Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • Crossing the Retirement Rubicon Means You Cannot Go Back

    Crossing the Retirement Rubicon Means You Cannot Go Back

    Once I had done my due diligence and concluded that I was emotionally and financially ready to retire, I began telling people: my wife, my children, friends, family, colleagues. This seemed like a straightforward administrative matter. I had made a decision. Now I was informing the relevant parties.

    I was wrong.

    I had stumbled upon what I call the Performative Retirement Principle: announcing your retirement does not merely describe a future event. It begins the event. The word itself changes your status. Before you say it, you are a person thinking about retirement. You can entertain the idea, examine pension statements, run calculations, meet with financial advisers, and imagine leisurely Tuesday mornings without fundamentally altering your identity. Retirement remains hypothetical, one possibility among many.

    Then you say it.

    Retirement.

    The effect is surprisingly close to Billy Batson screaming “SHAZAM!” One moment he is an ordinary boy; the next, lightning strikes and he occupies a different body. Retirement lacks the cape and thunderbolt, unfortunately, but the metaphysical principle is much the same. You utter the word and undergo a transformation.

    You are no longer merely a professor. You are a professor who is retiring.

    This distinction sounds trivial until you experience it. Once the announcement has been made, retirement begins colonizing your consciousness. Meetings acquire a strange archaeological quality. You sit through discussions of assessment procedures and curriculum revisions with the detached fascination of someone touring the ruins of Pompeii. Colleagues complain about problems that once irritated you, and you realize with a small electrical thrill that many of these problems will soon belong entirely to them.

    Someone starts explaining a new administrative initiative scheduled to roll out three years from now, and you experience the exquisite pleasure of realizing that this particular catastrophe will occur without you.

    The Performative Retirement Principle changes your relationship not only to work but to time. The future, once an enormous warehouse into which you casually tossed plans, begins to acquire walls. You have entered the strange territory of countdowns: last fall semester, last spring semester, last opening-day meeting, last committee assignment, last student who submits a 1,700-word essay consisting largely of AI-generated fog and then looks wounded when you suggest that perhaps he should participate in the writing of it.

    But the transformation is not entirely pleasurable.

    I first uttered the word retirement on August 26, 2026, and almost immediately felt older.

    Nothing had physically changed. My cells had not received an email from Human Resources. My knees did not buckle. My hair did not turn white during lunch. Yet something had shifted. By announcing retirement, I had publicly acknowledged a fact that had previously remained pleasantly abstract: my career had an ending.

    More disturbing, so did everything else.

    That is the hidden power of the word. Retirement appears to be about employment, but underneath it lurks mortality. When you are thirty-five, changing jobs suggests expansion. When you are sixty-five, leaving your career carries a different resonance. Nobody has to say anything. The arithmetic is sitting quietly in the room.

    My world suddenly felt smaller.

    The sensation reminded me of a scene from Battlestar Galactica in which a traitor is sealed behind glass before being expelled through an airlock. She pleads. The others watch. The machinery proceeds with terrible calm. Nobody is screaming. Nobody needs to. The transparent barrier has already divided the universe into two populations: those remaining aboard the ship and the person who is leaving it.

    A ritual exile.

    Aging can feel like that.

    The younger people remain inside the warm spacecraft of seemingly endless tomorrows. They discuss five-year plans, career pivots, promotions, new houses, new babies, new projects. Their futures stretch before them like an interstate disappearing into desert sunlight. You remember inhabiting that world. Indeed, some stubborn portion of your consciousness still believes you belong there.

    Then the glass descends.

    Not because anyone dislikes you. Not because society has declared you useless. The barrier is more unsettling precisely because nobody installed it. Time did.

    You tap the glass.

    Hello? I’m still here.

    And you are. You may be healthy, energetic, curious, productive, perhaps more intellectually alive than you were twenty years earlier. Yet you have glimpsed something the younger travelers cannot fully see because youth requires a certain optical illusion. They know intellectually that life is finite, just as they know Saturn has rings. The information is accurate but emotionally remote.

    Retirement brings the horizon closer.

    For a moment, you may want to take the word back. Perhaps you announced it too soon. Perhaps you should have kept retirement locked inside your head for another six months, privately admiring it like contraband. You might imagine stuffing the genie back into the bottle.

    Too late, my friend.

    You said it.

