Cinemorphosis

Tag: personal-growth

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • Nostalgia, Nihilism, and the Need for a North Star

    Nostalgia, Nihilism, and the Need for a North Star

    We live in a state of perpetual performance. Not just for others, but for ourselves. It’s cosplay with consequences—playful on the surface, deadly serious underneath. We obsess over how our performance lands. We evaluate our worth by the reactions we elicit. At stake is not just our reputation, but our very sense of moral character.

    This obsession isn’t new. The philosopher Blaise Pascal put it bluntly: we’d rather appear virtuous than actually be virtuous. It’s easier to sculpt the image than to develop the core. In this way, we’ve become artisans of curation, not content—architects of persona, not people.

    We live, as Shakespeare warned, on a stage. But our thirst for applause is bottomless. The more we receive, the more we crave. We become validation addicts, forever chasing the next fix of approval. And when applause falters or vanishes, anxiety rushes in. To soothe this anxiety, we self-medicate. Not just with likes and follows—but with food, consumption, workouts, and delusion.

    Some of us drown that dread in comfort food. Others sprint in the opposite direction—discipline, clean eating, high-performance regimens. But often, that stoicism is just cosplay too: hunger in a different mask. When that fails, we drift into nostalgia. We reimagine the past—not as it was, but as it flatters us to believe it was. We cast ourselves as the hero, the lover, the misunderstood genius. The story becomes so good, we forget it isn’t true. We live in the fiction and lose our grip on reality.

    This disconnect—between who we pretend to be and who we are—makes us brittle. Maladapted. And so the cycle deepens: more consumption, more self-distraction, more illusion. Consumerism becomes therapy. Hedonism becomes self-care. Nihilism becomes a badge of honor. All of it is cosplay. And all of it is corrosive.

    Philosophy, religion, and therapy exist to confront this masquerade. They offer a language for our delusions, a history of our dysfunction, and a spiritual direction out of the maze. They remind us that cosplay is not identity, and performance is not presence.

    I don’t pretend to have it figured out. But I’ve found insight in thinkers like Phil Stutz, who warns against the seductive ease of instant gratification, and Steven Pressfield, who speaks of resisting the lure of comfort in favor of a purposeful life. I’ve also been challenged—and strangely comforted—by Paul’s doctrine of kenosis: the radical idea that we’re not here to inflate ourselves but to empty ourselves in service of others. In a world obsessed with power and “respect,” that message lands like a thunderclap.

    What unsettles me most is not our ignorance—it’s our awareness. Many of us know the truth. We even live it for a while. But we drift. We relapse. We trade the hard-earned clarity for the cheap thrill of our old scripts. That’s what demoralizes me: not just the fall, but the speed and ease with which it happens.

    Yet I still believe in the power of a North Star. Call it purpose, vision, a calling—whatever name it takes, it’s the gravitational pull that keeps us from floating off into the void of our appetites. I think of Ann Kim, the Korean immigrant told to stay in her lane. She didn’t. She found her voice, expressed it through food, and became a James Beard Award-winning chef.

    The path to a good life, I suspect, doesn’t begin with fear of failure. It begins with a compelling vision of who we are meant to be. And the discipline to never look away from it.

  • Blubberation: The Scourge of Humankind

    Blubberation: The Scourge of Humankind

    Few words in the English language wear such a deceptive mask as maudlin. To the untrained ear, it sounds quaint—maybe even charming—like something involving an embroidered hanky and a soft violin cue. Most people, if they’ve heard it at all, treat maudlin like a minor indulgence in sentiment. But this tepid reaction completely misses the word’s fangs. In truth, maudlin is not merely saccharine—it’s a spiritual sickness. It is the emotional equivalent of soggy pie crust: overbaked, overhandled, and incapable of supporting the weight of anything real.

    Jeffrey Rosen, in The Pursuit of Happiness, opens with a quote from Paracelsus that nails the metaphysical rot at the core of maudlin: “Even as man imagines himself to be, such he is, and he is also that which he imagines.” Most of us don’t realize we’ve built our entire personalities around a grandiose hallucination—an operatic self-image drenched in tragic overtones, straining for gravitas. This isn’t just self-delusion. It’s Blubberation—a term I propose as an upgrade to the soft-focus failure of maudlin. Blubberation is not some quaint emotional hiccup. It’s our default operating system. We cling to our sad little myths and bathe in our own narrative syrup, while Rosen, echoing the Stoics, begs us to snap out of it. Real freedom, the kind Cicero and Jefferson admired, comes not from indulging the lower self with its gaudy tantrums, but from mastering our inner world—our thoughts, emotions, actions, and absurd yearnings for applause.

