Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • The Hidden Strength of American Loneliness

    The Hidden Strength of American Loneliness

    In his Atlantic essay “American Loneliness,” Yair Lapid approaches America with the fresh eyes of an outsider. Americans, immersed in their own culture, rarely notice the water they swim in. Lapid does. What he sees is a nation shaped by an affliction so pervasive that many Americans mistake it for ordinary life: loneliness.

    To Lapid, loneliness is not merely being alone. It is exile. He writes, “People like me—the children of the non-American world—are accustomed to thinking of loneliness as a kind of slow sadness. Loneliness is the failure to connect, the disintegration of a family, the collapse of community. Loneliness means you have fallen from a train and are lying beside the tracks, listening to the shriek of the whistle dying in the dark.” What Americans often accept as the inevitable cost of adulthood appears, to someone raised elsewhere, almost biblical in its severity—a banishment into the outer darkness.

    Over the past thirty-five years, Lapid has crossed America repeatedly, driving its highways, stopping at diners, gas stations, drugstores, and roadside cafés. Those travels have led him to reject the fashionable caricature of America as a nation consumed by violence, paranoia, and xenophobia. He has encountered something far less sensational: ordinary people who are generous, decent, and welcoming. The darker portrait of America, he argues, often comes from what he calls the “malicious gossip” of commentators who mistake hyperbole for insight because outrage attracts attention.

    Strip away the exaggeration, however, and one profound truth remains. America is lonely.

    That loneliness began with immigration itself. Millions crossed oceans seeking opportunity, but they paid for it by severing themselves from families, villages, languages, and traditions. They arrived carrying not only hope but also a deep sense of dislocation. Unlike societies that prize the family or the collective, America has long celebrated the self-made individual. The heroic image of the rugged pioneer carries a hidden cost. Independence often means separation.

    Geography reinforces the condition. America is immense. Its vastness allows reinvention, but it also makes disappearance easy. One can vanish into a new city, a new state, or an entirely new life without anyone noticing.

    Progress deepens the isolation. Lapid invokes Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction,” the process by which capitalism continuously replaces the old with the new. New technologies do not simply create industries; they erase them. They dissolve careers, weaken inherited authority, scatter communities, and reorder entire ways of life. Americans have long embraced this relentless churn because they believe tomorrow can be better than today. Yet every leap forward leaves someone standing amid the rubble.

    The Protestant work ethic intensifies the pattern. Americans devote extraordinary energy to achievement, often sacrificing community in pursuit of success. The rewards are undeniable. America has produced astonishing advances in technology, medicine, literature, music, entrepreneurship, and cinema. But the same relentless drive that fuels innovation can also leave people spiritually isolated, making them more vulnerable to addiction, extremism, and despair.

    For Lapid, these forces converge into a startling conclusion: loneliness is not an unfortunate by-product of the American experiment. It is one of its founding materials. As he writes, “Loneliness is not a glitch in the system; it is the raw material from which the system was built.”

    Yet Lapid does not regard this as a fatal weakness. On the contrary, he believes America’s unusual tolerance for upheaval gives it an advantage over many of its rivals. He worries more about Europe, whose attachment to tradition may inhibit adaptation. He is pessimistic about Russia, whose wars threaten to destroy public confidence in the state. He is skeptical that China’s centralized political system can absorb the economic and social disruptions that rapid technological change will bring.

    America, by contrast, has spent centuries reinventing itself.

    As Lapid memorably observes, “America is not a cathedral—it is a workshop.” Workshops are noisy, untidy places where old things are dismantled so new things can be built. They value experimentation over preservation and movement over permanence. Americans have repeatedly endured the loneliness that accompanies such transformation, and in doing so they have developed an unusual resilience.

    Lapid therefore arrives at a paradox. In much of the world, loneliness signals failure, abandonment, or despair. In America, it often signals something else entirely. It is the emotional price of mobility, reinvention, ambition, and progress. Americans do not merely endure loneliness; they incorporate it into their national identity. As Lapid puts it, they are “turning loneliness into a covenant.”

    Whether that covenant is ultimately a blessing or a curse remains an open question. But Lapid persuades us that it is one of the defining features of the American character—a burden that has produced extraordinary innovation even as it has left countless people searching for the connections that progress so often leaves behind.

  • What Happens After Peak Watch Addiction? 

    What Happens After Peak Watch Addiction? 

    When I uploaded my first YouTube video fifteen years ago, I approached the medium with all the technical sophistication of America’s Funniest Home Videos circa 1990. I had recently fallen under the spell of Seiko and Citizen watches and possessed exactly enough knowledge to be dangerous. I wasn’t a curator. I was a caveman who had just discovered fire. My videos consisted largely of me staring in astonishment at a titanium Citizen Promaster, hoping viewers might catch the same contagious wonder. My outfits were not professional. I was wearing a bathrobe with Cheerios clinging to the lapel and a milk mustache under my nose.

    The set looked as though a laundromat had exploded behind me. Laundry baskets overflowed with unfolded clothes. The lighting was so dreadful that viewers could never be entirely certain whether I was filming from my office or haunting a Medieval dungeon. As for focus, let us simply say that sharp images were treated as an optional feature rather than a design requirement.