    The word has entered circulation. Your wife knows. Your children know. Your colleagues know. Your friends know. Somewhere, forms are being completed. Social Security has your name, telephone number, address, and enough numerical information to reconstruct you after a plane crash. The bureaucratic machinery has begun to turn.

    More important, you know.

    That is the irreversible part.

    The Performative Retirement Principle therefore contains both liberation and terror. Saying the word frees you from the illusion that your career must continue indefinitely, but it also strips away another illusion: that time itself is indefinitely renewable.

    You have crossed the Retirement Rubicon.

    There is dignity, however, in refusing to spend the rest of the journey clawing at the glass. The shrinking horizon can clarify as much as it frightens. When time appears limitless, it is easy to squander enormous quantities of it accumulating objects, nursing grievances, winning arguments nobody remembers, and worrying about matters that will eventually seem as consequential as the seating arrangement at a faculty meeting in 1997.

    A finite horizon imposes editorial discipline.

    What stays?

    Family. Friendship. Reading. Writing. Teaching what remains worth teaching. Making things. Helping younger people without pretending they particularly want your wisdom. Paying attention. Remaining curious. Being useful.

    Perhaps that is the final stage of the Performative Retirement Principle. At first, saying “I am retiring” feels like announcing your departure from the world. Gradually, however, you realize that you are departing only from one arrangement of the world.

    The cockpit of youth is sealed. No reentry.

    Fine.

    There are other rooms on the ship.

  • The Vicarious Retirement Effect

    The Vicarious Retirement Effect

    For the last few years, several colleagues about ten years younger than I am have been asking me the same question with suspicious regularity:

    “When are you going to retire?”

    At first, I wondered if they knew something I didn’t. Perhaps my teaching evaluations had collapsed. Perhaps students were complaining that the old man kept referring to something called a “newspaper.” Perhaps a secret departmental committee had concluded that I was blocking the natural advancement of younger faculty and was waiting for me to shuffle toward the exit so someone else could inherit my office.

    But that wasn’t it.

    They didn’t want to get rid of me.

    They wanted me to escape.

    More precisely, they wanted me to escape first.

    Call this the Vicarious Retirement Effect: the tendency of still-employed colleagues to become unusually invested in someone else’s retirement because his departure allows them to rehearse their own escape psychologically. The prospective retiree becomes an advance scout sent beyond the walls of the institution to determine whether civilization exists on the other side. Does the pension arrive? Can you afford groceries? Do you become bored? Do you lose your identity? Do you wander around Costco at eleven in the morning wearing sweatpants and staring blankly at rotisserie chickens? Or do you appear six months later rested, solvent, twenty pounds lighter, and glowing with the serene expression of a man who has not attended a committee meeting since May?

    My colleagues want data.

    I am the probe.

    If I successfully land on Planet Retirement and begin transmitting photographs of myself reading novels at ten in the morning while they are sitting through a presentation on Student Learning Outcomes, I will have established the existence of intelligent life beyond academia.

    Their hunger for escape seems to have intensified after COVID. Something happened during those strange lockdown years when millions of people stopped commuting and discovered that a surprising amount of professional life could be conducted from a spare bedroom while wearing shorts. The workplace, once regarded as an immutable fact of adult existence, suddenly became negotiable. Meetings that had previously required forty people to drive across town, locate parking, find a conference room, and spend ninety minutes breathing the same recycled air were reduced to little rectangles on a laptop screen.

    Then the campuses reopened.

    People returned carrying dangerous knowledge.

    They knew what it felt like not to be there.

    At the same time, teaching itself had changed. Years of smartphone saturation had not exactly produced a renaissance in sustained attention or recreational reading. Students accustomed to receiving information in fifteen-second bursts were now being asked to read twenty-page essays containing paragraphs that stubbornly refused to dance, sing, or display subtitles. Then generative AI arrived, offering exhausted students the opportunity to outsource the inconvenience of thinking altogether. Suddenly professors who had spent careers teaching people how to write found themselves reading enormous quantities of synthetic prose generated by machines that could produce five pages of grammatically polished oatmeal in approximately eight seconds.

    For some of my younger colleagues, this appears to have accelerated the retirement clock by a decade.

    They aren’t necessarily miserable. They still care about students. They still take pride in teaching. But I can sense an emerging reluctance to volunteer for the next great transformation of higher education. They survived the pandemic. They survived Zoom. They survived smartphones. They survived declining reading stamina, assessment initiatives, learning-management systems, administrative acronyms, and enough pedagogical reforms to fill an archaeological museum.

