Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • Retiring the Satyr

    Retiring the Satyr

    I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, an era that treated recreational sex not merely as pleasure but as a pathway to transcendence. Television, movies, music, magazines, and bestselling novels all sang from the same hymnal. Liberation was the new gospel. Desire was the new sacrament. Happiness, we were told, awaited those bold enough to cast aside restraint and pursue every appetite without apology.

    The adults around me absorbed the message. Parents and their friends attended parties where alcohol flowed freely, clothes disappeared, and the soundtrack from Hair supplied the liturgy. Men’s magazines sat openly on living room coffee tables like decorative centerpieces. Nobody hid them. Nobody seemed embarrassed. They were advertisements for a particular vision of the good life.

    As a teenage boy with raging hormones and a vivid imagination, I absorbed the lesson completely.

    The images and stories convinced me that fulfillment lay in becoming a brazen sexual adventurer. I wanted the muscular body, the effortless charm, the magnetic confidence. I wanted admiration. I wanted conquest. What I did not understand was love. I knew little about devotion, sacrifice, responsibility, or the quiet dignity of caring for another person. Society’s vision of transcendence involved acquiring experiences, not serving people. Other human beings existed primarily as supporting characters in the drama of one’s own desires.

    The consequences of such a worldview are predictable. When people become instruments for self-gratification, hurt feelings, disappointment, alienation, and moral confusion inevitably follow. The bill always arrives, even if it arrives years later.

    Yet even after I grew older and recognized the folly of that outlook, a small part of that younger self remained alive inside me. The fantasy did not simply disappear. It lingered like an old song whose melody still occasionally drifts through the mind. The grand vision of endless Bacchanalian delights never entirely surrendered the stage.

    The challenge became learning not to romanticize it.

    There is a temptation to keep looking backward, to imagine that fulfillment was hiding somewhere in those abandoned fantasies. But looking backward can become its own form of captivity. The story of Lot’s wife endures because it captures a permanent human weakness. We long for the places we have outgrown. We become attached to identities that no longer serve us. We mistake fixation for vitality.

    In reality, selfishness, entitlement, and obsession are forms of death. They narrow the soul. They reduce the world to a mirror.

    I suspect this realization is familiar to anyone who has spent time in an addiction recovery program. Every day counselors sit across from people trying to understand the forces that shaped them decades earlier. The challenge is not simply breaking a habit. It is excavating an entire philosophy of life. Somewhere beneath the addiction lies a vision of happiness that proved incapable of delivering what it promised.

    The task of replacing that vision must be overwhelming.

    I cannot speak for addiction counselors. I can only speak from experience.

    A life devoted to unrestrained hedonism eventually exhausts itself. Chaos has a seductive glamour when viewed from a distance, but living inside it is another matter entirely. The endless pursuit of stimulation becomes tiring. The pursuit of novelty becomes repetitive. What initially feels like freedom gradually resembles bondage.

    Eventually reality intervenes.

    You have a career.

    You have a spouse.

    You have children.

    You have obligations and people who depend on you.

    Maintaining a double life becomes increasingly difficult. You cannot simultaneously inhabit the stable world of family and responsibility while pursuing the perpetual turbulence of adolescent fantasy. Domesticity and satyrhood occupy different planets.

    The older I became, the more I understood that fear has its proper place. Not fear of pleasure itself, but fear of the destruction that follows when pleasure becomes life’s highest value. The consequences are not merely moral. They are practical. Relationships fracture. Finances collapse. Trust evaporates. Even those fortunate enough to avoid financial ruin often leave behind a trail of emotional wreckage.

    Such people are not role models.

    They are cautionary tales.

    The challenge, then, is not merely abandoning an old identity. It is discovering a new one.

    The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that hope is like finding a new garment. I have always loved that image. A garment shapes how we present ourselves to the world. It signals who we believe ourselves to be.

    When the costume of the satyr no longer fits, something else must take its place.

    That search becomes the next great adventure.

    Not the search for another thrill.

    Not the search for another conquest.

    The search for a life worth inhabiting.

  • The Last Voyage of Captain Wrist Presence

    The Last Voyage of Captain Wrist Presence

    As you grow older, some of the things that once enchanted you begin to lose their magic. The familiar tingle of anticipation fades. The objects remain the same, but the spell weakens. If that enchantment is tied to a shared passion—a hobby, a subculture, a tribe—you will eventually find yourself drifting away from the people who still feel its pull. You will resist at first. You will tell yourself that nothing has changed. But something has. Eventually, the separation becomes undeniable.

    You have undergone Hobby Drift: the slow, often involuntary separation from a hobby community that occurs when one’s interests, priorities, and sources of meaning evolve in different directions from those of fellow enthusiasts.

    When I think about Hobby Drift, I think about watches.

    Over the past twenty years, I have forged more friendships through watches than I ever expected possible. Grown men from around the world bonded by steel bracelets, dial colors, lume shots, and the feverish conviction that the perfect collection was only one purchase away. Watch collecting is a peculiar brotherhood. Half support group, half addiction clinic. We compare scars from impulse purchases and premature sales. We confess our relapses. We laugh at our own insanity while secretly browsing for the next acquisition.

    My own horological delirium began in 2005 when I was forty-three years old and convinced that mechanical watches were tiny machines capable of repairing the machinery inside me.

    Twenty years disappeared in a blur of rotating bezels, sapphire crystals, and “just-in-case” divers purchased for adventures that never materialized.

    My attraction to watches is too complicated to reduce to a single cause, but vanity was certainly among the chief conspirators. I was obsessed with what collectors call “wrist presence.” I would see an actor on television wearing an expensive watch and become convinced that the watch was somehow responsible for his confidence, authority, and charisma. I wanted that presence. I wanted that commanding aura. I wanted the illusion of completeness.

    Even then I understood the thought was ridiculous.

    Unfortunately, understanding folly and escaping it are two different things.

    I was an emotional child afflicted with Horological Completionism: the recurring fantasy that one more watch purchase will finally complete one’s collection, identity, or emotional life.

    Then, at sixty-four, mortality tapped me on the shoulder.

    The watch hobby’s siren song did not disappear. It simply became quieter.

    The obsession remained, but something fundamental changed. After two decades, desire finally dimmed beneath the growing awareness that timepieces are no match for time itself. I still wear my watches. I still admire them. But they no longer occupy prime real estate inside my head.

    I have undergone Chronological Surrender: the acceptance that no collection of clocks, watches, calendars, or timekeeping devices can grant mastery over time itself.

    The result was an unexpected misalignment.

    Many younger collectors remained in a state of Horological Messianism: the belief that the next watch will deliver transformation, completion, confidence, status, or personal salvation.

    I do not judge them because I know exactly how it feels.

    I was them.

    Wisdom did not cure me.

    Age did.

    I did not reason my way out of the obsession. I simply reached a point where the obsession could no longer sustain itself. Mortality walked into the room and changed the conversation.

    What frightens me is not losing the hobby.

    What frightens me is losing the community.

    For more than twenty years, watches provided connection, friendship, conversation, and belonging. To drift away from the hobby is, in some sense, to drift away from a part of myself.

    Yet as unsettling as this misalignment is, another one frightens me even more.

    My younger colleagues.

    While I prepare for retirement, they are building careers. They are refining lectures, designing courses, earning tenure, publishing work, and imagining futures that stretch decades ahead of them.

    Their careers are in blossom.

    Mine is entering autumn.

