Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • The future, we’re told, is full of freedom—unless you’re the one still cleaning the mess.

    The future, we’re told, is full of freedom—unless you’re the one still cleaning the mess.

    Last semester, in my college critical thinking class—a room full of bright minds and burnt-out spirits—we were dissecting what feels like a nationwide breakdown in mental health. Students tossed around possible suspects like a crime scene lineup: the psychological hangover of the pandemic, TikTok influencers glamorizing nervous breakdowns with pastel filters and soft piano music, the psychic toll of watching America split like a wishbone down party lines. All plausible. All depressing.

    Then a re-entry student—a nurse with twenty years in the trenches—raised her hand and calmly dropped a depth charge into the conversation. She said she sees more patients than ever staggering into hospitals not just sick, but shattered. Demoralized. Enraged. When I asked her what she thought was behind the surge in mental illness, she didn’t hesitate. “Money,” she said. “No one has any. They’re working themselves into the ground and still can’t cover rent, groceries, and medical bills. They’re burning out and breaking down.”

    And just like that, all our theories—algorithms, influencers, red-vs-blue blood feuds—melted under the furnace heat of economic despair. She was right. She sees the raw pain daily, the kind of pain tech billionaires will never upload into a TED Talk. While they spin futuristic fables about AI liberating humanity for leisure and creativity, my nurse watches the working class crawl into urgent care with nothing left but rage and debt. The promise of Universal Basic Income sounds charming if you’re already lounging in a beanbag chair at Singularity HQ, but out here in the world of late rent and grocery inflation, it’s a pipe dream sold by people who wouldn’t recognize a shift worker if one collapsed on their marble floors. The future, we’re told, is full of freedom—unless you’re the one still cleaning the mess.

  • The Futility of Being Ready

    The Futility of Being Ready

    In December of 2019, my wife and I, both lifelong members of the National Society of Worrywarts, stumbled upon reports of a deadly virus brewing in China. Most people shrugged. We did not. I jumped on eBay and ordered a bulk box of masks the size of a hotel mini-fridge. It felt ridiculous at the time—a paranoid lark, like filling a doomsday bunker because you heard thunder on a Tuesday. But three months later, on March 13, 2020, the world shut down, and that cardboard box of N95s felt less like overreaction and more like prophecy.

    These days, I teach college in what I call the ChatGPT Era—a time when my students and I sit around analyzing how artificial intelligence is rewiring our habits, our thinking, and possibly the scaffolding of our humanity. I don’t dread AI the way I dreaded COVID. It doesn’t make me stock canned beans or disinfect door handles. But it does give me that same uneasy tremor in the gut—the sense that something vast is shifting beneath us, and that whatever emerges will make the present feel quaint and maybe a little foolish.

    It’s like standing on a beach after the earthquake and watching the water disappear from the shore. You can back up your files, rewrite your syllabus, and pretend to adapt, but you know deep down you’re stuck in Prepacolypse Mode—that desperate, irrational phase where you try to outmaneuver the future with your label maker. You prepare for the unpreparable, perform rituals of control that offer all the protection of a paper shield.

    And through it all comes that strange, electric sensation—Dreadrenaline. It’s not just fear. It’s a kind of alertness, a humming, high-voltage awareness that your life is about to be edited at the molecular level. You’re not just anticipating change—you’re bracing for a version of yourself that will be unrecognizable on the other side. You’re watching history draft your name onto the roster and realizing, too late, that you’re not a spectator anymore. You’re in the game.

  • Psychedelic Mushrooms and the Art of Saying “Meh”

    Psychedelic Mushrooms and the Art of Saying “Meh”

    People I admire—deep thinkers, seekers, trauma survivors, even that old roommate who once confused a lava lamp for God—swear by magic mushrooms. They describe transcendence, tearful reunions with their inner child, and conversations with the universe where the universe speaks perfect Jungian. Apparently, psilocybin is the shortcut to enlightenment, the divine inbox where angels drop PDFs of your truest self.

