Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • The Fix-It Myth: Why Self-Help is Just a Car Manual for Broken Humans

    The Fix-It Myth: Why Self-Help is Just a Car Manual for Broken Humans

    In her essay “Improving Ourselves to Death,” Alexandra Schwartz skewers our obsession with “setting goals” and the self-help prophets who profit by defining them. These gurus peddle life hacks as if they were cheat codes for existence, promising that with the right app, cue, or wearable gadget, you too can become a shiny human upgrade—an iPhone with abs.

    Their gospel is simple: optimization. A body that runs like a Swiss watch. A brain that hums like a Tesla battery. The result is a consumer barrage of homilies, buzzwords, and dopamine-chasing gadgets—all in service of transforming you into the ultimate product: yourself.

    But Schwartz argues that self-help is nothing more than a mirror, reflecting our dreams, neuroses, and insecurities. And one illusion persists like an American birthright: the Fix-It Myth. The fantasy that we are just machines—cars in need of a tune-up. Find the right manual, grab the right tools, and presto: you’re repaired, maybe even upgraded, ready to roar back onto the freeway of productivity.

    This myth has metastasized in the gig economy, where survival depends on perpetual hustle. We’ve convinced ourselves we must be perfectly fine-tuned—capable of juggling three jobs, dabbling in day trading, and hoarding enough cash to claw our way into a coveted zip code.

    At the core of this delusion is what therapist Phil Stutz calls the “Moment Frozen in Time”: a fantasy snapshot where everything is perfect—you look flawless, your soulmate is flawless, your calendar is conflict-free, and every day is a spa day in Shangri-La. The billion-dollar self-help industry feasts on this fantasy, offering secret codes that promise to deliver the life of a minor deity.

    Gwyneth Paltrow plays High Priestess of the Perfection Myth, hawking jade eggs and kale smoothies as though they were Eucharist wafers. On the Manosphere side, we’ve endured the spectacle of the Liver King—reduced from ancestral beef oracle to fallen fraud—and the smirking jiu-jitsu bodybuilder Mike Israetel, who at least delivers his advice with more honesty than theatrics.

    Stutz, however, refuses to sell the dream. His blunt counter-sermon: life is pain, uncertainty, and work. The faster you accept this, the happier you’ll be—because reality, not fantasy, is the only terrain where resilience and joy can actually grow. Otherwise, you’re just another maladapted child clinging to the hope of effortless bliss.

    And all the while, we’ve marinated in two decades of social media’s dopamine fever swamp: the endless scroll of FOMO, flexing, and fraudulence. Maybe the truest life hack isn’t another app or guru, but closing the laptop, lacing up your shoes, pounding out a five-mile run, and letting endorphins—not Instagram—clear your head.

  • Building a Bulwark Against Dopamine

    Building a Bulwark Against Dopamine

    Charles Duhigg, in The Power of Habit, insists that the real magic of self-improvement isn’t magic at all—it’s repetition, consistency, and time. Muscle memory married to good habits rewires the brain so that willpower stops being a daily knife fight. Instead, habits act as a bulwark, a fortification that keeps temptation outside the walls.

    Take my relationship with German Chocolate Cake. I adore it. But I eat it once a year because I never buy it. The thought of driving downtown, circling for parking, and elbowing through bakery lines kills the craving faster than broccoli. If people on TV are flaunting cake, I’ve trained myself to default to popcorn and an apple, which is like swapping bourbon for chamomile tea. Still, despite this culinary Maginot Line, I live fifteen pounds heavier than I want to be—proof that the fortress has weak spots.

    The Internet, however, is a stronger adversary than cake. Social media rewires the brain more ruthlessly than sugar. Twitter/X trained me to think in quips, Facebook taught me to beg for likes like a starving dog scratching at the door. I finally quit both. I post on Facebook once a month and promptly forget about it. I’m saner for it.

    But YouTube? That’s my heroin. I’ve been making watch-obsession videos for over a decade and built a modest following of 10,000. When a video pops, YouTube showers me with fireworks like a slot machine jackpot. When it flops, I get a scolding message: “This video isn’t bringing in as many of your subscribers as usual.” It’s the algorithm wagging its finger like a principal telling me I’ve failed society.

    YouTube has rewired my brain in both noble and grotesque ways. On the one hand, I’m sharper at public speaking, better at spinning essays into expositions, and more skilled at civil engagement with various personalities. On the other hand, I care too much about metrics, let them colonize my self-worth, and live half my life inside the algorithm’s funhouse mirror. I now inhabit parallel universes—the physical world and the YouTube world—fleeing one when the other displeases me.