    Eventually I purchased a better camera and developed a passing acquaintance with lighting and autofocus. But while I was taking baby steps, YouTube entered the Space Age. Channels began deploying drones over great white sharks, robotic camera rigs that glided through African safaris, helicopters circling erupting volcanoes, and editing suites that looked as though they had been borrowed from Christopher Nolan.

    I, meanwhile, was Fred Flintstone pedaling my Stoneage vehicle into a Tesla convention.

    Curiously, as YouTube marched into the future, I wandered in the opposite direction.

    I rarely make traditional watch videos anymore. Partly that’s because my collection has stabilized. I no longer acquire enough watches to justify another breathless “State of the Collection” update, a genre that now feels about as fresh and exciting as Hootie & the Blowfish.

    But something deeper also changed.

    I became uncomfortable participating in what I now recognize as the economics of envy. Every glossy close-up, every dramatic wrist roll, every thumbnail promising the next grail watch risks manufacturing dissatisfaction in viewers who were perfectly happy with their collections until five minutes earlier. I know because I spent years falling into exactly that trap myself.

    Instead of filming watches, I began interrogating the psychology behind collecting them.

    The channel gradually evolved into something resembling a podcast with occasional wrist shots. I developed a lexicon describing the peculiar madness of watch collecting and eventually self-published a book containing more than one hundred entries. Among them is what I call The Watch Potency Principle: as a collection expands, each individual watch loses a little of its emotional power. Eventually the collector experiences a crisis, sells everything in pursuit of liberation, discovers that liberation is strangely unsatisfying, and begins buying watches all over again. Repeat until death. Tolkien called this Gollum. I called it the process of Gollumification. 

    Having spent years dissecting the disease, I find myself with surprisingly little left to diagnose.

    That leaves my YouTube channel in an awkward adolescence.

    I don’t want to retire it because I genuinely enjoy making video essays. But I no longer possess the manic enthusiasm that algorithms adore. I am still a watch collector, just no longer in my Peak Addiction Period. Unfortunately, emotional equilibrium is terrible for audience engagement. YouTube rewards obsession far more enthusiastically than contentment.

    The truth is, I am also an extraordinarily boring man.

    I live in suburban Torrance. There is precious little cinematic drama in watching me search for a parking space at Costco, call a plumber when the shower backs up, or negotiate a family summit over the proper method for removing a daddy longlegs from my daughter’s bedroom wall. The algorithm craves spectacle. I offer plumbing invoices.

    People sometimes ask why I don’t pivot into politics.

    The answer is simple. Modern politics has become professional wrestling with legislation attached. Policy increasingly serves as the pretext for performance. Every public figure must become either the Hero or the Villain. Every disagreement requires apocalyptic language. Every debate ends with someone declaring civilization itself to be on the brink of collapse.

    I have no talent for that performance because I can see the stage directions.

    If my channel survives, it has to survive because I mean what I say, not because I have mastered the latest choreography of outrage.

    So here I am.

    I am sixty-four years old. I have spent forty years teaching writing, fifty years lifting weights and obsessing over nutrition, and twenty-five years collecting watches. By any reasonable measure, I should know exactly who I am.

    Instead, I find myself confronting an unexpected truth.

    I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

    Perhaps that uncertainty is no longer something to hide.

    Moving forward with the uncertainty is the story.

    If my YouTube channel has a future, I suspect it won’t be about watches at all. It will be about what happens after the obsessions cool, after the algorithms lose interest, and after a man discovers that the hardest collection to curate is not the one in his watch box, but the unfinished life still ticking quietly inside himself.

  • I’m a Radio Man Trapped in a YouTube Video

    I’m a Radio Man Trapped in a YouTube Video

    On the final episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca—who is leaving to assume an executive role at a still-undisclosed institution—lamented the passing of an older form of media. He spoke about the intimacy of hearing a voice without being forced to watch it. A voice enters your home stripped of spectacle. It asks for attention rather than demanding it. It does not require jump cuts, dramatic lighting, animated captions, exaggerated facial expressions, or an algorithm trained to hijack your dopamine receptors. Pesca admitted that one reason he was ending The Gist was simple: he no longer wished to compete in the circus.

    He spoke warmly of Julia Turner, whose Culture Gabfest has also come to an end. He noted that Marc Maron has little interest in becoming another video personality. Although Pesca didn’t mention them, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog of Blocked and Reported have similarly resisted reshaping their podcast into a YouTube product. Pesca observed that the retirement of Maron, the disappearance of Culture Gabfest, and the end of The Gist signal “the end of an era.”

    Listening to him, I realized I have been mourning that era for some time.

    Shortly afterward, David Greene closed an episode of Left, Right & Center by announcing the retirement of NPR’s Don Gonyea. Another unforgettable voice was disappearing from my daily life. I found myself oddly saddened. I wasn’t losing a face. I was losing a companion. Don Gonyea will be missed. So will Marc Maron. So will Mike Pesca. 

    It finally dawned on me while listening to Mike Pesca’s farewell episode of The Gist: I spent fifteen years making YouTube videos, but I was never really a YouTuber. I was a radio man trapped inside a YouTube video.