    My final year in the classroom has made me acutely aware of Generational Divergence: the growing separation between individuals at different stages of life, where the same institution simultaneously represents arrival for one generation and departure for another.

    The divergence is occurring in two places at once.

    The watch hobby.

    The college classroom.

    I cannot stop either process.

    The current is too strong.

    I feel less like a participant than a passenger being carried somewhere I did not choose to go.

    At times the sensation resembles exile.

    It reminds me of a scene from Battlestar Galactica. A condemned traitor stands behind a pane of glass as the airlock hisses. He pleads. The crew watches silently. No one is cruel. No one is angry. The decision has simply been made.

    The hatch opens.

    The separation becomes permanent.

    That is what aging sometimes feels like.

    Not tragedy.

    Not injustice.

    Just inevitability.

    There comes a point when those still living inside the warm illusion of endless tomorrows begin, without realizing it, to drift away from those who have glimpsed the shrinking horizon.

    A pane of glass descends.

    Not hostile.

    Not malicious.

    Just real.

    You tap on the glass and wave, hoping to climb back into the cockpit of youth’s ambitions, anxieties, and grand illusions.

    But the hatch has already sealed.

    There is no reentry.

    There is only the quieter work that remains: embracing the season you have been given, building meaning instead of collections, and helping younger travelers navigate a road whose ending they cannot yet see—but inevitably will.

  • Gollumification (a short story)

    Gollumification (a short story)

    I remain haunted by three men I attended high school with. More than four decades later, they are still gnashing their teeth over a missed romantic opportunity so catastrophic in their minds that it has become the organizing principle of their existence.

    The event occurred during the summer after their senior year, that magical season when testosterone, optimism, and stupidity join forces to create lifelong consequences.

    The three friends were driving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to attend a Dodgers game when they found themselves winding through the Grapevine. There, on the side of the highway, destiny appeared: four young women wearing tie-dye bikinis.

    An aging Volkswagen van, baked by the California sun into a shade best described as “burnt pumpkin regret,” had overheated and died. Standing beside it were four beautiful Grateful Dead devotees fresh from a concert and still drifting through the atmosphere on a cloud of music, freedom, and whatever else had been circulating at Dead shows in those years.

    These were not merely attractive women. In the mythology my friends later constructed, they became supernatural beings. They were road-worn muses, desert sirens, barefoot priestesses of possibility. They smelled of patchouli, sunscreen, and poor judgment. Their laughter floated through the air like wind chimes. Their sun-bronzed shoulders glistened beneath the California light. They waved their bikini tops and spaghetti-strap shirts overhead like flags announcing the arrival of a new religion.

    My friends, mechanically gifted but cosmically clueless, leaped into action.

    With grease-stained heroism, they diagnosed the problem, coaxed the van back to life, and restored order to the universe. The women were grateful. Very grateful.

    Then came the invitation.

    Forget the Dodgers game, they said. Come with us to the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival.

    To appreciate the magnitude of this offer, imagine being handed a winning lottery ticket, a backstage pass, and the keys to paradise simultaneously.

    My friends declined.

    They were committed to the Dodgers game.

    Even now, recounting the story causes physical pain.

    Armed with baseball tickets and the situational awareness of ornamental shrubbery, they thanked the women, climbed back into their car, and drove away. Behind them, the hippies disappeared into the California horizon, presumably continuing their lives completely unaware that they had become the central tragedy in three future divorces.

    My friends remember almost nothing about the baseball game.

    Not a single play.

    Not a single pitch.

    Not a single inning.

    But they can describe, with forensic precision, the exact moment they drove away from those women. They remember the sunlight, the smell of the road, the angle of the van, the sound of the laughter, and the fluttering of tie-dye fabric in the wind.

    Mention the incident today and they transform.

    Reason departs.

    Perspective evaporates.

    They begin snapping at one another like feral animals fighting over a scrap of meat. Each insists the others were responsible. Each argues that his entire life would have unfolded differently had they accepted the invitation.

    Their present lives barely register. Their former wives, their careers, their accomplishments, and their friendships all fade into the background. Spiritually speaking, they remain stranded on that highway, staring at those women as if they represented the entrance to a lost kingdom.

    The story would be funny if it were not so sad.

    The obsession has consumed them.

    They are bitter. They are divorced. They are trapped.

    They have spent decades worshipping a fantasy.

    What they believe they lost was not a romantic encounter. It was transcendence itself. They have convinced themselves that heaven briefly opened a window on a sunny California afternoon and that they foolishly chose baseball instead.

    This is what I call Gollumification: the process by which a person becomes spiritually deformed through obsessive attachment to a lost opportunity, fantasy, or object of desire, sacrificing present reality in worship of an imagined transcendence.

    The tragedy is not that they missed an opportunity.

    The tragedy is that they never stopped missing it.

    Their humanity has slowly curdled around a single idea: that fulfillment existed on the other side of that decision. Like Gollum clutching the Ring, they have spent decades staring at a false treasure while life continued to unfold around them.

    The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson warned that human beings frequently seek false transcendence through sex, alcohol, drugs, crowds, and ecstatic experiences. These pursuits promise elevation but often produce degradation. We imagine we are ascending toward something divine when in fact we are becoming diminished versions of ourselves.

    My friends illustrate this principle perfectly. They mistook a fleeting moment of possibility for ultimate meaning. They sought transcendence in the wrong place and became enslaved to the memory.

    To be human is not merely to desire transcendence. It is to recognize when that desire has attached itself to the wrong object. It is to notice the onset of Gollumification, slam on the brakes, and reverse the process before obsession calcifies into identity.

    Few people accomplish this.

    Most continue worshipping the lost opportunity, the former lover, the abandoned dream, the imagined paradise. Year after year, they become less flexible, less grateful, less alive. They harden around their regrets until they resemble pillars of salt, forever staring backward at the kingdom they believe should have been theirs.

    The missed opportunity did not ruin their lives.

    Their refusal to stop worshipping it did.

    I can worry about many things. I can worry about politics, the economy, my health, the future, and whether humanity is collectively losing its mind. But is there anything more important than waking up each morning prepared for my daily arm-wrestling match with Gollum?

    There he sits across the table waiting for me.

    He smiles with the confidence of an undefeated champion. He knows my weaknesses better than I do. He knows exactly where the cracks are in the foundation. He knows which temptations still sparkle in my imagination and which regrets still ache when I press on them.

    “Go ahead,” he says. “Try to beat me. Win today if you can. I’ll even let you enjoy the victory. But remember, I have thousands more opportunities. Tomorrow morning. This afternoon. Ten minutes from now. Next week. Next year. I can wait.”

    Then Gollum leans back in his chair and laughs.

    Unlike me, he never gets tired.

    Don’t feel sorry for me. My predicament is not unique. Like millions of others, I suffer from an addiction to shiny objects promising transcendence. What am I addicted to? That is the wrong question. The better question is: what am I not addicted to?

    Human beings have always been vulnerable to false promises of salvation. Some chase money. Others chase status, romance, sex, drugs, fame, luxury, political power, youth, beauty, watches, social media followers, or the approval of strangers. The particulars vary, but the underlying temptation remains the same. We convince ourselves that one more acquisition, one more achievement, one more experience, one more dopamine hit will finally complete us.

    There are tens of millions of us. I am not special.

    My life, like theirs, is defined by the constant struggle against vice, corruption, vanity, and the habits that threaten to reduce me to a lesser version of myself.

    Yet there is another danger.