    The problem is that the Internet’s temptations can’t be quarantined. My work machine is also my dopamine slot machine. One new tab, one click, and I’m plunging into a carnival of junk content, drenched in FOMO syrup and neon distraction. Cal Newport is right: when you toggle between focused work and dopamine junk food, the brain leaves behind a sticky residue that smothers concentration. I’ve felt that sludge firsthand, and I despise myself for swimming in it.

    As Duhigg notes, the brain is “constantly looking for ways to save effort” by making routines automatic. That’s useful for the monk who wakes at dawn to meditate, but disastrous for someone whose screen offers the New Tab to Nowhere. If only I could build a stronger bulwark against the carnival in my browser, I might actually live lighter, work deeper, and—dare I say it—be happier.

  • Autopilot or Choice: The Battle Beneath Our Habits

    Autopilot or Choice: The Battle Beneath Our Habits

    In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg challenges the comforting illusion that we live as fully self-possessed beings. Our existence, he argues, is far more random than we’d like to admit. Take the man who staggers home from work and pours himself a gin and tonic. The drink delivers its fleeting pleasure, but the deeper harm lies not only in the alcohol—it lies in the complacency of unexamined rituals, the sleepwalking habits that shape a life. Duhigg leans on William James to make the point: “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”

    By contrast, when I come home, I reach for sparkling water or diet 7-Up over ice. I probably get the same sensory refreshment as the martini drinker—minus the alcohol. What matters most is that I asserted a choice instead of slipping into autopilot.

    I apply this principle elsewhere. Because I know I tend to drive more aggressively than I’d like, I deliberately leave ten minutes earlier than most people would. That way, I don’t have to be a jackass on the road. Every time I make a conscious choice like this, I chip away at the pull of mindless behavior.

    Duhigg presses us to do the same: make deliberate decisions, rewire our routines, and stop letting unseen patterns run our lives. He cites a Duke study revealing that more than 40 percent of people’s daily actions aren’t conscious choices at all, but habits. From Aristotle onward, philosophers puzzled over why habits exist; now, neuroscience explains not only how they form but how they can be reshaped.

    The book’s central claim is hopeful: we aren’t doomed by our bad habits. We can change them, reprogram our brains, and redirect our lives—if we understand how the mechanics of habit work. I’d assume that anyone picking up Duhigg’s book already has the self-awareness and motivation to attempt change. In the short run, thoughtful people can transform themselves. The greater challenge comes later, when complacency sneaks back after the initial enthusiasm fades. That’s when I wonder if Duhigg’s manifesto offers not just inspiration, but a lasting answer.

  • The Keystone Habit: How One Change Rewires the Rest of Us

    The Keystone Habit: How One Change Rewires the Rest of Us

    Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business argues that vice, self-indulgence, and addiction operate on a neurological level. If we can deliberately rewire those pathways, we can free ourselves from much of our self-destructive behavior. Written more than a decade ago, the book anticipates the same themes that now surface in places like Reddit’s “Nofap” movement, where porn addicts admit their compulsions damage relationships and stunt growth, so they commit to abstinence—except with their partner. Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation makes a similar case, charting how dopamine overload leads to the inevitable crash of pleasure into misery.

    Duhigg opens with Lisa, an addict whose husband left her, likely exhausted by her behavior. When she finally saw how deranged her habits had become, she had the spark to change. She replaced her old compulsions with exercise and healthy eating. It’s the familiar “rock bottom” story: you face yourself stripped of illusions. Or as Marc Maron puts it, “Life hands you your ass on a stick.” Only when pride dissolves are you ready for answers.

    As someone who has wrestled with addictions and grown up with alcoholic parents, I read this story with recognition. The researchers studying Lisa’s brain found something striking: her old neural patterns were still visible, but they had been overridden by new ones. The impulses hadn’t vanished—they’d simply been crowded out. And while she overhauled many habits, it was quitting smoking that made the real difference. Duhigg calls this a “keystone habit.” In his words: “By focusing on one pattern…Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well.”

    The same principle applies to organizations: find the keystone habit, nurture it, and the ripple spreads across the whole system.

