Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    If I were the sort of watch enthusiast content with half a dozen Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shocks—a collection stretching from the hulking, superheroic Frogman to the modest, bespectacled GW-5000U—I would admire that collection for reasons having little to do with the watches themselves. Certainly, it would cover every practical need I could imagine. More important, however, it would signify that I had become an entirely different species of collector.

    My former self collected from a place of addiction, neediness, and what I have elsewhere called Gollumification. Every few months I required another gleaming mechanical diver, preferably one costing a few thousand dollars, to jolt me awake from the deadening fog of boredom. The ritual reminded me of suburban mothers in the late 1960s making their regular pilgrimage to the beauty salon to “get their hair done.” As a child, I watched them return transformed—not merely coiffed, but spiritually refurbished, buoyed by the conviction that a new hairstyle had somehow renewed the self beneath it.

    Waiting for FedEx to deliver an expensive Seiko diver is the masculine version of the same liturgy.

    Both rituals whisper the same seductive lie: This time you’ll feel complete.

    The object itself scarcely matters. Hair today. Watches tomorrow. Kitchen remodels, sports cars, cosmetic procedures, luxury vacations, religious conversions, career promotions, perfectly optimized bodies—the props change, but the script remains stubbornly familiar. We keep staging ceremonies of self-renewal, hoping the next acquisition will accomplish what none of its predecessors could.

    The collector I wish I were inhabits a different emotional universe. He still loves watches, perhaps loves them even more, but he no longer requires them to rescue him from himself. He can appreciate a beautifully engineered timepiece without recruiting it into a desperate campaign against boredom. His contentment is not the result of finally finding the perfect watch; it is the reason he no longer needs to keep looking for one.

    His most remarkable quality is not restraint but peace.

    He no longer hungers to be “energized” because boredom has ceased to function as an existential emergency. He no longer imagines that the next purchase will repair some invisible crack running through his identity. He is already whole before the courier rings the doorbell.

    Of course, I recognize this as a fantasy.

    I call it The Fantasy of the Whole Man: the dream that one final purchase, one decisive achievement, one dramatic conversion, or one perfectly timed life adjustment will usher us into permanent inner completion, rendering future craving obsolete. It imagines a version of ourselves so psychologically integrated that desire finally relinquishes its grip.

    No watch can perform that miracle.

    Yet the fantasy reveals something profoundly true about watch enthusiasts—and, indeed, about human beings generally. Beneath our fascination with polished titanium, Zaratsu finishing, Swiss escapements, or atomic timekeeping lies a quieter longing. We are not merely searching for the next beautiful object. We are searching for a version of ourselves that no longer requires beautiful objects to feel sufficient.

    That is the collection we never quite manage to complete.

  • The Great Social Media Deconversion

    The Great Social Media Deconversion

    In 2008 I was doing power yoga in my office while listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy, on KFI 640. In the middle of discussing routers, spyware, and the eternal misery of Windows Vista, he casually remarked, “This Facebook thing is a big deal.”

    I had no idea what he meant.

    I wasn’t the sort of person who chased the latest technological revolution. I listened to Leo for a different reason. I loved hearing retirees call in with computers so old they belonged in an archaeological dig. They would ask whether they should keep a desktop that required thirty minutes to boot, wheezed like an emphysema patient opening Microsoft Word, and treated email as an Olympic event, or whether it was finally time to buy “one of these new computers.”

    Facebook barely registered on my radar.

    Then, in the summer of 2009, my wife was pregnant with our twin daughters. It occurred to me that Facebook might be a convenient way to share photos and updates with family and friends. So I created an account.

    Within weeks my friend list exploded like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

    I was enchanted.

    Perhaps this was the medium I had been waiting for all my life.

    Unfortunately, Facebook did not merely connect me to other people. It connected me to the most embarrassing parts of myself. My ego, which until then had lived quietly in the basement, burst upstairs carrying champagne.

    People would discover me.

    I would become famous.

    How many friends could I accumulate?

    How many likes?

    How many followers?

    Would humanity finally recognize my genius now that history had invented the proper delivery system?

    The intoxication was exquisite.

    That was seventeen years ago.

