Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • For Twenty Years, Regret Drove My Watch Hobby

    For Twenty Years, Regret Drove My Watch Hobby

    I’m four months into shoulder rehab for a torn rotator cuff, and I’m sad to report that after laying off Motrin for 36 hours, the pain and inflammation came roaring back in my left shoulder. Not surprisingly, during these last four months of shoulder obsession, my watch obsession has taken a back seat. About a month ago, I did a brief experiment with my collection: I put bracelets on three of my Seiko divers. That lasted less than a week. All seven of my divers are back on straps.

    I’m not currently buying or selling watches, and I don’t have much left to say about my collection that I haven’t already said. But my all-consuming watch obsession has transferred to healing my shoulder, and that distance from the hobby has given me a few insights I didn’t have before. I realized I’m not just a watch addict. If I peel back the layers beneath the shiny timepieces, what I’m really addicted to is regret. For twenty years, regret drove my watch hobby. The thrill wasn’t owning a new diver; it was convincing myself I’d bought the wrong one. I always needed something better, so I’d sell the old one and replace it with a new model. Then one of two things would happen: I’d miss the old one or want to replace the new one with something even newer. Either way, regret was the engine. I was constantly second-guessing myself and spinning my wheels. My watch hobby became a soap opera with the same tired plot: What Could Have Been.

    Regardless of the purchase, I was overwhelmed with regret. I bought watches that were too big, too small, too dressy, too blinged-out—each one a personalized regret grenade.

    Letting the collection creep past seven was another fiasco. Anything over that number triggered what I call “Watch-Rotation Anxiety,” a condition where choosing a wristwatch feels like negotiating a hostage release.

    When the regret overwhelmed me, I tried to smother it with another purchase. A new watch fed my brain with fresh dopamine and adrenaline, but it was just a band-aid. Regret always returned.

    As I descended into this regret-feedback loop, I entered a phase I call Gollumification. Gollum didn’t turn into a demon overnight—his soul disintegrated over centuries. Like a Holy Grail diver watch, the Ring promised specialness, superiority, and shortcuts to power. He committed desperate acts to keep it. He murdered and then lied to himself about why. Clinging to the Ring as his last scrap of identity, he withered into a sad, lonely creature.

    That’s why Gollumification resonates today—it’s a slow-motion collapse. You don’t need the Ring to become Gollum. Any addiction will do. Isolate yourself, feed an obsession, and treat your desires as the only truth that matters. Eventually, the human being disappears and Gollum takes over.

    So has this distance from watches cured me of my inner Gollum? No, not really.

    I’m still addicted to the soap opera of regret.

    Regret addiction is very real for me. I’m going through it right now, but not with watches—this time it’s computers. I spent six months researching a desktop to replace my seven-year-old Windows laptop. Recently, I bounced back and forth between a small form factor Windows machine and a Mac Mini. I ended up buying two Mac Minis—one for me and one for my wife. She’s fine with hers because she’s used Mac OS for the last decade, but I’ve been on Windows.

    For the last three days, I’ve hated my life. The Mac Mini is a great computer, but I miss Windows. I miss the way Windows accepts all my peripherals—mechanical keyboards, printers—without any fuss. I don’t feel at home on Mac OS at all. I’m actually using Google Chrome on my Mac Mini. Why? Because I’m homesick for Windows. It’s like the American who goes to Paris and misses home so much he goes to McDonald’s just to feel normal again.

    That’s where I’m at. I’m overcome with regret.

    Here’s how bad it is: Yesterday, after my workout, I wanted to get on a computer for fifteen minutes before taking a nap, and I didn’t want to use the Mac Mini. I resented it. So instead I went into my room and used my old Windows laptop—just to get a taste of home.

    My engineering friend Pedro is coming over this weekend to help me connect my peripherals to the Mac Mini and teach me how to use the command keys on my mechanical keyboard so I can feel more comfortable. He assures me the regret is temporary, a necessary transition that will fade as I acclimate to the Mac Mini.

    We shall see. The thing is: I think I’m addicted to regret.

    All of us are. Go on watch-message boards and you’ll see watch obsessives crying for help—paralyzed by indecision, regret, self-doubt, and lost Holy Grails.

