Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    The Art of Being Busy While Wasting Your Life

    Because I’ve been absorbing television commercials since the 1960s, I’ve internalized the belief that suffering is a bad thing. To suffer means there’s a glitch in the system, if you will. Television has always told me: “You’re doing it all wrong. You can buy your way into enough pleasure, comfort, and convenience to iron away those ugly wrinkles of human suffering.”

    To internalize the idea that consumerism can overcome human suffering is to undergo a kind of infantilization. Here’s a case in point: I spent over twenty years obsessing over watches, creating a cozy ecosystem to buffer myself from the anxiety and restlessness arising from an existential vacuum. But creating that buffer only allowed those problems to grow and fester. I was in a strange state. I was hyper-focused on watches, but I wasn’t engaged with the real world or with myself. I was both engaged and disengaged at the same time. My life was full of intense mental activity without meaningful psychological engagement.

    This contradiction points to something we might call Disengaged Hyperfixation: a condition in which intense concentration on a narrow interest creates the illusion of meaningful engagement while the individual becomes increasingly disconnected from relationships, responsibilities, and self-examination. I was deeply engaged in the minutiae of watches but disengaged from the emotional problems that required my attention.

    Disengaged Hyperfixation seems to be central to the business model of the Attention Economy. Create undemanding videos in which you repeat the same thing over and over about how amazing this or that watch is. Tell car enthusiasts how superior their favorite brand is to the competition. Talk about a high-protein diet for the millionth time to high-protein disciples. The brutal fact about the Attention Economy and Disengaged Hyperfixation is that you can get lost in these dopamine farms and piss your life away, only to discover too late that you were never meaningfully engaged with the precious, short time you have here on Earth. That realization brings a despair and anguish no YouTube influencer can cure.

  • I Can’t Remember If I’m Losing My Mind

    I Can’t Remember If I’m Losing My Mind

    If you’re in your sixties, you may be terrified by your cognitive decline because you don’t know the difference between normal aging, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia. You’re eager to make exercise and dietary choices that might slow the decline. You may even consider medication if that’s the best route. More than anything, you want to be informed rather than left in the dark.

    My concerns about memory loss began in my late fifties when I noticed that if I didn’t play one of my piano compositions every couple of weeks, I would forget parts of it. Around sixty-four, I noticed more forgetfulness. I would share a story with my wife and then repeat it several hours later until she interrupted me to explain that she’d already heard it. In my college classes, I might tell an anecdote in the third week and repeat it in the tenth, only to hear students laughing and pointing out my redundancy. Once I left the burner on low after making pasta sauce, and another time I left my work keys in the door at work. In both cases, I was multitasking. Doing several things at once has become more of a liability than ever.

    Like many people in my age bracket, I became fearful. I didn’t know what constituted normal cognitive aging and what might point to something more serious.

    I needed a guide, so I did some research and came upon Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory: What’s Normal, What’s Not, and What to Do About It, by neurologist Andrew Budson and neuropsychologist Maureen O’Connor. They begin with Step 1, an explanation of normal and abnormal memory loss. They write “that the difference between normal and abnormal memory isn’t necessarily the type of problems that occur but rather the frequency and severity of those problems.”

    They describe memories as episodes: having a meal, completing a workout, going to a movie, and so on. These episodes create coherent stories full of sensory details. No one has perfect memory or recall, so let go of that myth. There are many reasons we fail to remember things. If you’re not paying attention to your surroundings but are going through the motions on autopilot, or you’re distracted, you’re less likely to remember what happened.

    The authors observe that anxiety and depression can interfere with memory. So if you’re a self-absorbed depressive who spends too much time living inside his own head, you may not be particularly attentive to the external world.

    As I read Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory, I see an ongoing theme: You need to train yourself to pay attention. As the frontal lobes age, certain aspects of attention and executive function can become less efficient. The result may resemble some symptoms of ADHD. I was never diagnosed with ADHD, but I’m convinced I’ve had some of its traits all my life. If that’s the case, my aging frontal lobes have given me a new layer of ADHD-like symptoms over an already existing layer.