    Looking back, my relationship with Facebook has all the emotional contours of a failed marriage. There was the honeymoon, the infatuation, the passionate commitment, the slow accumulation of grievances, the disappointment, the resentment, and now something even colder than resentment.

    Contempt.

    Or perhaps futility.

    The old expression comes to mind: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

    Another comes from the Book of Acts, where the risen Christ asks Saul, “Why are you kicking against the goads?” Stop exhausting yourself fighting reality.

    That is how social media feels now.

    Not tragic.

    Pointless.

    Because the marriage was built on lies.

    The lies sounded persuasive enough.

    Metrics measure significance.

    Engagement proves value.

    Visibility creates influence.

    Influence creates meaning.

    If enough strangers notice you, your life has somehow become larger.

    It took me years to realize that every one of those propositions was counterfeit.

    The pursuit of attention slowly teaches us to manipulate others.

    Eventually it teaches us to manipulate ourselves.

    The more desperately we chase attention, the more anxious we become.

    The anxiety metastasizes into resentment.

    Soon we are no longer expressing ourselves.

    We are auditioning for an algorithm.

    Attention capture is not meaning.

    Attention capture is not love.

    Attention capture is not flourishing.

    One can dominate the internet and still become another version of Gollum, clutching a glowing ring instead of a precious one.

    A few days ago I watched a fitness YouTuber whose work I normally admire upload one of those interchangeable “What I Eat in a Day” videos. He microwaved leftovers. He poured cereal into a bowl. He assembled a few perfectly ordinary meals to reassure viewers that he was just like them.

    The video felt less like communication than contractual obligation.

    He looked exhausted.

    Not physically.

    Spiritually.

    As though the algorithm had shown up at his front door demanding another sacrifice.

    I watched perhaps thirty seconds before closing the window.

    I did it for his dignity.

    And for mine.

    Now I don’t know what to do with Facebook, Instagram, or my fifteen-year-old YouTube channel.

    They feel less like hobbies than reminders of a marriage that should have ended years ago.

    I still write on my blog.

    Almost nobody reads it.

    Wonderful.

    Obscurity has become strangely liberating.

    I write what genuinely interests me instead of what might seduce an algorithm into distributing me like digital fertilizer across the internet. I no longer feel compelled to manufacture outrage, optimize thumbnails, or package my thoughts into bite-sized dopamine pellets.

    The work belongs to me again.

    People often wonder what comes after divorce.

    The honest answer is that nobody knows.

    You spend a long time discovering who you are after years spent becoming someone else.

    I suspect millions of us are undergoing that same process with social media.

    We experienced the honeymoon.

    We believed the promises.

    We invested our identities.

    We discovered the betrayal.

    Now we are wandering through the emotional wreckage trying to remember who we were before engagement statistics became a measure of our worth.

    We are all, in one way or another, losing our religion.

    R.E.M. accidentally wrote the soundtrack for the algorithmic age.

    I have become convinced that social media has diminished us personally, culturally, politically, and spiritually. It rewarded vanity, monetized outrage, industrialized narcissism, and trained us to confuse visibility with virtue.

    But I have also become convinced that this era is ending.

    People are tiring of the performance.

    The masks have grown heavy.

    The applause no longer sounds convincing.

    Something new is approaching.

    Whether it will be better or merely different, I cannot say.

    I only know that the old marriage is over.

    And, for the first time in years, that feels less like a loss than a beginning.

  • The Dishwasher and the Soul

    The Dishwasher and the Soul

    People love to narrate themselves into virtue. They announce that they are resilient, compassionate, emotionally intelligent, enlightened. Fine. But character is not established by autobiography. It is established by collateral damage. The verdict is rendered not by the stories we tell about ourselves but by the people who must live with us.

    By that standard, I don’t receive flattering marks.

    I alienate people. Friendships wither. Members of my own family find me exhausting. I do not know how to repair whatever defect keeps reproducing these outcomes. Self-loathing only deepens the rut. It is like trying to escape quicksand by thrashing harder.

