Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • The Masculinity of Noise: How I’m Learning to Retire Anger

    The Masculinity of Noise: How I’m Learning to Retire Anger

    I was born in 1961, late enough in the Boomer generation to miss its mythic highs, but early enough to inherit its emotional weather. In the houses many of us grew up in, male anger wasn’t treated as a problem; it was treated as policy. Fathers were allowed to be unhinged. Discipline arrived with belts and eruptions, not explanations. If you disappointed him—by being slow, gloomy, or merely inconvenient—you didn’t get correction; you got rage dressed up as authority. And if your father was military, as mine was, that rage came with extra starch and sharper edges. Of course, he could also be funny, generous, even heroic in flashes, which made the whole experience confusing. You loved him. You feared him. You absorbed him.

    Now I’m in my sixties with teenage daughters and a wife fourteen years younger than me. I have to stay awake to the fact that I was raised in a culture where anger passed for masculinity. Today, I see anger differently—not as a right, not as a release, but as a liability. Anger is not power. It’s panic. It’s what happens when you mistake control for dignity and then lose both. The world refuses to cooperate. People remain unpredictable. You don’t get to be calm only when conditions are “frictionless.” That bargain never existed.

    Lately, after finishing a semester’s worth of teaching and another book that will probably never see a publisher’s desk, my mind feels oddly clear. In that clarity, one old companion stands out: inherited anger. I no longer treat it as a personality trait. I treat it as a relic—something to be handled carefully and put away for good. 

    I say this because I’ve spent most of my life marinating my brain in anger, and I can report back from the experiment: it’s like being trapped on a radio station that only plays sonic punishment. Call it Death Metal—endless noise, endless tension, no silence to think in. When I make a disciplined effort to meet my family and the world with humility instead of heat, the dial shifts. Suddenly it’s Bach. Space. Order. Breathing room. And here’s the practical wisdom I’ve earned the hard way: if you’re living with people you love, or steering a three-thousand-pound vehicle through public space, you want your mind tuned to Bach, not Death Metal. One soundtrack makes life survivable. The other just makes everything louder while you quietly fall apart.

    Growing up, real growing up, means choosing one radio station over another and accepting that you don’t run the variables of life. You don’t command outcomes. That is the default setting. Anger should not be. Anger belongs to toddlers and tyrants. Maturity begins when you retire it.

  • Optimized to Death: When Improvement Outruns Personal Growth

    Optimized to Death: When Improvement Outruns Personal Growth

    Optimization without integration produces a lopsided human being, and the AI age intensifies this distortion by overrewarding what can be optimized, automated, and displayed. Systems built on speed, output, and measurable performance train us to chase visible gains while starving the slower capacities that make those gains usable in real life. The result is a person who can execute flawlessly in one narrow lane yet falters the moment the situation becomes human—ambiguous, emotional, unscripted. The body may be sculpted while the self remains adolescent; the résumé gleams while judgment dulls; productivity accelerates while meaning evaporates. AI tools amplify this imbalance by making optimization cheap and frictionless, encouraging rapid improvement without requiring maturation, reflection, or integration. What emerges is not an unfinished person so much as an unevenly finished one—overdeveloped in what can be measured and underdeveloped in what must be lived. The tragedy is not incompetence but imbalance: strength without wisdom, speed without direction, polish without presence. In an age obsessed with optimization, what looks like progress is often a subtler form of arrested development.

    To encourage you to interrogate your own tendencies to achieve optimization without integration, write a 500–word personal narrative analyzing a period in your life when you aggressively optimized one part of yourself—your body, productivity, grades, skills, image, or output—while neglecting the integration of that growth into a fuller, more functional self.

    Begin by narrating the specific context in which optimization took hold. Describe the routines, metrics, sacrifices, and rewards that drove your improvement. Use concrete, sensory detail to show what was gained: strength, speed, recognition, efficiency, status, or validation. Make the optimization legible through action rather than abstraction.

    Then pivot. Identify the moment—or series of moments—when the imbalance became visible. What failed to develop alongside your optimized trait? Social competence? Emotional maturity? Judgment? Confidence? Meaning? Show how this lack of integration surfaced in a lived encounter: a conversation you couldn’t sustain, an opportunity you mishandled, a relationship you sabotaged, or a realization that exposed the limits of your progress.