    The authors discuss strategies for improving attention, including the use of stimulants such as coffee. I drink my morning coffee religiously. My attention is at its best in the morning, when I do my best reading and writing.

    At the end of Chapter Two, titled “How Does Memory Change in Normal Aging?,” the authors explain that spending over an hour trying to find your car in a parking lot is not normal. This made me wonder whether I’ve been cognitively impaired all my life. Like my maternal grandmother, I have a horrible sense of direction. In 1980, during my sophomore year in college, it took me nearly half an hour to find my car. For the last decade or so, whenever I park in a giant garage, I photograph the identifying numbers so I can find my car later.

    My wife has known me for nearly thirty years. Throughout that time, she has observed that I live too much inside my head. We’ve all heard the cliché of the absent-minded professor. I’ve lived up to that cliché since I was in my thirties. I’ve shown up to class wearing slacks with tags and vertical strips of tape still affixed to them or wearing my shirt inside-out, only to be made aware of these sartorial violations by my attentive students. Old age may simply make the absent-mindedness more pronounced. In more serious cases, however, memory and navigation problems can point to Alzheimer’s disease. Warning signs include getting lost while driving and being unable to use familiar visual cues to find your way back, regularly forgetting appointments, repeatedly losing things, and asking the same questions or telling the same stories without remembering having done so. Such patterns can reflect the rapid forgetting associated with Alzheimer’s disease.


    I do repeat myself. For two consecutive weeks, I forgot that Thursday evening was when I was supposed to take one of my daughters to see her therapist. I also left a stovetop burner on, although that happened only once. So I’m not sure where I stand.

    I called my doctor to arrange a phone consultation and a cognitive assessment.

    One screening questionnaire discussed in the book is the AD8. Answering yes to two or more questions can indicate possible cognitive impairment that warrants further evaluation. It does not, by itself, establish Alzheimer’s disease or any other brain disorder.

    I answered yes to exactly two questions. Number 3 states: “Repeats the same things over and over (questions, stories, or statements).” I repeat myself, but usually only once. Does that count as a yes? Then there’s Number 7: “Trouble remembering appointments.” I forgot my daughter’s therapy appointment twice in a row and was so mortified that I doubt I’ll forget again. Does that count?

    Ambiguity is not helpful here, but the authors make a statement about dementia that is not ambiguous. They write that “Dementia indicates impairment of daily function due to problems with thinking and memory.”

    So the question is this: Is my daily functioning impaired? And that leads to a second question: How severe does the impairment have to be before it crosses the threshold into dementia?

    I suspect the next chapter of my life will involve exploring that second question more rigorously through cognitive testing, medical consultation, and lifestyle changes designed to protect my memory.

    I need to find out whether I have something called subjective cognitive decline, a condition in which people perceive a deterioration in their cognitive abilities even though standardized testing may show normal performance. I know I’m not the same person I used to be. I feel compromised, and I worry that this compromise may point to greater memory loss later in life.

    Or perhaps I have mild cognitive impairment, in which measurable cognitive difficulties don’t substantially interfere with independent daily functioning. Some people with this condition develop dementia, while others remain stable or even improve. The risk depends on the underlying cause, so I can’t assume that I face a fifty-fifty chance of developing dementia.

    Dementia is a general term for cognitive decline severe enough to interfere with independent functioning. It isn’t synonymous with Alzheimer’s disease, which is one possible cause. The authors define Alzheimer’s more specifically, writing that “Alzheimer’s is a brain disease characterized by amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.” The disease often affects memory-related structures, including the hippocampus, before progressing through other regions of the brain.

    Regular aerobic exercise, a healthy diet, and an active social life are among the habits associated with better cognitive health and a lower risk of dementia. Addicted to exercise and partial to a Mediterranean-style diet, I do reasonably well in the physical health department, although I could stand to lose thirty pounds.