    It is true that I am flawed. It is true that I have made mistakes. It is true that I possess an impressive talent for disappointing myself. But endlessly dwelling on my failures is simply another addiction wearing a different costume.

    I think of the writer and commentator Ana Marie Cox, who once observed that she struggled with many addictions, but the worst was picking up the bottle of self-loathing and drinking from it all day long.

    What a perfect image.

    Many of us stagger through life intoxicated by our own self-contempt. We nurse old embarrassments. We replay old failures. We rehearse our shortcomings with the diligence of scholars preserving sacred texts. We imagine this habit is a form of honesty or moral seriousness. In reality, it is often another form of self-absorption.

    The person addicted to self-loathing is no less trapped than the person addicted to alcohol, gambling, or pornography.

    Both are attempting to escape reality.

    And both find themselves drifting deeper into captivity.

    This compulsive consumption of self-hatred makes self-forgiveness nearly impossible. Yet self-forgiveness is one of the essential weapons in the fight against Gollumification.

    How can I forgive myself?

    The question sounds simple but feels impossible.

    After all, I know my failures better than anyone. I know the selfishness, vanity, cowardice, and foolishness that inhabit my history. I know the person I have been. Some days I find it nearly impossible to forgive myself for being such a wretched creature.

    But forgive myself I must.

    Forgiveness is not an act of indulgence. It is not a declaration that my failures never happened. It is not permission to continue living badly.

    Forgiveness is the first step in refusing to let my worst moments define me.

    It is the decision to stop worshipping my failures and start transcending them.

    Forgiveness is the commitment to become someone different from the stubborn sinner who generated so much regret in the first place. It is the refusal to spend the rest of my life drinking from the bottle of self-loathing while Gollum grins across the table.

    Because Gollum does not care whether I worship a lost opportunity or a past mistake.

    Either way, he wins.

    The only victory available to me is to stand up from the table, forgive myself, and continue the long work of becoming fully human.

    Once I understood that life is a continual test of character, and the struggle against Gollumification, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

    To be honest, however, there is something discouraging about viewing life as a daily battle against Gollum. I cannot always defeat him in an arm-wrestling match. Even on my best days, victory is incomplete. If I overcome Gollum half the time, I still fail the other half. The prospect can feel exhausting. How can I forgive myself if I remain locked in a struggle I never fully win? How can I live with peace if temptation is always waiting and I never know whether I will emerge victorious?

    The answer may be that the object of forgiveness is not perfection but perseverance. The purpose of self-forgiveness is not to transform me into a flawless person. It is to transform me into a person who continues striving toward the good despite repeated failures. The measure of my character is not whether temptation disappears, but whether I continue returning to the fight. Forgiveness allows me to rise after every fall rather than define myself by the fall itself. The truly unforgivable life is not the life marked by failure. It is the life that abandons the struggle altogether.

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily effective at razzle-dazzling you with objects of false transcendence and getting you to surrender.

    You can retreat into a climate-controlled cocoon furnished with streaming services, snack foods, delivery apps, and algorithmically engineered distractions. You can spend years drifting from one dopamine hit to the next while the world applauds your consumption and politely asks if you would like another. Temptation no longer lurks in dark alleys. It arrives in bright packaging and offers free shipping.

    The world will not object if you quit the struggle. On the contrary, it will happily assist you. Fresh temptations will appear on your phone, your television, your computer, and eventually your doorstep. At some point, however, a terrible realization emerges. You are no longer directing your life. Your cravings are directing it for you. As a result, you are becoming Gollum. 

    At that moment, you cease to be the protagonist of your own story. You become a supporting character in a drama written by your appetites, a bit player taking orders from every craving that wanders onto the stage. Perhaps you will grow numb to this reality and drift into a comfortable spiritual death, cushioned by convenience, entertained into submission, and surrounded by enough snacks and streaming content to dull any remaining sense of alarm. Or perhaps the discomfort will refuse to leave. Perhaps it will linger like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps it will haunt you until the life you have built begins to resemble a horror movie disguised as a luxury resort.

    That haunting may prove to be a gift. It may force you to confront the fact that you have been living in your own version of the Sunken Place, sinking ever deeper into passivity while your impulses seize control of the steering wheel. The tragedy is not that temptation exists. The tragedy is that you have mistaken indulgence for freedom and captivity for comfort. At some point, if you are fortunate, a voice will break through the fog. It will not whisper. It will not negotiate. It will issue a command as urgent as any ever spoken in a Jordan Peele horror film:

    Get out.

    The process of emancipating yourself from whatever hell you have wandered into is one of life’s essential tasks. Whether the prison is addiction, vanity, resentment, consumerism, or some other self-inflicted captivity, freedom rarely arrives on its own. 

    It helps to have role models—people who have somehow escaped the Sunken Place while the rest of us continue orbiting the same destructive habits.

    I have such a role model. His name is The Lonely Collector.

    I met him on the watch forums and social-media platforms where watch enthusiasts gather to discuss their latest acquisitions, compare collections, and reassure one another that purchasing yet another timepiece is not a symptom of a deeper problem. These communities often resemble support groups designed by the addiction itself. They are places where people seek solace and commiseration but rarely recovery. Imagine a convention of alcoholics held inside a liquor store. The attendees nod sympathetically as one another describes their struggles, then recommend a particularly excellent bottle that just arrived from Scotland.

    The watch world can be like that.

    Yet somehow The Lonely Collector moved among us untouched. While the rest of us disappeared down the timepiece rabbit hole, emerging weeks later clutching limited editions and obscure Japanese-market references, he remained curiously immune. He could admire a watch without needing to own it. He could discuss a new release without calculating how quickly he could justify purchasing it. He possessed a form of psychological insulation that bordered on the supernatural.

    I often imagined him wearing some kind of invisible protective suit, the sort of flame-retardant gear stuntmen wear before walking through walls of fire on Hollywood movie sets. Around him, collectors were exploding into fits of acquisition fever, setting their wallets ablaze in pursuit of the next grail watch, while he calmly strolled through the inferno without so much as singeing an eyebrow. He seemed to understand something the rest of us did not: that collecting a watch and being possessed by the desire to collect watches are two entirely different things.

    I met the Lonely Watch Collector about six years ago in the digital bazaar of watch enthusiasts, where grown men gather to convince one another that a slightly different arrangement of steel, sapphire, and gears constitutes a life-changing event. We became friends across several watch forums and social-media platforms. His Americanized name was Peter. He was a Vietnamese immigrant who worked in the tech industry and lived in the Dallas area.

    One day he sent me a message that immediately distinguished him from the usual crowd of enablers and acquisition evangelists. He confessed that he was, like me, a watch addict. Not a casual enthusiast. Not a collector. An addict. His condition had become so severe that he eventually sold every watch he owned, including pieces that cost nearly ten thousand dollars. In their place he bought a twenty-dollar Casio F91.

    The move struck me as both absurd and profound. Imagine a man abandoning a wine cellar filled with rare vintages only to drink tap water for the rest of his life.

    Peter explained that the Casio served a purpose beyond telling time. It was a daily reminder of how thoroughly the hobby had colonized his mind. Every glance at its tiny digital display reminded him of the sharp jaws of the addiction from which he had escaped. The humble plastic watch became a form of self-discipline, a wearable warning label. He never wanted to return to those feverish days when every waking hour was spent chasing the next purchase, the next dopamine hit, the next fantasy of completion that vanished the moment the package arrived.