    And yet, I remain a bastion of Mushroom Apathy Syndrome (MAS)—a spiritual condition marked by an impenetrable indifference to the fungal fanfare. While others are melting into cosmic unity on some mossy hillside, I’m thinking about whether it’s time to reorganize my spice rack. I don’t want to chew sacred mold to glimpse the divine. If I need an ego death, I’ll just read my old poetry.

    Sure, I’d love to encounter the Divine—maybe Spinoza’s glowing web of pantheistic awe, maybe a seraph with decent taste in jazz. But I just can’t take mystical advice from a guy in a woven beanie yelling about chakras while wearing Crocs. If I want a head trip, I’ll queue up Yes, The Strawbs, or Crosby, Stills & Nash and lie on the floor until my chakras align from sheer harmonic exhaustion. Or better yet, I’ll abstain from sugar for ten months and then unleash nirvana with a single bite of decadent, spice-laced carrot cake.

    My condition is also rooted in a kind of Fungal Nihilism—the belief that no mushroom, no matter how ancient, artisanal, or Amazonian, can fix the howling absurdity of existence. You can’t outrun entropy with a spore. If I want to stare into the abyss and laugh, I’ll binge-watch George Carlin eviscerate modern life with nothing more than a mic, a ponytail, and a pair of skeptical eyebrows.

    Ultimately, I practice Spore Snobbery—a reflexive contempt for the breathless mythologizing of psychedelic fungus. These aren’t sacred portals. They’re glorified mushrooms with a publicist. For some, they offer spiritual clarity. For me, they sound like a gastrointestinal trust fall with no one there to catch you but an ayahuasca-shaman-turned-life-coach named Brad.

  • From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    To mock Brian Johnson, aka the Liver King, feels like low-hanging fruit off a poisoned ancestral tree. The man is a walking satirical sketch, a steroid-soaked cartoon preaching “natural living” while pumping $11,000 a month of growth hormone into his glutes. He branded himself the King, his wife the Queen, and his sons with names fit for a Mad Max reboot about a paleo militia family eating spleen jerky by moonlight.

    His entire enterprise was Caveman Cosplay with a GoPro: gnawing on cow testicles at a blood-slicked picnic table, barking into the void like a tribal prophet in a trucker hat. He promised salvation to a nation bloated on Cheetos, Twinkies, and Red Bull—offering raw liver as the Eucharist for the metabolically lost.

    Netflix’s Untold: The Liver King makes a flaccid attempt at chronicling his rise and fall. The documentary is weirdly deferential, like it’s afraid he’ll burst through the screen and challenge the viewer to a push-up contest. YouTube, in contrast, has done the real exhumation—countless videos dissecting his addiction to fame, vanity, and unregulated supplements with far more insight and bite.

    Still, the Netflix film does offer one crystalline moment of pathos-turned-parody: Johnson, preparing to repent for the lies and the deception and the overpriced ancestral liver gummies, admits on camera that he’ll need to Google the words “repentance” and “atonement” before proceeding. Imagine Martin Luther, nailing his Theses to the church door—then pulling out his phone to ask Siri what “contrition” means.

    The man is a moral dumpster fire, ablaze with the fumes of self-delusion, influencer marketing, and raw meat. But that dumpster fire casts a telling glow on the cultural cave we all inhabit—where attention is currency, truth is performative, and the algorithm rewards the loudest lunacy.

    So let us name what we’ve seen:

    • Brovangelism – The sacred zeal of gym bros converted to primal living by a shirtless messiah with abs and a coupon code.
    • Swoleblindness – The ability to overlook blatant fraud if the fraudster has veins on his deltoids.
    • Rawthenticity – Mistaking uncooked meat for unfiltered truth.
    • Cloutuary – A public, slow-motion social media death staged for likes and shares.
    • Crashfluencer – He went from virality to liability, taking his followers on a nosedive into madness.
    • Declinefluencer – An influencer whose main content is his own collapse.
    • Brandamaged – A man whose brand has outlived his dignity, but not his desperation.