    I have never formed a deep attachment to YouTubers or Instagram personalities. I connect with voices. I grew up in the age of radio, when a voice carried enough authority to build an audience and enough warmth to become part of a family’s routine. I still remember the oversized preset buttons on my parents’ turquoise Chrysler Newport as Dionne Warwick asked if we knew the way to San Jose and The 5th Dimension floated “Up, Up and Away” through the speakers. In the 1970s, my mother’s Panasonic RF-1080 seemed permanently tuned to KGO 810 AM. Jim Eason, Jim Dunbar, and Ron Owens narrated our days with such consistency that they became as essential to the household as breakfast. When we visited my grandparents in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson drifted through the house while conversations about politics, books, and current events unfolded around him. Living among ideas was not an extracurricular activity. It was simply what adults did.

    Some of my happiest childhood memories involve nothing more than lying on a couch or sitting on the porch while an AM radio broadcaster called a baseball game. Those voices carried me into a dream world more comforting than the one outside my front door. Even now, I suspect that paradise sounds less like angels singing than a baseball announcer calmly describing a lazy fly ball to center field.

    When podcasts emerged in the early 2010s, they felt like radio reborn. I loved the voices. I loved the predictability. A good podcast possessed architecture. It opened with one segment, moved naturally into another, and arrived at a satisfying conclusion. As a writing instructor whose life revolves around lesson plans, outlines, and coherent arguments, I appreciated that structure. A podcast respected the listener’s attention instead of treating it as prey.

    Video rarely shows the same respect.

    Too often, it reshapes personalities into algorithmic caricatures. Everyone speaks with theatrical urgency. Every thumbnail depicts someone whose eyes appear to have witnessed the Second Coming or an alien invasion. Every headline promises that everything you believe has just been DESTROYED. Outrage has become less an emotion than a production budget.

    The internet has perfected a new facial expression: the clickbait gasp. Apparently, no thought is complete until someone opens his mouth wide enough to swallow the thumbnail.

    I find the entire performance exhausting.

    When I think back to watching The Dick Cavett Show as a ten-year-old, I remember almost nothing about the visuals. I remember Cavett’s voice—curious, literate, skeptical, and wonderfully patient. He made intelligence sound inviting rather than performative. Listening to him, I wanted to inhabit a world where thoughtful people spoke in complete sentences, entertained competing ideas, and considered nuance a virtue instead of a liability. Perhaps Cavett planted the seeds of elitism in me. If a conversation lacked subtlety, I assumed it lacked seriousness.

    Reflecting on Pesca’s farewell forced me to confront my own fifteen years on YouTube.

    Technically, I have always been hopeless. More than once I filmed a watch review so badly that the watch itself remained stubbornly out of focus while the comments section delighted in informing me of my incompetence. As YouTube evolved into an increasingly polished medium—with cinematic lighting, drone footage, elaborate editing, and graphics worthy of cable television—I never evolved with it.

    Nor, I eventually realized, did I want to.

    My interest gradually shifted away from close-up glamour shots of luxury watches and endless “State of the Collection” videos. I became more interested in why we chase possessions than in the possessions themselves. My videos became essays disguised as watch content. The algorithm, understandably, was unimpressed.

    Recently I noticed that six weeks had passed since I uploaded a video.

    I am not abandoning the channel. But I have become suspicious of speaking merely because the algorithm demands another upload. I have no desire to become someone who mistakes constant broadcasting for having something worth saying. Every new video should earn its existence. It should contribute something I have not already said. It should reflect genuine conviction rather than anxiety about disappearing.

    Perhaps that standard is impossibly high.

    Or perhaps it is simply what growing older feels like.

    I am sixty-four now. The older I become, the less interested I am in producing content and the more interested I am in producing thought. The algorithm rewards frequency. Age rewards discrimination.

    If I have learned anything from listening to voices like Mike Pesca, Don Gonyea, Dick Cavett, Jim Dunbar, and Marc Maron, it is that the medium was never the point. The point was never to command attention. It was to deserve it.

    Maybe that is the real end of the era—not the disappearance of podcasts, but the fading belief that a single thoughtful voice, speaking without spectacle, is enough.

    I hope it still is.

  • Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    In the documentary Queen of Chess, Judit Polgár recounts how she became a grandmaster at the age of fifteen, shattering one of the oldest gender barriers in competitive chess. She entered a world where many male players regarded women not merely as underdogs but as biological impossibilities. Looking back on her extraordinary rise, she credits her parents with many gifts, but one towers above the rest: they taught her always to believe in herself.

    I have heard those words my entire life. Believe in yourself. They are stitched onto graduation speeches, embroidered across motivational posters, and recited by well-meaning adults with the mechanical confidence of people reading assembly instructions. The phrase has always struck me as strangely hollow, a verbal vitamin whose label promises transformation while omitting the active ingredient. Yet when Judit Polgár uttered those same words, they landed differently. Here was someone who had walked into hostile rooms, defeated the world’s strongest players, and emerged victorious. Her confidence had survived contact with reality. That gave the cliché a gravity it had never possessed before.