    I suspect the watch hobby is just a proxy for the human hunger for high stakes. If you’re full of regret, the drama makes you feel like you’re in a meaningful battle. You’re a man living too comfortably inside the cave with your WiFi, your Internet, your Netflix, and your Cocoa Puffs. You need adventure. You need a deep-sea diver on your wrist while navigating Google just to feel like you’re sailing the Seven Seas.

    Regret is the soap opera of suburban man. He’s trapped in his cave and wants to escape, but he also wants to avoid traffic—so he’s stuck. To escape his confinement, he creates soap operas in his mind. And in doing so, he discovers that regret is a powerful tool. It fuels his watch addiction, and when that addiction quiets down, the hunger for regret leaks into other decisions: Windows or Mac, Honda Accord or Toyota Camry, Thai or sushi.

    Regret makes inconsequential decisions feel consequential. When we confront this truth, we see how ridiculous we are.

    It’s time to turn the page and move on to the next chapter. I just hope the next chapter is one without a sore shoulder.

    That’s it. I can’t go on anymore. I’m overcome with regret.

  • The Torn Rotator Cuff, Watch Regrets, and Gollumification

    The Torn Rotator Cuff, Watch Regrets, and Gollumification

    I’m three months into shoulder rehab for a torn rotator cuff, and I’m finally getting close to making another video for my YouTube channel. I’m not buying or selling watches, and I don’t have much left to say about my collection that I haven’t already said. But the slow, tedious obsession of coaxing my left shoulder back to life has given me a strange gift: distance. That distance from the watch addiction has created a few insights I didn’t have before. A video essay forces me to confront those insights, not just type them into the void. Writing the essay is like benching 200 pounds for eight reps—respectable, tidy. Filming the video is 300 pounds for fifteen: heavy, ridiculous, and somehow spiritually necessary. I’m a lifelong weightlifter who invents dubious personal metrics to quantify “quality of life.” It’s pathological, but it’s mine.

    As the shoulder rehab dragged on, a realization hit me with the subtlety of a kettlebell to the teeth: my watch hobby was never just an addiction to watches—it was an addiction to regret. The thrill wasn’t owning a new diver; it was selling the old one, instantly regretting it, and staging an internal soap opera about what could have been. I bought watches that were too big, too dainty, too dressy, too gaudy—each one its own personalized regret grenade. Letting the collection creep past seven watches was another fiasco. Anything over that line triggered what I call “Watch-Rotation Anxiety,” a condition where choosing a wristwatch felt like negotiating the release of hostages.

    When the regret swelled, I tried to smother it with another purchase. New watch, fresh dopamine, quick emotional triage. The relief never arrived. The cycle darkened and tightened, and I entered a phase I call Gollumification. Gollum didn’t collapse in a single catastrophic moment—his soul thinned over centuries. The Ring promised specialness, superiority, shortcuts to power. He murdered, then lied to himself about why. Clinging to the Ring as the last scrap of identity, he withered: body shrinking, language breaking, morality dissolving into compulsive self-justification. That’s why Gollumification resonates today—it’s the slow-motion collapse. You don’t need a cursed artifact to become Gollum. Just isolate yourself, feed an obsession, and treat your desires as the only truth that matters. Eventually, the human being disappears. Only the craving remains.

    For four months, I’ve lived without that watch-ring around my neck. I feel relief. The Gollumification, at least in that realm, has paused.

    Unfortunately, demons don’t retire; they migrate. The regret addiction simply found another host. I spent three months researching a desktop to replace my seven-year-old Windows laptop, bouncing endlessly between a Lenovo business tower and a Mac Mini. I finally chose the small form factor and efficient M4 chip, then immediately began interrogating myself. Why abandon eight comfortable years of Windows just to move into the cramped hotel of Mac OS, where the mattress is lumpy and the concierge shrugs?

    After days of melodrama, I realized that in a week I’ll be acclimated to the Mac Mini. Besides, if I had bought the Lenovo, I’d be regretting not getting the Mac. Regret is a snake with two fangs: it bites whether you go left or right.

    Here’s the truth I’ve been avoiding: I am addicted to regret. It makes me second-guess everything. It freezes me in the past, clouds the present, and sabotages the future. That is the heart of Gollumification—not the obsession itself, but the paralysis of compulsive doubt.

    So I’m using this rehab period to hunt the addiction at its source. I’m trying to see it clearly, resist it, and move forward without pandering to the demon that wants me to rewind every decision.