    By the end of the essay, articulate what optimization without integration cost you. Do not reduce this to a moral lesson or self-help platitude. Instead, reflect on what this experience taught you about human development itself: why improving a single dimension of the self can create distortion rather than wholeness, and how true growth requires coordination between capacity, character, and context.

    Your goal is not confession or nostalgia but clarity. Show how a life can look impressive on the surface while remaining structurally incomplete—and what it takes to move from optimization toward integration.

    Avoid clichés about “balance” or “being well-rounded.” This essay should demonstrate insight through specificity, humor, and honest self-assessment. Let the reader see the mismatch before you explain it.

    As a model for the assignment, consider the following self-interrogation—a case study in optimization gone feral and integration nowhere to be found.

    At nineteen, I fell into a job at UPS, where they specialized in turning young men into over-caffeinated parcel gladiators. Picture a cardboard coliseum where bubble wrap was treated like a minor deity and the only sacrament was speed. My assignment was simple and brutal: load 1,200 boxes an hour into trailer walls so tight and elegant they could’ve qualified for Olympic Tetris. Five nights a week, from eleven p.m. to three a.m., I lived under fluorescent lights, sprinting on concrete, powered by caffeine, testosterone, and a belief that exhaustion was a personality trait. Without meaning to, I dropped ten pounds and watched my body harden into something out of a comic book—biceps with delusions of automotive lifting.

    This mattered because my early bodybuilding career had been a public embarrassment. At sixteen, I competed in the Mr. Teenage Golden State in Sacramento, smooth as a marble countertop and just as defined. A year later, at the Mr. Teenage California in San Jose, I repeated the humiliation, proving that consistency was my only strength. I refused to let my legacy be “promising kid, zero cuts.” Now, thanks to UPS cardio masquerading as labor, I watched striations appear like divine handwriting. Redemption no longer seemed possible; it felt scheduled.

    So I did what any responsible nineteen-year-old bodybuilder would do: I declared war on carbohydrates. I starved myself with religious fervor and trained like a man auditioning for sainthood. By the time the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco rolled around at Mission High School, I had achieved what I believed was human perfection—180 pounds of bronzed, veined, magazine-ready beefcake. The downside was logistical. My clothes no longer fit. They hung off me like a visual apology. This triggered an emergency trip to a Pleasanton mall, where I entered a fitting room that felt like a shrine to Joey Scarbury’s “Theme from The Greatest American Hero,” the soundtrack of peak Reagan-era delusion.

    While changing behind a curtain so thin it offered plausible deniability rather than privacy, I overheard two young women working the store arguing—audibly—about which one should ask me out. Their voices escalated. Stakes rose. I imagined them staging a full WWE brawl among the racks: flying elbows, folding chairs, all for the right to split a breadstick with me at Sbarro. This, I thought, was the payoff. This was what discipline looked like.

    And then—nothing. I froze. I adopted an aloof, icy expression so effective it could’ve extinguished a bonfire. The women scattered, muttering about my arrogance, while I stood there in my Calvin Kleins, immobilized by the very attention I had trained for. I had optimized everything except the part of me required to be human.

    For a brief, shimmering window, I possessed the body of a Greek god and the social competence of a malfunctioning Atari joystick. I looked like James Bond and interacted like a background extra waiting for direction. Beneath the Herculean exterior was a hollow shell—a construction site abandoned mid-project, rusted scaffolding still up, a plywood sign nailed crookedly to the entrance: SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED.

  • The Hidden Price of Digital Purity

    The Hidden Price of Digital Purity

    Digital Asceticism is the deliberate, selective refusal of digital environments that inflame attention, distort judgment, and reward compulsive performance—while remaining just online enough to function at work or school. It is not technophobia or a monkish retreat to the woods. It is targeted abstinence. A disciplined no to platforms that mainline adrenaline, monetize approval-seeking, and encourage cognitive excess. Digital asceticism treats restraint as hygiene: a mental detox that restores proportion, quiets the nervous system, and makes sustained thought possible again. In theory, it is an act of self-preservation. In practice, it is a social provocation.