    For years my wife has insisted that I have Asperger’s, though I have never received a formal diagnosis. In 2013, I saw a psychiatrist who concluded that I had escaped my mother’s severe depression and bipolar disorder only to inherit a milder companion: dysthymia, a chronic, low-grade depression that rarely knocks you flat but seldom lets you stand fully upright. I eventually stopped seeing him after realizing that I seemed to be providing more entertainment than receiving treatment. I would leave his office lighter in wallet but not in spirit. The experience merely reinforced my suspicion that therapy, at least in my case, was proving more theatrical than therapeutic.

    So I became my own maintenance department.

    Routine is my antidepressant. I cling to it with the desperation of a fish clinging to water. Remove it, and anxiety rushes in to occupy the vacuum. Home becomes less a residence than a fortified monastery whose sacred relics are my kettlebells, exercise bike, piano, protein powder, creatine, and carefully arranged supplements. Every object reassures me that the machinery of the day can continue without surprise.

    Leaving this sanctuary, even for something as benign as a vacation, often feels less like recreation than exile.

    While other people return from holidays refreshed, carrying photographs and amusing anecdotes, I return as though I have survived a natural disaster. Friends ask, “How was your vacation?” I usually shrug because I honestly cannot answer. It dissolves into a hazy montage of disrupted routines, low-grade dread, and the relief of finally coming home. Rather than becoming more engaged with life, I retreat inward. I regress. I become emotionally unavailable. Sometimes I stay home to spare my family the burden of dragging me through another reluctant excursion. They enjoy themselves more, but they miss me all the same.

    That realization hurts.

    I often feel as though I am the heaviest burden my family carries. I bought us a home in a beautiful coastal suburb. The mortgage is gone. We enjoy financial security and enough discretionary income to live comfortably. Yet I cannot escape Christ’s unsettling question, slightly rewritten for my own circumstances: What does it profit a family to live in a lovely house if the husband and father carries conspicuous gaps in his emotional life?

    If there were a genuine cure, I would pursue it tomorrow.

    A retreat deep in the woods. An ayahuasca ceremony promising psychic rebirth. A religious conversion dramatic enough to rearrange the furniture of my soul. If someone could convincingly promise to transform me from an anxious, melancholy recluse into a man whose presence naturally enlarged the lives of others, I would sign the consent form before they finished explaining the side effects.

    Instead, the dishwasher beeps.

    In half an hour I’ll empty it, wipe down the counters, and make salmon, rice, and salad for my family. It is not redemption, but it is dinner.

    Perhaps this is where real life usually unfolds—not in miraculous transformations but in ordinary competence. I can contribute. I can keep the kitchen running. I can exercise. I can stay away from alcohol. I can show up for the responsibilities that lie directly before me, even if I stumble over the emotional ones that lie beyond them.

    There is an old wisdom about staying in your lane. It is not a cure, but it prevents unnecessary collisions.

    Good physical health is not salvation, but it helps. Financial stability is not happiness, but it removes many unnecessary sorrows. A clean kitchen does not heal the mind, but it gives tomorrow one less disorder to inherit.

    So, for now, gratitude remains my most reliable therapy—not because it erases my defects, but because it keeps them from becoming the only facts I recognize. It reminds me that a life can be imperfect without being worthless, that a man can remain unfinished without being beyond repair, and that sometimes the most meaningful victories are measured not in dramatic breakthroughs but in quietly making dinner when your mind insists you’ve accomplished nothing at all.

  • The Man Who Wanted to Defeat His Therapist

    The Man Who Wanted to Defeat His Therapist

    In Lives Other Than My Own, Emmanuel Carrère recounts seeking treatment from the celebrated psychoanalyst François Roustang. Roustang refused to take him as a patient. His reason was devastating in its simplicity: Carrère, he believed, was not interested in getting better. He was interested in tripping up the therapist.

    Imagine arriving at the office of a renowned psychoanalyst desperate for relief from some nameless psychic misery, only to be told that your real ambition is to make your therapist look like a fool.

    It is a remarkable diagnosis.

    Carrère’s impulse, Roustang concluded, was not to surrender to therapy but to convert it into a duel. Every session would become an opportunity to expose the therapist’s blind spots, frustrate his methods, and demonstrate that no one—not even a celebrated analyst—could penetrate his defenses. The goal was not healing but victory.

    On the surface, this sounds clever.