    Over the months since watching the documentary, I have tried to understand what believing in yourself actually means. It is not wishful thinking, nor is it chanting affirmations in the bathroom mirror before work. It is trust. It is the confidence that your conscious intentions and your unconscious habits are allies rather than enemies. It is the quiet expectation that when difficulty arrives, you will respond with discipline instead of sabotage. Believing in yourself also means possessing the assurance that you belong in rooms where others doubt your right to enter. It is the conviction that closed doors are obstacles to overcome rather than verdicts to accept.

    The difficulty, at least in my case, is that I have accumulated decades of evidence against myself. My adversary has never been an unsympathetic chess establishment. It has been the unruly republic inside my own skull. I resolve to become more patient, then lose my temper over some trivial irritation before lunchtime. I promise to eat sensibly, only to find myself negotiating peace treaties with pizza and signing unconditional surrender documents to apple pie crowned with vanilla ice cream. I announce noble intentions with presidential confidence, while my appetites quietly stage a coup before dinner. After enough of these episodes, self-doubt ceases to be a philosophical problem and becomes a statistical conclusion.

    Then there is vanity, perhaps the most elegant form of self-deception ever invented. Blaise Pascal observed that we expend more effort creating the appearance of virtue than acquiring virtue itself. I have often found that observation painfully accurate. It is easier to curate the image of a disciplined life than to endure the discipline required to build one. Vanity offers applause without achievement, while laziness quietly pockets the bill. Together they form a conspiracy against genuine confidence. You cannot consistently admire a person who repeatedly breaks promises to himself, even when that person happens to be you.

    Of course, recognizing these flaws carries its own danger. Honest self-examination can quickly mutate into sophisticated excuse-making. One can become so fascinated by one’s defects that they begin functioning as permanent alibis. “This is simply who I am,” the inner defense attorney argues, as though diagnosis absolves responsibility. It does not. Accurate self-knowledge should produce accountability, not acquittal.

    That is why I admire Judit Polgár. Her confidence does not appear theatrical or narcissistic. It rests upon competence, discipline, and years of keeping promises to herself. I suspect her parents did more than encourage her to believe in herself. They taught her to become the sort of person who deserved her own trust.

    For those of us who did not inherit that gift so naturally, there is another path. We cannot manufacture self-belief through slogans. We must earn it the old-fashioned way, by repeatedly choosing character over compulsion, humility over vanity, discipline over appetite, and substance over performance. Confidence is not bestowed by motivational speeches. It is accumulated, one kept promise at a time.

  • The Museum of Youth

    The Museum of Youth

    The Getty Museum has a way of conspiring with beautiful weather to make mortality feel especially impolite. Today, the sky possessed the crystalline blue one imagines hovering over ancient Pompeii before Vesuvius interrupted everyone’s plans. The museum’s travertine terraces glowed in the California sun, and everywhere I looked were couples in their twenties, impossibly attractive and strolling with the unselfconscious confidence that only youth can afford. Watching them, I found myself seized by an irrational envy. They seemed to possess not merely smooth skin and stronger knees but entire decades still waiting to unfold before them. Their lives resembled gleaming new luxury cars rolling effortlessly off the showroom floor. Mine, by comparison, felt like an old jalopy whose owner had begun listening nervously for unfamiliar noises under the hood.

    I envied what they represented more than who they were. They still possessed unopened chapters, careers not yet exhausted, friendships not yet mourned, dreams still wrapped in factory packaging. Youth carries with it the intoxicating illusion that time is an inexhaustible natural resource rather than a rapidly depreciating asset. Standing among them, I felt like someone who had arrived late to a party only to discover that everyone else was just beginning. I attempted the usual remedies. I reminded myself how fortunate I have been, how much joy my life has contained, how many blessings I scarcely deserved. None of it helped. Self-awareness is an ineffective antidepressant. Instead, I found myself scolding my own melancholy, accusing myself of being simultaneously ungrateful, petty, and embarrassingly sentimental—as though shame were somehow an antidote to longing.

    Fortunately, despair has an enemy that rarely receives the credit it deserves: usefulness. Later that afternoon, my teenage daughter and I sat in the museum café eating burgers while the conversation drifted toward her latest fascination—the pop music of the 1970s. Suddenly I was no longer competing with twenty-five-year-olds for possession of the future. I was explaining why certain songs endure, introducing artists she had not yet discovered, and watching her curiosity gather momentum. In that ordinary exchange, something quietly shifted. My value no longer depended upon having decades ahead of me. It depended upon having decades behind me that were worth sharing.

    That afternoon reminded me that envy is often a failure of perspective. I had mistaken youth for significance when significance had been sitting across the table all along. The young couples wandering the Getty possessed one kind of wealth: possibility. I possessed another: memory, experience, hard-earned judgment, and a daughter who still found those things worth hearing. The museum’s masterpieces had survived centuries because they continued to speak across generations. Perhaps that is the better aspiration. We eventually stop being the newest exhibit in the gallery. Our task then is to become one of the paintings that still rewards anyone willing to stop, look closely, and listen.