    But the social component is more disturbing. Antisocial, introverted, and depressive, I’ve failed considerably in the social health category.

    My wife began worrying about my lack of a social life a few years ago. She was also the first to express concern about my memory loss. So I got off my butt, started doing some research, called my doctor for an appointment, and decided to become proactive about my cognitive health.

    I know a retired martial arts instructor who used to be an officemate at the college. I need to reach out to him and see whether he’ll join me for an hour-long walk at the beach every week. That kind of social routine could be a first step.

    I’m not hopeless. I didn’t dismiss my wife’s concerns. I took them seriously and responded appropriately. I just hope I haven’t done too little too late. If I do have a serious form of memory loss, my goal, as the authors advise, is to manage it so that it doesn’t take over my life.

    One thing is clear. Memory loss can lead to anxiety and depression, and anxiety and depression can produce cognitive symptoms that resemble dementia. So I may be dealing with a recursive loop, one condition feeding the other in a vicious cycle of what has sometimes been called “pseudodementia.”

    One thing I know that fights depression and learned helplessness is knowledge.

    I must continue the deep dive.

  • Consumerism Dies Before You Do

    Consumerism Dies Before You Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Problem with Becoming a Better Person

    The Problem with Becoming a Better Person

    In her memoir Will and Attention, Meghan O’Gieblyn reminds us that exhortations to listen more, engage more fully with the world, and pay closer attention to what is happening around us are easier said than done. Part of the struggle comes from the tension between the voices inside our heads and the voices in the outside world. When the internal voices become loud enough, they drown out everything else, making genuine attention nearly impossible. Nor are these thoughts necessarily useful or interesting. O’Gieblyn describes her own as “circular, deterministic, and relentlessly self-excoriating.”

    That last word, with its suggestion of self-laceration, reminded me of something writer Ana Marie Cox once said on her now-defunct podcast. Just as she had been addicted to alcohol, she suffered from another addiction: self-hatred. Her therapist warned her not to pick up the liquor bottle of self-loathing and drink from it. Yet she would lift this metaphorical bottle to her lips as compulsively as an alcoholic sipping vodka. Once such a habit becomes deeply entrenched, paying attention to it becomes extraordinarily difficult because the behavior feels almost as involuntary as breathing.

    As O’Gieblyn struggles to follow Simone Weil’s advice to abandon the will and replace it with attention, she learns that she must engage with the world “without the distorting lens of the ego.” She must confront what William James called the “sick soul,” the soul divided against itself. We cannot simply will these divided selves into wholeness. In the tradition of the great religions, wholeness often requires surrender to a power greater than ourselves. But O’Gieblyn no longer finds the tenets of religion useful to her, nor even the more universal spiritual tenets of AA. “Letting go” too often returns her to the original problem: the egotistical self doing the letting go.

    Rather than seek surrender in the traditional religious sense, O’Gieblyn turns toward the kind of surrender Simone Weil associates with attention. Attention is not merely focus. It involves what Weil calls the “indirect method,” an idea she never explicitly defines. We can infer, however, that the indirect method requires us to approach a problem with calm and patience rather than demand immediate results. We engage with our problems from different angles, remain attentive to what they reveal, and hope to plant seeds that eventually bear fruit.

    But this approach presents a maddening problem. It requires maturity, and maturity may be the very state we are trying to attain. If we need maturity to approach life’s challenges with patient attention, we arrive at a bootstrapping paradox: We need the capacity we are trying to develop in order to develop that capacity.

    We all need maturity, poise, and wholeness, but the patience required to travel that path may be precisely what the immature person lacks. A patient person is therefore better equipped to practice Weil’s indirect method and bear fruit. An impatient person may become frustrated, abandon the endeavor, and regress into deeper forms of infantilization and addiction. Thus, he who has, more shall be given; he who has not, more shall be taken away. This is the psychological Matthew Effect: maturity creates conditions for greater maturity, while immaturity can create conditions for deeper immaturity. The rich get richer not merely in money but in psychological resources.