    In reality, it is the psychology of a frightened child.

    The patient who must always outwit the therapist is not displaying superior intelligence. He is displaying superior evasiveness. His greatest fear is not failure but surrender. If he can reduce the therapist to exasperation, then he never has to confront the far more terrifying possibility that someone might actually understand him.

    For that reason, Roustang’s refusal seems puzzling.

    Surely this was exactly the patient he ought to have accepted.

    Instead, he sent him away.

    One imagines that Carrère experienced a brief flash of triumph. The contest had ended before it began, and somehow he had won. Another therapist defeated. Another authority figure frustrated. Another confirmation that no one could reach him.

    What exquisite misery.

    But Roustang had anticipated the move.

    His refusal was not surrender. It was strategy.

    He later told Carrère that if he was so determined to remain miserable, he had only two honest options: end his life or begin living.

    With that brutal simplicity, Roustang shattered the entire game.

    There was no argument to refute, no interpretation to ridicule, no therapeutic jargon to dismantle. There remained only a stark moral choice. Continue worshiping misery or abandon it.

    Suddenly Carrère’s obstinacy no longer looked rebellious.

    It looked juvenile.

    The performance he had mistaken for intellectual sophistication was revealed as the defensive posture of an anxious ego terrified of vulnerability. His endless resistance ceased to resemble strength. It resembled Gollum clutching the Ring while congratulating himself on his independence.

    Roustang’s words proved bracing rather than cruel. Carrère gradually emerged from his depression and eventually found the strength to write My Life as a Russian Novel, the book that, in his words, pulled him “from the abyss.”

    His story clarifies a distinction our culture often blurs: the difference between being childish and being childlike.

    The childish person is governed by wounded pride. He is obstinate, theatrical, self-absorbed, forever digging trenches around his private kingdom of resentment. He mistakes defiance for courage and isolation for authenticity. Like Gollum, he clings to the very thing that is poisoning him while insisting it is his greatest treasure.

    The childlike person possesses the opposite spirit. He is open rather than defensive, curious rather than suspicious, grateful rather than entitled. He greets the world with wonder instead of grievance. He resembles Adam before the first bite of the apple, when innocence had not yet curdled into self-justification.

    Perhaps that is the hidden kinship between therapy and religion.

    Neither exists merely to make us feel better.

    Both seek to expose the childish ego that mistakes stubbornness for strength and self-protection for freedom. Both ask us to relinquish the exhausting performance of being unconquerable. Both invite us to recover something we once possessed before fear, vanity, and self-deception took root.

    The task, in the end, is not to become more sophisticated.

    It is to become less like Gollum.

  • When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    When Sore Calves Meant Salvation

    Emmanuel Carrère writes that in 1990 he was “touched by grace.” For the next three years he attended Mass every day, immersed himself in the Gospel of John, and filled some twenty notebooks with commentaries. Looking back, he remembers remarkably little of that period and has made no effort to recover it. His amnesia suggests that grace, at least in its fanatical form, can be exhausting enough to become something one prefers to leave buried.

    I underwent my own conversion in 1976.

    I was touched not by grace but by the bodybuilding bug.

    Like every true conversion, it demanded far more than outward behavior. It required a new vocabulary, new authorities, new rituals, and a new vision of salvation. My sacred texts were Iron Man, Strength & Health, Muscle Builder, and MuscleMag International. My saints were Ron Teufel, Frank Zane, Robbie Robinson, Mike Mentzer, and Tom Platz. Their routines were studied with the seriousness medieval monks reserved for Augustine.

    Every afternoon I retreated to my father’s office and sat before his IBM Selectric typewriter. Carrère filled notebooks with reflections on John’s Gospel. I filled page after page with workouts.

    The process bordered on liturgical.

    KSFX drifted through the room, playing the O’Jays, the Four Tops, Earth, Wind & Fire, and the Miracles while I stared at the page like a theologian confronting an elusive doctrine. I would type a routine, scrutinize it, decide that my split routine lacked perfection, tear it from the machine, crumple it into a ball, and begin again. Sets became sentences. Repetitions became revisions. Every workout was a rough draft of the body I believed I was destined to become.

    What I sought was not merely a better pump.