  • The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    My video production is on hold because I find myself interrogating my place in the watch world. I have little appetite for another “State of the Collection” video. That genre has become the YouTube equivalent of a sitcom reunion special: everyone knows the script before the opening credits roll. Likewise, I am convinced I have exhausted the lexicon of watch addiction. I have dissected acquisition syndrome, rationalization, buyer’s remorse, dopamine hits, grail watches, collection pruning, and every psychological contortion a watch enthusiast performs while pretending another purchase is somehow “different this time.” At some point, the commentary begins recycling itself, and I have no desire to become an echo of my former self.

    The irony is that none of this means I love watches any less. They remain as captivating—and as capable of hijacking my imagination—as they were twenty years ago. Two pieces continue to haunt me. The first is the Grand Seiko SBGP009, whose champagne-silver dial possesses the quiet authority of vintage elegance while its quartz movement drifts no more than ten seconds in an entire year. The second is the Orient Star M42 Diver 1964 Recreation (RE-AU0503N), a watch that somehow manages to look both nostalgic and purposeful without descending into retro cosplay. My greatest misfortune is that neither watch is outrageously expensive. The Grand Seiko costs only about three thousand dollars, and the Orient Star about one thousand. I almost wish they were twice as expensive. Overpriced luxury has an odd virtue: it occasionally protects us from ourselves.

    Meanwhile, most of my creative energy has migrated to my blog. There I can pursue ideas that would suffocate inside a fifteen-minute YouTube video. I can move from watches to literature, from moral philosophy to true crime, from AI to theology without asking whether the algorithm will punish me for changing lanes. The writing feels richer, stranger, and ultimately more meaningful. Unfortunately, blogs occupy the cultural equivalent of a deserted side street while YouTube resembles Times Square. One offers freedom without an audience; the other offers an audience that constantly demands the familiar. Whether I can remain content scribbling thoughtful essays into relative obscurity is a question I have not yet answered.

    One conclusion, however, no longer requires interrogation. I am an incurable watch enthusiast. There is no treatment, no twelve-step program, no miraculous cure. I have accepted that reality. My task is not to extinguish the fascination but to discipline it. I must keep reminding myself that admiring a watch is not the same thing as needing to own it. Beauty can be appreciated without becoming another possession. In fact, the older I become, the more I suspect that an overcrowded collection diminishes rather than enriches the experience, spreading affection so thinly that no single watch receives the attention it deserves. Perhaps the highest form of collecting is learning that appreciation sometimes reaches its fullest expression the moment you decide to walk away.

    Happy Fourth, everyone.

  • Every Watch Collector Dreams of Losing His Collection

    Every Watch Collector Dreams of Losing His Collection

    I’ve been obsessing over watches for more than twenty years. During that time I’ve come to know hundreds of fellow obsessives, and I’ve learned that we all suffer from the same peculiar affliction.

    Many of us eventually assemble collections that should, by any reasonable standard, satisfy us. Mine certainly should. I own watches I genuinely love and wear regularly. The hunt is largely over.

    Or so it would seem.

    Because every serious collector eventually asks the same deliciously irrational question.

    What if I had to start over?

    Suppose I came home from work and discovered that an earthquake, a burglary, or perhaps the Rapture had removed every watch from my collection. My watch box sat open like an abandoned nest.

    Tabula rasa.

    Nothing remained.

    What would I buy first?

    Among watch enthusiasts, this thought experiment produces an excitement that borders on religious ecstasy. It is Dorothy taking her first step onto the Yellow Brick Road. The adventure begins anew.

    The appeal isn’t difficult to explain.

    You would have the opportunity to lose your mind all over again.

    You could experience, for a second time, the exquisite madness of becoming a watch collector.

    When you were young in the hobby, you complained endlessly about the obsession. The endless research. The sleepless nights. The compulsive buying and selling. The dopamine dripping from every incoming package and every outgoing shipment.

    You called it addiction.

    You called it insanity.

    You swore that one day you would finally reach contentment.

    Then contentment arrived.

    And quietly, almost shamefully, you began missing the insanity.

    The seasoned collector sometimes resembles Neddy Merrill in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” Like Neddy, he imagines himself younger than he really is, setting out once more on an impossible journey, convinced that somewhere ahead waits the exhilaration of youth. Not because youth was wiser—it certainly wasn’t—but because everything still shimmered with possibility.

    That is what the empty watch box promises.

    Possibility.

    So what would I do if fate forced me to begin again?

    I’d like to think experience has made me wiser.

    I’d probably abandon mechanical watches altogether. I’d pursue precision instead of romance.

    Every watch would be solar-powered.

    Every watch would synchronize itself through atomic radio signals or GPS satellites.

    No winding.

    No battery changes.

    No time drift.

    Just effortless perfection beneath the endless Southern California sun.

    The collection might include several digital G-Shocks, unquestionably a Frogman, a couple of Citizen Promasters, one or two Citizen Attesas, and perhaps a pair of Seiko Astrons.

    On paper, it sounds almost ideal.

    Until I imagine living with it.

    Then the doubts begin.

    I’d miss my Seiko mechanical divers.

    I’d miss my quartz Tuna.

    I’d miss the gentle sweep of a mechanical seconds hand doing absolutely nothing more accurately than a quartz movement while somehow feeling infinitely more alive.

    Before long, I’d find myself rebuilding almost exactly the collection I own today.

    That’s when the embarrassing truth becomes impossible to ignore.