    As I reach retirement age, I find myself caught inside this very problem. I am trying to live as long as possible so I can collect as many monthly retirement checks as possible, turning myself into a commodity in the name of gaming the system on the metaphorical game show I call Beat the Actuary. Intellectually, I know this is spiritual madness, but I cannot simply will the impulse away. Nor do I appear to possess the patience necessary to attend to it in the calm and mature manner Simone Weil describes.

    Fortunately, I remain genuinely amused by the comic absurdity of my predicament. Without that amusement, I might tumble into despair. But despair eludes me for now. I am content to read Meghan O’Gieblyn’s meditations on will and attention and hope that, by the time I finish her book, I will have become a slightly better man.

  • Beat the Actuary

    Beat the Actuary

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Optimizing is not living. It’s constantly calculating.

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

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

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

    Not embracing the vegan lifestyle? Shave off another five.

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

    Optimization is not life. It is death.

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

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

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

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

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

  • A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    Like many of my fellow Boomers, I’ve gone down a commonly trodden and forlorn path in the realm of dwindling friendships. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I took friendship for granted. It came as naturally as going to the gym, shopping for clothes, going to clubs, and eating lunch at a cafe. These endeavors were often accompanied by friends. In the 80s and 90s, long conversations on landline phones were also part of the fabric of my social life. That I merited a two-hour phone conversation was no big deal. People found me engaging. My self-worth wasn’t something I questioned. It was simply a matter of fact that I was worthy of a two-hour conversation on random topics.

    Spending time with friends diminished in my late thirties and forties. I would go to a restaurant once every other month or so with colleagues. As I grew apart from some of them and others retired, I did not notice that their disappearance was not accompanied by replacements. My friendship count went down. Meanwhile, I acclimated to life in the cave, my expression for retreating into a suburban enclave and learning to entertain and distract yourself as you disconnect from the beehive of life.

    As engagement farms sprouted up around 2010 and offered frictionless, half-baked social interaction, my habits of isolation worsened because superficial parasocial interactions substituted for in-depth, messy, real ones. These digital engagements proved unsatisfactory. Engagement on these platforms was not authentic friendship. It was a brief burst of dopamine. When the dopamine died, you were left hungry for real social interaction. These engagement farms, in other words, were the equivalent of junk food. You could overconsume the processed stuff while remaining emotionally malnourished.

    Fifteen years of this social deprivation, combined with the chaos and false euphoria of attention-capture platforms, lulled Boomers like me into a state of social isolation that became our new normal.

    There could be a gender factor here. My wife maintains real friendships, and she notices my deprivation in that department. She wants me to put time and energy into my “social health,” as she calls it. I agree that engaging in real friendships would be good for my social health and, in turn, put less pressure on her. The problem is that I don’t have a magic wand. I can’t say abracadabra and have a friend materialize like a genie from a bottle.

    Social entropy is a real and insidious thing that can’t be reversed overnight. I worry that you reach an age and become so entrenched in routines and habits that you cross the Isolation Rubicon, making a return to a normal and healthy social world extremely difficult.

    In this new landscape, where landline phones and two-hour conversations have become extinct and we spend much of our time in parasocial engagements, I can appreciate some of these mediated communications. By and large, people are friendly on my YouTube channel and Instagram page. I don’t diminish these interactions. I simply see them for what they are. They are limited because they exist in the digital sphere. They cannot substitute for real interaction.

    I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with two Trader Joe’s clerks, both in their late twenties. One was scanning my food items. The other was bagging them. I told them that 99% of the time I shop at Trader Joe’s at eight a.m., and I want to be out of the store by 8:45 because I notice that each passing hour brings more people, stress, and anxiety. I told them that one time I had to come in at three p.m. for emergency provisions when my wife’s friends from out of town showed up. I walked into a crowded Trader Joe’s and didn’t even recognize the place. Nor did I recognize the customers.