    I learned another useful term from the book: “behavioral inhibition.” It resonates painfully, because from 7 to 10 p.m. I suffer relentless food cravings. By then I’ve usually reached 2,300 calories, and eating more destroys my calorie deficit. But television sabotages my self-control—everywhere I look, people are drinking rosé, eating pizza, ice cream, carrot cake. Triggers, triggers everywhere. If I hid in an igloo, maybe I’d get ripped abs, though the view would be grim.

    Still, I’ve seen the power of a keystone habit. My mornings begin with coffee and buckwheat groats mixed with protein powder. Then I study a book and take notes, as I’m doing now. If I skip this, I get swallowed by the Internet, a dopamine carnival of watches, consumer temptations, and FOMO. I unfollow Instagram “safari” channels that inevitably mutate into half-naked influencers shaking their butts in gym close-ups. Once seen, such images can’t be unseen. Now I choose carefully.

    Replacing bad habits with good—writing, piano, exercise—changes not only my productivity but my temperament. I become friendlier, more patient with my family. But when I binge on Internet dopamine, I snap at people. I become “that guy.”

    The contrast reminds me of something Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin confessed in America’s Team: “We are all imperfect people. And each of us has at least two people in all of us; the person you show everybody and that person you never show to anybody.”

    We curate public personas and believe our own polished lies, all while a darker self hides in the shadows. But once life hands you your ass on a stick, integrity becomes your only way forward. Rewiring the brain isn’t just a neurological project. It’s a moral one.

  • Dopamine Nation: Self-Help Without the Fairy Dust

    Dopamine Nation: Self-Help Without the Fairy Dust

    I’ve never trusted the mythology of self-help books—the fairy tale that you identify Problem X, buy a book, read a few hundred pages, and Problem X vanishes. What I do believe is that a self-help book, at best, can make you stare harder at your demon, dull its sharper edges, and maybe hand you a strategy or two to keep it from devouring you whole.

    That’s why Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence punched me in the gut. Her blunt lesson: dopamine addiction—whether through scrolling, swiping, shopping, or vaping—doesn’t lead to pleasure but to misery, pain, and the hollowing-out of your agency. Reading her, I shuddered at the years I wasted feeding my brain with Internet sugar highs.

    Lembke makes no bones about the world we live in: a digital carnival of “overwhelming abundance.” She puts it starkly: “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon to a website near you.” Pleasure and pain, she reminds us, are processed in the same brain circuitry—and the more dopamine that flows, the stickier the addiction.

    The horror story isn’t abstract. Her case studies peel the skin off addiction’s double life: secret compulsions, corrosive shame, shattered relationships. Some people are more vulnerable—those with addictive parents, those with mental illness in the family—but Lembke insists access is the true accelerant. The Internet puts a casino in our pocket; supply breeds demand. Worse, social media monetizes outrage until we mistake 24/7 hair-on-fire hysteria for “normal.”

    Lembke’s most grotesque example is Jacob, a sex addict who literally builds himself a “Masturbation Machine.” She confesses she feels horror, compassion—and dread that she herself is not immune. Her verdict is bleak: “Not unlike Jacob, we are all at risk of titillating ourselves to death.” Seventy percent of global deaths, she notes, stem from modifiable behaviors like smoking, gluttony, and sloth. Addiction, in short, is a slow suicide dressed up as entertainment.

    Part of the problem is philosophical. As Philip Rieff noted in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” We’ve traded the pursuit of goodness for the pursuit of good feelings. Jeffrey Rosen put it more bluntly: classical wisdom insists we should aim to be good, not simply to feel good. Instead, we’re anesthetizing ourselves with meds, therapy-lite, dopamine drip-feeds, and hedonism. And as Lembke observes, hedonism curdles into its opposite: anhedonia, the inability to enjoy anything at all.

    Her prescription? The brutal reset of a “dopamine fast.” Four weeks off your drug of choice to force your brain back to balance. She offers a framework—DOPAMINE (data, objectives, problems, abstinence, mindfulness, insight, next steps, experiment). It’s clever, but the hard truth runs underneath: most addicts, myself included, are not “moderators.” We’re all-or-nothing. For me, the Internet isn’t moderation-friendly; it’s a rabbit hole with no bottom.

    Lembke knows willpower is not enough. She prescribes “self-binding”: physical, chronological, and categorical walls between you and your poison. But in the digital economy—where work and addiction ride on the same Internet rails—such barriers are fragile. Moderation may be the fantasy; abstinence the only real survival strategy.

    So yes, I’m glad I read Dopamine Nation. It clarified the trap, exposed the double life, and framed the fight as both biological and spiritual. But let’s not be naïve. Like all self-help, it’s not a magic pill. At best, it’s a mirror, a warning flare, and a rough map out of the dopamine swamp. The walking out is still on you.