    The exercise was never about watches.

    It was about the rabbit hole.

    Collectors often imagine they’re addicted to acquiring things.

    I don’t think that’s quite right.

    We’re addicted to anticipation.

    To research.

    To comparison charts.

    To late-night YouTube reviews.

    To convincing ourselves that the next purchase will finally resolve the argument raging inside our heads.

    The object merely gives the obsession somewhere to land.

    Take away the watches, and we’d simply begin manufacturing another fantasy.

    The empty watch box isn’t appealing because it contains nothing.

    It’s appealing because it gives us permission to become beautifully irrational one more time.

    That is the secret longing of the seasoned collector.

    Not another watch.

    Another chance to go gloriously, ecstatically, and completely mad.

  • A Hundred Calories, Elaine Pagels, and Dvořák

    A Hundred Calories, Elaine Pagels, and Dvořák

    Yesterday I came within one hundred calories of eating only three meals.

    Around 7:30 in the evening, I made my daughter a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder, sliced peaches, banana, and vanilla unsweetened soy milk. She lost interest before she finished. Three lonely tablespoons remained in the bowl.

    As I carried it to the sink, a familiar voice appeared.

    “Don’t let perfectly good food go to waste.”

    Naturally, I obeyed.

    I polished off the leftovers before rinsing the bowl, thereby adding roughly one hundred unnecessary calories to my day under the noble banner of environmental stewardship.

    It’s remarkable how virtue always volunteers to represent appetite in court.

    Oddly enough, I didn’t feel especially guilty. One hundred calories is hardly the nutritional equivalent of robbing a bank.

    Later that evening, while my wife visited with friends, I watched Perfect Days. It is one of those rare films that quietly restores your faith in ordinary goodness. Its protagonist cleans public toilets with such humility and grace that he makes most ambitious people seem spiritually impoverished.

    The film’s generous silences reminded me of La Strada. Both movies revolve around souls so guileless they expose the vulgarity of everyone around them. As I watched Perfect Days, I kept thinking, This has the same moral weather as La Strada.

    Yesterday also taught me three lessons.

    The first concerns hunger.

    Going five or six hours between lunch and dinner is uncomfortable.

    That’s all.

    It isn’t torture.

    It isn’t a crisis.

    It isn’t an emergency requiring immediate intervention by almonds, protein bars, or peanut butter.

    It’s simply a mild inconvenience.

    Seeing it stripped of melodrama made me realize something about myself. If I insist on pampering every small discomfort, I’ll never accomplish anything worthwhile. I have no trouble punishing myself on the Airdyne or during a hard kettlebell workout. Physical exertion doesn’t intimidate me.

    Resisting the urge to snack?

    That turns out to be the harder discipline.

    And that’s precisely why I need to practice it.

    The goal is straightforward: 230 pounds down to 210.

    No heroics.

    Just consistency.

    The second lesson concerned reading.

    Or rather, the uncomfortable realization that I haven’t really been reading.

    Twice I “read” Elaine Pagels’ Why Religion? on my Kindle.

    Now I’m listening to the audiobook.

    The difference is almost embarrassing.

    The audiobook has revealed a memoir that is moving, intellectually rich, and deeply humane. I feel as though I’m absorbing ten times more than I ever did with the Kindle. My earlier readings now strike me less as acts of reading than as acts of turning pages while my mind wandered off to inspect some unrelated shiny object.

    Apparently my eyes were reading.

    My brain had clocked out.

    The only way I genuinely read on a Kindle is as a form of critical study. I sit at my desktop with the Kindle open on one monitor and Google Docs on the other. I take notes, write commentary, formulate questions, and argue with the author. That’s reading.

    Collapsing into bed with a Kindle at night turns out to be something else entirely.

    I’m beginning to suspect that bedtime belongs to printed books or audiobooks, while the Kindle belongs at my desk, where it can be interrogated rather than merely glanced at.

    Ironically, as I write this, another possibility occurs to me. Perhaps a split-screen setup on my laptop—with the Kindle on one side and Google Docs on the other—would recreate that same active engagement away from my desktop.

    That idea sounds far better now than it did five minutes ago.

    The third lesson came courtesy of Dvořák.

    Ever since buying a Marshall Stanmore III for the bedroom, I’ve fallen even more deeply in love with classical music. Last night I typed Dvořák’s name into the SiriusXM search bar, and the app rewarded me with an endless procession of Eastern European composers.

    The sound pouring out of that speaker is breathtaking.

    Rich.

    Warm.

    Expansive.

    The music doesn’t merely occupy the room.

    It ennobles it.

    In fact, it may be sabotaging my Kindle reading. Faced with music that beautiful, why would I pay attention to the printed page? The orchestra wins every time.

    Then bedtime arrives.

    I reach for the power button.

    And a strange thought enters my mind.

    Turning off music this beautiful feels almost morally questionable.

    Surely another symphony wouldn’t hurt.

    Perhaps just one more movement.

    This is, I admit, the most luxurious problem I’ve ever had.

    I won’t lose sleep over it.

    If my greatest dilemma is choosing between Dvořák and Elaine Pagels before bed, I have wandered into the safest corner of the First World.

