Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • His Last Words: “Too Much Trouble”

    His Last Words: “Too Much Trouble”

    No one wants the following carved into their headstone:
    “He really liked convenience.”
    Or:
    “He really knew how to wind down after a long day.”
    Or the ultimate in mediocrity:
    “He was quite the expert at calmly not answering the door when strangers knocked.”

    Yet I can’t lie—those epitaphs could summarize me with cruel efficiency. I should be ashamed. If the highlight reel of my life is craving convenience and dodging conflict, then I’m a sloth, a coward, and a comfort-zone junkie. Guilty as charged.

    Of course, apologists for my particular brand of laziness will insist there’s wisdom in centering life on convenience: you save time, conserve resources, and maximize efficiency. But let’s not kid ourselves. “Optimization” is just a euphemism for avoiding reality. And then come the even shinier euphemisms: “life hacks.” If all you’ve done is engineer a way to dodge effort, that’s not a hack—it’s a confession.

    Not that every convenience is unworthy. I won’t step foot in a gym: too expensive, too crowded, too germy, and far too drenched in bad pop music. I prefer my garage—cheap iron, good podcasts, and zero chance of catching COVID off the lat pulldown machine. That’s not clever; it’s survival.

    Same with my diet: when I’m home alone, dinner is steel-cut oats or buckwheat groats with protein powder and soy milk. It’s not innovation; it’s five minutes of apathy in a bowl. To call it a “hack” would be grandiose.

    The pandemic hardened this streak. Three-fourths of my classes went online in 2020, and they’ve never returned to campus. Everything lives on Canvas now. I barely drive 3,000 miles a year. Efficiency became narcotic. Once you’ve tasted it, going back to inefficiency feels like shoving rocks in your shoes for nostalgia’s sake.

    Even my piano habit has become infected. Cecil, my seventy-eight-year-old tuner, has warned me: when he’s gone, so is my piano’s soul. Skilled tuners are rare. My solution? Buy an electric keyboard. Sure, the sound won’t have the magical sound of my acoustic Yamaha, but it’ll move easily from room to room and never need Cecil. Convenience conquers music too.

    I’m also a poor excuse for a parent in the Uber era. Driving my teen daughters to football games, birthday parties, and amusement parks feels like sacrilege to my convenience creed. Honestly, if I were truly committed to convenience, I never would’ve had children. Or cats. Litter boxes, flea treatments, vet visits—each one an affront to my principles of time-saving and efficiency.

    Convenience can metastasize into pathology. Violations of my “policies” breed resentment. Aging itself infuriates me because it’s inconvenient. Doctor appointments and funerals snarl my schedule. Death doesn’t just terrify; it inconveniences.

    Routine is the bride to the groom of convenience, and together they dominate. 

    Even my relationship to religion is seen through the lens of convenience. I wish I could slam the door on doubt and join the ranks of militant atheists—or zealous believers. Either extreme would be neat, clean, convenient. Instead, I’m stuck in agnostic purgatory, forced to read philosopher Elizabeth Anderson’s critiques of scripture, Saint Paul, and every thinker in between. Anderson reduces morality to evolution; Paul calls us fractured, fallen souls, a mirror I dislike but recognize. I want a bow on the present of certainty, but instead, I get the knot of doubt.

    Jesus, of course, preached a gospel of uncompromising inconvenience. His very life was a rebuke to comfort. Following him means picking up a cross, not a La-Z-Boy. For disciples of the gospel of ease, his way is impossible—requiring nothing less than a Damascus-level conversion to set a new course.

    When I think of convenience, I think of Chris Grossman, my co-worker at a Berkeley wine shop in the 1980s. He was the store’s golden boy—popular with customers, armed with quick wit and easy charm—and utterly allergic to human entanglements. Girlfriends, he explained, weren’t worth the trouble. Not because of their flaws, but because the whole enterprise of romance reeked of inconvenience: compromise, obligation, scheduling. He lived alone, ate the same meals on repeat, and once a year drove his Triumph to Carmel for a car show. I adored him. He was my kind: a fellow monk in the Church of Convenience.