    Watching Johnson spiral felt eerily familiar. It brought to mind Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I once assigned to bright-eyed freshmen before they lost their souls to TikTok. Lanier warns that algorithmic performance rewires the brain, dragging us back to our reptilian roots. It doesn’t make us more “authentic”—it makes us worse. Dumber. Meaner. Hungrier for clicks and validation. Johnson is not just a cautionary tale. He’s the caution in full, swollen flesh—drenched in growth hormone and influencer pathology.

  • Jia Tolentino Explores the Neverending Torments of Infogluttening

    Jia Tolentino Explores the Neverending Torments of Infogluttening

    In her essay “My Brain Finally Broke,” New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino doesn’t so much confess a breakdown as she performs it—on the page, in real time, with all the elegance of a collapsing soufflé. She’s spiraling like a character in a Black Mirror episode who’s accidentally binge-watched the entire internet. Reality, for her, is now an unskippable TikTok ad mashed up with a conspiracy subreddit and narrated by a stoned Siri. She mistakes a marketing email from Hanna Andersson for “Hamas,” which is either a Freudian slip or a symptom of late-stage content poisoning.

    The essay is a dispatch from the front lines of postmodern psychosis. COVID brain fog, phone addiction, weed regret, and the unrelenting chaos of a “post-truth, post-shame” America have fused into one delicious cognitive stew. Her phone has become a weaponized hallucination device. Her mind, sloshing with influencer memes, QAnon-adjacent headlines, and DALL·E-generated nonsense, now processes information like a blender without a lid.

    She hasn’t even gotten to the fun part yet: the existential horror of not using ChatGPT. While others are letting this over-eager AI ghostwrite their résumés, soothe their insecurities, and pick their pad thai, Tolentino stares into the abyss, resisting. But she can’t help wondering—would she be more insane if she gave in and let a chatbot become her best friend, life coach, and menu whisperer? She cites Noor Al-Sibai’s unnerving article about heavy ChatGPT users developing dependency, loneliness, and depression, which sounds less like a tech trend and more like a new DSM entry.

    Her conclusion? Physical reality—the sweaty, glitchy, analog mess of it—isn’t just where we recover our sanity; it’s becoming a luxury few can afford. The digital realm, with its infinite scroll of half-baked horror and curated despair, is devouring us in real time. To have the sticky-like tar of this realm coat your brain is the result of Infogluttening (info + gluttony + sickening)–a grotesque cognitive overload caused by bingeing too much content, too fast, until your brain feels like it’s gorged on deep-fried Wikipedia.

    Tolentino isn’t predicting a Black Mirror future. She is the Black Mirror future, live and unfiltered, and her brain is the canary in the content mine.

  • Sociopathware: When “Social” Media Turns on You

    Sociopathware: When “Social” Media Turns on You

    Reading Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine is like realizing that Black Mirror isn’t speculative fiction—it’s journalism. Seymour depicts our digital lives not as a harmless distraction, but as a propaganda-laced fever swamp where we are less users than livestock—bred for data, addicted to outrage, and stripped of self-agency. Watching sociopathic tech billionaires rise to power makes a dark kind of sense once you grasp that mass digital degradation isn’t a glitch—it’s the business model. We’re not approaching dystopia. We’re soaking in it.

    Most of us are already trapped in Seymour’s machine, flapping like digital pigeons in a Skinner Box—pecking for likes, retweets, or one more fleeting dopamine pellet. We scroll ourselves into oblivion, zombified by clickbait and influencer melodrama. Yet, a flicker of awareness sometimes breaks through the haze. We feel it in our fogged-over thoughts, our shortened attention spans, and our anxious obsession with being “seen” by strangers. We suspect that something inside us is being hollowed out.

