Tag: mental-health

Why Your Watch Doesn’t Make You Happy Anymore

To understand the madness of the modern watch addict, you’d do well to consult Dopamine Nation by Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, a book that should be shelved somewhere between philosophy, neuroscience, and quiet screaming. Her central thesis? In an age of relentless indulgence, the line between pleasure and pain is not only blurry—it’s the same neurological pathway. You’re not escaping pain with your latest acquisition. You’re feeding it.

“The smartphone,” she writes, “is the modern-day hypodermic needle.” And the drug? Dopamine—delivered in neat little parcels: TikToks, tweets, memes, and yes, wrist shots of watches you don’t own (yet). If you haven’t met your poison of choice, don’t worry. It’s just a click away.

Lembke makes the uncomfortable truth clear: The more dopamine hits we seek, the more our brain adapts by reducing our baseline pleasure response. What once thrilled you—your grail watch, your Rolex Explorer, your Seiko with the Wabi-Sabi patina—now barely registers. You’re not chasing pleasure anymore. You’re just trying to feel something.

Watch addicts, of course, understand this intimately. The pursuit of horological perfection starts out innocent enough: a G-Shock here, a vintage diver there. But soon you’re tumbling into the abyss of boutique limited editions and message board enablement, haunted by the need to stay relevant. Because here’s the twist: It’s not just about the watches. It’s about being seen. You post, you review, you flex because if you stop, you vanish. No new watches = no new content = digital extinction.

And extinction, in a social-media world, feels like death.

Lembke warns us that addiction thrives in secrecy, in the exhausting double life. The watch addict may present as a tasteful minimalist to family and friends, while secretly rotating 19 watches, five straps deep, waiting for the next “drop.” The addiction is fed by access, and we live in an access economy. New releases are no longer annual events—they’re hourly temptations. The vortex is bottomless. The supply creates the demand.

Even worse, modern society normalizes this behavior. Everyone is scrolling. Everyone is upgrading. Our addiction to novelty is passed off as taste. Our frenzied consumption masquerades as identity. Lembke borrows from Philip Rieff to explain the deeper shift: “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” The modern watch collector doesn’t believe in salvation. He believes in configuration.

But here’s the cruel irony: The more you seek to be pleased, the less capable you are of being pleased. In Lembke’s words: “Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia—the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”

You can understand the watch addict’s feeble quest when you look at the Horological Dopamine Loop–the self-reinforcing cycle in which acquisition, posting, validation, and anticipation replace enjoyment. The watch no longer delivers pleasure; it merely resets the craving for the next hit.

What’s the solution? A dopamine fast. Lembke prescribes it like a bitter medicine: Remove the source. Reset the brain. Let it reestablish homeostasis. For the watch addict, this means one thing: a watch fast.

And yes—it’s brutal. I’ve been a watch obsessive for over twenty years. My longest fast? Six months. And I nearly went feral. New releases tempt. Friends enable. Algorithms whisper. Strap swaps and vintage reissues beckon like sirens. Even the FedEx truck starts to look like a personal tormentor.

So you get creative. You stash watches in the safe and “rediscover” them. You buy new straps instead of new watches. You try to redirect the compulsion toward something productive: fitness, music, sourdough, monkish austerity. Anything but another chronograph.

But the real cure, oddly enough, may be conversation—actual human connection. At watch meet-ups, we start out discussing bezels and spring bars, but within ten minutes we’re talking about life: real estate, parenting, knee surgeries, emotional burnout, dinner recipes. We talk for hours. But barely about watches.

The truth slips out in these moments: we want to be free. We crave community more than we crave sapphire crystals. What began as a shared obsession has become a trap, and these conversations, paradoxically, offer relief from the very addiction that brought us together.

Imagine a bunch of watch enthusiasts at a watch meet-up and we’re talking about everything but watches. Wrap your head around that.

February 3, 2026
When a Strap Solved Everything—and Instagram Ruined It

I don’t work for Divecore straps. I don’t have an affiliate link. I don’t even remember how I found them. They just appeared one day, like a cult recruiter with good posture. All I know is this: once I tried them, something clicked. The fit was right. The comfort was immediate. The look was honest. So I did what any rational watch obsessive does when he thinks he’s reached enlightenment—I stripped every watch off its bracelet, slapped on black or orange FKM Divecore straps, and declared myself finished.

Done.
Happy.
At ease.