    Now AI has arrived carrying a flamethrower.

    At some point, even conscientious educators begin looking toward the next generation and thinking: You know what? You guys handle this one.

    COVID also produced another curious phenomenon among Californians approaching retirement age: the Great Zillow Migration.

    My colleagues began spending their lockdown afternoons browsing houses in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. They weren’t moving, exactly. They were conducting reconnaissance. A four-bedroom house in Albuquerque appeared on the screen for approximately the price of a detached garage in Southern California, and suddenly a person who had never expressed the slightest interest in New Mexico was researching property taxes, summer temperatures, crime statistics, and the distance from Santa Fe to the nearest Trader Joe’s.

    The fantasy was remarkably specific.

    They wanted to leave California without actually leaving California.

    They wanted the enormous affordable house in Arizona but also the Trader Joe’s. They wanted Texas prices but California produce. They wanted New Mexico solitude but a Costco within twenty minutes. They wanted a quiet desert neighborhood, central air-conditioning, excellent broadband, decent Thai food, and a yoga studio where the instructor had somehow been imported directly from Manhattan Beach.

    Give them those things and Albuquerque started looking like Tuscany.

    This is why my retirement has become strangely important to people who are still a decade away from their own. When they ask, “So, are you really retiring?” there is sometimes an unmistakable gleam in their eyes.

    They aren’t asking about me.

    They’re asking about themselves.

    They want to know whether escape is possible. They want someone they trust to cross the border first, establish a settlement, and send word back that the natives are friendly and the pension checks clear.

    So I will go.

    I will venture beyond the faculty parking lot into that mysterious territory where Mondays are indistinguishable from Saturdays and nobody knows what a Student Learning Outcome is. I will establish whether a man can survive without checking his college email. I will determine whether the human nervous system can recover from four decades of grading freshman composition papers.

    And if everything works out, I will send a message back to my younger colleagues:

    The air is good. The money arrived. Costco is open.

    Come when you’re ready.

  • Autobiographical Time Lag

    Autobiographical Time Lag

    I am obsessed with accurate watches. I own radio-controlled G-Shocks that communicate with atomic clocks in the middle of the night, correcting themselves so that I don’t have to endure the indignity of being three seconds late to nowhere. I put them near windows to improve reception, check whether they synchronized overnight, and derive absurd satisfaction from knowing that the watch on my wrist agrees with official time down to the second.

    Yet I’ve recently discovered an embarrassing irony: while my watches keep nearly perfect time, the clock inside my head is hopelessly slow. Ask me how long I’ve been teaching, lifting weights, trying to write books, or engaging in any of my other lifelong enterprises, and I routinely misplace entire decades. My G-Shock may be off by half a second. My autobiographical clock is off by twenty years.

    This discrepancy recently surfaced in a dream about my friend Adam, whom I’ve known since 1998, when he took my college writing class. Adam went on to build a successful career in advertising and branding, married, had a daughter, and now works from home. Perhaps because of his professional expertise, my dreaming mind decided that Adam was precisely the man to stage an intervention.

    With my retirement approaching, he apparently concluded that my malfunctioning internal clock required professional attention. He took me to an office specializing in something I didn’t know existed: the rebranding of human beings.

    I was immediately suspicious.

    “Rebranding” is one of those words that makes me reach instinctively for my wallet. I imagined consultants with expensive eyeglasses explaining that retirement represented an exciting opportunity to “reimagine my personal narrative” while helping me establish an Instagram presence in which I would pose beside cappuccinos and announce that sixty-five was the new forty-five.

    No thanks.

    But the woman assigned to me wasn’t like that.

    She was maternal, down-to-earth, dressed in jeans and a football jersey. No power suit. No TED Talk headset. No laminated diagram explaining My Journey. She had the reassuring manner of someone who might help you change a tire and then send you home with a casserole.

    She explained that retirement required more than leaving my job.

    I had to reinvent myself.

    Worse, I had to rebrand myself.

    I prepared to resist, but something about her practical manner disarmed me. Fine. Ask your questions.

    She began with the basics.

    How old was I?

    How many years had I been teaching?

    How long had I been trying to write novels?

    How many years had I been trying to lose weight?

    How long had I been lifting weights?

    Easy questions.

    Except I got nearly every answer wrong.