    Some of us are more diseased than others, and the infection corrodes standards. I loathe factory farming, dream of veganism, but recoil at the social cost. Every vegan I’ve spoken with admits the hardest part isn’t the kale; it’s the cold shoulder. I already wear the family badge of black sheep. If I imposed tofu bakes on my wife and daughters, I’d be ostracized. They want meat; I want peace. When I mention plant-based dinners, they shoot me a side-eye sharp enough to slice seitan. Push it further, and I can see my tenuous connection with them unravel thread by thread until exile is complete. And clawing my way back into their good graces would be the most inconvenient penance imaginable.

    I’m already a neurotic who alienates people more often than I’d like. Rebuilding broken ties is grueling work—humiliating, exhausting, inconvenient. So I stay walled up in my fortress of convenience, half-proud, half-ashamed, imagining my epitaph chiseled in granite: He preferred the easy way.

  • My Lifelong Marriage to Convenience

    My Lifelong Marriage to Convenience

    There is much to admire about centering our lives on convenience. We save time and resources, avoid wasted effort, and maximize efficiency in the name of what is too often called “optimization.” A life built around convenience often becomes a quest for “life hacks.” But if our behavior is less inventive, we don’t call it a hack at all—just a preference.

    For example, I refuse to go to the gym. It’s inconvenient, time-consuming, costly, and exposes me to airborne illnesses. I prefer to work out in the garage. That’s not a life hack—it’s just easier. The same goes for meals: having a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder and soy milk instead of lunch or dinner isn’t clever or innovative. It’s simply what I do when my family is out and I’m eating alone. Spending more than five minutes on a meal under those circumstances feels unnecessary. Calling a bowl of steel-cut oats or buckwheat groats a “life hack” would be grandiose.

    During the pandemic, three-fourths of my classes moved online through Canvas, a Learning Management System (LMS). Hard copies disappeared. Graded documents were uploaded to the platform, which was remarkably efficient. I didn’t have to drive to campus. The college saved on electricity. That was five years ago, and my classes remain online. I now drive less than 3,000 miles a year. Online classes have made me very efficient. Once you taste efficiency, it’s nearly impossible to go back to inefficiency.

    I admit I’m a less than admirable parent. I don’t like driving my teen daughters to their social functions—birthday parties, football games, dance practices, amusement parks. I find it all inconvenient. That’s my choice. If I were truly devoted to convenience, I wouldn’t have become a parent at all. And certainly not a cat owner. Kitty litter, flea control, vet visits, and travel arrangements are an affront to any serious commitment to convenience.

    As desirable as convenience is, some personalities—mine included—turn it into a pathology. We center our lives around it, and any violation of our convenience policies breeds resentment. Many of these resentments are unreasonable. I resent old age and death, primarily because they are inconvenient. Doctor appointments and funerals interfere with my routine.

    Convenience culture also makes us adore routine. I suspect routine is the groom to the bride of convenience.

    Even my worldview is infected by this impulse. I am an agnostic, which I despise, because it is inconvenient. Agnosticism demands reading and constant reflection. I’ve consumed books by agnostics, atheists, universalists, infernalists, and the post-mortem-salvation curious. While Elizabeth Anderson’s critique of scripture has many compelling points, her notion of morality as nothing more than evolution feels inadequate. Paul’s vision of humanity as fallen and divided is more persuasive and mirrors my own psychology. I wish I could settle happily into Anderson’s worldview. It would be so convenient.

    Speaking of religion, Jesus preached a gospel of inconvenience. His willingness to sacrifice his life in such a manner stands as the very opposite of convenience. For devotees of the gospel of ease, following Jesus is nearly unthinkable—a path that demands nothing less than a Damascus-level upheaval like Paul’s.

    When I think of convenience, I’m reminded of Chris Grossman, a wine salesman I worked with in the 1980s. He was brilliant and affable but had no close relationships. He admitted he didn’t care much for life. He had tried having a girlfriend once and said it was awful—not because of her, but because it was too inconvenient. By his late thirties, he was a bachelor. He ate the same foods every day for simplicity’s sake and once a year drove his Triumph to a car show in Carmel. I loved him for it, because I knew we were both soulmates in convenience culture.