That phrase—at ease—matters. A seven-watch collection, unified by one strap philosophy, felt merciful. There was no mental juggling, no wrist gouging from metal end links, no micro-adjustment rituals to accommodate the daily swelling and shrinking of my aging, temperamental wrist. The system was clean. Elegant. Humane. For once, the hobby felt like a hobby instead of a low-grade engineering problem.

Then, in August of 2025, Instagram did what Instagram does best: it ruined my peace. Someone informed me—solemnly, heroically—that a study had been released about FKM straps and PFAS “forever chemicals.” The straps in the study were abused like props in a MythBusters episode—conditions so extreme they bore little resemblance to actual wrist life—but still. With plastic contamination already saturating the planet, did I really need to marinate my arteries in additional synthetic mystery?

So off came the FKM. On went the “safe” alternatives: urethane, silicone, vulcanized rubber. They were… fine. Adequate. Technically acceptable. Emotionally inert. I wore them the way you eat airline chicken—without complaint, but without love. And yes, I feel compelled to say it again: I still don’t work for Divecore.

Feeling vaguely bereaved, I did what many men do when they sense disorder: I tried to impose balance. I put stainless steel bracelets back on some heavy hitters. I even bought a gunmetal, monochromatic dive watch on a bracelet, as if symmetry itself could rescue me. I now had four watches on straps and four on bracelets. The collection looked fantastic. Museum-worthy. Spreadsheet-perfect.

And yet—I was less happy.

That’s when I recognized the familiar enemy: Cognitive Load Creep. The slow, insidious return of mental fatigue as the collection grows more complex. Straps versus bracelets. Balance logic. Adjustment rituals. The hobby quietly mutates into unpaid systems management. Every glance at the watch box now came with a background hum of decision-making. And whenever that hum gets loud enough, a voice appears.

You lost the plot.

And it’s right.

The plot was never variety.
The plot was never balance.
The plot was happiness.

Happiness, in the watch hobby, is hard to define—but it’s easy to identify its opposites: stress, obsession, second-guessing, wheel-spinning, FOMO anxiety, mental overload, and the constant sense that you’ve taken on more than you can metabolize. If your watches feel like a to-do list, something has gone wrong.

I’m trying to learn from this chapter. I know, intellectually, that less really is more. I know stress is poison. I also know I have a flair for melodrama. I can turn a strap swap into a Greek tragedy. I pine. I brood. I catastrophize like an adolescent waiting for a love note reply that never comes. It’s embarrassing. It’s funny. And I’m certain I’m not alone. Watch people are wired this way—OCD-prone, sentimentally overloaded, forever narrating their own inner turmoil.

So what’s next?

I don’t know. There’s no blueprint. No masterplan. No illuminated exit sign pointing toward Horological Sanity. The best I can do is remain watch-agnostic, laugh at my own compulsions, and tell the truth about whatever move I make next—if I make one at all.

The world, I assure you, is not holding its breath.

But a fellow watch obsessive might be.

February 2, 2026
Why You Can’t Pursue the Watch Hobby in Solitude

I should have known at thirteen that seventeen would be brutal. At thirteen, Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” was already circulating through the house like a prophecy. I liked the song well enough, but my mother loved it. It was her time machine back to high school—loneliness, rejection, the ache of not measuring up. More than once I watched her eyes fill as the song drifted out of our Panasonic portable radio. That was her loneliness anthem. I needed my own. Mine was “Watching and Waiting” by the Moody Blues—a song for someone alone in the dark who senses there is something greater beyond himself and aches to make contact with it. Less teenage rejection, more metaphysical hunger.

By seventeen, starting college, I was profoundly lonely. According to Erik Erikson, this is the stage defined by intimacy versus isolation, and I was losing badly. I felt it in my bones as a socially maladroit bodybuilder shuffling through classes by day and working nights as a bouncer at a teen disco called Maverick’s in San Ramon. Picture it: me at the door, arms crossed, watching a parade of thrill-seekers gyrate, flirt, and dissolve into noise. The job didn’t cure my loneliness; it distilled it. I was close enough to touch the crowd and miles away from belonging to it.

One morning after a late shift, I dreamed I was living in the Stone Age. I was alone in a cave, wrapped in animal skins, stepping out into a gray, indifferent sky. I raised my arms toward the clouds, reaching for something—anything—that might answer me. In the background, “Watching and Waiting” played like a prayer I hadn’t yet learned how to pray. The dream was sad and beautiful, which felt like progress. As Kierkegaard noted, despair’s worst form is not knowing you’re in it. At least I knew. And as the Psalmist understood long before therapy existed, grace tends to follow sorrow once the sorrow has been fully felt.