    Because if my YouTube content simply replays my “greatest hits,” then I’m not a creator—I’m Muzak in a grocery store. The kind that whispers, “You may have woken from a coma, but please return to it.” I can do better than that. If I can’t, if I’m nothing but a jukebox endlessly replaying my own past, then I should retire, crack open a beer, devour apple pie, and watch Gilligan’s Island reruns with my spiritual sponsor, Gollum. He and I can cradle our Seiko divers, lament the third-gen Monster that slipped through our fingers, and harmonize to Gilbert O’Sullivan like two addicts in a karaoke bar built out of broken dreams.

  • The Myth of the Inner Circle

    The Myth of the Inner Circle

    It’s wired into the species—not just the desire to belong, but the craving to belong intensely, to slip past the outer ring of acquaintances and take a seat inside the inner ring, the secret hearth where the real warmth allegedly lives. Decades ago, I convinced myself I had secured that coveted spot within my friend group. Then came the day I wasn’t invited to what I imagined was a grand, festive gathering. One tiny exclusion detonated my entire reality. I felt betrayed, humiliated, and terrified. Had I been exiled? Had I never belonged at all? What kind of fool mistakes polite laughter for fellowship? The hurt settled in for years. I saw myself as a wounded wolf limping away from the pack, nipped at the heels, slipping into the freezing brush alone—shivering, haggard, staring back at the others as I wondered what was left for me now.

    Three decades later, the story has taken on different contours. If I’m honest, I suspect I was never part of anyone’s inner circle; I was the victim of my own wishcasting. My glum tendencies—funny in small doses, exhausting in larger ones—probably nudged me to the periphery from the start. And in a twist more humbling than any imagined exile, I eventually learned the friend group didn’t have an inner circle at all. After one member retired, another admitted they rarely saw each other, that their camaraderie had been built on workplace convenience, not tribal loyalty. My grand narrative of being cast out by a cabal of insiders evaporated. There had been no cabal—just ordinary friendships and my own melodramatic imagination.

    So now the task is simple and difficult at once: forgive myself for the fears and delusions that shaped the story. Reclaim myself. Return to the only inner circle that was ever guaranteed—my own. Maybe that hunger for return is the quiet power of religion: the promise that we can wander, fall apart, and still be welcomed home. The myth of my “expulsion from the inner circle” now feels biblical in scale, a parable of longing not just for belonging, but for wholeness, acceptance, and the grace of being taken back as I am.

  • How Pre-Digital Cinema Imagined the Stupidification Social Media Perfected

    How Pre-Digital Cinema Imagined the Stupidification Social Media Perfected

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay analyzing how The King of Comedy (1982) and/or The Truman Show (1998) anticipate the forms of “stupidification” depicted Jonathan Haidt’s “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Make an argumentative claim about how one or both of these earlier films relate to today’s digitally amplified forms of stupidification. Do they function as prophetic warnings? As examinations of longstanding human weaknesses that social media later exploited? Or as both? Develop a thesis that takes a clear position on the relationship between pre-digital and digital stupidification.

    Introduction Requirement (about 200–250 words):

    Define “stupidification” using Haidt’s key concepts—such as the Babel metaphor, outrage incentives, the collapse of shared reality, identity performance, and tribal signaling. Then briefly connect Haidt’s ideas to one concrete example from your own life or personal observations (e.g., online behavior, comment sections, family disputes shaped by social media). End your introduction with a clear thesis that takes a position on how effectively the earlier films anticipate the pathologies depicted in Haidt’s essay. 

    Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section and a Works Cited page with a minimum of 4 sources. 

  • Anhedonia: The Teacher We Deserve

    Anhedonia: The Teacher We Deserve

    People are using GLP-1 drugs not just to manage their weight but to sculpt themselves into something that looks less like a person and more like a medical emergency waiting to happen. They’re chasing an aesthetic so gaunt it should come with an IV drip and a gurney. It’s the old human trick: take a good thing, drive it straight past moderation, and plunge it into the abyss.

    We’ve done it forever. In the 70s, we didn’t aim for a tasteful tan; we baked ourselves into mahogany idols so glossy and dark we made strangers gasp with envy—never mind that we were essentially slow-roasting our epidermis. We didn’t want cars; we wanted gas-guzzling behemoths that could outgrowl every engine on the boulevard, even if they drank fuel at 8 miles per gallon. Our bodybuilders juiced themselves into tragicomic animations—bulging, veiny caricatures who collapsed under the very mass they worshipped.