    Some of us are more diseased by this devotion to convenience than others, and it often lowers our standards. I am appalled by factory farming and would like to be vegan. Perhaps if I lived alone, I could do it. But in a family of omnivores, that move would not go over well. I could prepare plant-based meals for myself, but I don’t—partly because of the inconvenience. Vegans I’ve spoken to say the hardest part isn’t the food but the social ostracism.

    I’m already the black sheep in my family—the anti-social shut-in whose quirks are laughed at on good days and resented on bad ones. If I imposed a vegan diet, I fear it would alienate me further, and I’d have to grovel my way back into some semblance of connection.

    As a lifelong neurotic who already alienates people more than I’d like, I know that repairing frayed relationships is an excruciating, arduous task. And it’s so inconvenient.

  • On Watches, Aging, and Invisibility

    On Watches, Aging, and Invisibility

    Today I strapped on my Seiko Tuna diver, a hulking slab of steel that announces itself the moment you walk into a room. I don’t exactly want the attention, but let’s be honest: the watch is a radar blip that keeps me from fading into the wallpaper, just another suburban relic limping through the final trimester of existence.

    This fear of invisibility gnawed at me after my cousin Pete’s 75th birthday party in Studio City. His brother-in-law Jim, a retired ophthalmologist at 77, leaned in and muttered, “The worst part of aging is people stop seeing you.” Those words have been rattling around in my skull ever since. Old age, it seems, is less about wisdom and more about turning into a frayed recliner everyone resents but no one wants to haul to the curb.

    I’ll be 64 soon, and I know the rules: Father Time has a master plan, and it doesn’t include my vanity. Sure, you can still play piano with arthritic fingers, hike with a knee brace and a back girdle, and keep a smartwatch ready to call in helicopter rescue if you tumble into a viper-filled canyon. But invisibility is baked into the contract. You can fight it with kale salads and kettlebells, but in the end, your processor slows, your refresh rate lags, and the world swipes past you at 5G speed.

    Take the Samsung QLED my wife bought at Sam’s Club in 2021. Four years later, the picture is fine, but the processor is a fossil. Menus freeze, apps take two minutes to load, and the whole thing wheezes like a Pentium II running Windows 11. Samsung cheaped out on the chip, and now I’m stuck with a dinosaur. My solution? Upgrade to an LG OLED, not because I need perfect pixels, but because I want a TV with an AI 4K processor that doesn’t choke when I click Netflix. The irony isn’t lost on me: I’m furious at Samsung for selling me a laggy processor, yet here I am, trudging through life as a laggy processor. My younger colleagues adapt to new tech in a snap; I freeze and buffer. I’m a Boomer Samsung in a Gen Z OLED world.

    Nature is no kinder than tech. Watch the documentaries: Scar the lion rules the pride until Skip, the younger challenger, finally takes him down. Scar hobbles into the brush, invisible, forgotten, licking his wounds. That’s the arc. You don’t argue with it; you acknowledge it, maybe laugh about it, then go buy a $50 German Chocolate Cake at Torrance Bakery and eat the whole delicious thing. Because if invisibility is inevitable, you might as well go out with frosting on your face.

  • Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    I’m fewer than four semesters away from retirement—June 2027, the final curtain—and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. For nearly forty years I’ve worn the armor of a college classroom persona: bigger, bolder, more disciplined than the fragile, fumbling man who hides inside. Teaching gave me a stage and a referee’s whistle. Without it, who am I? Just the broken man-child without a supervisor, left to his own devices.

    During the pandemic, when colleagues were clawing to get out, I puffed out my chest and declared I was born ready for retirement. I pictured myself a disciplined Renaissance man: mornings at the piano, afternoons writing, evenings lifting kettlebells in the garage, book in hand before bed. A gilded schedule, as though I were independently wealthy. Now those boasts feel like hot air. Structure is one thing. The man animating that structure is another. In the classroom, the stakes were high: thirty pairs of eyes asking, Are you boring? Do you know what you’re talking about? The pressure kept me sharp, funny, and, occasionally, wise. No one lets you coast when you’re trapped under fluorescent lights for two hours with judgmental twenty-year-olds.