  • The Infinite Hole: Addiction, Part X, and the Fight for the Higher Channel

    The Infinite Hole: Addiction, Part X, and the Fight for the Higher Channel

    A friend once told me that when he was nine, hanging out after school, some boys insisted they had to walk across the neighborhood to watch “a girl fight.” He assumed the girls were older, maybe middle schoolers. The boys were giddy: they claimed clothes would rip, and they’d get the thrill of seeing girls half-dressed.

    My friend refused to join them. He didn’t want to see a fight. But in that moment he was struck by a recurring fantasy: the wish to be invisible, to slip into girls’ rooms and spy. That impulse stayed with him for years.

    Decades later, YouTube would grant him such invisibility. Millions of young women had become willing exhibitionists. He became addicted. The voyeurism consumed him, draining his time, corroding his relationships, creating a double life thick with shame and self-loathing. He even dreamed of damnation, his soul circling a pit dug by his own compulsions.

    Addiction ruins us because it hijacks our agency. Urges swell until they dictate every move. Writing about this in Lessons for Living, Phil Stutz explains: “When you behave as if there are no consequences, you’ve lost your sense of the future. Immediate pleasure is all there is. Without a future, life becomes meaningless.”

    Stutz names the inner saboteur “Part X.” This demon convinces us that we can’t survive without indulging our urges. But Part X is a liar.

    Why do we fall for it? Stutz argues that it’s simple: “It’s human nature to want a reward for our pain and effort.” We grow restless waiting for pleasure to arrive. Faith and patience feel intolerable. Part X whispers that we are special, entitled to gratification now, free from universal law. Faith is unnecessary.

    And so the cycle begins. Faith collapses, the urges tighten, and soon we are hooked, yoked to Part X. Stutz warns:

    “Unstopped, this force turns your impulses into addictions. Every lower-channel impulse takes you outside yourself for gratification. But we are spiritual beings, and the only real satisfaction comes from connecting to higher forces. What you call these forces—God or flow or the unconscious—doesn’t matter. These are infinite forces, found only inside ourselves. The more you go out into the material world, the further you get from these forces and the emptier you feel. To one degree or another, we all feel this inner emptiness, this hole inside. Part X lies, telling us to go outside ourselves for one more joint or piece of cake or outburst of rage—this will finally fill up the hole. Then we take ourselves even further from the inner forces that could actually satisfy the emptiness. It’s an escalating cycle. The more we act out our impulse, the bigger the hole gets.”

    This is addiction’s essence: trying to fill an infinite hole with finite scraps.

    Freedom doesn’t come cheap. Stutz insists that change is brutal because deprivation feels unbearable. Part X insists suffering is intolerable. The only way forward is to flip the script: to see deprivation itself as reward. To starve the demon is to grow strong. As he puts it, “Each time you retrain your impulses, you close off the lower channel. A dynamic inversion occurs—when you curb the impulse you invert its energy, holding it inside yourself. This energy gets transformed and then emerges in a more powerful form through the higher channel.”

    The difference is palpable. In the lower channel, you rot in a swamp of shame, fatigue, and alienation. In the higher channel, you live with integrity, vitality, and connection. One road leads to corrosion, the other to grace.

    To walk the higher path requires humility: admit your condition, seek higher forces—God, Flow, your own language for the divine—and retrain your impulses. The more you resist, the stronger you become. Each act of resistance is an investment in yourself, a deposit of energy and purpose.

    The strategy includes visualization. Stutz recommends imagining not only your degraded state after indulgence—the lizard eyes in the mirror, the soul hollowed by shame—but also your rescue: “Imagine that a host of spiritual guides descend to lift you out of the lower channel. I see them in white robes; you can use any image that works. If the concept of guides bothers you, think of them as pure forces from out of your own unconscious. Finally, imagine yourself walking out into the world with these guiding figures. Your purpose is to be of service to the world. Again, teach yourself to quickly create this feeling of being of service. Service is the most direct way to open the higher channel.”

    This is Stutz’s religion: service as salvation, energy as grace, the higher channel as the place of renewal. It mirrors Judeo-Christian patterns of death and rebirth: die to the old self, be born into the new. Paul himself would likely reject it as a man-made scheme, but the parallels are striking.

