Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

    The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

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

    It never does.

    Still, I’m not without hope.

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

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

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

    The pattern continued.

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

    It’s boring.

    That is precisely the point.

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

    Call it Zen-illa.

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

    Then there is the watch.

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

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

    Increasingly, that is the beauty I find myself pursuing.

    Perhaps this is what maturity looks like.

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

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

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

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

  • The Vulcan Fallacy

    The Vulcan Fallacy

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

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

    For Seneca, that discipline begins with relentless attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He doesn’t.

    He believes something essential is missing.

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

    It is a devastating metaphor.

    Life surely demands more than emotional climate control.

    Carrère presses the point further:

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

    That question lingers.

    I think of hobbies that border on obsession.

    Some people collect paintings.

    Others collect sculpture or photography.

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

    The obsession is irrational.

    That is precisely why it is enjoyable.

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

    They are the hobby.

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

    It also risks becoming flavorless.

    No spice.

    No texture.

    No delightful absurdity.

    It is a world in perfect emotional equilibrium.

    It is also a world inhabited by Dr. Spock.

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

    We are not.

    This is where I part company with Stoicism.

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

    Human beings are not designed merely to maintain psychological equilibrium.

    We fall in love knowing our hearts may be broken.

    We create art knowing it may fail.

    We raise children knowing they will one day leave us.

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

    The point is not to eliminate suffering.

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

    Perfect serenity may produce admirable self-control.

    It has never produced Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

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

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

  • When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

    When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

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

    Not because I can’t appreciate them.

    Not because they aren’t beautiful.

    Because I no longer have the wrist time.

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

    Time eventually becomes the harshest accountant.

    But time is only half the problem.

    The other half is geography.

    Or, more accurately, lifestyle.

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

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

    The watch would be dressed for an expedition to Antarctica.

    I would be buying gummy bears by the ounce.

    The mismatch is almost comic.

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

    Recognizing these two forms of misalignment is not depressing.

    It is liberating.

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

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

    The question is what deserves that energy instead.

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

    Now that enthusiasm has become available for reassignment.

    It belongs elsewhere.

    It belongs in writing.

    It belongs at the piano.

    It belongs in my kettlebell-filled garage.

    Most of all, it belongs to my health.

    I am still about twenty pounds overweight.

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

    So the mission is obvious.

    Reach 210 pounds.

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

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

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

    That is not surrender.

    That is maturity.

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

    He begins issuing instructions.

    He says:

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

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

    Your assignment now is different.

    Become as healthy as possible.

    Remain mentally sharp.

    Write your books.

    Play your piano.

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

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

    His orders make perfect sense.

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

    They simplify it.

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

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

    It told time just as faithfully as any luxury watch.

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

  • The Young and the Larval

    The Young and the Larval

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

    Most of the guests were in their seventies.

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

    It was invisibility.

    “People look right through you,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I refuse to let my mind become larval.

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

    Besides, history has a wicked sense of irony.

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

    That is the true danger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    His most remarkable quality is not restraint but peace.

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

    Of course, I recognize this as a fantasy.

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

    No watch can perform that miracle.

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

    That is the collection we never quite manage to complete.

  • The Great Social Media Deconversion

    The Great Social Media Deconversion

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

    I had no idea what he meant.

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

    Facebook barely registered on my radar.

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

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

    I was enchanted.

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

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

    People would discover me.

    I would become famous.

    How many friends could I accumulate?

    How many likes?

    How many followers?

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

    The intoxication was exquisite.

    That was seventeen years ago.

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

    Contempt.

    Or perhaps futility.

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

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

    That is how social media feels now.

    Not tragic.

    Pointless.

    Because the marriage was built on lies.

    The lies sounded persuasive enough.

    Metrics measure significance.

    Engagement proves value.

    Visibility creates influence.

    Influence creates meaning.

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

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

    The pursuit of attention slowly teaches us to manipulate others.

    Eventually it teaches us to manipulate ourselves.

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

    The anxiety metastasizes into resentment.

    Soon we are no longer expressing ourselves.

    We are auditioning for an algorithm.