    “These aren’t my people,” I said.

    My dismay at feeling like an alien during my afternoon shopping spree made the clerk, a short woman whose arms were generously covered with tattoos, stop scanning my groceries. She let out a loud belly laugh. I could see the self-abandoned joy in her face. Making her laugh in that moment was more gratifying than a decade of social-media engagements. You cannot substitute real engagement with parasocial interplay.

    But real engagement is increasingly rare. If I shop at Target, there is no clerk. I scan the items myself while a robot admonishes me if I don’t place them in the designated bagging area.

    A lot of my social deprivation is of my own making. I am lazy, sullen, egotistical, and introverted. While I can be entertaining, I am usually tolerated in low doses. Regardless of what I think about myself, the world does not owe me a bevy of friends waiting on my doorstep to join them in some madcap adventure or other.

    I feel dumb that back in 2010 I was enticed by the so-called social-media corporations. Relying on engagement farms for a morsel of social interaction while curating some energetic persona full of moxie and frisson was pure chicanery. The fact that I substituted this curated nonsense for real life was my fault. I played myself. I let the engagement-farm companies play me as well.

    I don’t have an easy solution to my social health, but I can see the landscape clearly. I am sobered enough after decades of curating a dazzling persona to end that folly. Wherever life takes me from this point on, I’m going there without the fakery.

  • The Nap of No Return

    The Nap of No Return

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The problem, of course, is overdoing it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

    Life Refuses to Follow the Syllabus

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

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

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

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

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

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

    That is your syllabus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This was my golden opportunity. My moment to shine.

    And what did I do?

    I froze.

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

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

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

    And I became an annoying pseudo-intellectual snob.

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

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

    So what was the good life?

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

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

    Being respectful required being authentic.

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

    In the end, no philosopher was my teacher.

    Life was the teacher.

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

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

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

    I know that territory.

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

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

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

  • The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    Dementia and cognitive decline are real concerns in old age. Think of them as the hurricane forming somewhere offshore. You don’t know if it will hit you, but you prepare anyway. Stock up on water and canned beans. Nail plywood over the windows. Make sure you have quick access to the potato cellar.

    Old age requires its own hurricane preparations. Don’t carry excess body weight. Maintain normal blood pressure. Go easy on sugar. Exercise. Avoid alcohol. Don’t smoke. If your hearing deteriorates to the point that you withdraw from conversation and retreat into your own head, get a hearing aid. Keep your mind active. Build what researchers call cognitive reserve—the brain’s capacity to withstand some of the damage associated with aging and disease while continuing to function.

    You can challenge yourself by playing a musical instrument, doing crossword puzzles, starting a podcast, learning something difficult, or writing a multigenerational novel. Think of these pursuits as mental exercise, potentially as important to your aging brain as going to the gym five days a week is to your aging body.

    But not all mental exercise is equal.

    Consider journaling, that beloved sacrament of wellness culture. Journaling requires a physical notebook, your favorite pen or mechanical pencil, perhaps a steaming mug of tea positioned nearby for atmosphere. For this one noble endeavor, you have gone off the grid. You are the intellectual equivalent of outdoorsman Euell Gibbons, wandering through the wilderness and surviving on the edible portions of pinecones.

    Writer and professor Katie Roiphe challenges our assumptions about this supposedly healthy practice in her essay “Is Journaling Bad for You?” Her objections are formidable. For one thing, your journal is never as private as you imagine. Eventually some nosy relative will root through your belongings like a truffle sow and unearth thoughts never intended for public consumption.

    Worse, those thoughts may be misunderstood. They may even repel people who once loved you. The disparity between the person they thought they knew and the creature muttering from the pages of your private notebook may be too great to reconcile.

    You may not particularly enjoy meeting your former selves, either.