    Whether believer or skeptic, the conclusion remains: renounce the lower channel, resist Part X, and live in the higher one. Only then can you taste true courage, creativity, and purpose.

  • The Demon Named Part X

    The Demon Named Part X

    To show my students the power of negative thinking, I tell them how I lost my first girlfriend. Convinced she was dissatisfied, I kept asking every ten minutes, “You’re leaving me, aren’t you?” or “Are you leaving me?” After three days of this, she finally did. My paranoia became prophecy, and I smugly congratulated myself: “Nothing gets past me!”

    In Lessons for Living, therapist Phil Stutz explains how negative thinking snowballs into catastrophe, giving paranoia the illusion of truth. This is the self-fulfilling prophecy, the negative feedback loop. “Your mind is broken,” he writes. “If you bought an appliance that worked this poorly you would be at the store demanding a refund. But there is no return policy for your brain.”

    Repair, Stutz insists, begins by naming your adversary: a virus lodged in your psyche he calls Part X. This “inner demon,” he writes, “is part of your psyche, and it has an agenda all its own.” Its goal is to stop you from living in reality, to trap you in stillness, fixation, and spiritual death. The universe is always in motion; Part X hates that. It wants stagnation, dullness, nihilism.

    Here lies the trap: nihilism flatters you into thinking you’re special—outside the flux of life, aloof from change. You cling to helplessness, self-pity, resentment. The deeper you sink, the more Part X convinces you that your paralysis proves your uniqueness. You become skilled in negative thinking until, as Stutz puts it, “You no longer respond to the world, you merely react to what X tells you about the world. Spiritually blinded, you are totally alone.”

    How to break free? Gratitude. “You must find a force in your soul that is even stronger than the power of negative thinking. The force is gratefulness.” Gratitude anchors you in reality; it cuts through the fever swamp of negativity. Addicts illustrate the opposite: whether it’s cocaine, alcohol, or endless Internet porn, their obsession isolates them from the universe and community. Addiction is the triumph of Part X. Negative thinking itself is a kind of addiction.

    The antidote is connection—to reality, to others, to the larger universe. Gratitude means humility: admitting you’re not an island. Unlike “positive thinking,” which projects fantasies into the future, gratitude keeps you rooted in the present. Stutz urges immediacy: “Try this. For about thirty seconds, think of things for which you’re grateful. Not just the big things; focus on everyday things we often take for granted.”

    I’m grateful for organic coffee beans, for my morning ritual of brewing coffee beside my radio tuned to classical music. I’m grateful I can digest my buckwheat groats and protein powder before my hour-long kettlebell workout, then shower, shave with fragrant cream, eat a clean lunch, and nap before “Part 2” of my day. These are not small things. They are the fabric of a life.

    The more gratitude you practice, the stronger your defenses against Part X. Gratitude trains your mind into motion, aligned with the universe’s own flux. Stutz even calls it prayer: “Independent of your personal spiritual beliefs and practices, you have led the mind beyond itself, making it a bridge into a higher place.”

    Here Stutz blends psychology with the language of religion—gratitude, humility, prayer, liberation from Jonah-like isolation inside the belly of the Leviathan. His message: escape the solitary prison of negative thought by opening yourself to a reality larger than you.

    I write about Stutz with ambivalence. His wisdom feels real, his tools practical. Yet part of me suspects a New Age sleight of hand: a watered-down religion that borrows sin (Part X), prayer, and humility while dodging the harsher demands of faith—judgment, accountability, sacrifice. Is his system merely the good parts of religion without the bite? Or am I letting my own negative thinking sneak in through the back door, looking for reasons to resist his wisdom?

  • From Dopamine to Divinity: The Case for Transmutational Motivation

    From Dopamine to Divinity: The Case for Transmutational Motivation

    In Lessons for Living, Phil Stutz recounts his refusal to prescribe Prozac to a patient. The patient wanted the pill as he wanted everything else—romance, fame, applause, alcohol: all shortcuts to happiness. Stutz wasn’t buying it. He writes:

    “Believing that things outside you will make you happy is a false hope. The Greeks considered it the ‘doubtful gift from the gods.’ In reality, there can only be two outcomes. Either the hoped-for thing does not happen, or it does and its effect quickly wears off. Either way, you are worse off than before because you have trained yourself to fixate on outer results.”