    Not slightly wrong.

    I was shaving decades off my life.

    “How long have you been teaching writing?”

    “About twenty years.”

    She looked at her records.

    “Forty.”

    Oh.

    Next question.

    “How long have you been lifting weights?”

    “Forty years.”

    Another glance at the paperwork.

    “Fifty-four.”

    Excuse me?

    Apparently I had begun lifting weights sometime during the Nixon administration and simply neglected to update my internal records.

    The interrogation continued.

    Every number I produced was suspiciously flattering. Years disappeared from my career. Decades vanished from my ambitions. Entire geological periods evaporated from my biography.

    I had apparently been cooking the chronological books.

    That’s when I realized I suffered from Autobiographical Time Lag: the discrepancy between one’s actual age and the age assumed by one’s interior sense of self.

    I know how old I am.

    Of course I do.

    But apparently some deeper part of my brain does not.

    That brain maintains a fraudulent set of books in which everything happened twenty years ago. I’ve been teaching for twenty years. I’ve been lifting for forty. I’ve been struggling with my weight for a while. I’ve been trying to become a writer for a reasonable amount of time.

    Then the auditor from the Department of Time arrives.

    Forty years.

    Fifty-four years.

    Decades.

    Decades.

    More decades.

    The horror of aging is partly numerical. You don’t experience yourself as a stack of calendar pages. Consciousness feels continuous. The thirteen-year-old who picked up his first weights doesn’t seem like some extinct ancestor whose bones were recently discovered beneath a shopping mall.

    He’s me.

    I can still feel him in there.

    So my brain performs an enormous act of biographical compression. It takes fifty-four years of lifting weights and somehow files them under “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

    But fifty-four years isn’t a long time.

    It’s a civilization.

    I’ve been lifting weights longer than many of the people I work with have been alive. Presidents have come and gone. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Internet appeared. Phones became computers. Artificial intelligence began helping me write essays about how old I am.

    And through all of it, apparently, I’ve been doing curls.

    The same distortion applies to teaching. Forty years sounds preposterous. Surely I haven’t been standing in front of college writing classes for four decades.

    But I have.

    I’ve taught through chalkboards, dry-erase boards, overhead projectors, PowerPoint, Canvas, online instruction, Zoom, and artificial intelligence. At this point I’m less a professor than a sedimentary record of educational technology.

    The woman in the football jersey understood something I didn’t.

    Before I could reinvent myself for retirement, I had to locate myself accurately on the map of chronological time.

    I couldn’t begin the next chapter while pretending I was halfway through the previous one.

    That, I realized, was the purpose of the strange rebranding office. They weren’t going to manufacture some shiny post-retirement identity for me. They weren’t going to turn me into Professor 2.0, complete with a podcast, personal logo, and inspirational LinkedIn posts about embracing change.

    They were performing an intervention.

    The first step wasn’t reinvention.

    It was arithmetic.

    I kept giving the woman the age of the man I felt myself to be.

    She kept giving me the age of the man who actually existed.

    And the numbers refused to negotiate.

    Perhaps that’s the strangest thing about getting older. The calendar ages with perfect accuracy, but my autobiographical clock is running slow.

  • The Exhaustion Paradox

    The Exhaustion Paradox

    In 1974, when I was in junior high, a friend came to school looking wrecked. He had spent the weekend at his family’s cabin skiing at Bear Valley Mountain Resort, and when he returned home Sunday night, exhausted from two days on the slopes, he couldn’t sleep.

    This made no sense to me.

    Wasn’t exhaustion supposed to produce sleep? You depleted the body, crawled into bed, and disappeared for ten hours. That was the arrangement.

    His mother, a nurse, offered a different explanation. Her son had gone beyond ordinary fatigue. He was so exhausted that his body could no longer relax enough to sleep.

    I found the idea fascinating and horrible.

    Call it The Exhaustion Paradox: the state in which fatigue becomes so acute that instead of producing relaxation and sleep, it produces agitation, anxiety, and an inability to rest. The body desperately needs the very thing its exhausted condition prevents it from obtaining.

    I filed this strange idea somewhere in my adolescent brain and didn’t think about it again for more than fifty years.

    Then I decided to recreate the experiment.

    My current weight-loss campaign has made me eager to exercise. Usually, this is a good thing. I know my body well enough to understand that I need one or two days off every week. Recovery allows my muscles to heal and lets me return to my workouts with enough energy to attack them rather than merely survive them.