    I was searching for the Platonic Workout, the one perfect arrangement of exercises that would lift me beyond ordinary muscular development into something approaching spiritual transcendence.

    It was absurd.

    It was also glorious.

    The ritual calmed me, excited me, and filled me with hope all at once. Every newly typed workout promised that next week, finally, I would become the person I had imagined myself to be.

    The conversion had other liturgical requirements.

    On more than one occasion I composed these workouts wearing nothing but a Speedo because it somehow placed me in the proper state of mind. Serious theological work demanded proper vestments.

    One afternoon, after an hour of merciless calf raises, I sat typing when I noticed that my calves were exquisitely tender to the touch. The soreness delighted me.

    My mother walked into the office.

    “Dinner’s ready,” she said. Then she paused.

    “Why are you so happy?”

    I reached down and squeezed my calf.

    “My calves,” I said. “They’re sore.”

    She looked puzzled.

    “Why does that make you happy?”

    I smiled with the serene certainty of a man who had glimpsed the kingdom.

    “They’re growing, Mom.”

    A pause.

    “They’re growing.”

  • The X-Ray Bully Principle

    The X-Ray Bully Principle

    I have often imagined writing a novel about a boy tormented by a sixth-grade bully. At first glance, the story seems painfully familiar. One child possesses power; another lacks it. One humiliates; the other endures. There are already enough novels about that.

    The interesting story begins decades later.

    The bully is drawn to the boy’s visible sadness the way sharks are drawn to blood. Whether that instinct originates in the bully’s own wounds is impossible to know. Perhaps his father’s death from a heart attack in his thirties left him carrying around an anger too large for a child to bear. Perhaps he simply needed somewhere to dump his rage, and the melancholy boy looked like an accommodating landfill.

    Or perhaps that explanation is sentimental nonsense.

    Perhaps the bully required no tragedy to become cruel. Some people seem to arrive in the world with an uncanny instinct for locating weakness and pressing on it until it bruises.

    Whatever the explanation, the bully needed only to glimpse the boy’s face.

    That face was enough.

    The sadness irritated him. The fear provoked him. The quietness felt like an accusation. Around everyone else he was merely disagreeable. Around this particular boy he became incandescent with contempt. The sight of vulnerability transformed him into an artist of humiliation.

    That, however, is not the novel.

    Bullies are common.

    What fascinates me is what happens inside the victim.

    At first the boy hates his tormentor in the ordinary way. He dreams of revenge. He imagines vindication. He rehearses speeches he will never deliver.

    Then something disturbing happens.

    He grows older.

    He begins examining himself with ruthless honesty. He sees his cowardice, vanity, evasions, self-pity, and moral compromises. Gradually, almost against his own will, he starts to wonder whether the bully had been right all along.

    Not right about the cruelty.

    Right about him.

    The bully becomes, in memory, the only person who had truly seen through the performance. Everyone else had mistaken shyness for humility, sensitivity for virtue, sadness for depth. The bully had looked beneath the surface and detected something darker.

    Weakness.

    Duplicity.

    Self-deception.

    The victim begins to believe that the insults were less acts of cruelty than acts of diagnosis.

    He embraces what I call the X-Ray Bully Principle: the belief that a tormentor’s cruelty was justified because he uniquely perceived one’s hidden moral defects and therefore functioned, however unwillingly, as a truth-teller rather than merely an aggressor.

    This inversion changes everything.

    The bully is no longer remembered as a playground tyrant.

    He becomes a prophet.

    His taunts acquire the authority of Scripture. His ridicule is transformed into revelation. His contempt begins to resemble religious flagellation—a painful but necessary discipline administered to expose hidden corruption.

    The victim quietly canonizes his persecutor.

    That is the real tragedy.

    The bully’s greatest victory was never the humiliation he inflicted on a frightened twelve-year-old. It was persuading that boy, decades later, that the humiliation had been deserved.

    The novel, then, is not about bullying.

    It is about the terrifying human capacity to mistake condemnation for insight and abuse for truth. It asks whether our harshest critics possess privileged access to our secret selves or whether shame simply grants them an authority they never earned.

    That question has haunted me far longer than any playground insult ever could.

  • 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.