    When the outer world filters through imagination, it becomes a chimera. We don’t pursue things for what they are, but for what we fantasize they’ll be. I feel this pull myself: I’m nearly sixty-four, inching toward retirement, and browsing real estate in Orlando—dreaming of a second life in a faux-tropical paradise. A $600K “mansion” with a community pool, an hour from the beach, safe from hurricanes (mostly). Yet what I imagine as paradise may in fact be a barcalounger-sized sarcophagus—3,000 square feet of embalmed leisure.

    Stutz warns against such chimeras. They must be replaced by action—behavior that connects us to our true nature: the spiritual self. He writes:

    “We are spiritual beings and can be emotionally healthy only when we are in touch with a higher world. We need higher forces just as we need air. This is not an abstract philosophy, it is a description of our nature.”

    But here’s the rub: staying in touch with higher forces requires constant work, and it’s in our nature to avoid work. Life, then, is a perpetual battle with ourselves. Stutz’s description amounts to the purpose of religion: the angel conquering the demon. Yet in our therapeutic age—where religion is dismissed as a fairy tale—misalignment between spiritual thirst and materialist fixation manifests as depression. Conventional psychiatry treats depression with drugs. Stutz reframes it as a teacher, a reminder that the answer is spiritual life:

    “This awareness is the first step in overcoming depression.”

    His point calls to mind Katie Herzog’s mention of Laura Delano’s memoir Unshrunk, a story of misdiagnosis and drug therapy that deepened rather than cured suffering. It also echoes Philip Rieff’s famous distinction in The Triumph of the Therapeutic:

    “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”

    Stutz insists that pleasing ourselves with material trinkets is a false and destructive path. Real responsibility means behaving in ways that connect us with our spiritual core. Judaism frames this as God meeting us halfway; Pauline Christianity insists we are helpless, depraved, and must be remade entirely. I’d be curious to know where Stutz lands on this divide.

    Either way, his therapy unsettles his patients. A man clinging to Prozac, money, and fame stares at Stutz as though he’s lost his mind. Why? Because society has brainwashed us into believing happiness comes from external outcomes.

    So what’s the alternative? Relentless self-monitoring. Stutz writes:

    “Taking responsibility for how you feel isn’t an intellectual decision. It requires monitoring yourself every moment. This is the most freeing thing a person can do, but also the most tedious. Your connection to the higher world must be won in a series of small moments. Each time you become demoralized, depressed, or inert, you must counteract it right then.”

    This isn’t entirely secular advice. Proverbs tells us to hang wisdom notes around our necks. Today, that might be post-its urging us to choose virtue over distraction. Still, Paul’s lament in Romans—that his darker nature sabotages his noblest intentions—remains apt. If Paul were not a Christian convert, would he be able to successfully use Stutz’s tools to connect with his Higher Powers, or would his dark side undermine the mission over and over? 

    Stutz’s counsel is pragmatic: notice when you sever your connection to the higher world, and fight back. If I’m meant to write or practice piano but instead scroll the Internet’s dopamine-drenched rabbit holes, that’s the moment to act. As Stutz puts it:

    “If your habit is to look outside yourself for stimulation or validation, then each time you fail to get it, you’ll become depressed. But if you assume inner responsibility for your own mood and take action to connect yourself to higher forces at the moment you feel yourself going deep into a hole, you will develop habits that put you on a new level of energy and aliveness.”

    In darkness, we don’t have to surrender. The “inner tools” give us armor. Stutz writes:

    “The only way to achieve this confidence is to take a tool and actually experience how it works. Only then will you be willing to do what is required, which is to use it over and over, sometimes many times within one day.”

    One such tool is “transmutational motivation.” The exercise: picture yourself demoralized after indulging temptation. Then imagine a higher power above you. Visualize yourself taking forward motion—meditation, writing, exercise—and rising into “the jet stream.” Stutz writes:

    “Now you are going to fly straight up into this picture by feeling yourself take action and imagining this feeling causes you to ascend. Tell yourself that nothing else matters except taking the action. As you feel yourself rise, sense the world around you falls away. There is nothing except the action itself. Rise high enough to enter the picture. Once inside, tell yourself that you have a purpose. You will feel a powerful energy. To end the exercise, open your eyes and tell yourself that you are determined to take the pictured action. This time you will feel the picture above you pull you effortlessly up into itself. You will feel expanded and energized.”

    With practice, the ritual takes fifteen seconds. Done daily, it rewires despair into life force.

    But is this just Part X renamed? Steven Pressfield’s Resistance? Pauline sin? Or all of the above? Does Christianity accuse Stutz of diluting prayer into self-help? Do secularists argue his method is religion without the dogma? The questions multiply.

    Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation frames it as neuroscience. Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit frames it as cognitive-behavioral reprogramming. Stutz straddles both: science and soul. And looming above it all is the Internet—the Great Temptor of our age. A bottomless pit of pornography, consumerism, and status-chasing, piped directly into our dopamine circuits.

    And here’s the meta-question: what’s the point of rewiring your habits without a greater frame of meaning? Is Stutz peddling spirituality without religion—or is he smuggling in a stripped-down religion we secretly crave? Would Sam Harris nod approvingly at this secularized toolkit? Or would Dale Allison, the careful Christian scholar, recoil and insist that while Stutz offers clever strategies for habit change, he misses the essence of true spirituality—the self-giving sacrifice patterned after Christ in Philippians?

    Unanswered questions aside, Stutz’s message is stark: life is high-stakes. We are fighting, every day, between dark and light forces. We don’t just change habits to “optimize” our brains. We change them to keep our souls alive.

  • Rising Above the Wreckage: Finding Meaning in the Broken Phase

    Rising Above the Wreckage: Finding Meaning in the Broken Phase

    For the last several years, I have been haunted by the lines of Yeats’s poem The Second Coming: “the center will not hold; anarchy is loosed upon the world.” A.I., deepfakes, the social media fever swamp, and deranged populists seem to have splattered into a chaotic universe. It’s tempting to surrender to nihilism, declare it all over, and use that declaration as an excuse to live with reckless disregard—eat chocolate cake three times a day and go completely to pot.

    But I know that impulse is folly. Viktor Frankl is right: we don’t get to choose the meaning of our lives. Life presents challenges within our particular circumstances that force us to rise up, stand to attention, and embrace the meaning laid before us. To live this way is to live in kairos—meaningful time.

    So what does it mean to rise above? What are the circumstances we now inhabit? These questions animate Alana Newhouse’s essay “Everything Is Broken.” Written ten months after the pandemic, in January 2021, Newhouse and her husband know something is wrong with their newborn son but cannot get answers from the medical establishment as they undergo what she calls a “Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.” By sheer luck, they finally discover their son’s rare disease. When they ask a family friend, physician Norman Doidge, why so many medical “experts” failed to diagnose it, he delivers the following diatribe:

    “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it’s now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it . . . Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

    After diagnosing the ills of medicine, Norman pivots to journalism. Aware he is speaking to two journalists, he asks: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

    Realizing the truth of Norman’s rant, Alana wonders if not just medicine and journalism, but everything, is broken. She resists the thought as hyperbolic, even doomsday, but after reflection she concludes: the center isn’t holding; anarchy has indeed been loosed upon the world. The institutions that once gave us sense, order, and trust are fractured.

    When did the fracturing begin? She traces it back to the 1970s, when business lowered labor costs with “labor-saving technology” and offshore jobs. The tech revolution followed, making the American Dream more precarious than ever. As workers were paid less and less, they entered what she calls a condition of flatness—a hollowed uniformity in which institutions persist yet fail in eerily similar ways.

    We now live in an age of commodified experience—flat, Uncanny Valley-like, predictable. In a state of flatness, critical thinking atrophies and people can be led to believe almost anything: that Iran is trustworthy, that there are no biological differences because gender is purely social construction, or that tech lords can transfer massive assets to themselves and polarize society without consequence. She writes, “Seduced by convenience, we end up paying for the flattening of our own lives.” Stupid ideas proliferate because flatness produces stupidity.

    Newhouse reserves most of her ire for the Woke as the source of stupidity, which to my consternation means she leaves equally idiotic Right-wing trolls comparatively unscathed. Still, her central thesis—that we are in a Broken Phase, that cycles of collapse are part of the human condition, and that our current state is not permanent—gives me a measure of comfort. It reminds me to be strong, to rise up, and to embrace a life of meaning.

  • Stepford Dreams and Other Diseases

    Stepford Dreams and Other Diseases

    “Our culture denies the nature of reality,” therapist Phil Stutz declares in one of his chapters from Lessons for Living. In denial, we drift through a fantasy world—a frictionless utopia where everything turns out perfectly with minimal effort, unpleasantness is airbrushed away, and immediate gratification flows like tap water. If you fail to thrive in this Instagram-ready Eden, well, clearly it’s your fault.