    At the time he was in his mid-thirties, married, and raising a newborn child. He had decided that his attention was a finite resource. Every ounce of mental energy spent obsessing over watches was energy unavailable to his wife, his son, and the life unfolding directly in front of him. He chose his family over watches.

    Over the years he would occasionally contact me. He would compliment one of my latest acquisitions, mention that he had watched another video from my YouTube channel, where I often explored the psychology of watch addiction, and then close with the same refrain.

    He was still wearing the Casio.

    The statement was never delivered with judgment. He never lectured me. Never told me to sell my collection. Never suggested I quit the hobby. Yet I could feel the unspoken message beneath his words. It radiated from the quiet contentment he seemed to have found. He had escaped a maze that many of us were still wandering. Without saying so directly, he wanted me to find the exit as well.

    Then, about a year ago, I noticed that he had vanished.

    Not from my life specifically. From the platforms themselves.

    His accounts disappeared. No dramatic farewell. No manifesto. No final post announcing his liberation from the algorithmic plantation. He simply left.

    I found myself oddly moved by his disappearance. He had already been a hero of mine for replacing a small fortune in luxury watches with a twenty-dollar Casio. But abandoning social media entirely elevated him to an even higher category. Even more important than escaping the watch addiction, he had escaped from the social media platforms. 

    Most of us treat these platforms as public squares. However, they are closer to dopamine troughs—vast digital feedlots where human attention is harvested, processed, and sold. Every notification is a pellet tossed into the cage. Every scroll promises stimulation and delivers restlessness instead.

    Peter walked away from all of it.

    I have experienced watch-related FOMO countless times. I have watched men on YouTube peel the protective plastic from a new Panerai, Omega, or Tudor with the reverence of archaeologists uncovering a sacred relic. For a moment, I would feel the familiar pang—that small stab of desire convincing me that happiness was apparently one purchase away.

    But that feeling was insignificant compared to the FOMO I felt when I thought about Peter.

    I did not envy his watches. He no longer had any.

    I envied his freedom.

    He had escaped not only the watch fever dream but also the sprawling digital carnival that feeds it. He had walked away from the endless cycle of acquisition, validation, comparison, and display. No wrist shots. No watch forums. No YouTube rabbit holes. No dopamine pellets dispensed by algorithms disguised as communities.

    Sometimes I imagined becoming like him.

    Of course, being afflicted with a healthy case of vanity, I never imagined quietly disappearing the way Peter did. No. In my fantasy, I would announce my departure with a bombastic YouTube video worthy of a retiring televangelist, a defeated Roman emperor, and a recovering addict all rolled into one.

    The thumbnail would feature me staring solemnly into the camera beneath giant yellow letters:

    I AM LEAVING THE WATCH HOBBY.

    The video would begin with a dramatic pause.

    “God has told me to quit collecting watches.”

    Another pause.

    “I do not wish to quit collecting watches. Quite frankly, I would prefer to buy several more. But this is no longer a matter of my will. It is a matter of God’s will.”

    At this point I would lean toward the camera as if preparing to reveal the final secret of existence.

    “Today, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to discuss freedom. Not the freedom we celebrate, but the freedom we counterfeit. We tell ourselves that every indulgence is an act of self-expression. We call surrendering to our impulses freedom. We call compulsive consumption freedom. We call addiction freedom.”

    Then I would hold up a luxury watch.

    “This is not freedom.”

    A dramatic pause.

    “This is jewelry for Gollum.”

    I would continue.

    “We are undergoing a process I call Gollumification. We clutch our precious possessions with trembling fingers and then congratulate ourselves for being independent thinkers. We mistake obedience to our appetites for self-mastery. We chain ourselves to desires and then celebrate the length of the chain.”

    By this point the comments section would be in flames.

    Half the audience would accuse me of having a nervous breakdown. The other half would demand to know whether I was selling my collection.

    Meanwhile, Peter would be sitting somewhere in Dallas wearing his twenty-dollar Casio, helping his kid with homework, blissfully unaware that I had just uploaded a forty-five-minute philosophical monologue about the spiritual dangers of luxury watches.

    And that contrast is precisely why he won.

    I needed an audience to imagine my liberation.

    Peter simply liberated himself.

    Could I ever forgive myself for not possessing Peter’s strength? For lacking his discipline? For remaining vulnerable to the vanity and compulsions that he had managed to escape?

    I did not know.

    But I knew I had to try.

    In many ways, that is the reason for telling this story. Not to celebrate Peter as some flawless saint, nor to condemn myself as uniquely weak, but to confront a question that lurks beneath every addiction and every act of self-deception: What would it mean to become a little more free than I am now?

    Peter answered that question by quietly walking away.

    I didn’t hear from Peter for about a year, but one day he commented on my YouTube channel that he and his wife were visiting family in Los Angeles, and he suggested we meet for coffee at a local cafe. 

    The coffee shop possessed the warm, cultivated coziness that modern cafés seem to manufacture with scientific precision. Sunlight spilled through tall front windows and settled across weathered wooden tables polished smooth by years of elbows, laptops, and lingering conversations. The air carried a mingled perfume of freshly ground coffee beans, toasted pastries, steamed milk, and cinnamon. A low murmur of conversation drifted through the room, punctuated by the occasional hiss of the espresso machine and the clatter of ceramic cups meeting saucers.

    Peter sat at a corner table with his wife and two young children. I had expected to find him alone, but instead I found a scene of quiet domestic happiness. The children, perhaps two and four years old, sat absorbed in coloring books spread across the table. They worked with the intense concentration that only young children can summon for such endeavors. One would occasionally hold up a page for parental approval while the other remained determined to keep every crayon stroke inside the lines.

    Peter’s wife, Pam, an attractive redhead in her mid-thirties, watched over them with an easy smile, alternating between conversation and gentle supervision. Both she and Peter had their arms covered in an impressive collection of tattoos. Yet whatever rebellious or edgy associations I once attached to tattoos evaporated almost immediately. The two of them radiated warmth, kindness, and ease with one another. They possessed that unmistakable quality found in genuinely happy couples: a relaxed affection that requires no performance and no explanation. Watching them interact with their children, it became clear that the tattoos were merely decoration. The deeper story was written in their patience, their attentiveness, and the quiet contentment they shared as a family.

    Around them, the coffee shop’s usual cast of characters carried on with their rituals. Young professionals peered into glowing laptops. Students hunched over textbooks as though preparing for oral examinations before a medieval tribunal. A retired couple shared a muffin and the morning’s gossip. Yet the scene at Peter’s table seemed somehow untouched by the surrounding bustle. The children colored. The parents relaxed. The aroma of coffee drifted through the air. It was the sort of ordinary family moment that often passes unnoticed while it is happening but later returns in memory with surprising clarity and affection.

    Peter introduced me to his wife as his “YouTube hero.”

    I immediately objected.

    “I can’t be your hero,” I said. “You’re my hero.”

    After all, Peter had accomplished something I had not. He had escaped. He had walked away from the watch addiction, abandoned social media, and returned to the land of the living. While the rest of us were still debating the merits of sapphire crystals and limited editions, Peter had slipped out of the casino and gone home.

    Pam laughed.

    As a therapist, she had developed a dim view of social media. What had once seemed novel now struck her as tacky—a vast digital theater in which people carefully curated evidence that their lives were perpetually delightful. The result was a form of psychological vandalism. People scrolled through these highlight reels and concluded that everyone else was happier, prettier, wealthier, more successful, and more fulfilled than they were.