People hate being alone. They’ll sit through ads on YouTube rather than listen ad-free on Spotify because YouTube lets them comment, scroll, argue, agree—experience the song with others. Solitude may be cleaner, but communion is warmer. Which brings me to watches. What is the watch hobby in isolation? Nothing. A watch on a deserted island is just a lump of steel keeping time for no one. The hobby exists only because a community animates it—supports it, debates it, sometimes overfeeds it. A watch on your wrist is a semiotic flare. It says something. Others read it. You read them back. That exchange is the point.

This is what I mean by Horological Communion: the quiet fellowship formed when watches are not hoarded as private trophies but offered as shared symbols. Meaning emerges only when the object is seen, recognized, and answered—at meetups, in forums, in comment sections, across a knowing glance from one wrist to another. Without that communion, the watch is mute. It ticks, faithfully, but it says nothing at all.

February 1, 2026
The Watch Relapse Spectacle

Watch addicts eventually reach a terminal stage of torment: the moment when the hobby that once delivered pleasure produces only agitation. The rotation feels oppressive. The collection feels accusatory. At this point, the addict does what desperate cultures have always done—he invents a ritual.

Surveying the landscape for deliverance, one inevitably recalls the 2014 viral fever dream known as the Ice Bucket Challenge. The watch world demands its own purgative spectacle. Enter the One-Watch Challenge.

The ritual is simple and public. A ten-minute YouTube video is required. The setting must be tasteful—backyard at golden hour or living room with flattering light. Friends gather. Straws are drawn. Every watch in the collection is claimed except the one the addict secretly hopes will remain. The winners strap on their spoils, grinning like looters at the fall of a city. The subject is then lifted into the air, victorious yet emptied, holding aloft his single remaining watch.

He is reborn. He is no longer a collector. He is a Oner—a new creature who has renounced rotation days for the austere monogamy of one watch, worn for the rest of his natural life. He speaks of clarity. He speaks of peace. He uploads the video and waits for absolution.

Naturally, the movement does not end there.

A counter-genre soon emerges: the Relapser. These videos document former Oners discovered months later, sprawled on their carpets amid a shameful abundance of watches. Boxes are open. Straps are tangled. The men appear undone—glassy-eyed, infantile, muttering references to limited editions and “just one more.” The videos are initially consumed as comedy, shared with a wink and a laugh.

Over time, the laughter fades.

The genre acquires a formal name: the Watch Relapse Spectacle—the inevitable counter-ritual in which renunciation collapses into excess. What began as entertainment hardens into parable. For the first time, the wider public glimpses the pathology beneath the polish. The madness is no longer charming. It is instructive.

February 1, 2026
The Schwinn Airdyne and the Three Realms of Fitness

About fifteen years ago, the literary magazine Zyzzyva published one of my short stories, “Phittnut’s Progress.” It followed a workout addict who trained with the same manic devotion Martin Luther once applied to penance and self-flagellation. At the time, I thought I was being clever. In retrospect, I was being autobiographical.

I’ve long understood exercise as a spiritual journey—less Peloton, more Dante. Every workout is a descent, an ascent, or, on rare days, a brief glimpse of paradise. I grasped this intuitively long before I had any formal exposure to theology.

When I was about seven, I watched a 1960s TV show in which a man in a gorilla suit terrorized castaways on a nameless island. The production values were laughable; the fear was not. That night, the gorilla followed me to my room. I lay in bed convinced the beast was beneath my mattress, growling, reaching upward, eager to drag me into its lair.

Sleep was impossible until I deployed my first metaphysical escape hatch. I imagined myself drifting on a raft along a calm river, safely beyond the monster’s reach. Above me stood a benevolent woman—a hybrid of the Statue of Liberty and Dante’s Beatrice—watching over my passage. Ahead was a luminous haze, the same gauzy heaven Fred Gwynne’s Patience the Guardian Angel inhabits in the 1969 film The Littlest Angel. Only then did peace return.

This architecture still governs my workouts.

When I’m out of shape, I’m back in the Monster’s Lair. When conditioning improves, I find myself floating along Beatrice’s River. And when I hit my goal—when effort dissolves into rhythm—I enter the Glory of Patience.

My Schwinn Airdyne is the portal between these realms.