    Reading your journals twenty years later can become an archaeological excavation of every insecurity, obsession, grievance, humiliation, and catastrophically stupid opinion you once possessed. Instead of illuminating the present, your journal can lure you backward. Like Lot’s wife, you become fixated on what lies behind you and eventually turn into a pillar of salt—though perhaps one with very good handwriting.

    Then there is the problem of introspection cosplay.

    You may believe you’re plumbing the depths of your psyche when you’re really performing the role of Thoughtful Person. Instead of being brutally honest with yourself, you curate your introspection. Journaling becomes an exercise in self-regard, another platform for presenting yourself to an audience—even if the audience consists entirely of you.

    You become like the gym novice who spends two hours at the fitness center every day talking to people, listening to music, watching television, drinking smoothies, checking his phone, and occasionally wandering onto a treadmill. Six months later, he stands before the mirror bewildered that he has somehow failed to transform into an Olympic decathlete.

    But the fact that journaling can be done badly—and occasionally with disastrous consequences—is not an argument against journaling. It is an argument against performative journaling.

    If you can be unflinchingly honest with yourself, by all means journal. If you understand, in accordance with Sturgeon’s Law, that 90 percent of everything you write will be crap, by all means journal. If you approach your inner life with the same rigor that someone brings to a serious circuit-training session—working rather than posing, examining rather than admiring—then by all means journal.

    Roiphe’s argument, as I understand it, isn’t really against journaling. It is against confusing the performance of introspection with introspection itself. Beneath her skepticism lies an argument for authenticity.

    And perhaps that brings us back to cognitive decline.

    We worry about forgetting names, losing words, walking into rooms without remembering why we went there. These are frightening possibilities, and we should do what we reasonably can to protect ourselves.

    But there may be another kind of cognitive failure worth fearing: losing the ability to distinguish between examining your life and performing an examination of your life.

    You can fill a thousand notebooks and never confront yourself.

    The handwriting may remain perfectly legible while the mind behind it disappears.

  • Nobody Ever Needed an Angiogram Because of Too Many Seikos

    Nobody Ever Needed an Angiogram Because of Too Many Seikos

    As I close in on sixty-five and retirement in eight months, I hunger for life changes. A new chapter makes life feel longer. It’s like adding a second story to your house. You get the permits, hire the contractors, endure six months of dust, and your single-story shack becomes a glorious two-story home. Surely you will live longer now.

    A lot of these life changes are fantasies. I find myself looking at real estate. With my suburban Los Angeles home approaching two million dollars in value, I could sell it and buy a sort of mansion in Henderson, Las Vegas, or Orlando, Florida—a place big enough that I could finally trade in my Yamaha upright for a grand piano.

    I know it would be ridiculous to make my wife and teenage twin daughters pack their belongings and move to Nevada or Florida so I could indulge my fantasy of “starting life over.” Such a rebirth in a new land would mostly be a chimera. No matter where I went, I’d still have Netflix, a nearby bagel place, and a Costco. I would have traveled hundreds of miles to discover that I was still me.

    So as a proxy for uprooting my Southern California life, I look for smaller transformations. One has already occurred: my obsessive watch hobby.

    I currently have two discrete collections, Seiko divers and G-Shocks. The Seikos are the expensive ones. I own four mechanical Seiko divers that cost between $1,200 and $3,400 apiece. I spent about $8,100 on those mechanical divers, plus another $1,200 on my iconic quartz Seiko Tuna. Altogether, I have about $9,300 sitting in a box telling time.

    What amazes me is that after twenty years of manically flipping watches—buying and selling them in an addictive frenzy—I stopped buying expensive Seiko divers more than a year ago.

    The last mechanical Seiko I bought, the Coastline Diver SBDC203, was purchased in August 2025. My SLA023, SLA051, SLA055, and quartz SBBN049 Tuna have been around considerably longer. This is a dramatic departure from the years when I could buy and sell a thousand-dollar watch every month as if horological instability were a medical condition.

    Something changed.