    “People think we’re perfect,” Pam said. “But we have our struggles.”

    The statement caught me off guard.

    From where I sat, they looked like the cover photo for a family counseling brochure. Two adorable children. A happy marriage. Meaningful careers. The sort of family that made you assume the universe had quietly decided to be generous.

    Then Pam explained that she suffered from clinical depression.

    There were periods, she said, when the depression became so severe that she could go months without being emotionally available to her husband or children. I found this difficult to reconcile with the woman sitting across from me. She appeared warm, attentive, thoughtful, and fully engaged. She looked like the last person who would disappear behind a wall of emotional darkness.

    Yet there she was describing a battle that remained invisible to everyone except those closest to her.

    The irony was striking. Here was a therapist who attended therapy herself. Here was a mental-health professional who required help from other mental-health professionals. After years of trial and error, she had finally found the proper balance of medication—enough to keep the depression from swallowing her whole but not so much that it dulled her emotions and left her disconnected from the people she loved.

    The conversation reminded me how deceptive appearances can be. Social media trains us to judge lives from the outside, but real life operates differently. Everyone is carrying something. Some burdens are simply hidden beneath better lighting, flattering camera angles, and carefully edited captions.

    The family sitting before me was not perfect.

    They were something far more impressive.

    They were real.

    I sat there taking in the scene before me. The children colored quietly. Peter and Pam exchanged the effortless glances of people who genuinely liked each other. The entire family radiated a warmth that was difficult to describe and impossible to fake. To my surprise, I felt myself getting emotional. I wanted so badly for them to be happy that my eyes began to sting.

    To distract myself, I pointed at the small Casio on Peter’s wrist.

    “Peter,” I asked, “how did you do it? How did you walk away from the watch addiction?”

    He didn’t hesitate.

    “It’s like this,” he said. “I think of addiction as a hot stove. You touch it and it burns like hell. After a while, you stop romanticizing the stove. You stop admiring the stove. You stop writing poems about the stove. You realize the stove can hurt you. Once you see it for what it is, it becomes easier to stay away.”

    I laughed.

    “But you still watch my YouTube channel. That’s like an alcoholic hanging around a liquor store. Every week some lost soul gets on camera, complains about his watch addiction, and then spends twenty minutes showing off shiny watches.”

    Peter laughed.

    Tall and slender, with short dark hair, sharp features, and glasses that gave him the appearance of a thoughtful professor, he seemed amused by the accusation.

    “I watch cooking competition shows,” he said. “I enjoy the craftsmanship, the attention to detail, the incredible food. But I know I’m not going to spend twelve hours making those dishes. It’s entertainment. Your videos are the same thing. I can enjoy watching them without feeling compelled to live that life.”

    “I’m a cautionary tale,” I said.

    That earned a laugh from both him and Pam.

    The two of them shared a piece of banana bread while looking at me with the kind of affection usually reserved for eccentric relatives.

    “You see me for what I am,” I continued. “But you don’t glorify my life. You understand there is no transcendence in watches.”

    Peter smiled.

    “There’s no transcendence,” he repeated.

    The sentence hung in the air for a moment.

    “You have your family,” I said. “You have real things to take care of.”

    Peter reached for Pam’s hand and squeezed it.

    Then he smiled at her.

    “I have no time for fantasies.”

    The simplicity of the statement struck me harder than any self-help book ever could.

    I found myself thinking about the three men from my high school days. I told Peter and Pam the entire story: the broken-down Volkswagen van, the Grateful Dead girls, the invitation to the Summer Solstice Festival, and the decades of regret that followed. I explained how the men had become consumed by what might have been, how they had transformed a brief encounter into a lost Eden, and how they had spent years undergoing the process I call Gollumification.

    As I spoke, I could see that Peter and Pam were enjoying the story.

    “What happened to them?” Pam finally asked.

    “Where are they now?” Peter added.

    I told them.

    They lived alone in modest apartments. They drifted from paycheck to paycheck. Their lives felt provisional, as though they were still waiting for the real story to begin. They possessed no grand purpose, only old grievances. Their conversations revolved around disappointments, regrets, and imagined alternate timelines in which everything had gone right.

    They had become caretakers of a fantasy.

    And that fantasy had slowly devoured them.

    As I spoke, I realized why the story continued to haunt me.

    It wasn’t because of the hippie girls.

    It wasn’t because of the missed opportunity.

    It was because I understood how easily their fate could become mine.

    Every day I struggle not to become one of those men. Every day I fight the temptation to believe that fulfillment lies somewhere else: in another watch, another achievement, another fantasy, another version of my life that never existed.

    Every day I struggle against Gollumification.

    And sitting there across from Peter and Pam, watching their children color pictures while they shared a piece of banana bread, I was struck by a thought so obvious that it felt profound.

    Perhaps transcendence had never been hiding in the Volkswagen van.

    Perhaps it had been sitting quietly at this coffee-shop table all along.

  • The Forgiveness Paradox

    The Forgiveness Paradox

    Learning to forgive yourself would become far less difficult if you understood what self-forgiveness actually is. It is not indulgence. It is not self-flattery. It is not a permission slip to ignore your failures and move on as though nothing happened. Genuine self-forgiveness demands the opposite. It requires you to clarify your moral code, raise the standard of your conduct, and commit yourself to a life that justifies forgiveness. The goal is not to erase the past but to answer it with better behavior.

    When you refuse to forgive yourself, however, you become haunted by the worst versions of your former self. Old humiliations emerge uninvited. Forgotten acts of selfishness return with startling clarity. You cringe, wince, and recoil as though the memories possess physical force. Part of the pain comes from the distance between who you were and who you are now. You look upon your former self with disbelief and wonder how you could ever have acted that way. Yet instead of moving toward redemption, you become trapped in a kind of moral purgatory—a psychological limbo in which you endlessly replay past wrongdoing without arriving at either genuine repentance or genuine forgiveness. You remain suspended between condemnation and redemption, unable to reach either shore.

    Paradoxically, this unforgiven state often makes you more likely to repeat the very behaviors that trouble your conscience. Burdened by guilt, you seek relief. Instead of confronting your pain directly, you look for escape in distractions, compulsions, and addictive pleasures. Whether the refuge is food, alcohol, entertainment, gambling, pornography, or some other dopamine-rich diversion, the purpose is the same: to silence the accusing voice within. The relief is temporary. The guilt soon returns, accompanied by fresh reasons for self-reproach. What follows is a guilt-dopamine loop, a self-perpetuating cycle in which unresolved guilt drives a person toward unhealthy pleasures for relief, only to create new guilt that deepens the original wound.

    The way out is not punishment but transformation. To escape guilt properly requires two acts. First, you forgive yourself. Second, you dedicate yourself to living with greater integrity, clearer intentions, and a moral seriousness that defies your former conduct. In doing so, you embrace what might be called the Forgiveness Paradox: the truth that people often become more virtuous after forgiving themselves than they ever were while punishing themselves. Endless self-condemnation rarely produces wisdom or character. Forgiveness, when joined to genuine moral renewal, often does. It allows you to stop staring at the wreckage behind you and begin building the life that your better self has been calling you toward all along.