Six months ago, my ambition was modest: 600 calories in 54 minutes. Respectable. Enough to keep the gorilla at bay. As fitness returned, so did ambition. A month ago, I raised the standard. To remain outside the inferno, I now needed 700 calories in roughly 55 minutes.

Then reality intervened.

Four days ago, after brutalizing my body with an ill-advised plumbing project, I plunged straight into the pit. Two days later, I slogged for 56 minutes and scraped together a humiliating 500 calories. Full inferno. The simian breathed hotly.

Today, I clawed my way back to 603 calories in 54 minutes. Not glorious. Not close to the 810 calories I burned in 61 minutes six days ago. But it’s movement in the right direction. The river is visible again. The monster’s reach falls short.

For now, that’s enough.

January 28, 2026
Overthinking Puts You in the Way of Enjoying Your Watch Hobby

I’m trying not to get in the way of enjoying my watch hobby. Let me restate that, because it sounds absurd even as I say it: I’m attempting to stop sabotaging my own pleasure in a hobby I genuinely love. I’m trying to step aside so I can simply look at a watch and enjoy it like a normal human being.

What’s the obstruction?

Overthinking.

Yes, I’m addicted to watches—but that’s a minor vice compared to my real dependency. I’m addicted to thinking about thinking. Overthinking is my true Grail, and it’s always in stock. The more I indulge it, the darker and more pessimistic my inner monologue becomes. I don’t pretend to have a cure for something that has been with me my entire life. I do, however, recognize the pattern.

This goes back a long way.

In 1967, I was five years old and anxious about lunch. When was it coming? Why wasn’t it here yet? My grandmother looked at me and said, “Jeff, you worry too much.” The moment she said it, a switch flipped. I wasn’t comforted. I was horrified. She was right. I did worry too much. And now I had something new to worry about: the fact that I worried too much.

Congratulations, kid. You’ve unlocked the meta-anxiety level.

I do the same thing with watches. I overthink my overthinking. I analyze my tendency to analyze. Then I wonder if that analysis itself is the problem. Before long, the joy drains out of something that should be simple: wearing a watch.

Do I have a solution? Not really.

What I do have is a strategy borrowed from a therapist I saw as a neurotic college student in the 1980s. His advice was disarmingly calm: when negative thoughts appear, don’t fight them. Don’t suppress them. Just notice them. Observe them as if they were weather passing through. No judgment. No panic. No dramatic counteroffensive.

So that’s the plan. Observation without self-flagellation.

This morning, for example, I strapped on the mighty Seiko Tuna SBBN049—on a bracelet, no less—and immediately my brain went to work. Is this watch too big? Too bold? Will I still be wearing a Tuna in my eighties? Will octogenarian me look ridiculous?

The thoughts were stupid. They were also funny. And—most importantly—irrelevant. Rather than scolding myself, I watched the thoughts float by, labeled them mental debris, swept them out, and got on with my day.

My oatmeal was excellent.
My coffee was perfect.
The Tuna looks fine on the wrist.

Sometimes that’s enough.

January 28, 2026
The Hot Take Is the Chronic Cough of Something Gone Wrong

We live in a Hot Take culture, and on balance, hot takes do more harm than good.

For a decade, I feasted on them. Back when it was still called Twitter, my days were seasoned with sharp one-liners, instant judgments, and rhetorical mic drops. It felt bracing at first—intellectual espresso shots delivered in 280 characters. But over time, the feed stopped feeling like conversation and started feeling like a room full of people shouting clever insults at a fire.

About a year ago, I deleted my account. By then, I barely recognized the people I once followed. Everything had gone shrill. Bombast replaced thought. Even the impressive hot takes—clever, ruthless, beautifully phrased—eventually blurred into something anesthetizing. A constant buzz that left me dull rather than informed.

I didn’t quit social media entirely. What I actually want is boring, old-fashioned breaking news. Tell me what happened. Tell me where. Tell me when. I don’t need a verdict within thirty seconds. So now I drift through places like Threads, mostly lurking. Many of the smart people I used to follow migrated there. Some still do what they’ve always done: post headlines and context. Others can’t resist the gravitational pull of commentary. News first, hot take immediately after. Their allies cheer them on inside familiar silos, and the machine rewards escalation.

To be fair, not everyone posting is chasing dopamine. Some journalists are doing real work. They have massive audiences and feel a genuine obligation to interpret chaos in real time. They live in a crucible of praise and abuse, applause and outrage. That kind of constant psychic weather can’t be healthy, but the motive is understandable—meaningful engagement. If this were a pre-digital era, they’d still be doing something similar, just with deadlines instead of feeds. Slower. Quieter. Possibly saner.