    Bitter irony: I’m leaving just as I finally got it right. It took me decades to balance theater with approachability, to drop the drill-sergeant persona that once scared students into silence, to actually build a classroom where people learned and laughed. Now I can scaffold essays like an architect and coax timid students into crafting arguments brick by brick. And just as the machinery is humming, I’m stepping offstage. Melancholy doesn’t begin to cover it.

    And then retirement makes you pay with loads of endless paperwork. Work forms that warn you that you cannot rescind your decision. Medicare forms with their cryptic alphabet soup (A, B, C, D), switching to my wife’s insurance, navigating private plans that read like IKEA instructions translated from Martian. I’ve joked I’d rather do faculty assessment reports than wrestle with retirement forms, and I meant it.

    Meanwhile, time itself heckles me. I’ll be sixty-four in six weeks. At my cousin’s seventy-fifth birthday, the guests—all seventysomethings—mingled like ghosts of futures to come. One cousin, seventy-eight, told me that old age makes you invisible. You still occupy space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture. Old age is rude like that: the world resents you for hogging resources after your best years are spent. You should apologize for existing. Step aside, old man.

    So here I am, staring down a three-headed monster: paperwork, invisibility, and the slow evaporation of the job that kept me sane. What’s the plan? At six years old, I invented a companion—James, my imaginary friend. I’d knock on the apartment wall and tell my parents James wanted to play. They laughed, which only confirmed that James and I were onto something.

    Now, on the cusp of retirement, I feel his absence. Because when I think of retirement, I think of loneliness, and when I think of loneliness, I think of Gollum—squatting in the cave, muttering “precious” as he caresses the ring. Only for me, the ring isn’t a piece of jewelry. It’s youth. Precious, lost youth. I stroke it with nostalgia and curse it with bitterness. How dare people treat me like I’m invisible, when old age has taught me more than their Google searches ever will? And yet—I know this bitterness is the opposite of wisdom.

    So maybe I do need James back. But not the sweet, knock-on-the-wall James of childhood. I need James 2.0: a drill-sergeant life coach who will slap me across the face and bark: Stop whining. You’ve got love. You’ve got lights on in the house. You’re walking into retirement with more than most people ever dream of. Be grateful. And don’t you dare let this next chapter kick your ass.

  • The Tabloid Mind Vs. The Thoughtful Mind

    The Tabloid Mind Vs. The Thoughtful Mind

    The verdict is in: after fifteen years of running their experiment on us, social media has mangled the human psyche. It has sandblasted away nuance, turned civility into snarling, and left us performing as shrill tribal mascots. The trouble begins with its essence: an Attention Machine. Every scroll is a sugar hit for the brain—quick spike, hard crash. We learn the trick ourselves, spitting out content like human Pez dispensers, packaging our thoughts as candy for the feed.

    Belonging is rationed out in likes and retweets, and the cost is subtlety. To win attention, you don’t weigh both sides—you crank the volume, you caricature, you inflame. What begins as a hook metastasizes into belief. We develop the Tabloid Mind: the reflex to turn every notion into a screaming headline. And once we inhabit the Tabloid Mind, we degrade, becoming not better humans but better performers for the algorithm.

    The Thoughtful Mind never stood a chance. A Tabloid platform attracts tens of millions; the Thoughtful Mind, if lucky, limps along with scraps. Yet the difference is stark. The Thoughtful Mind asks, listens, considers contradictions, and cools the room so clarity can thrive. The Tabloid Mind, by contrast, thrives on panic and rage, reducing discourse to a lizard-brain cage match where opponents are demons and the fire must never go out.

    A culture enthroned by the Tabloid Mind breeds paranoia, extremism, conspiracy, and violence. And violence doesn’t need to be shouted—it can be winked into existence by the constant drip of toxic adrenaline.

    I know the alternative exists because I live it daily in the classroom. When my students wrestle with bro culture, influencer fakery, or the cultural fallout of GLP-1 drugs, they do so with humor, nuance, and critical thought. The Thoughtful Mind lives there, in the room, face to face. No one is frothing at the dopamine mouth. No one is shitposting for clout. We disagree, we wrestle, we laugh—but we think.

    The Tabloid Mind is not sustainable. It’s a toxin, and unchecked, it will kill us. Our survival depends on choosing the Thoughtful Mind instead. The fight between them—clickbait versus clarity, heat versus light—is not just cultural noise. It’s the defining battle of our age.