    Consider Cicero’s ideal: the man who is not tormented by longing, not broken by fear, not drunk on ambition or self-congratulating euphoria. This man, Cicero says, is the happy man. And here’s the kicker: this man is the sworn enemy of Blubberation. The Stoic’s strength lies in composure; Blubberation recoils from it like a vampire from sunlight. Rosen knows this. His book is a case against the lachrymose self—the one addicted to its own melodrama, whose emotional overreach demands constant rewards: a cookie, a compliment, a new Omega Speedmaster.

    Let me be clear. I am not above this. I am its most devout practitioner. In fact, my watch addiction is Blubberation in horological form. I’ve shed actual tears during a wrist rotation cull. I have felt the full agony of “falling out of love” with a diver watch I once swore was “The One.” I’ve experienced the euphoric lift of trimming my collection, only to relapse a week later with trembling hands at a DHL box. We call this collecting. We dress it up as passion. But let’s be honest: it’s the theater of the self. It’s manufactured meaning in a velvet-lined case.

    Maudlin doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s too polite, too antique-shop sad. Blubberation, on the other hand, is a full-body emotional spill. It’s sadness with jazz hands. It’s weeping into your soy latte because someone forgot to like your Reels. It’s mistaking catharsis for wisdom. It’s trying to turn your trauma into TikTok content with the right music filter. And it’s not limited to watches. It infects how we narrate our lives, our diets, our so-called “journeys.” It’s the self crying out, not for help—but for attention.

    Blubberation, in the end, is a trap. It offers the illusion of depth but delivers only the shallows. It promises identity but trades in caricature. The Stoics warned us: without restraint and clarity, we become slaves to our worst performances. We become sentimental hustlers, selling tragedy like perfume. And as long as we keep mistaking our emotional indulgence for authenticity, we’ll never touch happiness—only sniff it through the fog of our own overwrought monologues.

  • Wristwatches and Wastelands: How Fashion Can Hollow You Out

    Wristwatches and Wastelands: How Fashion Can Hollow You Out

    Amy Larocca, a fashion journalist with twenty years of runway reportage under her belt, understands the psychological scaffolding beneath a well-tailored sleeve. “Fashion,” she writes in How to Be Well, “is about beauty, of course, but it is also about the desire to elevate daily life from its more banal limitations, to consciously and actively share something about how you’d like to be perceived by the rest of the world.”

    And that, my friend, is exactly where the trouble starts.

    Take a stroll through the horological asylum known as the watch community. What starts as an appreciation for precision craftsmanship often spirals into a neurotic fixation. A dive watch isn’t just for telling time—it’s for announcing to the world that you’re rugged, refined, and possibly ready to harpoon something. The desire to “elevate daily life” with just the right wrist candy turns into a slow-motion personality collapse. It becomes a lifestyle audition for an identity you don’t actually inhabit.

    The trap is cunning. At first, fashion promises transformation: a sharper silhouette, a touch of mystique, a sense of control in a chaotic world. But when the performance replaces the person—when dressing well becomes a proxy for purpose—you’re not elevating your life. You’re embalming it in linen and leather.

    The real tragedy isn’t vanity. It’s the way compulsive self-curation smothers empathy. Narcissism isn’t just annoying—it’s lonely. It dislocates you from community, connection, and anything approaching transcendence. A meaningful life, if it’s worth living at all, doesn’t orbit around the mirror.

    To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with looking sharp. Be fit, be stylish, radiate confidence. But when your wardrobe becomes your worldview—when you dress not to express but to impress—you trade depth for dazzle. You don’t become interesting. You become exhausting.

  • College Essay Prompt for Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You

    College Essay Prompt for Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You

    In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport argues that the “craftsman mindset”—a focus on deliberate skill-building and becoming excellent at what you do—is a better path to career fulfillment than following one’s passion. He contends that “passion is rare, passion is dangerous, and passion is overrated.” In his view, obsessing over finding your “true calling” can lead to dissatisfaction, impulsivity, and a lack of resilience when things get hard. Instead, he believes that meaningful, satisfying work emerges from developing rare and valuable skills over time, which in turn gives people autonomy, impact, and a sense of mastery.

    However, some of the sharpest critiques of Newport’s thesis have come from students who see flaws in his binary framing of passion and craftsmanship. They argue:

    1. Not all passion is immature or fleeting. Passion, when grounded in lived experience and self-knowledge, can serve as a powerful motivator—especially when it is shaped by identity, values, and purpose.
    2. Without passion, work risks becoming soulless. A purely utilitarian focus on skill and market value can produce high-functioning but emotionally empty careers, where people feel like cogs in a machine rather than fulfilled human beings.
    3. The craftsman mindset doesn’t guarantee fulfillment. There’s no promise that honing a skill will magically lead to loving the work. Some people get really good at something and still hate doing it.
    4. Newport may be promoting a productivity ideology. His message can be interpreted as a form of secular Protestant work ethic: just grind hard, monetize your skill, and stop complaining. Some students have noted that this implicitly prioritizes economic value over personal meaning.