    But weight-loss impatience has a way of making perfectly sensible principles seem negotiable.

    If exercise burns calories, more exercise must burn more calories. And if more is good, ten consecutive days must be magnificent.

    So I trained for ten days without a break.

    On the tenth day, I climbed onto my exercise bike and discovered that my body had apparently resigned without giving notice.

    My usual power was gone. My legs felt hollow. I produced less than half my normal output. Every pedal stroke seemed to require a committee meeting. This wasn’t the satisfying fatigue of a hard workout. I felt depleted at the cellular level, as if someone had reached inside me and removed the batteries.

    Fine, I thought. Obviously I need sleep.

    I dragged myself to bed.

    And couldn’t rest.

    Instead of sinking gratefully into the mattress, I became anxious. The exhaustion itself was unnerving. I could feel how badly my body needed recovery, yet I couldn’t cross the threshold into it. I tossed and turned for ninety minutes, simultaneously desperate for sleep and incapable of surrendering to it.

    Then a memory surfaced from 1974.

    Bear Valley.

    My junior-high friend.

    His nurse mother.

    He was too exhausted to sleep.

    Fifty-two years later, I finally understood what she meant.

    I got out of bed and told my wife what was happening. She suggested I drink some water mixed with electrolyte powder.

    I did.

    Soon I felt considerably better. Whether the electrolytes were responsible, the water helped, or simply getting out of bed broke the cycle of anxious exhaustion, I don’t know. But the feeling of physical crisis subsided. I did a few chores and eventually sat down to write.

    The episode reminded me of something I already knew but had temporarily decided didn’t apply to me: recovery is not the enemy of training.

    It is part of training.

    You cannot bully the body indefinitely and call it discipline. Eventually the distinction between training and punishment disappears. The workout deteriorates, the body rebels, and even rest becomes difficult.

    At thirteen, I thought The Exhaustion Paradox was fascinating and awful.

    At sixty-four, I can confirm the awful part.

  • The Happiness Performance Principle

    The Happiness Performance Principle

    Before long I began to notice a curious couple on Facebook.

    Every single day they appeared together, smiling with such unwavering enthusiasm that they seemed less like two human beings than the official mascots of matrimonial bliss. Their grins possessed the tensile strength of industrial adhesives. Their faces radiated enough saccharine cheerfulness to put the greeting-card industry out of business. Every photograph announced the same message:

    Look how happy we are.

    A few years ago, I barely noticed them.

    Now I brace myself.

    Their daily appearances have become as predictable as sunrise and almost as obligatory. Every scroll through Facebook feels like waiting for a television commercial whose dialogue you already know by heart.

    I want to be fair to them.

    For all I know, they are generous friends, devoted parents, faithful spouses, and decent human beings. I would hate to commit the very sin social media encourages: reducing an entire person to a single online habit.

    Yet habits have consequences.

    When someone repeatedly performs happiness before an audience, the performance eventually overwhelms the happiness itself.

    The smiles stop looking spontaneous.

    They begin looking contractual.

    What once appeared joyful gradually acquires the unsettling atmosphere of a hostage video filmed inside a Pottery Barn catalog.

    The more insistently they proclaim their happiness, the more I find myself wondering what invisible anxiety demands such relentless reassurance.

    That reaction says as much about the audience as it does about the performers.

    Human beings possess surprisingly sensitive authenticity detectors. We do not expect perpetual happiness because we have never met anyone who actually lives that way. Real marriages contain grocery lists, bad moods, unpaid bills, stomach flu, arguments over thermostats, and long stretches of ordinary Tuesdays. They breathe.

    Curated happiness does not.

    It smiles.

    Constantly.

    The phenomenon illustrates what I call The Happiness Performance Principle: the tendency for repeated public displays of happiness to become progressively less convincing, eventually suggesting the insecurity they were meant to conceal.

    This does not mean the couple is secretly miserable.

    It means the performance has become louder than the reality.

    Paradoxically, genuine happiness rarely feels compelled to advertise itself. It is too busy living. It has no quarterly reporting requirements. It does not wake each morning asking, How can we reassure strangers that our marriage remains delightful?

    Incessant documentation changes the nature of the experience itself. The camera quietly becomes a third partner in the relationship. Every lunch, vacation, anniversary, sunset, and coffee date begins asking the same question:

    “Should we post this?”