  • I’m in a YouTube Video Slump and I Don’t Know Why

    I’m in a YouTube Video Slump and I Don’t Know Why

    My WordPress dashboard tells me I’ve posted on Cinemorphosis for 152 days in a row, as if it’s awarding me the Blogging Olympics medal for “Most Neurotic Streak.” I don’t post daily out of discipline so much as survival. Writing is my mental hygiene—my daily scrub against chaos. Free therapy without the billable hours.

    YouTube, however, is another story. I haven’t made a video essay in over two weeks, and the gap feels like a cyst growing on my confidence. The longer I wait, the heavier the silence becomes, like trying to deadlift after skipping the gym for a month. I want to post, but not just to feed the beast. I don’t want to churn out recycled monologues about my watch obsession or let YouTube’s algorithm turn me into a carnival barker with clickbait headlines and fake urgency.

    It’s not as if I lack material. College just started, and I’m teaching the entire athletic department. A room full of goal-driven athletes who actually follow instructions? For a writing professor, that’s better than tenure. And as a relic from the muscle era of the 70s—Olympic lifts, protein shakes, and the occasional posing oil—I feel a strange kinship with them. We’ve already launched into our first essay assignment: the crisis of masculinity and how Bro influencers like the Liver King peddle snake oil dressed in bison liver. These guys exploit the anxieties of young men the way payday lenders exploit the broke. Can’t buy a house? Don’t worry, kid, buy abs. Tongue-tied around women? No problem, creatine is your Cyrano de Bergerac. The students are eating it up, and for once, their feedback has been better than protein pancakes.

    So why can’t I translate this into a video essay? Maybe because my brain recently short-circuited over something ridiculous: watch straps. I fell down the rabbit hole of FKM rubber straps after reading a study claiming they leach chemicals into your skin. My beloved Divecore straps—once the apex of wrist comfort—suddenly looked like toxic bracelets. I agonized for days, debating whether to bin them, keep them, or wrap my wrists in cheesecloth. The obsession drained me like a bad relationship. In protest, my mind and body staged a walkout, shutting down further watch chatter. For now, I’m taking a mental break. I’m grateful for the watches I have, but I don’t want to rejoin the strap wars or churn out videos about my latest dive into consumer madness.

    So here I am, taking a mental breather, trying to avoid the treadmill of compulsive content. It’s humbling to admit that the blogging streak hides a creative stall. But I know the video essays will return. They always do. Once I shake off the chemical paranoia and algorithm anxiety and process my thoughts, I’ll be back in the groove—hopefully with something worth watching.

  • Radical Boring: The Oatmeal-Based Lifestyle Brand No One Asked For

    Radical Boring: The Oatmeal-Based Lifestyle Brand No One Asked For

    Next month I’ll be 64, which apparently means my taste buds have joined AARP. My diet is now narrower than my tolerance for small talk: buckwheat groats, oatmeal (rolled or steel-cut, because why not keep things spicy), Greek yogurt with berries and honey, and peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches on dark bread. While normal humans dream of steak and champagne on a Paris-bound jet, I fantasize about oatmeal for dinner. Forget first class—I’m on the Oatmeal Express, and my only beverage service is dark roast coffee, soy milk, and sparkling water, which is just soda pretending it went to finishing school.

    I know what’s happening. I’m regressing. I crave mush, porridge, pablum—the kind of food that comes in jars with smiling cartoon fruit. My kettlebell workouts, five days a week, are my only defense. I sweat buckets, swing heavy weights, and imagine I look like a Viking—but in truth, it’s just a grown man clinging to his giant metal pacifier. Exercise has become my lullaby. When I collapse afterward, I feel less like a warrior and more like a sedated infant.

    Of course, at a family birthday party, one cousin reminded me that growth only happens when we leave our comfort zones. I nodded while thinking, No thanks, I’ve had enough character development for one lifetime. At this stage, I don’t want adventure. I want oatmeal. I don’t want novelty. I want predictability. I’m not only becoming a baby—I’m pioneering a whole new lifestyle brand called Radical Boring.