    Attention capture is not meaning.

    Attention capture is not love.

    Attention capture is not flourishing.

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

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

    The video felt less like communication than contractual obligation.

    He looked exhausted.

    Not physically.

    Spiritually.

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

    I watched perhaps thirty seconds before closing the window.

    I did it for his dignity.

    And for mine.

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

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

    I still write on my blog.

    Almost nobody reads it.

    Wonderful.

    Obscurity has become strangely liberating.

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

    The work belongs to me again.

    People often wonder what comes after divorce.

    The honest answer is that nobody knows.

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

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

    We experienced the honeymoon.

    We believed the promises.

    We invested our identities.

    We discovered the betrayal.

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

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

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

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

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

    People are tiring of the performance.

    The masks have grown heavy.

    The applause no longer sounds convincing.

    Something new is approaching.

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

    I only know that the old marriage is over.

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

  • The Dishwasher and the Soul

    The Dishwasher and the Soul

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

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

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

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

    So I became my own maintenance department.

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

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

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

    That realization hurts.

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

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

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

    Instead, the dishwasher beeps.

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Man Who Wanted to Defeat His Therapist

    The Man Who Wanted to Defeat His Therapist

    In Lives Other Than My Own, Emmanuel Carrère recounts seeking treatment from the celebrated psychoanalyst François Roustang. Roustang refused to take him as a patient. His reason was devastating in its simplicity: Carrère, he believed, was not interested in getting better. He was interested in tripping up the therapist.

    Imagine arriving at the office of a renowned psychoanalyst desperate for relief from some nameless psychic misery, only to be told that your real ambition is to make your therapist look like a fool.

    It is a remarkable diagnosis.

    Carrère’s impulse, Roustang concluded, was not to surrender to therapy but to convert it into a duel. Every session would become an opportunity to expose the therapist’s blind spots, frustrate his methods, and demonstrate that no one—not even a celebrated analyst—could penetrate his defenses. The goal was not healing but victory.

    On the surface, this sounds clever.

    In reality, it is the psychology of a frightened child.

    The patient who must always outwit the therapist is not displaying superior intelligence. He is displaying superior evasiveness. His greatest fear is not failure but surrender. If he can reduce the therapist to exasperation, then he never has to confront the far more terrifying possibility that someone might actually understand him.

    For that reason, Roustang’s refusal seems puzzling.

    Surely this was exactly the patient he ought to have accepted.

    Instead, he sent him away.

    One imagines that Carrère experienced a brief flash of triumph. The contest had ended before it began, and somehow he had won. Another therapist defeated. Another authority figure frustrated. Another confirmation that no one could reach him.

    What exquisite misery.

    But Roustang had anticipated the move.

    His refusal was not surrender. It was strategy.

    He later told Carrère that if he was so determined to remain miserable, he had only two honest options: end his life or begin living.

    With that brutal simplicity, Roustang shattered the entire game.

    There was no argument to refute, no interpretation to ridicule, no therapeutic jargon to dismantle. There remained only a stark moral choice. Continue worshiping misery or abandon it.

    Suddenly Carrère’s obstinacy no longer looked rebellious.

    It looked juvenile.

    The performance he had mistaken for intellectual sophistication was revealed as the defensive posture of an anxious ego terrified of vulnerability. His endless resistance ceased to resemble strength. It resembled Gollum clutching the Ring while congratulating himself on his independence.

    Roustang’s words proved bracing rather than cruel. Carrère gradually emerged from his depression and eventually found the strength to write My Life as a Russian Novel, the book that, in his words, pulled him “from the abyss.”

    His story clarifies a distinction our culture often blurs: the difference between being childish and being childlike.

    The childish person is governed by wounded pride. He is obstinate, theatrical, self-absorbed, forever digging trenches around his private kingdom of resentment. He mistakes defiance for courage and isolation for authenticity. Like Gollum, he clings to the very thing that is poisoning him while insisting it is his greatest treasure.

    The childlike person possesses the opposite spirit. He is open rather than defensive, curious rather than suspicious, grateful rather than entitled. He greets the world with wonder instead of grievance. He resembles Adam before the first bite of the apple, when innocence had not yet curdled into self-justification.