    If you resist forgiving yourself, you must confront an uncomfortable possibility: on some level, you derive satisfaction from your own self-punishment. You rehearse old failures, revisit old humiliations, and keep your guilt alive as though tending a wound that has already begun to heal. But do not mistake this habit for moral seriousness. Self-flagellation is not a sign of piety, humility, or virtue. More often, it is a sign of someone unwilling to leave the familiar misery of guilt behind. It is easier to remain trapped in the guilt-dopamine loop—oscillating between self-condemnation and temporary escape—than to undertake the harder work of forgiveness and renewal. Genuine moral growth requires the courage to step out of the mire, accept that the past cannot be changed, and begin the difficult task of becoming a better person. The purpose of guilt is not to imprison you forever. Its purpose is to teach you what kind of life you must now live.

    Another way to understand self-forgiveness is to think of it as laying down a predicate. A predicate is incomplete by itself; it requires an object. What, then, is the object of forgiveness? It is the deliberate renunciation of your former way of life and the commitment to a new one. The purpose of forgiveness is not merely to erase guilt but to make moral renewal possible. When a person is forgiven, the message is not simply, “You are absolved.” It is also, “Go and sin no more.” Forgiveness is therefore not a form of moral amnesia. It is a moral summons. It calls you to become the kind of person whose present conduct stands in defiance of a shameful past. In this sense, forgiveness is not free. It imposes an obligation. Forgiveness is the predicate; a life of integrity is its object.

    Failing to forgive yourself lays down a very different predicate. It becomes a permission slip to remain trapped in the guilt-dopamine loop, endlessly oscillating between self-condemnation and temporary escape. The longer you remain in that cycle, the more you surrender your sense of agency. Instead of directing your life, you become directed by your cravings, compulsions, and darker passions. Whatever your station in life, such submission is a profound failure because it places your impulses in command and reduces your capacity for self-governance.

    To be ruled by your passions is to live in a kind of bondage. You may possess degrees, professional accomplishments, and worldly success, but you have not received the deepest form of education. As author and professor Luke Burgis argues, the purpose of education is to become the protagonist of your own life. A truly educated person is not merely informed; he possesses the freedom and discipline to shape his own destiny rather than being dragged along by appetite, resentment, or fear.

    Forgiveness is therefore not a luxury but a necessity. Without it, you remain chained to your past, allowing old failures to dictate the terms of your present existence. With it, you reclaim authorship of your life. You step out of the role of a passive observer, a background character, a non-player character reacting mechanically to circumstance. Self-forgiveness allows you to become the protagonist of your own story, capable of choosing a better path and living a life that is no longer defined by the worst things you have done.

  • The Loneliness Crisis: Social Isolation and the Rise of American Hostility (college essay prompt)

    The Loneliness Crisis: Social Isolation and the Rise of American Hostility (college essay prompt)

    Read David Brooks’ essay “How America Got Mean” and Derek Thompson’ essay “The Anti-Social Century.” Then watch Roy Wood Jr.’s comedy special Lonely Flowers.

    In the comedy performance Lonely Flowers, Roy Wood Jr. argues that increasing loneliness and social disconnection are contributing to rising anger, hostility, tribalism, and violence in American culture. Brooks and Thompson similarly describe a society that is becoming more fragmented, isolated, distrustful, and emotionally brittle. Together, these works raise an important question: What happens to individuals and societies when meaningful human connection begins to collapse?

    Write a 1,200-word argumentative essay analyzing the claim that social isolation is a major cause of America’s rising hostility, cruelty, and social dysfunction. Your essay may support, challenge, or complicate Roy Wood Jr.’s argument, but you must engage deeply with the ideas presented by Brooks and Thompson as you develop your position.

    As you develop your argument, consider how these writers and performers describe the psychological and cultural effects of loneliness, alienation, and declining social trust. How do social isolation, digital life, political tribalism, economic pressure, social media, declining community institutions, and weakened friendships contribute to anger and resentment? To what extent do modern Americans increasingly experience one another not as neighbors or fellow citizens but as abstractions, enemies, audiences, or online avatars?

    You should also consider competing explanations for cultural hostility. Is loneliness truly the central problem, or are broader forces—economic inequality, political polarization, consumer culture, technological addiction, family breakdown, declining religion, or social media algorithms—more responsible for rising social tension? Does loneliness cause hostility, or does hostility itself drive people further into isolation?

    In addition to analyzing the ideas presented in these works, examine how each creator communicates their message. Consider the differences between Brooks’ social criticism, Thompson’s cultural analysis, and Roy Wood Jr.’s use of comedy, storytelling, exaggeration, and observational humor. Why might comedy be an especially effective way to address painful subjects such as loneliness, disconnection, and social fragmentation?

    You must include at least one counterargument and rebuttal. For example, some critics may argue that modern technology and online culture have actually expanded social connection rather than weakened it. Others may argue that Americans are not truly isolated but are instead forming new kinds of communities online. Respond to these objections by evaluating the quality and depth of modern social relationships.

    As you conclude your essay, consider the larger implications of these works. What do they suggest about the future of friendship, community, empathy, and civic life in America? If loneliness and social fragmentation continue to grow, what might happen to the culture, politics, and mental health of the nation?

    Requirements:

    • 1,200 words minimum
    • MLA format
    • Use evidence from all three works
    • Include a clear thesis with mapping components
    • Include at least one counterargument and rebuttal
    • Analyze specific examples, scenes, or passages rather than merely summarizing
    • Develop a focused argument about loneliness, social fragmentation, and cultural hostility
  • The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    The Loneliness Entertainment Complex

    There is something faintly dystopian about solitary people spending hours online watching other solitary people perform the microscopic rituals of daily life: tying shoelaces, cracking open cans of diet soda, pouring kibble into a cat’s bowl, unloading groceries with monk-like precision, folding laundry beneath soft lighting while melancholy piano music drifts through the background like emotional Febreze.

    At some point loneliness ceased being merely a condition to endure and became a genre of entertainment.

    You are not simply alone anymore. You are curating aloneness, aestheticizing it, monetizing it, and binge-watching it as though isolation itself were a luxury lifestyle brand. The modern internet increasingly resembles a vast digital aquarium filled with emotionally sedated people observing one another through glass while reassuring themselves that this counts as connection.

    I sometimes wonder if this phenomenon functions as a form of emotional jiu-jitsu. Instead of confronting the pain of alienation directly, people transform it into a consumer product. The loneliness does not disappear; it merely changes costume. By packaging solitude into soothing, carefully curated content, the sharp edge of disconnection becomes dulled. The ache remains, but now it arrives with ambient lighting, artisanal tea preparation, and a Scandinavian throw blanket.

    We now inhabit a condition I would call Consumptive Solitude: the state in which loneliness evolves from a painful human experience into a consumable form of entertainment. Isolated individuals compulsively watch other isolated individuals perform the mundane choreography of domestic life in order to simulate companionship without assuming the emotional risks, obligations, friction, compromise, or unpredictability of genuine human intimacy.

    This pathology is explored in Faith Hill’s essay “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer,” in which she examines the rise of what she calls “solitude influencers” and what their popularity reveals about contemporary society. These influencers present carefully curated lives of performative isolation: beautiful apartments, immaculate routines, quiet mornings, tasteful meals, dim lighting, tasteful melancholy, and endless scenes of one person existing in exquisitely controlled seclusion.

    The performance contains all the machinery of attention addiction without the inconvenience of actual friendship. There are no difficult conversations, no emotional demands, no conflicting schedules, no awkward silences, no disappointments, and no compromise. The viewer receives the emotional atmosphere of companionship without having to endure another person’s needs or complexity. It is intimacy stripped of reciprocity.