    Reading Stutz’s dissection of this mythical paradise—one that entitlement and cleverness supposedly guarantee—I’m reminded of family vacations to Hawaii. The trip’s curated perfection feels ripped straight from pop culture’s catalog of false realities. I start imagining myself as a minor Polynesian god, which makes returning home to laundry, bills, and chores feel like divine demotion.

    Stutz’s mission is to break our addiction to the idea that life is a permanent Hawaiian vacation. His blunt truth: life is pain and adversity, the future is uncertain, real accomplishments require sweat and discipline, and—brace yourself—you are not special enough to escape these rules. These principles don’t expire.

    This is not, Stutz insists, a gospel of misery. Love, joy, surprise, transcendence, and creativity are woven into life’s fabric—but so are conflict, loss, and uncertainty.

    Why, then, do we cling to the fantasy? In part, because the media keeps showing us people who appear to have escaped reality’s terms. Movie stars and influencers are lit like Renaissance portraits, perfectly curated, radiating supreme happiness. Their romances are operatic, their sex lives cinematic. They seem universally adored and gracious enough to share the “secrets” of their bliss. They look as if they’ve broken free of pain, adversity, and doubt—and they promise we can do the same if we just buy the right products and mimic their lifestyle.

    It doesn’t matter where you sit in the social pecking order; the fantasy assures you can ascend to the influencer’s Olympus.

    This is a mass delusion. Stutz writes, “When everyone acts as if a fantasy is real, it begins to seem real.” But for you, it never arrives. Your bank account wheezes. Your waistline ignores your best intentions. Your body refuses to flatter you. Your parenting is a gamble at best. Your life often feels like it’s running you.

    Because you believe in the fantasy, you think you’re defective. You look in the mirror and mutter, “Loser.”

    That’s the invoice for believing in perfection: when it inevitably collapses, you’re left with self-loathing. Stutz warns, “The problem is that the other group has become the standard, and self-esteem starts to depend on being like them. An adverse event feels like something is happening that is not supposed to be happening. The natural experiences of living make you feel like a failure.”

    His solution? Total reorientation. Replace the static images of perfection—what I call “Magical Moments Frozen in Time”—with the truth: life is a messy, moving process. Stutz explains: “The ideal world with the superior people is like a snapshot or a postcard. A moment frozen in time that never existed. But real life is a process; it has movement and depth. The realm of illusion is an image, dead and superficial. Still, these images are tempting. There is no mess in them.”

    If media has brainwashed us into aspiring to be perfect Stepford spouses, how do we reject these static ideals and embrace life in its raw, dynamic, and inconvenient fullness? Stutz says we must accept this: “Life is made up of events. The only real way to accept life is to accept the events that comprise it. And the flow of events never stops. The driving force of the universe reveals itself via the events of our lives.”

    This flow connects us to life’s energy, making us fully alive. The downside? It leaves us feeling small, exposed, and out of control. The false paradise promises to free us from that vulnerability, but in doing so, it severs our connection to life’s current and leaves us in “spiritual death.”

    Mental health, Stutz argues, depends on accepting this unstoppable flow of events. He compares it to good parenting: “It is not good enough to just show up. You need a point of view and a set of tools. It is impossible to deal with events constructively without being prepared.” If you’re clinging to Magical Moments Frozen in Time, you’re unprepared when reality slaps you.

    The preparation, he says, is a philosophy—one that lets you redefine negative events. Stutz writes, “Preparing yourself with a philosophy enables you to change the meaning of a negative event. With a specific philosophy, you can aggressively change your perception of events.” That philosophy rests on three pillars:

    • Adverse events are supposed to happen; they don’t mean you’re broken.
    • Every negative event is a growth opportunity.
    • Spiritual strength matters more than positive outcomes.

    When you accept life as a series of crises, you stop throwing toddler-level tantrums every time something goes wrong. People addicted to Magical Moments tend to overreact to challenges—often making their reaction worse than the original problem.

    Reading this, I recall when my wife and I had twins fifteen years ago. She handled meltdowns with calm; I met a child’s tantrum with one of my own. A therapist told me, “When you get angry, you go zero to ten in under a second, and your body chemistry changes in a way that fills the room with toxic energy. That escalates your children’s tantrums. Your wife, on the other hand, stays calm. She has a calming effect on the twins. You need to learn how to calm down in a crisis.”

    Stutz is right. Being a spiritual person means maturing as a parent. Being a devotee of Magical Moments Frozen in Time means being a spoiled child yourself—an extra in Idiocracy. A society enthralled by fake perfection can’t sustain itself; it’s destined for regression, chaos, and entropy.