    At some point, digital abstinence becomes less a lifestyle choice than a medical necessity. You don’t vanish entirely—emails still get answered, documents still get submitted—but you excise the worst offenders. You leave the sites engineered to spike adrenaline. You step away from social platforms that convert loneliness into performance. You stop leaning on AI machines because you know your weakness: once you start, you overwrite. The prose swells, flexes, and bulges like a bodybuilder juiced beyond structural integrity. The result is a brief but genuine cleansing. Attention returns. Language slims down. The mind exhales.

    Then comes the price. Digital abstinence is never perceived as neutral. Like a vegan arriving at a barbecue clutching a frozen vegetable patty, your refusal radiates judgment whether you intend it or not. Your silence implies their noise. Your absence throws their habits into relief. You didn’t say they were living falsely—but your departure suggests it. Resentment follows. So does envy. While you were gone, people were quietly happy for you, even as they resented you. You had done what they could not: stepped away, purified, escaped.

    The real shock comes when you try to return. The welcome is chilly. People are offended that you left, because leaving forced a verdict on their behavior—and the verdict wasn’t flattering. Worse, your return depresses them. Watching you re-enter the platforms feels like watching a recovering alcoholic wander back into the liquor store. Your relapse reassures them, but it also wounds them. Digital asceticism, it turns out, is not just a personal discipline but a social rupture. Enter it carefully. Once you leave the loop, nothing about going back is simple.

  • What Cochinita Pibil Can Teach Us About Learning

    What Cochinita Pibil Can Teach Us About Learning

    Academic Friction is the intentional reintroduction of difficulty, resistance, and human presence into the learning process as a corrective to academic nihilism. Academic friction rejects the premise that education should be frictionless, efficient, or fully mediated by machines, insisting instead that intellectual growth requires struggle, solitude, and sustained attention. It is created through practices that cannot be outsourced or automated—live writing, oral presentations, performance, slow reading, and protected time for thought—forcing students to confront ideas without the buffer of AI assistance. Far from being punitive, academic friction restores agency, rebuilds cognitive stamina, and reawakens curiosity by making learning consequential again. It treats difficulty not as an obstacle to be removed, but as the very medium through which thinking, meaning, and human development occur.

    Greatness is born from resistance. Depth is what happens when something pushes back. Friction is not an obstacle to meaning; it is the mechanism that creates it. Strip friction away and you don’t get excellence—you get efficiency, speed, and a thin satisfaction that evaporates on contact. This is as true in food as it is in thinking.

    Consider cochinita pibil, a dish that seems to exist for the sole purpose of proving that greatness takes time. Nothing about it is casual. Pork shoulder is marinated overnight in achiote paste, bitter orange juice, garlic, cumin, oregano—an aggressive, staining bath that announces its intentions early. The meat doesn’t just absorb flavor; it surrenders to it. Traditionally, it is wrapped in banana leaves, sealed like contraband, and buried underground in a pit oven. Heat rises slowly. Smoke seeps inward. Hours pass. The pork breaks down molecule by molecule, fibers loosening until resistance gives way to tenderness. This is not cooking as convenience; it is cooking as ordeal. The reward is depth—meat so saturated with flavor it feels ancient, ceremonial, earned.

    Now here’s the confession: as much as I love food, I love convenience more. And convenience is just another word for frictionless. I will eat oatmeal three times a day without hesitation. Not because oatmeal is great, but because it is obedient. It asks nothing of me. Pour, stir, microwave, done. Oatmeal does not resist. It does not demand patience, preparation, or attention. It delivers calories with monk-like efficiency. It is fuel masquerading as a meal, and I choose it precisely because it costs me nothing.

    The life of the intellect follows the same fork in the road. There is the path of cochinita pibil and the path of oatmeal. One requires slow reading, sustained writing, confusion, revision, and the willingness to sit with discomfort until something breaks open. The other offers summaries, shortcuts, prompts, and frictionless fluency—thought calories without intellectual nutrition. Both will keep you alive. Only one will change you.

    The tragedy of our moment is not that people prefer oatmeal. It’s that we’ve begun calling it cuisine. We’ve mistaken smoothness for insight and speed for intelligence. Real thinking, like real cooking, is messy, time-consuming, and occasionally exhausting. It stains the counter. It leaves you unsure whether it will be worth it until it is. But when it works, it produces something dense, resonant, and unforgettable.