    Naturally, narcissism plays some role in this ecosystem. But narcissism alone does not explain the appeal. Control may be the deeper force at work. Real life is chaotic, humiliating, exhausting, and unpredictable. The solitude influencer offers the fantasy of total environmental management. Everything is calm. Everything is clean. Everything is curated. Nothing intrudes.

    For burned-out viewers, the effect can become psychologically narcotic, almost ASMR-like in its soothing predictability. After spending the day navigating economic stress, social tension, workplace absurdity, family obligations, and digital overload, people retreat into videos of someone silently pouring a glass of chablis while a Haydn sonata drifts through a minimalist apartment that appears untouched by conflict, debt, sickness, or despair.

    As I read Hill’s essay, I kept thinking about the word infantilization.

    The solitude influencer increasingly functions like a pacifier for emotionally exhausted adults. Millions of viewers recalibrate their nervous systems through these carefully controlled simulations of peace and containment. Some no longer wish to engage fully with the real world. Others feel incapable of doing so. Still others may have quietly surrendered altogether.

    And this is where the phenomenon begins to feel genuinely troubling.

    I suspect there is something psychologically regressive about spending one’s days and nights watching solitary performers enact sanitized domestic rituals for passive spectators. At some point, watching people “play house” begins replacing the harder work of building a life oneself. The performance of adulthood slowly replaces adulthood itself.

    Because you can only simulate intimacy, routine, domesticity, and emotional safety for so long before you begin forgetting what genuine growth requires: risk, struggle, awkwardness, responsibility, sacrifice, and contact with real people whose existence cannot be muted, paused, skipped, unsubscribed from, or optimized into aesthetic tranquility.

    The solitude influencer offers peace without vulnerability, companionship without obligation, and emotional atmosphere without genuine human entanglement.

    And that may be precisely why so many people find it irresistible.

  • Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    It was difficult to watch the Netflix documentary The Crash, which chronicles the horrifying case of two young men killed in a car crash after prosecutors argued that the driver, Mackenzie Shirilla, deliberately floored the gas pedal of her Toyota Camry to nearly one hundred miles per hour in an act deemed premeditated murder. The documentary is disturbing not merely because of the violence of the crash, but because of the portrait it paints of a young woman whose identity had become inseparable from her online performance. Mackenzie appeared trapped inside the exhausting machinery of self-curation, sculpting and broadcasting her existence with the kind of manic persistence social media now rewards as normal behavior. Her digital persona no longer seemed like an accessory to her life. It had metastasized into her life.

    Today, while listening to the podcast Blocked and Reported, I heard Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog discuss Gen Z’s eerie fluency for turning existence itself into a livestream. Both millennials sounded genuinely alienated by the phenomenon, as though they were describing a species only slightly adjacent to their own. Jesse referenced Mackenzie Shirilla’s relentless online presence as depicted in The Crash, pointing to the unsettling ease with which younger generations curate themselves for permanent digital exhibition. Yet one of the influencers discussed on the podcast commands nearly a million followers—a level of attention powerful enough to hijack almost any fragile human nervous system. Social media platforms have effectively industrialized validation, converting attention into a neurochemical slot machine that pays out in intermittent bursts of relevance, envy, and simulated affection.

    Attention itself is not the enemy. Human beings need recognition. Writers, artists, teachers, comedians, philosophers, and musicians all seek an audience because they are attempting to contribute something meaningful to the ongoing argument about what it means to be alive. But attention detached from substance becomes false gold. It glitters, intoxicates, and ultimately leaves the soul spiritually bankrupt. The dopamine cycle masquerades as significance while quietly hollowing out the self.

    The danger comes when a person can no longer distinguish between authentic identity and algorithmic performance. The online persona begins as branding, then evolves into compulsion, and finally hardens into pathology. It becomes louder, crueler, more narcissistic, and more detached from ordinary human proportion. The person starts living not for reality itself, but for its documentation. Meals become props. Relationships become content. Suffering becomes theater. Even grief gets optimized for engagement metrics. At that point, the self is no longer steering the machine; the machine is steering the self.

    Mackenzie Shirilla appears to have crossed that line. She allowed the curated self to consume the actual self. What remained was not individuality but a kind of digital possession—a consciousness warped by attention addiction, performative intensity, and emotional exhibitionism. The tragedy of The Crash is not merely that lives were destroyed in a violent instant. It is that modern culture increasingly trains young people to confuse visibility with meaning, performance with identity, and online relevance with human worth. Mackenzie lost that distinction entirely. In the end, the algorithm did not merely shape her personality. It devoured it.

  • The Limits of Gasbaggery

    The Limits of Gasbaggery

    Comparison is a reliable factory of misery. At sixty-four, with retirement in sight, good health, a wife, and twin daughters under the same roof, I possess the raw materials of a decent life. Yet a few minutes of comparing my gasbaggery with the professional gasbags–my favorite podcasters and YouTubers–and the arithmetic collapses. I measure my output against their reach, my voice against their polish, and conclude—too quickly, too confidently—that I am a small, forgettable thing. This kind of self-excoriation is a symptom of comparison collapse: the rapid psychological deflation that occurs when one measures a competent, grounded life against the amplified success of public figures, resulting in an exaggerated sense of smallness untethered from reality.

    If I want to be a professional gasbag, I suppose I could become an online influencer. I have a good communications background, having taught college writing for forty years, but my qualifications stop there. In truth, I have no skills or interests worthy of making me an influencer. I don’t feel compelled to sermonize college writing online. I’ve trained my body for decades, but I have no appetite to package kettlebells and nutrition into content as if they were revelations. I love wristwatches, but talking about them only seems to exacerbate my already debilitating timepiece addiction. 

    Knowing I can’t be an influencer makes me drift into a soft, theatrical lament: I wish I could be somebody–a gasbagger with lots of reach. I succumb to the fallacy: “If only I could become a professional gasbagger, I’d find happiness. Woe is me.”

    To combat my self-pity, I think of my daughter and I playing Yahtzee. When the dice fall short of glory but still land on something usable—a Full House, a Small Straight—we shrug and say, “I’ll take what I can get.” It’s a small sentence with a sturdy backbone. Life does not hand out only Yahtzees or their analog, a life of glory and fanfare. Life offers partial wins, mixed hands, and the occasional quiet competence. Taking what you can get is not surrender; it is calibration. It means knowing the difference between what can be improved through discipline and what must be accepted without drama. It is not mediocrity. It is accuracy.

    The second idea is less a principle than a confession: I cannot will myself into being a YouTube star. I do not have the desire to edit for twelve hours a day, to hype products, or to rehearse insights that anyone can find with a competent search. My attention, such as it is, doesn’t belong so much to my YouTube channel about watch obsession these days as much as it belongs to a small corner of the internet—my less popular piano channel with fewer than eighty subscribers. There, I introduce a piece, play it, and accept the likely outcome: twenty views, one generous like. It is a modest exchange, but it is honest. I am not forcing a persona into existence; I am following a thread that feels like mine.

    This refusal to force myself down a path that doesn’t align with my heart reminds me of a basic truth from yoga. Some days the body opens and the breath cooperates; I go into a state of sweat-induced bliss from the exercise intensity, but about one day every two months, the joints resist, the mind wanders, and the practice feels like a negotiation with gravity. On those days, you do not escalate the conflict. You ease back. You take the version of the practice that the day allows. I see the same pattern on the exercise bike. Most sessions render about 700 calories per hour; but once a month or so the legs turn to lead and the numbers sag. Two days ago, I posted a modest 500 calories and left it there. No drama. No verdict. The next ride would likely return to form. It usually does. It wasn’t the Yahtzee of exercise bike sessions. It was the Full House. 