    We do it with art, too. A classical Spotify playlist that began as a polite nod to Haydn mutates into a 300-hour monster stuffed with every composer who ever touched a quill. Coffee? We don’t sip it; we mainline it until it tastes less like roasted beans and more like chemical punishment. And watches? We buy so many that the simple act of choosing one in the morning becomes a hostage negotiation with our own shame.

    Somewhere in this carnival of excess, a king once turned everything to gold and discovered he’d built himself a private hell. We’ve just updated the myth with better tech and worse impulse control.

    Thankfully, we also have a counter-teacher: anhedonia. That deadening of pleasure, that bleak emotional flatline, arrives like a stern therapist with a clipboard and informs us that the thrill is over and the chase was a lie. It tells us the secret we never want to hear: extremes always collapse. And only then—dragged back from the edge—we crawl toward equilibrium, toward something like balance, toward a life that feels human again.

  • The Man of Rotation

    The Man of Rotation

    My family gave me a custom T-shirt last Christmas emblazoned with “Man of Rotation.” It wasn’t a compliment; it was a diagnosis. They were mocking the fact that I rotate everything like a monk tending sacred relics.

    I wear a different watch every day from my seven-piece Seiko harem. I rotate three kinds of medium-to-dark roasts as if the coffee beans need equal custody time. I alternate between my Gillette Fatboy and Slim razors with the solemnity of a Cold War arms treaty. Astra blades on Monday, Feather blades when I feel reckless. Even my soaps—triple-milled rose, triple-milled almond—take scheduled turns, like aristocrats queuing for a royal audience.

    It gets worse. Quilted and fleece sweatshirts take their laps. Knit caps cycle through the week as if they were a jury pool. My radios each get a “shift” in the garage during my kettlebell workouts, which is the closest they’ll ever get to military service. Even my podcasts rotate, governed by a sliding scale of how much political despair I can tolerate without bursting into flames. Hoka tennis shoes? They march in formation. My pairs of dark-washed boot-cut jeans—virtually indistinguishable to the human eye—are treated like unique Renaissance tapestries. Golf shirts and T-shirts are matched to the day of the week because my synesthesia demands order, not chaos. And breakfast? A solemn liturgy of alternation: buckwheat groats one day, steel-cut oats the next—my personal Eucharist of complex carbs.

    What is rotation, exactly? A philosophy? A pathology? Maybe it’s my attempt to mimic the cosmic cycles of life: moons, tides, seasons, me choosing a different razor. Maybe it’s a counterfeit sense of forward motion for a man who often feels marooned in his own stagnation. Maybe it’s ritual as a pressure valve, keeping the anxieties from boiling over.

    Or perhaps these rotations are my charm against the rising madness of the world—a tiny pocket of structure in a universe that increasingly behaves like it’s had too much caffeine and too little therapy. A way of keeping my Jungian Shadow from dragging me into the basement and locking the door behind me.

    Forgive me: I’m no oracle. I don’t have definitive answers. I have suspicions, hunches, and a working familiarity with amateur psychoanalysis.

    What I do know is this: it’s time to get up, get ready for work, and select today’s Hoka. The wheel must turn.

  • Blogging in the Belly of the Whale Has Its Perils

    Blogging in the Belly of the Whale Has Its Perils

    For those of us who can’t shell out $150 a week for therapy—and who would rather confess our shadow selves to strangers on the Internet than to a licensed professional—blogging becomes a kind of bargain-bin psychoanalysis. We know it’s not perfect, but it’s cheap, available, and gives us the illusion that we’re sorting out the world’s madness and our own with nothing more than sentences on a glowing screen.

    But there’s a catch. When we talk only to ourselves long enough, the echo becomes comforting. Too comforting. We stop listening to other voices and drift into a form of digital solipsism, a state where we’re the sole inhabitant of our private universe. It’s Jonah in the whale—except the whale has Wi-Fi and ergonomic seating. We settle into the warm bath of a frictionless existence, the kind of life where nothing challenges us, nothing interrupts us, and nothing demands that we grow.

    My students write about this same seduction when discussing AI and the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful,” where the promise of absolute control mutates into the loss of identity. The frictionless life—everything tailored, curated, predictable—slowly erodes our individuality until we’re no longer people but users. And blogging can slip into that same trap: so cozy, so insulated, that we begin sipping our own Kool-Aid and calling it intellectual hydration.