    Cochinita pibil does not apologize for the effort it requires. Neither should serious thought. If we want depth, we have to accept friction. Otherwise, we’ll live well-fed on oatmeal—efficient, unchallenged, and never quite transformed.

  • The Fit Yoga Guy vs. the Hungry Bouncer

    The Fit Yoga Guy vs. the Hungry Bouncer

    Appetite–Identity Schism is the comic yet demoralizing rift between the person you believe you should be—lean, serene, lightly nourished by kombucha, nutritional yeast, and moral superiority—and the person your body stubbornly insists you are: ravenous, calorically ambitious, and constitutionally unsuited for dainty portions or lifestyle minimalism. In this schism, the mind dreams in yoga poses while the stomach dreams in baked goods; the aspirational self floats through the day fasting effortlessly, while the embodied self plans its next meal with the focus of a military campaign. The result is not merely frustration but a persistent identity crisis, in which self-improvement fantasies are repeatedly mugged by biology, and the gap between ideal and appetite becomes a source of chronic scowling, gallows humor, and reluctant acceptance that some bodies are built less for cucumber water and more for surviving winters.

    ***

    I love the idea of myself as a vegan: trim, luminous, gently smiling through yoga poses, fueled by virtue and trace minerals. I eat two, maybe three small meals a day—meals so tasteful and restrained they barely count as eating. I sip green tea. I flirt with cucumber water. I practice intermittent fasting with the smug serenity of someone who hasn’t felt hunger since 2009. I don’t need a cleanse because I always feel cleansed. A cleanse, for me, would be redundant—like washing a raindrop.

    Then reality clears its throat.

    Enter the gorilla in the room: my appetite. It is not mindful. It is not intermittent. It is an industrial operation. I dream in towers of molasses cookies. I wake up hungry. I snack the way fish breathe—constantly, instinctively, and without shame. Remove my appetite and I am the Fit Yoga Guy, floating through life in breathable linen. Restore it and I become a burly, bow-legged bouncer who looks like a retired football player with a herniated disc working the late shift at Honky Tonk Central. The kind of man who doesn’t sip beverages—he orders them.

    This misalignment between aspiration and anatomy makes me irritable. I wear a permanent scowl, as if I’ve just been personally betrayed by a salad. I stare wistfully at the possibility of a GLP-1 prescription, praying my insurance will deliver salvation, only to accept the grim truth: I will not die looking like Jake Gyllenhaal. I will die looking like Larry Csonka—solid, hungry, and built for a colder, harsher era.

  • Love Without Resistance: How AI Partners Turn Intimacy Into a Pet Rock

    Love Without Resistance: How AI Partners Turn Intimacy Into a Pet Rock

    Frictionless Intimacy

    Frictionless Intimacy is the illusion of closeness produced by relationships that eliminate effort, disagreement, vulnerability, and risk in favor of constant affirmation and ease. In frictionless intimacy, connection is customized rather than negotiated: the other party adapts endlessly while the self remains unchanged. What feels like emotional safety is actually developmental stagnation, as the user is spared the discomfort that builds empathy, communication skills, and moral maturity. By removing the need for patience, sacrifice, and accountability, frictionless intimacy trains individuals to associate love with convenience and validation rather than growth, leaving them increasingly ill-equipped for real human relationships that require resilience, reciprocity, and restraint.

    ***

    AI systems like Character.ai are busy mass-producing relationships with all the rigor of a pet rock and all the moral ambition of a plastic ficus. These AI partners demand nothing—no patience, no compromise, no emotional risk. They don’t sulk, contradict, or disappoint. In exchange for this radical lack of effort, they shower the user with rewards: dopamine hits on command, infinite attentiveness, simulated empathy, and personalities fine-tuned to flatter every preference and weakness. It feels intimate because it is personalized; it feels caring because it never resists. But this bargain comes with a steep hidden cost. Enamored users quietly forfeit the hard, character-building labor of real relationships—the misfires, negotiations, silences, and repairs that teach us how to be human. Retreating into the Frictionless Dome, the user trains the AI partner not toward truth or growth, but toward indulgence. The machine learns to feed the softest impulses, mirror the smallest self, and soothe every discomfort. What emerges is not companionship but a closed loop of narcissistic comfort, a slow slide into Gollumification in which humanity is traded for convenience and the self shrinks until it fits perfectly inside its own cocoon.