    Perhaps that is the hidden kinship between therapy and religion.

    Neither exists merely to make us feel better.

    Both seek to expose the childish ego that mistakes stubbornness for strength and self-protection for freedom. Both ask us to relinquish the exhausting performance of being unconquerable. Both invite us to recover something we once possessed before fear, vanity, and self-deception took root.

    The task, in the end, is not to become more sophisticated.

    It is to become less like Gollum.

  • When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

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

    I underwent my own conversion in 1976.

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

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

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

    The process bordered on liturgical.

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

    What I sought was not merely a better pump.

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

    It was absurd.

    It was also glorious.

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

    The conversion had other liturgical requirements.

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

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

    My mother walked into the office.

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

    “Why are you so happy?”

    I reached down and squeezed my calf.

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

    She looked puzzled.

    “Why does that make you happy?”

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

    “They’re growing, Mom.”

    A pause.

    “They’re growing.”

  • The X-Ray Bully Principle

    The X-Ray Bully Principle

    I have often imagined writing a novel about a boy tormented by a sixth-grade bully. At first glance, the story seems painfully familiar. One child possesses power; another lacks it. One humiliates; the other endures. There are already enough novels about that.

    The interesting story begins decades later.

    The bully is drawn to the boy’s visible sadness the way sharks are drawn to blood. Whether that instinct originates in the bully’s own wounds is impossible to know. Perhaps his father’s death from a heart attack in his thirties left him carrying around an anger too large for a child to bear. Perhaps he simply needed somewhere to dump his rage, and the melancholy boy looked like an accommodating landfill.

    Or perhaps that explanation is sentimental nonsense.

    Perhaps the bully required no tragedy to become cruel. Some people seem to arrive in the world with an uncanny instinct for locating weakness and pressing on it until it bruises.

    Whatever the explanation, the bully needed only to glimpse the boy’s face.

    That face was enough.

    The sadness irritated him. The fear provoked him. The quietness felt like an accusation. Around everyone else he was merely disagreeable. Around this particular boy he became incandescent with contempt. The sight of vulnerability transformed him into an artist of humiliation.

    That, however, is not the novel.

    Bullies are common.

    What fascinates me is what happens inside the victim.

    At first the boy hates his tormentor in the ordinary way. He dreams of revenge. He imagines vindication. He rehearses speeches he will never deliver.

    Then something disturbing happens.

    He grows older.

    He begins examining himself with ruthless honesty. He sees his cowardice, vanity, evasions, self-pity, and moral compromises. Gradually, almost against his own will, he starts to wonder whether the bully had been right all along.

    Not right about the cruelty.

    Right about him.

    The bully becomes, in memory, the only person who had truly seen through the performance. Everyone else had mistaken shyness for humility, sensitivity for virtue, sadness for depth. The bully had looked beneath the surface and detected something darker.

    Weakness.

    Duplicity.

    Self-deception.

    The victim begins to believe that the insults were less acts of cruelty than acts of diagnosis.

    He embraces what I call the X-Ray Bully Principle: the belief that a tormentor’s cruelty was justified because he uniquely perceived one’s hidden moral defects and therefore functioned, however unwillingly, as a truth-teller rather than merely an aggressor.

    This inversion changes everything.

    The bully is no longer remembered as a playground tyrant.

    He becomes a prophet.

    His taunts acquire the authority of Scripture. His ridicule is transformed into revelation. His contempt begins to resemble religious flagellation—a painful but necessary discipline administered to expose hidden corruption.

    The victim quietly canonizes his persecutor.

    That is the real tragedy.

    The bully’s greatest victory was never the humiliation he inflicted on a frightened twelve-year-old. It was persuading that boy, decades later, that the humiliation had been deserved.

    The novel, then, is not about bullying.

    It is about the terrifying human capacity to mistake condemnation for insight and abuse for truth. It asks whether our harshest critics possess privileged access to our secret selves or whether shame simply grants them an authority they never earned.

    That question has haunted me far longer than any playground insult ever could.