    So when I hear the voice of envy and my self-grandiosity pouring out operatic self-pity with remarks like “My life is so paltry,” and “Why am I not the YouTube star I deserve to be?,” I have to remind myself I can discipline and push myself to be a better person and make a better life without forcing myself to do things that aren’t driven by my heart or things that are spurred by comparing myself to others. 

    Though I lack the reach of my favorite gasbags–Sam Harris, Mike Pesca, Katie Herzog, Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg–I am nevertheless a gasbag albeit on a smaller scale. They are the Yahtzees. I am the Full House. 

    I am not succumbing to mediocrity. I am simply stating my place on the Gasbag totem pole with the objectivity of reporting the weather. 

    Seething with envy or undergoing some sort of “rebranding” probably won’t change the situation. I’d rather occupy my modest space with a modicum of grace than spend my remaining years as a bitter, self-appointed understudy, convinced that the spotlight was stolen.. 

    As a lifetime gasbagger with the boorish grandiosity of Commander McBragg, I am seeking Full House Acceptance: The sober recognition that most lives are built from partial wins—modest reach, limited audience, quiet competence—and the decision to inhabit that reality without resentment.

    Not all gasbags are created equal.

    And not all of them need to be.

  • The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    My YouTube channel, now more than a decade old, has gathered over 11,000 subscribers and delivers anywhere from a polite 700 views to a respectable 5,000, depending on how shameless I’m willing to be. The high performers are predictable: watch reviews and those ceremonial “State of the Collection” videos—rituals of conspicuous enthusiasm that the algorithm devours like a starving dog. These are the videos where I feel myself performing, angling, posturing. I can practically see the hook in the water. I am not expressing myself; I am fishing. And the bait is always the same: dopamine, desire, envy, and that most reliable narcotic of all—FOMO. These are not just videos; they are small moral compromises dressed as content. They feed what the famous therapist Phil Stutz calls the “lower channel.”

    Then there are the other videos—the ones where I sit back and become a kind of rambling talk show host, reflecting on the week, my thoughts, my minor existential skirmishes. I sprinkle in a bit of watch talk as a courtesy to the faithful, but the real subject is the human condition, or at least my version of it. These videos are closer to the truth. Naturally, they struggle to crack a thousand views. Authenticity, it turns out, is not algorithm-friendly.

    This creates a tidy little crisis. Do I continue manufacturing these glossy, attention-seeking performances—feed the beast, play the game, become a caricature of myself? Or do I choose integrity and accept the role of a man speaking into an increasingly empty room? If the audience shrinks in proportion to my honesty, why not go all the way—abandon video altogether and disappear into a novel no one will read?

    The problem is, I’m not built for that kind of monastic focus. Eighty thousand words on a single idea feels less like a creative challenge and more like a prison sentence. I prefer miscellany. I like to ricochet between obsessions: watches, my adolescent bodybuilding fantasies, the enduring mystery of my own arrested development. I am, by any reasonable definition, a man-child with a specialty in distraction.

    Take food. Not just eating—how I eat. I am obsessed with meals that can be held in one hand: tacos, burritos, sandwiches, wraps—portable architecture. The ideal scenario involves standing over the kitchen sink, dispensing with plates, silverware, and any trace of ceremony. It is efficiency elevated to philosophy. Why sit down when you can hover? Why clean dishes when you can bypass them entirely? This is my idea of innovation: reducing life to its lowest possible friction. Call it optimization if you’re feeling generous. Call it laziness if you’re not.

    And yet, paradoxically, I am disciplined—ferociously so—when it comes to exercise. Olympic lifting in my youth, kettlebells and power yoga now. But even here, discipline is the wrong word. This is compulsion. I don’t train because I choose to; I train because I need to. The workout is less a virtue than a medication, a daily dose of relief for a mind that resists stillness.

    My days split cleanly in two. Morning brings optimism: coffee, steel-cut oats with protein powder, the illusion of infinite possibility. I feel like a serious person, a thinker, someone on the verge of producing meaningful work. By night, the illusion collapses. Fatigue sets in, mood darkens, and I retreat into a fog of lethargy and low-grade dread. The same man who greeted the day with ambition now negotiates with anxiety before sleep, wondering what small catastrophe might arrive in the dark. Will the dream render me so helpless I have a heart attack? Will I even wake up from this dream or succumb to eternal slumber? 

    Hovering over all of this is a private mythology, one I’ve borrowed—perhaps stolen—from Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” I cast myself as the misunderstood artist, the outsider, the man quietly suffering for his craft. It’s a flattering fiction. In reality, I’m less tortured genius and more well-fed procrastinator—an enthusiast of shortcuts, a collector of appetites, a man who stands over the sink eating a breakfast burrito while postponing his lab work. The cholesterol test can wait. The scale will sort itself out. The fantasy persists.

    And that, I suppose, is the truth: I oscillate between aspiration and avoidance, between the higher and lower channels, between the man I imagine myself to be and the one holding a sandwich over the sink.

  • Don’t Hang On to Your Job as a Social Life Raft

    Don’t Hang On to Your Job as a Social Life Raft

    Yesterday I stepped into a small knot of colleagues in the corridor, that narrow strip of campus where ideas briefly outrun the clock. We traded jokes about the recent Canvas collapse, congratulated ourselves for having our lectures safely parked on Google Slides, and circled the usual anxiety about AI—this new auditor that has wandered into the classroom and begun asking uncomfortable questions about our usefulness. The conversation had the easy rhythm of habit. No one spoke as if I were leaving.

    So I reminded them: one year to go.

    S shook her head as if I had announced a mild illness. I shouldn’t retire, she said. I thrive on the friction of the place—the chatter, the debate, the daily collision with students. Besides, she added, men don’t retire well. Men don’t cultivate friendships the way women do; they don’t maintain the networks that keep the emotional weather from turning bleak. 

    I admitted what I already know. I have two friends. I see them rarely enough to qualify as seasonal.

    “I’m an appetizer,” I said. “People enjoy me in small doses.”

    S dismissed that with a wave. “No. You’re a sprawling Las Vegas buffet.”

    The hallway erupted with laughter. It was a generous line and a dangerous one. Flattering, because it confirmed what I trade on: conversation, wit, the ability to animate a room. Terrifying, because buffets are not known for cultivating long-term friendships, and I have no second act of friendships waiting in the wings.

    Oddly, the exchange reinforced my decision to leave at sixty-five, after four decades of teaching. Staying on the job to stave off loneliness is a poor reason to keep a desk. It erodes dignity and, eventually, the quality of the work itself. A classroom deserves more than a man using it as a social life raft.

    The conversation ended the way these corridor encounters always do—with a sudden glance at the time and a polite tearing-away, each of us sprinting back to our assigned rooms before we become late versions of ourselves. Those moments are rare and bright—half a dozen a year, if that—and they carry a dangerous illusion: that their warmth can be stretched across an entire calendar.

    They can’t.

    I will miss them. I will miss the quick intelligence, the laughter, the feeling that something alive is happening just outside the classroom door. But a handful of good conversations a half dozen times a year does not justify postponing an ending that has already announced itself.

    I could stay three more years. I would be sixty-eight, still having the same conversation in a slightly older voice. My challenges would not change; only the date would. Delaying the inevitable is not a strategy. It’s a habit.

    So I’ll leave while the hallway still feels like a gift—and before it becomes an excuse.