    But Seymour doesn’t offer false comfort. He cites a 2015 study in which people attempted to quit Facebook for 99 days. Most couldn’t make it past 72 hours. Many defected to Instagram or Twitter instead—same addiction, different flavor. Only a rare few fully unplugged, and they reported something radical: clarity, calm, and a sudden liberation from the exhausting treadmill of self-performance. They had severed the feed and stepped outside what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls gamification capitalism—a regime where every social interaction is a data point, and every self is an audition tape.

    Seymour’s conclusion is damning: it’s time to retire the quaint euphemism “social media.” The phrase slipped into our cultural vocabulary like a charming grifter—suggesting friendly exchanges over digital lattes. But this is no buzzing café. It’s a dopamine-spewing Digital Skinner Box, where we tap and swipe like lab rats begging for validation. What we’re calling “social” is in fact algorithmic manipulation wrapped in UX design. We are not exchanging ideas—we are selling our attention for hollow engagement while surrendering our behavior to surveillance capitalists who harvest us like ethical-free farmers with no livestock regulations.

    Richard Seymour calls this system The Twittering Machine. Byung-Chul Han calls it gamification capitalism. Anna Lembke, in Dopamine Nation, calls it overstimulation as societal collapse. And thinkers studying Algorithmic Capture say we’ve reached the point where we no longer shape technology—technology shapes us. Let’s be honest: this isn’t “social media.” It’s Sociopathware. It’s addiction media. It’s the slow, glossy erosion of the self, optimized for engagement, monetized by mental disintegration.

    Here’s the part you won’t hear in a TED Talk or an onboarding video: Sociopathware was never designed to serve you. It was built to study you—your moods, fears, cravings, and insecurities—and then weaponize that knowledge to keep you scrolling, swiping, and endlessly performing. Every “like” you chase, every selfie you tweak, every argument you think you’re winning online—those are breadcrumbs in a maze you didn’t design. The longer you’re inside it, the more your sense of self becomes an avatar—algorithmically curated, strategically muted, optimized for appeal. That’s not agency. That’s submission in costume. And the more you rely on these platforms for validation, identity, or even basic social interaction, the more control you hand over to a machine that profits when you forget who you really are. If you value your voice, your mind, and your ability to think freely, don’t let a dashboard dictate your personality.

  • We Must Combat Gluttirexia

    We Must Combat Gluttirexia

    In his biting essay “The Intellectual Obesity Crisis,” Gurwinder Bhogal delivers a warning we’d be wise to tattoo on our dopamine-blasted skulls: too much of a good thing can turn lethal. Whether it’s sugar, information, or affirmation, when consumed in grotesque, unrelenting quantities, it warps us. It becomes less nourishment and more self-betrayal—a slow collapse into entropy, driven by the brain’s slavish devotion to short-term gratification.

    Bhogal cites a study showing that the brain craves information like it craves sugar: both deliver a dopamine jolt, a hit of synthetic satisfaction, followed by the inevitable crash and craving. It’s the biological equivalent of that old Russian proverb: “You feed the demon only to find it’s hungrier.” Welcome to the age of Gluttirexia—a condition I’ve coined to describe the paradox of overconsumption that leaves us spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally starved. We’re stuffed to the gills, yet empty at the core.

    Demonically famished, we prowl the Internet for sustenance and instead ingest counterfeits: ragebait, influencer slop, and weaponized memes. It’s not just junk food for the mind—it’s spoiled junk food, fermented in grievance and algorithmic manipulation. The information that lights up our brains the fastest is also the most corrosive: moral outrage, clickbait trauma, tribal hysteria. It’s psychological Cheetos dust—and we are licking our fingers like addicts.

    Reading Bhogal’s work, I pictured the creature we’ve become: not a thoughtful citizen or curious learner, but a whirling, slobbering caricature straight out of Saturday morning TV—the Tasmanian Devil with Wi-Fi. And it tracks. In a moment so self-aware it feels scripted, Bhogal notes that “brain rot” was Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year. Fitting. We gorge ourselves on intellectual cud and become bloated husks—distracted, indignant, and dumb.