    My big act of rebellion? When my twins turn sixteen in six months, they will take my wife’s 2014 Accord, she’ll inherit my 2018 Accord, and I’ll step into the future—so long as the future, a 2026 Accord that comes in “canyon river blue.” My wife begged me not to get silver or gray again, so this is me living dangerously. Of course, I’ll rarely drive it. I’ll open the garage, admire the shiny paint, then close the door and scuttle back inside for a soothing bowl of oatmeal.

    My family laughs at me. They think I’m absurd, predictable, hopelessly domestic. But at least I’m consistent. And if authenticity means being true to yourself, then yes—I am authentically a 64-year-old content with my porridge, my pacifier workouts, and my canyon river blue Honda. Call it returning to the womb if you want. I call it destiny.

    And now, having confessed this ridiculous self-revelation, I find myself thinking of my literary kindred Ariel Levy and her An Abbreviated Life—a memoir I clearly need to revisit, if only to confirm that my brand of absurdity has precedents.

  • Maybe There’s a Friendship Renaissance Waiting for Retirees, Or Maybe There Isn’t

    Maybe There’s a Friendship Renaissance Waiting for Retirees, Or Maybe There Isn’t

    In a recent conversation with Mike Moynihan on The Moynihan Report, media analyst Doug Rushkoff described social media life as a kind of self-inflicted madness: we willingly lobotomize ourselves into shrill binaries, flattening nuance until the “other side” is little more than a demon enemy. His words echoed Jaron Lanier’s decade-long dirge about how the online hive mind debases us into cheap caricatures.

    After fifteen years inside this funhouse, I can vouch for Rushkoff. Chasing likes and subs is a direct pipeline to despair. The algorithm isn’t designed for truth or connection — it’s a slot machine that spits out dopamine crumbs in exchange for outrage and hype. And yet, podcasters like Rushkoff and Moynihan point to a counterargument: in the right hands, social media can host intelligent conversations. But it’s a fragile victory, like surviving on a vegan diet — possible, but you’ll work twice as hard and swallow twice as much chalk.

    Socially, though, the medium is barren. Scroll long enough and the promise of “connection” curdles into loneliness.

    This hits me harder as retirement creeps closer — twenty-one months and counting. I’ve spent forty years teaching face-to-face, and I’ll miss it desperately. This semester I have student-athletes: sharp, disciplined, driven, engaging. Those classroom connections have been the marrow of my career, and they won’t be replicated by a Facebook feed.

    I’ll still have a family. I’ll still have two best friends in Torrance. But unlike my wife, who maintains a weekly social circuit of concerts, trips, dinners, and parties, my friendships are skeletal. Months-long “friendship fasts” punctuated by rare meetups. Husbands, as the cliché goes, lean too heavily on their wives for connection — a weight she may already feel pressed under. An isolated husband becomes a burden.

    You reap what you sow. Neglect friendships for decades, and you retire into isolation, wondering if you can still course-correct. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe habit calcifies into solitude.

    Or maybe not. Maybe there’s a friendship renaissance waiting out there: gray-haired amateur philosophers huddled at gritty diners, pickleball warriors at dawn, retirees solving the world over coffee. Maybe the beach yoga crowd will embrace me.

    Or maybe that’s just wishcasting. We’ll see.

  • The Influenza of the Mind

    The Influenza of the Mind

    Last week, one of my teen daughters caught a cold. She shrugged it off with the stoicism of a soldier, and I barely noticed she was sick. Then my wife came down with it five days ago. It hit her harder, but she still managed to run errands, wrangle housework, and conquer the Everest of six laundry baskets stuffed with clothes that needed folding.

    Then there was me. Yesterday, after my afternoon nap, I felt aches and pains and immediately began writing my obituary. Sprawling out on the couch in the living room, I put on the docuseries The Kingdom on ESPN but had to close my eyes, then take another nap because I was “so unwell.” 

    Convinced I was succumbing to something sinister, I staggered into the kitchen and cooked dinner. The salmon, broccoli, and rice all came out overcooked—not because I was incapacitated, but because I was deep into Internet articles about PFAS “forever chemicals.” Nothing like a side of toxic paranoia with your charred protein.