But then there’s another species entirely: the professional Hot Taker.

This person has mastered the form. Their posts are short, sharp, structurally elegant. A good hot take is witty, memorable, and instantly legible. It lands. It spreads. It racks up likes and reposts like a slot machine hitting cherries. Success is measurable, public, addictive.

And that’s the trap.

When identity and self-worth become tethered to engagement metrics, the self gets commodified. Everything becomes raw material for the next take. Nuance is a liability. Hesitation is death. The hot take demands boldness, outrage, and certainty—even when certainty is fraudulent.

At that point, the Hot Taker is no longer responding to the world; they are farming it.

I’ve watched thoughtful, decent people slide into this role. At first, their posts are useful. Then they overshare. Then they pick fights they don’t need to fight. Eventually, their online life becomes a series of skirmishes that feel exhausting even to sympathetic observers. They can’t stop—not because they’re evil, but because the machine has trained them well.

So yes, we live in the Age of the Hot Take, where people measure their purpose by their ability to generate applause from the faithful. Hot takes don’t convert anyone. They delight the choir and enrage the opposition. Polarization intensifies. Nothing moves.

Is it unfair to call this a disease? I don’t think so.

First, there’s the hijack. The belief that constant expression equals relevance, that relevance equals worth. It’s a delusion reinforced by numbers. Likes don’t satisfy; they sharpen hunger.

Then there are the consumers. By liking and reposting, they feel they’re participating in history, bending reality toward justice. In practice, they’re mostly helping tribes harden their borders. Everyone believes they’re weaponizing truth. No one notices the epistemic ground eroding beneath them.

When COVID hit, I assumed the crisis would force clarity. Instead, it deepened the divide. Now measles—a disease we already solved—is making a comeback. Science, once the shared floor, has become another battlefield. If pandemics and preventable deaths can’t bring us together, hot takes certainly won’t.

You can fire off the most righteous, viral condemnation imaginable. Measles will still spread.

So what should we do instead?

The answer isn’t attractive. Reality hasn’t hit hard enough yet. Historically, people abandon fantasy only when consequences become unavoidable. Until then, we chatter. We posture. We perform. Hot takes aren’t solutions. They’re symptoms—the chronic cough that tells you something deeper is wrong.

January 28, 2026
The Myth of the Ultimate Watch Collection

There is no such thing as an ultimate watch collection. That fantasy survives only in Instagram grids and forum signatures. In real life, your taste sharpens, clarifies, narrows—and that clarity does bring you closer to something satisfying. But it never brings closure.

The problem is not the watches. The problem is us.

We are capricious animals. One day we crave restraint; the next day we want spectacle. Nostalgia ambushes us and sends us chasing a watch tied to some earlier version of ourselves—college years, first job, first illusion of competence. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. A watch can be a time machine or a dead end.

Then there’s money. Grail pieces often cost so much that they can’t be worn without anxiety. They live in safes, not on wrists. You admire them abstractly but never bond with them. On the other end, budget watches sometimes fail the respect test. You want to love them, but something feels compromised—finish, heft, presence. The relationship never quite takes.

So if there is a destination, it isn’t perfection. It’s the sweet spot.

The watch isn’t too small or too large. It isn’t priced so high that you fear it, or so low that you dismiss it. It isn’t dull, but it isn’t shouting either. You can look at it from different angles and keep finding reasons to linger. It holds your attention without demanding it.

Some people chase that feeling through complexity. Chronographs seduce with their subdials and mechanical busyness. I tried that path. Instead of enchantment, I got sensory overload. Too much information. Too much pleading. I found myself longing for the blunt honesty of a diver.

But even a diver has to earn its place.

It needs salient features. Bold, but not desperate. Visually striking, but instantly legible. Purposeful without cosplay. The Seiko MM300 SLA023 comes to mind. It’s a legend in the Seiko lineup because it commits fully to its identity. Over 44mm wide. About 15mm thick. It doesn’t apologize. If you can carry those dimensions, it rewards you with gravitas and coherence.

If you can’t, there are alternatives.

The Seiko Alpinist SBDC209 is a different kind of seduction. At 39.5mm, it’s compact, refined, endlessly stare-able. You can live with it all day without fatigue. On the right wrist, it’s perfect. On mine, it disappears. And when a watch disappears, the answer is simple: no.