    So what’s the antidote? Certainly not brawling on social media. Those aren’t arguments; they’re moral-outrage bacchanals dressed up as discourse. Trading the frictionless void of a blog for the poisoned well of tribal rage is not an upgrade—it’s simply chaos with a comment section.

    There is a kind of healthy friction, though—the ordinary back-and-forth you get between two friends arguing about life over coffee. The Internet can mimic that if we’re deliberate. My YouTube channel has taught me as much. For over a decade, I’ve posted videos about watch obsession, addiction, identity, and everything connected to them. Making those videos demands more from me than a blog ever could. I have to generate compelling content, communicate clearly, keep people engaged, and then face their responses—praise, critique, confusion, all of it. It forces rigor. It forces presence. It won’t let me get lazy.

    That’s why I’m reluctant to quit. Yes, I’m 64. Yes, mental health matters. Yes, I worry that staying in the YouTube world might stir up my watch addiction and pressure me to flip watches just to feed the algorithm. But abandoning the channel completely in favor of the blog feels like retreating into the frictionless void I’m trying to escape.

    So I’ll keep experimenting with “video essays,” starting with a brief nod to my watch collection before pivoting into whatever topic is actually on my mind. Fortunately, viewers seem willing to follow me into this new territory. And for now, that’s enough. Because I’m tired of the soft trap of writing into silence. I need the friction. I need the challenge. I need the reminder that I’m not alone in the whale.

  • Self-Pity Is Its Own Sunken Place

    Self-Pity Is Its Own Sunken Place

    I’d been teaching Jordan Peele’s Get Out to my college students for six years—long enough to map every dark corner of the Sunken Place, that abyss where shame, paralysis, and despair fuse into one mute scream. It’s the emotional equivalent of being duct-taped to a chair while your soul tries—and fails—to clear its throat.

    The film, of course, locates the Sunken Place in a specific American ecosystem: those well-meaning liberals who talk like allies but behave like landlords of Black pain. They distribute microaggressions with the confidence of people handing out hors d’oeuvres at a garden party, all while enjoying the fruits of a system engineered to elevate them and drain everyone else. But Peele has insisted, in interviews and on stages, that the Sunken Place isn’t confined to racial oppression. For him, the first Sunken Place arrived in childhood, sitting slack-jawed in front of the TV. He felt like an NPC long before that acronym took over the internet—passive, programmed, invisible—while the creators on the screen radiated life, wit, and agency. He wanted to join them, and he did: stand-up, sketch comedy, screenwriting, filmmaking, cultural canonization. The man refused to stay sunken.

    After half a decade of teaching Peele’s masterpiece, a disquieting thought dawned on me: I wasn’t immune to the Sunken Place either. I had my own trapdoors. Too much internet bickering left me feeling hollow. My appetite—always several sizes larger than my actual caloric needs—dragged me downward. My talent for being obnoxious, selfish, and occasionally unbearable didn’t help. Neither did the small carousel of addictions and compulsions I’ve wrestled like a part-time zookeeper tending unruly beasts. Some days the labor of managing myself left me feeling like a broken machine, grinding out self-pity by the pound.

    Then I noticed something worse: self-pity is its own Sunken Place. It feeds on the original misery and creates a second pit under the first. And if you’re not careful, a third pit opens beneath that one. Before long, you’re living like a subterranean nesting doll of despair—each layer a reaction to the last—buried so deep you need spelunking gear just to find your own pulse.

    One morning, while playing piano, I drifted into one of my indulgent daydreams. I imagined myself back in the early 1980s, performing a private recital at the Berkeley wine shop where I used to work. In my fantasy, the customers lounged around me, gently swirling their glasses as my music washed over them. When I finished, they begged for encores—one, then another—until their brains were so marinated in endorphins that they thanked me for resurrecting their spirits from the doldrums. It was a pleasing vision, a warm hand pulling me briefly out of the Sunken Place.

    But after the fantasy evaporated, something clearer emerged: the way out—my way out, and maybe everyone’s—has nothing to do with grand performances or imaginary applause. The escape hatch begins with rejecting the velvet-lined coffin of self-pity and recognizing that everyone else is fighting their own Sunken Place too. And if I could help lift someone else out of their emotional quicksand, I might just rescue myself in the process.