    My family tolerated the burnt offering, attributing it to my alleged illness. But once I slumped onto the couch after dinner to watch Below Deck, I went full opera tenor: sighs, groans, complaints, the whole libretto of impending doom. My family, unimpressed, mocked me. “Illness always makes me morbid and lugubrious,” I explained, as if quoting from a Victorian diary.

    My daughters laughed. My wife rolled her eyes: “Here we go. The man flu.” I thought about citing research suggesting men actually suffer more with the flu, but even I knew I’d already overshared.

    “Maybe you’re just tired,” my wife said. “Maybe you shouldn’t work out tomorrow.”

    I declared that one missed workout would cause my muscles to shrivel like neglected houseplants. “I’m doomed,” I muttered, then retreated to bed before nine like a bereft invalid.

    This morning, I awoke braced for catastrophe—a full-blown cold, a fever, the Grim Reaper at my door. Instead, I felt…fine. Perfectly fine. My wife and daughter had been right. I wasn’t sick. I was just tired.

    The truth is, when I sense illness creeping in, I go from zero to tragic opera in seconds. I suffer from Influenza of the Mind, a performance illness that turns me into a paranoid man-baby. Last night’s theatrics were not the noble struggle of a fading patriarch, but the wailings of a melodramatic hypochondriac in need of nothing more than eight hours of sleep.

  • No Age Is for Cowards: Worry as Full-Time Employment

    No Age Is for Cowards: Worry as Full-Time Employment

    When I was six, my Grandma Mildred came to visit us at the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose. This was around 1967. Like any neurotic little kid, I peppered her with endless questions about an upcoming event. Most of them revolved around food: what would we eat, would there be enough, and what if the deviled eggs ran out? Eventually, Grandma sighed and told me, “You worry too much.”

    Really? Another thing to worry about? Thanks, Grandma. Now I could add “chronic worrying” to my list of anxieties. Would it turn me into a puddle like the Wicked Witch? Would I self-destruct under the sheer weight of my own nerves?

    Flash forward fifty-eight years. Spoiler: I still worry like a professional. My bandwidth jams up with the dumbest obsessions—like finding the right rubber strap for my Seiko diver. I’ll lose sleep and dive so deep into Internet rabbit holes you’d think I was chasing doctorates in linguistics and ophthalmological physics simultaneously.

    Food isn’t any easier. Reading How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, I encountered Hillel’s famous line: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?” Roberts added that anyone who would sacrifice millions of lives to save a finger is “a monster of inhuman proportions.” Cue existential panic: If I chow down on Greek yogurt and whey protein while ignoring the industrial torture of animals, what kind of person does that make me?

    That question dredged up a memory. Years ago, while doing valet duty at my twins’ school, I chatted with Lucianna, a Brazilian parent. She told me about growing up on her uncle’s dairy farm, where calves were torn from their mothers so humans could have their milk. She remembered the calves wailing all night, a sound so haunting she’s sworn off dairy for life. Her story still rings in my ears.

    So here I am, designing my new plant-based meal plan: buckwheat groats, tofu, tempeh, nut butter, soy milk, a stack of supplements, and protein powder. I’m ready to begin. But, of course, my inner worry machine kicks in:

    • What about my omnivore family? My tofu will feel like an accusation on their dinner table.
    • What about my friends and relatives? I’ll be dismissed as a moral buzzkill, banished to the Lonely Dungeon.
    • What about vacations? Hunting for vegan options in Miami or Oahu will turn relaxation into reconnaissance.
    • What about protein and Omega-3s? My muscles will wither, my brain will curdle, and I’ll be left a vegan husk.
    • What about cheating? What if, in a moment of weakness, I scrape a lemon-pepper shrimp into my mouth while clearing plates? Then I’ll hate myself, because I’ll have violated both my morals and my macros.

    And so the worrying goes. Yet maybe this is the point. Doing the right thing rarely comes gift-wrapped in comfort. It comes with sweat, tension, and plenty of struggle.

    My grandfather once told me when he was eighty and drowning in doctor visits: “Old age is not for cowards.” I’ll amend that. No age is for cowards. Living—really living—means confronting fears, fighting cowardice, and resisting the bondage of compulsive worrying. And if anyone has the secret sauce for escaping this mental hamster wheel, I’m all ears.