    I slowed down until, eventually, I stopped. I have bought nothing in the mechanical realm for more than thirteen months. There was no declaration, act of will, twelve-step program, or magical incantation. The desire simply weakened. I died to the frenzy.

    During this stoppage, however, a far less expensive subcollection appeared. Over the last eight months, I accumulated a modest collection of G-Shocks: the Frogman GWF-1000, Mudman GW-9500, Mudman G-9300, Rescue GW-7900, and King GXW-56-1BJF. I also own the famous GW-5000U, although my wife has largely annexed it.

    I am content with my G-Shocks. I currently have nothing on my wishlist.

    Well, almost nothing.

    I admire the G-Shock GWF-D1000BC with its DLC coating and combi bracelet, but it is an absurdly overqualified Hero Watch for a man who spends most of his time playing piano and doing dishes in a suburban kitchen. At $1,500, buying it would carry a faint whiff of desperation: an aging consumer hoping another cardboard box on the doorstep might generate a fresh squirt of dopamine.

    I have ridden that merry-go-round enough times to know where it stops.

    Buying the Frogman might produce more shame than pleasure, so I am resisting it.

    My watch-wearing habits have changed as well. Ninety-five percent of the time, I wear G-Shocks. They are comfortable, atomic-time accurate, solar-powered, and worry-free. I still look at my Seiko divers and marvel at their beauty, but I no longer feel connected to them the way I once did.

    They belong to my past self.

    They are me living in the one-story house. They are vintage cars I take out for a ten-minute drive every four months before carefully returning them to the garage.

    The G-Shocks are my new companions. The G-Shocks and I live upstairs in my imaginary mansion.

    More important, the affordable G-Shocks comfort me in a way the expensive mechanical watches no longer do. Mechanical watches are beautiful little stress generators. They can require hundreds of dollars in servicing and reward your investment by keeping approximately the correct time.

    My G-Shocks are Tough Solar and synchronize with the atomic clock in Fort Collins. They ask almost nothing of me.

    It is as if the Invisible Retirement Sherpa whispered into my ear: “You don’t need another job flipping and worrying about expensive watches. You already have a new job. Retirement. Put on the G-Shock and get moving.”

    So I did not buy a mansion in Henderson or Orlando.

    I started a new life with G-Shocks.

    I hunger for other changes as well, particularly regarding health and diet. Last night I dreamed I was at a party. I went into the hosts’ bathroom, pulled up my shirt, and confronted a gut that did not inspire confidence. I was overcome with dread—not simply because of my expanding lower torso but because of what it represented: a man so consumed by food noise that he could not control himself.

    I lowered the watch noise.

    Could I lower the food noise?

    That raises a harder question: How do we lower unwanted noise in the first place? My appetite for expensive watches died largely on its own. I didn’t wrestle it into submission. Food is another matter.

    And the stakes are considerably higher. Nobody ever needed an angiogram because he bought too many Seikos.

    Recently I spoke with my eighty-one-year-old aunt in Minnesota. After experiencing shortness of breath and dizziness, she underwent an angiogram, the same procedure my grandfather had in his late seventies. Heart blockages have appeared on my mother’s side of the family. If changing my diet could reduce my chances of eventually following them into the cardiac catheterization lab, I would like to make that change now.

    But what would that diet look like? Do I go for the gold standard and become plant-based? What happens then? Do I become a social pariah, a weirdo, a scold—the guy interrogating the waiter about chicken stock while everyone else is trying to order dinner?

    And would I really care if the diet helped keep my arteries open?

    So from both a health and moral standpoint, I fantasize about becoming vegan in much the same way I fantasize about moving into a mansion in Henderson. The vegan life represents another new chapter, another second story added to the house.

    For now, however, veganism, like fleeing Los Angeles, remains a chimera.

    Meanwhile, I am typing on a satisfyingly clicky mechanical keyboard with my trusty G-Shock Rescue on my wrist.

    Change is not impossible.

    Sometimes you notice only after it has already happened.