    At that moment, life subtly shifts from being lived to being curated.

    The relationship acquires a marketing department.

    I sometimes wonder whether the saddest consequence of social media is not that it encourages vanity, but that it gradually replaces identity with performance. Careers disappear. Hobbies fade. Conversations are forgotten. Complexity evaporates.

    People become remembered for one repetitive act.

    This couple may have built remarkable lives. They may have overcome hardships I know nothing about. They may possess virtues worthy of admiration.

    Yet I suspect that to hundreds of acquaintances they have become something far smaller.

    They are simply the couple that always posts.

    That strikes me as a peculiar tragedy.

    A lifetime compressed into an algorithmic reflex.

    Not because they smile too much.

    But because somewhere along the way, their happiness stopped looking like a gift and started resembling a job.

  • The Collective Willpower Principle

    The Collective Willpower Principle

    The television comedy Loudermilk centers on Sam Loudermilk, a recovering alcoholic played by Ron Livingston, whose permanently disappointed, basset-hound face seems genetically incapable of approving of humanity. Loudermilk is a music critic, an addiction counselor, and an equal-opportunity offender. He insults friends, strangers, and fellow recovering addicts with such relentless precision that sarcasm becomes his native language. His group meets in a church overseen by a perpetually exasperated priest who seems forever one wisecrack away from throwing Loudermilk onto the sidewalk.

    The characters spend much of the series antagonizing one another. They lie, relapse, brood, sabotage themselves, and exchange insults with the affectionate brutality of siblings who have survived the same dysfunctional childhood. The comedy is shamelessly outrageous, yet beneath the profanity and chaos lies genuine tenderness. Loudermilk understands something profound: broken people often love one another more honestly than polished ones.

    I eventually realized I had become an evangelist for the show. Whenever the opportunity arose, I urged people to watch it.

    That became unmistakably clear during a visit to my favorite watch store.

    I have been patronizing the same shop for nearly twenty-five years. The Owner and the Assistant know me well enough to recognize my recurring condition: chronic horological temptation. Visiting the store has become something like the Saturday beauty salons my mother frequented during the late 1960s. Women would spend hours having their hair done while gossiping, laughing, and catching up on neighborhood life. The appointment wasn’t merely cosmetic. It was communal. Hair happened to be the excuse.

    For me, watches became the excuse.

    Over two decades, the Owner and Assistant have resized bracelets, regulated movements, replaced batteries, and quietly indulged my fascination with mechanical jewelry. They are master technicians, equal parts craftsmen and therapists for anxious watch enthusiasts.

    One afternoon I stopped in to have a bracelet adjusted on one of my Seiko divers. As the Assistant removed a link, I mentioned Loudermilk and described its recovering alcoholics driving one another crazy with their compulsive, self-destructive behavior.

    His expression changed immediately.

    He stepped away from his workbench and leaned against the counter.

    “I watch it,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic.”

    He told me he had been attending five recovery meetings every morning, despite not being “a morning person.” For years he had dismissed his drinking because, in his culture, men routinely drank enormous quantities of alcohol well into old age. It seemed normal—until it wasn’t. Eventually he realized alcohol was dismantling his life one drink at a time.

    He had been sober for thirteen days.

    Thirteen days.

    Long enough to glimpse hope.

    Not nearly long enough to trust it.

    I thanked him for telling me. What surprised me was not his honesty—we had known each other for almost twenty years—but his willingness to speak so openly while another customer browsed nearby carrying a Chihuahua tucked comfortably in her arms.

    Then something unexpected happened.

    The woman looked up.

    “I love Loudermilk,” she announced.

    “What a shame they canceled it after only three seasons.”

    The Assistant immediately objected.

    “It could still come back.”

    For several minutes they debated the show’s fate with the enthusiasm normally reserved for constitutional amendments or playoff baseball.

    I smiled, said goodbye to both of them, and walked toward the parking lot.

    Halfway across the sidewalk, the obvious finally occurred to me.

    I loved Loudermilk because, in my own way, I belong to its congregation.

    I am an addict.

    Not an alcoholic.

    But addiction wears many disguises.

    To be an addict is to discover that you are inhabited by two competing selves. One seeks discipline, moderation, and long-term flourishing. The other wants immediate gratification and endlessly whispers that one more purchase, one more indulgence, one more exception surely won’t matter.