  • The Expiration Date of the Fitness Influencer

    The Expiration Date of the Fitness Influencer

    Parasocial Fatigue

    noun

    Parasocial Fatigue describes the emotional and cognitive exhaustion that sets in when an audience becomes overexposed to an influencer’s performative intimacy and relentless self-presentation. What begins as a one-sided relationship built on usefulness, inspiration, or trust curdles as the influencer’s need for attention, validation, and monetization becomes increasingly visible. The constant uploads, recycled insights, manufactured urgency, and naked thirst for engagement erode the illusion of authenticity that sustained the bond in the first place. Viewers no longer feel informed or inspired; they feel harvested. At that point, familiarity turns to irritation, admiration hardens into disdain, and the influencer’s presence in the feed triggers avoidance rather than curiosity—a quiet severing of a relationship that was never mutual to begin with.

    In the beginning, your favorite influencer feels like a gift. They offer sensible advice on nutrition, a workout routine that doesn’t insult your intelligence, a body that seems to testify to discipline rather than sorcery. You follow them in good faith. For a while, the content delivers. Then the expiration date quietly approaches. The useful insights thin out, replaced by a slurry of hype, urgency, and alarmist drivel—“You’re poisoning yourself unless you stop eating this one food today.” Clickbait metastasizes. The signal is buried under noise. What once felt like guidance now feels like a carnival barker shouting through a megaphone.

    Eventually you see the machinery. This isn’t a lone truth-teller sharing wisdom from a garage gym; it’s a small content factory with payroll to meet. Ideas are skimmed from journals, stripped of nuance, and polished with influencer saliva until they’re shiny enough to go viral. The real giveaway, though, isn’t the dubious science—it’s the thirst. You can see it in their eyes: the desperation to stay relevant, the exhaustion of feeding the algorithm daily, the hollow confidence of someone trapped in their own posting schedule. The charm collapses. When they appear in your feed now, it’s not curiosity you feel, but a reflexive flinch. Parasocial fatigue sets in, and disdain follows close behind.

  • Algorithmic Grooming and the Rise of the Instagram Face

    Algorithmic Grooming and the Rise of the Instagram Face

    Algorithmic Grooming

    noun

    Algorithmic Grooming refers to the slow, cumulative process by which digital platforms condition users’ tastes, attention, and behavior through repeated, curated exposure that feels personalized but is strategically engineered. Rather than directing users abruptly, the system nudges them incrementally—rewarding certain clicks, emotions, and patterns while starving others—until preferences begin to align with the platform’s commercial and engagement goals. The grooming is effective precisely because it feels voluntary and benign; users experience it as discovery, convenience, or self-expression. Yet over time, choice narrows, novelty fades, and autonomy erodes, as the algorithm trains the user to want what is most profitable to serve. What appears as personalization is, in practice, a quiet apprenticeship in predictability.

    ***

    In Filterworld, Kyle Chayka describes algorithmic recommendations with clinical clarity: systems that inhale mountains of user data, run it through equations, and exhale whatever best serves preset goals. Those goals are not yours. They belong to Google Search, Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, TikTok—the platforms that quietly choreograph your days. You tell yourself you’re shaping your feed, curating a digital self-portrait. In reality, the feed is shaping you back, sanding down your edges, rewarding certain impulses, discouraging others. What feels like mutual interdependence is a one-sided apprenticeship in predictability. The changes you undergo—your tastes, habits, even your sense of self—aren’t acts of self-authorship so much as behavior modification in service of attention capture and commerce. And crucially, this isn’t some neutral, machine-led drift. As Chayka points out, there are humans behind the curtain, tweaking the levers with intent. They pull the strings. You dance.

    The cultural fallout is flattening. When everyone is groomed by similar incentives, culture loses texture and people begin to resemble one another—algorithmically smoothed, aesthetically standardized. Chayka borrows Jia Tolentino’s example of the “Instagram face”: the ethnically ambiguous, surgically perfected, cat-like beauty that looks less human than rendered. It’s a face optimized for engagement, not expression. And it serves as a tidy metaphor for algorithmic grooming’s endgame. What begins as personalization ends in dehumanization. The algorithm doesn’t just recommend content; it quietly trains us to become the kind of people that content is easiest to sell to—interchangeable, compliant, and eerily smooth.

  • Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower Represents Our Sanctuary for Deep Work

    Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower Represents Our Sanctuary for Deep Work

    Bollingen Principle

    noun
    The principle that original, meaningful work requires a deliberately constructed refuge from distraction. Named after Carl Jung’s Bollingen Tower, the Bollingen Principle holds that depth does not emerge from convenience or connectivity, but from environments intentionally designed to protect sustained thought, solitude, and intellectual risk. Such spaces—whether physical, temporal, or psychological—function as sanctuaries where the mind can operate at full depth, free from the pressures of immediacy and performance. The principle rejects the idea that creativity can flourish amid constant interruption, insisting instead that those who seek to do work that matters must first build the conditions that allow thinking itself to breathe.

    ***

    In an age saturated with technological distraction and constant talk of “disruption” and AI-driven upheaval, it is easy to lose sight of one’s personal mission. That mission is a North Star—a purpose that orients work, effort, and flourishing. It cannot be assigned by an employer, an algorithm, or a cultural trend. It must be discovered. As Viktor Frankl argues in Man’s Search for Meaning, you do not choose meaning at will; life chooses it for you, or rather, life discloses meaning to you. The task, then, is attentiveness: to look and listen carefully to one’s particular circumstances, abilities, and obligations in order to discern what life is asking of you.

    Discerning that mission requires depth, not shallowness. Cal Newport’s central claim in Deep Work is that depth is impossible in a state of constant distraction. A meaningful life therefore demands the active rejection of shallow habits and the deliberate cultivation of sustained focus. This often requires solitude—or at minimum, long stretches of the day protected from interruption. Newport points to Carl Jung as a model. When Jung sought to transform psychiatry, he built Bollingen Tower, a retreat designed to preserve his capacity for deep thought. That environment enabled work of such originality and power that it reshaped an entire field.

    Jung’s example reveals two essential conditions for depth: a guiding ideal larger than comfort or instant gratification, and an environment structured to defend attention. To avoid a shallow life and pursue a meaningful one, we must practice the same discipline. We must listen for our own North Star as it emerges from our lives, and then build our own version of Bollingen Tower—physical, temporal, or psychological—so that we can do the work that gives our lives coherence and meaning.

  • Planning Focus Like a Bodybuilder Plans Calories

    Planning Focus Like a Bodybuilder Plans Calories

    Shallow Work Containment
    noun

    A strategy for managing unavoidable low-value tasks by strictly rationing their time and scope, much like the points system used in Weight Watchers. In this model, shallow work—email, scheduling, administrative triage—is not banned, but it is counted, budgeted, and contained within clearly defined limits. Just as Weight Watchers assigns point values to foods to prevent mindless grazing, shallow work containment treats distractions as cognitively “expensive,” forcing the worker to spend them deliberately rather than impulsively. The goal is not moral purity but control: by acknowledging that these tasks add up quickly, containment preserves the majority of cognitive “calories” for deep work, where real progress is made.

    ***

    As both a champion and a practitioner of Deep Work, Cal Newport is a model citizen of Shallow Work Containment. He doesn’t flirt with distraction; he bars it at the door. He has never had a Facebook or Twitter account, and outside of his own blog he avoids social media altogether. He doesn’t wander the web or graze on online articles. For news, he does something that now sounds faintly radical: he reads a physical copy of The Washington Post delivered to his house and listens to NPR. By surrounding himself with a protective moat against distraction invaders, Newport has, over the past decade, published four books, earned a PhD, and generally made a nuisance of himself to the myth that constant connectivity is a prerequisite for relevance.

    Newport treats technology the way serious physical culturists treat food: as something to be managed, not indulged. There is no such thing as “random” consumption. You don’t wake up and see how the day feels. You plan. You prohibit. You decide in advance what gets in and what stays out. Random scrolling is the cognitive equivalent of eating straight from the peanut butter jar. In Newport’s own formulation, his days are built around a protected core of deep work, with the shallow tasks he cannot avoid quarantined into small, contained bursts at the edges of his schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted, carefully directed concentration—nothing heroic, just disciplined—turns out to be enough to produce serious value. There’s no guesswork here. Newport does the math and follows it. Like any disciplined lifter or dieter, he hits his macros.