    This condition—what Bhogal terms intellectual obesity—is not a joke, though it often looks like one. It’s a cognitive disorder characterized by mental bloat, sensory chaos, and a confused soundtrack of half-remembered factoids screaming over each other for attention. You don’t think. You stagger.

    As a college writing instructor trying to teach critical thinking in a post-literate era, I am in triage mode. My students—through no fault of their own—are casualties of this cognitive arms race. They arrive not just underprepared but neurologically disoriented, drowning in an ocean of noise and mistaking it for knowledge.

    Meanwhile, AI accelerates the descent. Everyone is outsourcing their cognition to silicon brains. The pace is no longer quick—it’s quantum. I’m dizzy from the whiplash, stunned by the sheer speed of the collapse.

    To survive, I’ve started building a personal lexicon—a breadcrumb trail through the algorithmic inferno. Words to name what’s happening, so I don’t lose my mind entirely:

    • Lexipocalypse: the shrinking of language into emojis, acronyms, and SEO sludge
    • Mentalluvium: the slurry of mental debris left after hours lost in the online casino
    • Chumstream: the endless digital shark tank of outrage and influencer chum
    • Gluttirexia: the grotesque irony of being overfed and undernourished—bloated with junk info and spiritually famished

    I keep this list close, like a man at sea clinging to his life vest in the middle of a storm. I sense the hungry oceanic sharks circling beneath me. 

  • We Are Lost Inside the Mentalluvium

    We Are Lost Inside the Mentalluvium

    We are staggering through an unprecedented fugue state—an acute disorientation born of our immersion in the social media Chumstream, a digital shark tank where recycled outrage, trauma bait, and influencer chum swirl together in a frothy, click-hungry frenzy. It’s not a stream so much as a bloody whirlpool, designed to keep us circling, feeding, and forgetting.

    Gurwinder Bhogal, a rare voice of reason in this algorithmic carnival, broke it down on Josh Szeps’ Uncomfortable Conversations. Social media, he said, isn’t just addictive—it’s engineered by tech lords who know exactly how to hijack your brain. Blue light. Intermittent dopamine rewards. Infinite scroll. Welcome to the digital casino, a neon maze with no clocks, no windows, and no exits—only flashing notifications and the creeping sense that your life is being siphoned off one swipe at a time.

    In this fever swamp of the self, people aren’t just bored—they’re bloated. Stuffed with half-digested TED Talk wisdom, viral symptom checklists, and influencer pathology. They gorge on intellectual junk food and, as Bhogal put it, suffer from “intellectual obesity.” Diagnoses become identities, and confusion is recast as empowerment. It’s not that they have ADHD, long Covid, autism, or gender dysmorphia—it’s that they scroll into them, self-diagnosing in real time, latching onto whatever trending malaise grants them a fleeting sense of belonging in the void.

    These are not charlatans. These are casualties. Belief becomes ballast in a digital landscape where nothing is anchored. They wander through the cognitive casino, zombified, dislocated, convinced that a diagnostic label is the same as self-knowledge, and that performative suffering is the highest form of authenticity.

    What we’re experiencing isn’t just burnout. It’s Mentalluvium—the psychic sludge left behind after gorging on content. It’s the mental silt of endless scrolling: micro-identities, algorithm-approved neuroses, and dopamine-smeared fragments of truth. We are not thinking. We are sedimenting.

    If this is hell, it didn’t come with flames. It came with filters.

  • Waiting for the Angels to Descend and Hand Me the Perfect Book Title on a Velvet Pillow

    Waiting for the Angels to Descend and Hand Me the Perfect Book Title on a Velvet Pillow

    After reading Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga—a meandering, self-lacerating spiral of spiritual ambition, narcissism, and depressive collapse—I’ve found myself inspired, if not outright possessed, by the urge to write my own autobiographical novel. Not about yoga, of course. I have the flexibility of a rusted lawn chair. Mine would be about my lifelong addiction to exercise. Working title: Kettlebell.