    The battle is exhausting because it never quite ends.

    The encouraging news is that the adult gradually becomes stronger. Every act of restraint weakens the impulsive child within. Every healthy habit transfers a little more authority to the wiser self.

    The sobering news is that the child never entirely disappears.

    One unexpected trigger.

    One careless decision.

    One rationalization.

    Suddenly the old voice is speaking again with astonishing confidence.

    That is why Loudermilk revolves around a support group.

    Recovery is rarely a solitary achievement.

    Human beings are remarkably poor at borrowing strength from their future selves.

    We are much better at borrowing it from one another.

    That is the quiet wisdom beneath all the profanity and comic dysfunction. The addicts keep returning because they understand something the rest of us prefer to ignore. Self-mastery is not simply an individual accomplishment. It is often a communal one.

    The show illustrates what I call The Collective Willpower Principle: certain forms of self-mastery cannot be sustained through determination alone but require the borrowed strength of a community committed to the same struggle.

    Perhaps that explains why I left the watch store feeling unexpectedly hopeful.

    Three strangers—a recovering alcoholic, a watch addict, and a woman carrying a Chihuahua—had briefly formed a fellowship around a television comedy.

    The subject wasn’t really Loudermilk.

    It was the shared recognition that every one of us is trying to keep some unruly part of ourselves from taking over the wheel.

  • The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

    The Strange Beauty of Boring Things

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

    It never does.

    Still, I’m not without hope.

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

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

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

    The pattern continued.

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

    It’s boring.

    That is precisely the point.

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

    Call it Zen-illa.

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

    Then there is the watch.

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

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

    Increasingly, that is the beauty I find myself pursuing.

    Perhaps this is what maturity looks like.

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

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

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

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

  • The Vulcan Fallacy

    The Vulcan Fallacy

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

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

    For Seneca, that discipline begins with relentless attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    He doesn’t.

    He believes something essential is missing.

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

    It is a devastating metaphor.

    Life surely demands more than emotional climate control.

    Carrère presses the point further:

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

    That question lingers.

    I think of hobbies that border on obsession.

    Some people collect paintings.

    Others collect sculpture or photography.

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

    The obsession is irrational.

    That is precisely why it is enjoyable.

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

    They are the hobby.

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

    It also risks becoming flavorless.

    No spice.

    No texture.

    No delightful absurdity.

    It is a world in perfect emotional equilibrium.

    It is also a world inhabited by Dr. Spock.

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

    We are not.

    This is where I part company with Stoicism.

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

    Human beings are not designed merely to maintain psychological equilibrium.

    We fall in love knowing our hearts may be broken.

    We create art knowing it may fail.

    We raise children knowing they will one day leave us.

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

    The point is not to eliminate suffering.

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

    Perfect serenity may produce admirable self-control.

    It has never produced Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

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

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

  • When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

    When Father Time Becomes Your Authorized Watch Dealer

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

    Not because I can’t appreciate them.

    Not because they aren’t beautiful.

    Because I no longer have the wrist time.

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

    Time eventually becomes the harshest accountant.

    But time is only half the problem.

    The other half is geography.

    Or, more accurately, lifestyle.

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

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

    The watch would be dressed for an expedition to Antarctica.

    I would be buying gummy bears by the ounce.

    The mismatch is almost comic.

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

    Recognizing these two forms of misalignment is not depressing.

    It is liberating.

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

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

    The question is what deserves that energy instead.

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

    Now that enthusiasm has become available for reassignment.

    It belongs elsewhere.

    It belongs in writing.

    It belongs at the piano.

    It belongs in my kettlebell-filled garage.

    Most of all, it belongs to my health.

    I am still about twenty pounds overweight.

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

    So the mission is obvious.

    Reach 210 pounds.

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

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

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

    That is not surrender.

    That is maturity.

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

    He begins issuing instructions.

    He says:

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

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

    Your assignment now is different.

    Become as healthy as possible.

    Remain mentally sharp.

    Write your books.

    Play your piano.

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

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

    His orders make perfect sense.

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

    They simplify it.

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

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

    It told time just as faithfully as any luxury watch.

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

  • The Young and the Larval

    The Young and the Larval

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

    Most of the guests were in their seventies.

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

    It was invisibility.

    “People look right through you,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I refuse to let my mind become larval.

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

    Besides, history has a wicked sense of irony.

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

    That is the true danger.

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

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

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

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

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