  • The Watches Were Never the Addiction–It Was the Rabbit Holes

    The Watches Were Never the Addiction–It Was the Rabbit Holes

    Over the past twenty years, I’ve learned that I love watches a little too much.

    Not because I own too many.

    Because I expected too much from them.

    I made two mistakes. First, I convinced myself that the next watch would somehow complete me, that a particular dial, bezel, or movement would usher me into a higher state of existence. Second, I became addicted to flipping watches—not because I disliked them, but because every purchase, every sale, every unboxing delivered another hit of dopamine and another round of approval from fellow enthusiasts online.

    The watches became secondary.

    The chase became the hobby.

    Fortunately, my collection has settled into something resembling adulthood. I own five Seiko divers and five G-Shocks. After falling under the spell of G-Shock’s atomic precision—watches so obsessively punctual they correct themselves while I sleep—I have found myself drifting back toward my mechanical Seikos with fresh appreciation. As I write this, I’m wearing my Seiko SBDC203 Coastline Diver on a Divecore Waffle strap, watching its blue wave dial catch the light with quiet confidence.

    Oddly enough, I have nothing on my wish list.

    That statement would have sounded impossible a few years ago.

    I still admire watches. I linger over Citizen Attesas, Seiko Astrons, and Grand Seikos. My favorite watch ever made remains the Seiko SLA017, but I suspect our relationship will remain safely one-sided. I’ll admire it from afar on YouTube, where it can continue living its best life without emptying my wallet.

    That realization has spilled into other corners of my life.

    Once you discover that a watch cannot make you whole, you begin looking suspiciously at everything else trying to make the same promise.

    A forty-thousand-dollar Honda.

    A forty-thousand-dollar Toyota.

    A four-thousand-dollar luxury mattress.

    Consumer culture speaks with remarkable consistency.

    “Buy me,” it whispers. “Your new life begins here.”

    No, it doesn’t.

    At best, your new life begins with a slightly nicer object.

    The harder truth is that the improvements I actually want cannot be purchased.

    I want to become healthier.

    I want to lose twenty pounds.

    I want more discipline.

    I want to be fully present for my wife and daughters.

    I want to become the kind of man whose character quietly exceeds his possessions.

    No watch accomplishes that.

    No car does.

    No mattress does.

    The real danger isn’t believing that buying something will make me happy.

    That illusion is almost too obvious.

    The greater danger is subtler.

    It’s the research.

    I can disappear for hours into consumer rabbit holes with the enthusiasm of an archaeologist uncovering a lost civilization. I compare specifications, memorize model numbers, watch endless YouTube reviews, read forum debates, and convince myself that this painstaking investigation is somehow productive.

    It isn’t.

    It’s beautifully disguised procrastination.

    The internet has become a casino where information replaces slot machines. Every click offers the possibility that the next review, the next comparison, the next expert opinion will reveal the perfect purchase. Hours disappear without resistance.

    The acquisition isn’t the addiction.

    The pursuit is.

    That’s the part that frightens me.

    I have an obsessive personality. Obsession can be useful when it is harnessed toward writing, teaching, or improving my health. Left unattended, however, it happily attaches itself to titanium watch cases, mattress coil counts, automobile trim packages, fountain pens, headphones, or whatever shiny object wanders into view.

    Obsession doesn’t particularly care about the subject.

    It simply wants something to consume.

    Going forward, I want to become more suspicious of that impulse.

    Not because curiosity is bad.

    Curiosity is wonderful.

    But there is a profound difference between curiosity that enlarges your life and curiosity that distracts you from it.

    I want to spend fewer afternoons researching products and more afternoons becoming the kind of man who no longer needs them to feel complete.

    The irony is almost embarrassing.

    For years I believed I was searching for the perfect watch.

    What I was really searching for was the discipline to stop searching.

    ***

    For my fellow watch addicts, here is the link to my book The Man Who Lost His Mind to Watches:

  • The Blurred Line Between Mental Illness and Evil (college essay prompt)

    The Blurred Line Between Mental Illness and Evil (college essay prompt)

    When people encounter shocking acts of cruelty, manipulation, or obsessive behavior, they often reach for two explanations. One explanation is psychological: the person must be mentally ill. The other explanation is moral: the person is evil. These explanations offer a kind of comfort because they simplify the problem. If destructive behavior is the result of mental illness, it can be understood through psychology and possibly treated. If the behavior is evil, it can be condemned and punished. However, many real-life cases resist these simple categories. Some individuals appear both irrational and calculating at the same time. Their actions may show signs of psychological instability while also involving deliberate choices that harm others.

    The documentaries The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish explore this unsettling territory. In both films, individuals behave in ways that disturb viewers because their actions seem both obsessive and intentional. Conflicts escalate beyond reason. Deception and manipulation play central roles. At the same time, the people involved often feel deeply wronged, isolated, or misunderstood. Their sense of grievance becomes a powerful narrative that justifies their behavior in their own minds. As the stories unfold, viewers are left asking a difficult question: Are these individuals primarily suffering from mental illness, or are they morally responsible for destructive actions that reveal something darker about human nature?