    It has a certain Zen austerity to it. One word. Heavy. Spherical. Monastic. A blunt object and a metaphor all in one. A symbol of focus in a world engineered for entropy. While others turn to wine, weed, or weaponized mindfulness apps, I have turned to iron. Cold, unyielding, mildly concussive iron.

    Of course, I could flirt with cleverness—titles like The Church of Sweat or The Temple of Gains—but those reek of Instagram influencers and overpriced gym merch. Kettlebell is purer. But then again, Dumbbell tugs at me. It’s honest. It’s humiliating. It suggests what I secretly suspect: that I’ve spent a lifetime mistaking pain for virtue and resistance training for redemption. I am a Dumb Bell. A heavy object being swung around in circles, hoping to find peace through repetition.

    Still, perhaps I’m playing into the oldest self-help trap of them all—masquerading self-deprecation as enlightenment. Perhaps the search for the perfect title is simply a glorified avoidance ritual, a form of literary procrastination wrapped in velvet. Because deep down, I know the book isn’t just about fitness. It’s about how I’ve used discipline as anesthesia, reps as prayer beads, and physical exhaustion as a form of epistemology. I don’t know what God looks like, but I suspect He smells like workout chalk and vanilla protein shakes.

    Some mornings I feel like a garage-dwelling mystic, swinging kettlebells under flickering LED light, muttering mantras between sets. Other days I feel like an absurd parody of Sisyphus—except instead of rolling a boulder up a hill, I’m performing goblet squats in my tattered gym shorts, chasing transcendence in 30-second rest intervals.

    And now, on the brink of another workout, I’m wasting precious calories spiraling into a metaphysical title crisis. Maybe the perfect name will descend from the sky, borne aloft by angels in sweatbands and Lululemon, whispering, “This is it. This is your brand.” They will hand me the title on a velvet pillow. Or maybe I’ll figure it out in the middle of a brutal set, when my soul finally detaches from my body like a spent shell casing and whispers, “Just call it Garage Monk and be done with it.”

    One way or another, the iron awaits. And it does not care what the book is called.

  • It’s Time to Replace the Manoverse

    It’s Time to Replace the Manoverse

    The Manoverse—if we’re still calling it that—is less a universe and more a glorified bachelor pad of delusion: part weight room, part cigar lounge, part bunker of arrested development. It’s where middle-aged men cosplay as lone wolves, though most couldn’t survive a weekend without their chiropractor, their wireless earbuds, or the approval of a group chat titled “Legends Only.”

    Here, masculinity is curated like a Spotify playlist: heavy on Joe Rogan and conspiracy theories, light on self-awareness. It’s a world built on protein powder, podcast epistemology, and the sacred belief that buying another tactical flashlight will somehow repair one’s crumbling sense of purpose. These men aren’t villains. They’re just… tired. Tired of being told to open up and tired of not knowing how. So instead, they talk about cigars and bourbon like it’s therapy and do deadlifts until their emotions herniate.

    It’s not toxic masculinity—it’s post-traumatic stoicism, sprayed with Axe and monetized via affiliate links. A more accurate word for Manoverse is Brocosytem–a thriving ecosystem of protein, posturing, and podcast quotes or Testosterzone– where men go to reclaim their abs, autonomy, and adolescent values.

    We need a wholesome place for masculinity–a place for strength and stewardship. We need a Manstead–a homestead of character; a grounded place where strength meets responsibility or a Mantlehood–which suggests taking up a mantle: carrying responsibility with humility and grace. Or we need a Manhaven–a sanctuary of stable, nurturing masculinity. Protective, not possessive.

    The self-satisfied podcasters of the so-called Manosphere have officially jumped the shark. Their recycled rants and tired performances have lost whatever relevance they once had. It’s clear they’ve outlived their cultural moment. What we need now are new voices—embodied, grounded examples of healthy masculinity—men who lead with integrity, vulnerability, and actual wisdom instead of volume and vanity.