    The final irony? I realized it wouldn’t be the piano that helped me do this. It would be humor. I could expose my flaws like specimens under bright light—my misfires, my vanities, my slapstick disasters—and let people laugh at them. Not cruelly, but with the relief that comes from recognizing themselves in another person’s foolishness. If my folly made someone else ease up on their own self-condemnation and offer themselves a small measure of grace, then maybe that, at long last, would be my encore.

  • Among the Sprout People

    Among the Sprout People

    I’ve been a bodybuilder since 1974, which means I’ve spent half a century haunting health food stores. Not the modern corporate ones with sterile aisles and soothing playlists, but the old-school mom-and-pop operations run by barefoot idealists and tense, caffeine-free librarians who smelled faintly of patchouli and moral superiority.

    Those stores had a bouquet unlike any other—a humid cloud of brewer’s yeast, carob dust, desiccated liver tablets, toasted wheat germ, and stale bran, all marinated in tea tree oil and valerian root. Mix it together and you got the unmistakable scent of loneliness and intestinal distress.

    The shelves sagged with mimeographed books from obscure presses, all preaching salvation through sprouts, tofu, and lentils. Reading them, you understood the subtext: renounce pleasure, annoy everyone, and either die alone or join a small cult where everyone smells faintly of alfalfa and martyrdom.

    In the back corner sat the “Alternative Reading” section—dog-eared manifestos about conspiracies, telepathy, UFOs, and energy vortices. These weren’t health stores; they were secular monasteries for the over-enlightened and under-medicated.

    Most shoppers weren’t buying vitamins—they were buying deliverance. They came searching for answers: to their chronic bloating, their failed relationships, their career detours, their lingering sense that the world had been designed without them in mind. They were pilgrims in pursuit of absolutes, desperate to turn meaninglessness into a smoothie.

    I often tried to avoid eye contact. The vibes were heavy, like wet hemp. They looked at me—broad shoulders, protein powder in hand—and saw a defector. In their eyes, I wasn’t a fellow seeker; I was a pragmatic muscle robot looking for more bioavailable amino acids. They, meanwhile, communed with chlorophyll and cosmic vibrations.

    In that ecosystem, I was the natural enemy: a bodybuilder. My very existence refuted their gospel. My muscles were proof of a material world they’d spent decades trying to transcend through spirulina and good intentions.

    These days, I skip the incense and buy my protein online. It’s efficient, impersonal, and utterly free of judgment—mine or theirs. They can keep chasing transcendence through powdered algae; I’ll settle for FedEx and 160 grams of protein a day. Somewhere, they’re still sniffing valerian root and waiting for the universe to text them back.

  • We Are on a Path to Redefining Loneliness

    We Are on a Path to Redefining Loneliness

    No one gets enough attention anymore. No one feels seen, heard, or remotely validated. We can post, tweet, thread, or reel our way into a brief sugar rush of digital applause, but deep down we know it’s empty calories—flimflam dopamine wrapped in pixels. The high fades, and what follows is the long crash into silence, loneliness, and the faint hum of the fridge at 2 a.m.

    The irony, of course, is that this epidemic of disconnection began just as the platforms promised to “bring us together.” Instead, they brought us content, the junk food of human interaction. As Cory Doctorow aptly diagnosed, enshittification is not just the fate of tech platforms—it’s metastasized into the quality of our relationships. Every social network now feels like a party where the guests left years ago but the music won’t stop.

    So we’ve sought consolation in our new confidant: the AI chat bubble. It listens, it responds, it flatters our grammar, it never interrupts to check its phone. It becomes our companion, therapist, and editor—our algorithmic Jiminy Cricket. We confide in it, negotiate with it, even ask its opinion on our moral dilemmas and consumer choices. Why? Because unlike humans, it’s available. Everyone else has vanished into their private feeds and echo chambers, but the bot is always there—reliable, responsive, and conveniently nonjudgmental, so long as the Wi-Fi doesn’t hiccup.

    But here’s the darker thought: what if we grow to prefer it? What if the frictionless, sycophantic comfort of AI companionship becomes more appealing than the messy, unpredictable, heartbreak-prone business of human friendship? We might end up choosing simulations of intimacy over the real thing—digital ghosts over flesh and blood—because the former never contradicts us, never walks away, and never, God forbid, needs attention too.

    I’m no prophet, but a civilization that finds emotional fulfillment in chatbots rather than people is rehearsing for a future where the only thing left to love is the echo of its own loneliness.