfully cruel opening of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, employees at a prominent law court learn that Ivan Ilyich has died. Almost immediately, they begin wondering what promotions and personnel changes his death might make available to them.

    Ivan is dead. Someone may be getting a better office.

    They are also secretly relieved by the most fundamental fact of the situation: death happened to Ivan and not to them. One person’s catastrophe becomes another person’s reassurance.

    Then comes the funeral, which presents its own set of irritations. Death requires scheduling adjustments. There must be displays of grief, solemn expressions, uncomfortable clothing, flowers, condolences, and perhaps an afternoon sacrificed to standing around a coffin when everyone has other things to do.

    The dead can be terribly inconsiderate.

    But Ivan’s greatest breach of etiquette is more serious. His death reminds everyone that they are fools for living as though they will live forever.

    That is the real violation of The Mortality Courtesy.

    We spend much of our lives climbing ladders of pleasure, status, acquisition, accomplishment, and recognition, always imagining that happiness waits on the next rung. Better house. Better job. Better body. Better vacation. Better restaurant reservation. Better retirement portfolio. Keep climbing and eventually you will arrive at the radiant platform where everything finally makes sense.

    Then some inconsiderate bastard dies.

    Suddenly the entire enterprise looks suspicious.

    This may explain why visible aging can make younger people uncomfortable. The old person isn’t merely old. He is carrying information. His stooped posture, hearing aids, liver spots, pill organizer, orthopedic shoes, and careful descent down a staircase are little dispatches from the future.

    Nobody asked for these updates.

    Wouldn’t it be more polite to remain eternally youthful and salubrious? Stay lean. Keep your teeth. Maintain excellent posture. Swim laps at seventy-five. Wear tasteful linen. Post photographs from Tuscany. Inspire everyone with your vitality.

    This is the kind of aging society can tolerate because it doesn’t look sufficiently like aging.

    Perhaps that is what fascinated me about Pete’s birthday party. The septuagenarians launching themselves into the pool were performing the acceptable version of old age. They were vigorous, social, musical, suntanned, drinking wine, singing Beatles songs, and behaving as though seventy-five were merely fifty with a better retirement account.

  • I Left My Own Funeral Early

    I Left My Own Funeral Early

    A month before my sixty-fifth birthday, I dreamed I attended my own funeral.

    It wasn’t just for me. A beloved janitor at my college had also died. He and I stood inside a pristine dumpster, apparently scrubbed to a meticulous shine out of respect for the dead. Evidently even in death, the college had standards. I was both the subject of the funeral and a witness to it, simultaneously dead in the receptacle and standing with the other attendees observing my disposal.

    The aching sadness of the dream was undeniable, and it followed me into the morning as I tried to restore normal operations with coffee, oatmeal, writing, and piano practice. None of it worked. I felt sad and scared.

    Seeking consolation, I looked at some titles on my Amazon wishlist: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older; Susan Moon’s Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch and This Is Getting Old: Zen Thoughts on Aging with Humor and Dignity; Catherine Bradbury’s This Way Up: Old Friends, New Love, and a Map for the Road Ahead.

    Seeing these titles depressed me even more.

    I was reminded of 2010. I was forty-eight and overwhelmed with having twins. There were parenting podcasts everywhere. I couldn’t bear them. I was already living the struggle of parenting. The last thing I wanted after a day of actual parenting was to put on headphones and listen to two cheerful people discuss the challenges of parenting.

    The same thing happened during my forty years of teaching college writing. I never developed much tolerance for writing conferences, teaching podcasts, or education seminars. I was already teaching. I didn’t have room in my brain for shop talk and inspirational tidbits about connecting with my students. Occasionally I allowed some external pedagogy to sneak through the back door. I’m not above teaching the Sandwich Paragraph Structure. I have standards, but I also have bills to pay.

    And now death, aging, and retirement have generated their own industry. There are books, podcasts, YouTube channels, retreats, coaches, maps for the road ahead, instructions for the home stretch, and presumably somebody somewhere offering a twelve-week seminar on embracing your authentic elder self.

    It is all too on the nose.

    I’d rather approach death indirectly. I want to sneak up on it and surprise it. I want to be the agentive force, not the other way around.

    Good luck to me.

    Part of the problem is that while I believe in having a purpose and maintaining a positive attitude toward life’s final chapters, conversations about these matters quickly become infested with clichés and saccharine encouragement. Find your purpose. Practice gratitude. Embrace the journey. Age with intention. Become the sage.

    Apparently death becomes less alarming if you surround it with enough inspirational nouns.

    There is no panacea, formula, podcast, or twelve-step plan that removes the sting from your final chapters. Mortality remains stubbornly unimpressed by branding.

    Being old reminds me of a bunch of boomers attending a Rolling Stones concert. The band members themselves are around eighty, and now they’re playing the final encore. Do you stay and savor every remaining moment?

    That sounds good on paper.

    In reality, you’re already thinking about the parking lot.

    The concert peaked about an hour ago. If you stay until the final note, twenty thousand other people will stampede toward the exits at precisely the same moment. Then comes the parking structure. Then comes traffic. You can already see yourself trapped behind a Suburban containing six other boomers discussing their statins.

    So you leave early.

    You hear “Satisfaction” beginning behind you as you make your way toward the exit, congratulating yourself on your strategic brilliance.

    This impulse has an equivalent in aging. Call it Exit Anticipation: the tendency to begin psychologically withdrawing from life because you have become acutely aware that the event is approaching its conclusion.

    You know the peak is probably behind you. You know the concert cannot continue indefinitely. And once you start thinking about the exit, it becomes increasingly difficult to concentrate on the music.

    A sense of futility creeps in. Why start another project? Why buy another piano? Why make another friend? Why write another book? Why become deeply invested in anything when the ushers are already stacking chairs in the back of the auditorium?

    Exit Anticipation whispers that perhaps you should begin disengaging now. Get ahead of the crowd. Beat the traffic.

    It is a dark impulse, but denying it seems more dangerous than acknowledging it. You need to know that the impulse exists precisely so that you don’t obey it automatically. Otherwise, you can spend years leaving a life that hasn’t ended.

    That may be one of the peculiar psychological challenges of aging. The knowledge that the concert will end can interfere with your ability to hear the music that is still playing.

    My dream understood this before I did.

    There I was, looking at my own body inside a meticulously sanitized dumpster, attending the final ceremony of my existence.

    Did I stay until the end?

    Of course not.

    I wanted to beat the crowd.

    I wanted to beat the traffic.