    These documentaries also highlight the role of loneliness, resentment, and social alienation. Individuals who feel rejected or humiliated may develop a deep sense of grievance toward others. Without meaningful relationships or healthy outlets for frustration, those grievances can intensify over time. Emotional pain can slowly transform into anger, suspicion, and obsession. In some cases, people begin to see themselves as victims of a hostile world. When this happens, harmful behavior may feel justified to them—even when it appears shocking or cruel to outsiders.

    At the same time, manipulation and deception complicate the psychological explanation. In High School Catfish, elaborate lies and fabricated identities are used to control and emotionally manipulate others. In The Perfect Neighbor, conflicts escalate through a pattern of hostility and retaliation. These behaviors often appear strategic rather than purely irrational. This raises an important question: when someone carefully constructs deception or escalates conflict, does that suggest deliberate moral wrongdoing rather than mental illness? Or can manipulation itself be a symptom of deeper psychological disturbance, such as narcissism, obsession, or a need for validation?

    Write a 1,200-word argumentative essay that explores the blurred line between mental illness and evil as it appears in The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish. Your essay should develop a clear thesis that explains how these documentaries challenge the simple distinction between psychological disturbance and moral responsibility.

    Your introduction must include a thesis with mapping components. This means your thesis should clearly state your main argument and identify the key reasons that will organize your body paragraphs.

    Example thesis with mapping:

    The disturbing behavior portrayed in The Perfect Neighbor and High School Catfish demonstrates that the boundary between mental illness and evil is often blurred because intense loneliness can distort perception, personal grievances can justify cruelty, and deliberate manipulation allows individuals to transform emotional pain into calculated harm.

    In this example, the mapping components are:

    ● loneliness and social isolation

    ● grievance and resentment

    ● manipulation and deception

    Each of these would become a body paragraph in the essay.

    Your essay should include the following elements:

    • A clear thesis with mapping components
    • Analysis of both documentaries
    • Specific examples from the films that support your argument
    • A counterargument that challenges your thesis
    • A rebuttal defending your position
    • A concluding paragraph that reflects on what these cases reveal about human behavior and modern society

    Possible directions for your argument include:

    • destructive behavior may emerge from both psychological disturbance and moral choice
    • loneliness and grievance can transform emotional pain into cruelty
    • manipulation and deception suggest deliberate moral responsibility
    • society sometimes labels disturbing behavior as mental illness in order to avoid confronting the reality of evil
    • disturbing actions may result from a complex mixture of psychological vulnerability, social isolation, and moral failure

    Your goal is not simply to summarize the documentaries but to analyze what they reveal about the complicated relationship between mental illness, moral responsibility, and destructive human behavior. In your conclusion, reflect on what these stories suggest about how society should understand and respond to actions that appear both psychologically disturbed and morally troubling.

    Helpful Definition: “The Hero Delusion.”

    It’s the phenomenon in which people commit harmful acts while believing they are the protagonist in a moral drama. Both documentaries actually illustrate that pattern remarkably well.

    Personal Engagement Building Block 3

    For your first paragraph, write a 200-300-word profile of someone you know—or a friend of a friend—whose behavior could reasonably be described as morally troubling, destructive, or reprehensible. Begin by vividly describing the person’s actions and their impact on others. While it may be tempting to condemn the behavior outright, the purpose of this paragraph is not simply to judge the individual but to explore the difficulty of explaining why they behave as they do.

    As you develop the profile, consider competing interpretations of the person’s conduct. Some observers might view the individual as fundamentally immoral or “evil,” arguing that their actions reflect selfishness, cruelty, or a conscious disregard for others. Others might suggest that the behavior is rooted in psychological disorders, trauma, personality pathology, or mental illness. Use specific details to illustrate why the person’s actions resist simple explanations and raise difficult questions about moral responsibility, free will, and human behavior.

    Your paragraph should ultimately establish the central tension of your essay: whether certain forms of harmful behavior are better understood as evidence of moral corruption, psychological dysfunction, or some combination of both. The goal is not to resolve the debate but to introduce a complex case that invites further analysis.

    Argumentative Engagement Building Block 3

    Write two paragraphs: a thesis paragraph and a counterargument-rebuttal paragraph.

    Your thesis paragraph should present a clear, arguable, and defensible claim that answers the central question of your essay. The paragraph should not merely announce a topic but establish a position that reasonable people could debate. After stating your thesis, include mapping components that identify the major points your body paragraphs will use to support your argument. These mapping components should provide readers with a clear roadmap of your essay’s structure and reasoning. Your thesis paragraph should be approximately 200 words.

    Your counterargument-rebuttal paragraph should address a legitimate objection to your thesis. Begin by clearly and fairly explaining a viewpoint that challenges your argument. Demonstrate why thoughtful readers might disagree with your position and how their concerns complicate your claim. After presenting the counterargument, write a rebuttal that responds to those objections. A strong rebuttal may concede valid points made by the opposing side while demonstrating that, on balance, your argument remains more persuasive. It may also alleviate concerns by clarifying misconceptions, introducing additional evidence, or identifying important information that the opposing side overlooks. The goal is not to dismiss opposing viewpoints but to engage them thoughtfully and strengthen your overall argument. Your counterargument-rebuttal paragraph should be between 200 and 250 words.