That’s the truth most collectors avoid. The “ultimate” collection isn’t about consensus or rankings. It’s about proportion—between the watch and the wrist, between desire and restraint, between fantasy and daily life.

You don’t arrive at it once.
You circle it.
And if you’re lucky, you pause there for a while.

January 27, 2026
How Pain Turns Writers Into NPCs.

Writers love to repeat this creed: writers write. Every day. They sit down, stare at the blank page, and through sheer ritual force the gears to turn. In The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield insists on this daily discipline and warns of the inevitable adversary—Resistance. Resistance whispers that your writing is vain, repulsive, predictable, and hollow. Why bother? Go online. Look at shoes. Browse wristwatches. Watch YouTube reviews of sedans you’ll never buy. Burn the day on frictionless nonsense. It’s all equally meaningless, right?

Pressfield and therapist Phil Stutz argue that this internal battle is the whole point of being alive. Pressfield calls the enemy Resistance. Stutz calls it Part X. Different names, same parasite. Its goal is not laziness but annihilation—to grind you into a nihilist, a Non Player Character who anesthetizes himself with consumer trinkets and cheap pleasures while his self-respect quietly decomposes.

This morning, Part X arrived early and well-fed. My left shoulder throbbed from a five-month war with a torn rotator cuff and biceps tendon. Two days ago, I committed the cardinal sin: light pec flyes. Light. Humane. Respectful. Wrong. My shoulder throbbed. Apparently my shoulder has revised the Geneva Convention. I’m furious. A pec pump feels like a constitutional right. Don’t take that from me.

But reason—cold, joyless, correct—has entered the chat. It says: you don’t need a pec pump; you need healing. If the weight room has turned hostile, pivot. Yoga. The bike. Calisthenics that whisper instead of shout. I’ve lifted my entire life, but at sixty-four my shoulder has submitted its closing argument, and it’s persuasive.

The real danger isn’t losing bench presses. It’s waking up sore, cranky, and vulnerable—exactly the emotional state Part X thrives on. Injury lowers your defenses. Pain invites despair. Despair opens the door to distraction, and distraction is how the demon eats.

So today I’ll keep it modest. Trader Joe’s. Groceries. Lower-body kettlebells. Rehab work that looks unimpressive but feels like loyalty to the future. May my shoulder accept this offering. More importantly, may it keep Part X from getting its teeth in me before breakfast.

January 24, 2026
How Zombies Taught Me to Do the Dishes

I was in sixth grade when I made the worst procrastination decision of my young life: I watched Night of the Living Dead instead of doing the dishes.

I didn’t even want to watch it. My parents were out for the evening and issued a single, modest commandment: Do whatever you want—just do the dishes. The sink was stacked with plates, bowls, pots, and pans, a greasy jungle daring me to enter. I took one look and decided I deserved a short rest before battle. I collapsed into a yellow bean bag chair, turned on the TV, and landed on Creature Features, which was broadcasting one of the most psychologically devastating films ever made.

I’d heard about the movie at school. Kids spoke of it in hushed, reverent tones, as if surviving it were a rite of passage. Fear, apparently, was proof of greatness. How bad could it really be? I told myself this while enjoying the immediate relief of not scrubbing forks. Then the movie started: a brother and sister visiting a grave. The atmosphere curdled instantly. Something was wrong. I should have changed the channel. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Fear and curiosity locked arms and dragged me forward.

Minutes turned into hours. I watched bodies fall apart, social order dissolve, and hope get eaten alive. The gore wasn’t just gross—it was existential. By the time the credits rolled, something essential in me had been misplaced. Innocence, for starters.

It was nearly midnight. My parents still weren’t home. I wandered into the kitchen and stared at the sink, now radiating menace of a different kind. I was in no psychological condition to clean anything. Zombies had ruined that option. I retreated to my room, crawled into bed, and slept with the covers pulled over my head like a man hiding from the apocalypse.

Morning arrived with consequences. My parents were furious. The dishes remained undone. I tried to explain that I had endured profound trauma at the hands of George A. Romero, but this defense carried no legal weight. I had failed on all fronts: my psyche was scarred, my parents were enraged, and the dishes were still filthy.

That night taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Procrastination lies. It promises comfort and ease but delivers a punishment far worse than the task you avoided. I could have spent thirty dull minutes cleaning plates. Instead, I spent the night traumatized by the collapse of civilization and woke up grounded. Avoiding the dishes cost me about a hundred times more than doing them ever would have.

January 22, 2026