    With these critiques in mind, write a 1,700-word argumentative essay in which you respond to the following question:

    To what extent is Cal Newport’s “craftsman mindset” a better path to meaningful work than pursuing passion?

    In your essay, be sure to:

    • Summarize Newport’s central argument about the craftsman mindset and how it contrasts with the passion mindset.
    • Critically engage with the counterpoints listed above, especially those concerning the role of passion, emotional fulfillment, and the potential risks of overcommitting to skill development without joy.
    • Use examples from personal experience, observation, or research to illustrate your claims. You might consider real-world figures, your own aspirations, or trends in education and work culture.
    • Address the underlying values and assumptions behind both perspectives. What does Newport value most in his vision of meaningful work? What do his critics value? Where do these value systems clash?
    • Argue your position: Do you agree more with Newport or his critics? Or do you see a third way that reconciles the craftsman and passion mindsets?

    Your essay should aim to do more than take a side. It should dig into the philosophical and practical tensions between passion, discipline, skill, fulfillment, and economic survival. It should explore what we mean by “meaningful work” and who gets to define that meaning.

    Remember: this is not just a debate about careers. It’s a debate about how we live.

  • Shifting from literary delusion to real work

    Shifting from literary delusion to real work

    Much of my so-called rehabilitation boiled down to admitting the humiliating truth: I wasn’t just a failed writer—I was the lowest form of literary life, a wannabe. A person who didn’t write so much as perform the idea of being a writer. A cosplay novelist, strutting around in the costume of a tortured genius while producing little more than pretentious drivel and a growing pile of abandoned manuscripts. It wasn’t just about impressing others; it was about impressing myself, clinging to the illusion that I was part of some grand tradition of suffering scribes.

    True rehab meant ditching the farce, but not the writing itself. That would have been its own brand of self-sabotage—flipping the table and storming off because I couldn’t be Tolstoy. No, the real challenge wasn’t quitting writing; it was quitting the wrong kind of writing, the one that had wasted decades of my life. What that left me with, I wasn’t sure. But I knew one thing: I had to approach writing with a level of honesty and discipline my past posturing had never allowed.

    To guide this shift from literary delusion to something resembling actual work, I turned to Steven Pressfield’s manifesto The War of Art: Break Through the Block and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. If anyone understood the difference between real work and creative self-deception, it was him. And if I was going to claw my way out of my own nonsense, I needed a drill sergeant, not another enabler.

    Steven Pressfield does not sugarcoat the reality of writing. Sit down at the keyboard, and you’re not just typing—you’re waging a spiritual war. The enemy? A malevolent, shape-shifting force hellbent on keeping you from producing anything meaningful. It doesn’t want you to write. It doesn’t want you to create. It doesn’t even want you to try. Instead, it wants you lulled into the soft coma of complacency, soothed by self-indulgence, and sedated by excuses. Pressfield has a name for this insidious saboteur: Resistance.

    And Resistance isn’t just out to destroy your writing career. It’s an all-purpose wrecking ball, ready to demolish anything of value in your life. Want to exercise? Resistance whispers, “Tomorrow.” Want to eat healthy? Resistance hands you a menu and points at the nachos. Thinking of saving your marriage, reconnecting with an old friend, or simply being a functional human being? Resistance assures you that Netflix is easier. Resistance thrives on inertia, feeding off your lowest instincts until your grand ambitions are reduced to doomscrolling and DoorDash. As far as Resistance is concerned, there is no higher self—only Bread and Circus, perpetual comfort, and a well-padded existential void.

    But then Pressfield throws a curveball, one that had me stop mid-page, coffee cup hovering in midair. He insists that each of us has been gifted by the divine with “our own unique genius.” A talent, a calling, something only we can do. A mission we’re supposed to fulfill.

    Which led me to a harsh realization: If I wasn’t the brilliant comic novelist I had once deluded myself into believing I was—if my grand literary dreams had been little more than feverish cosplay—then what the hell was my so-called genius? Because, according to Pressfield, if I wasn’t meant to write the next Confederacy of Dunces, then surely I had something up my sleeve. Right?

    Unless, of course, Resistance had already won.

    As I read Pressfield’s case studies in human self-sabotage, it dawns on me: Resistance isn’t just some minor inconvenience—it’s a full-blown existential heist, engineered to ensure we squander our brief time on this planet in a haze of cheap dopamine and deferred dreams. It doesn’t just want us to fail; it wants us to fail happily, lulled into a state of passive indulgence, too numbed by distraction to notice the slow-motion car wreck of our own potential.

    The real danger? Not taking it seriously. Resistance thrives on skepticism. It wants you to roll your eyes, to dismiss it as some overblown metaphor. Pressfield, however, has a blunt rebuttal for the doubters: “You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.” And judging by the graveyard of abandoned projects and untapped ambitions littering my past, I’d say he’s got a point.

    Pressfield doesn’t tiptoe around Resistance—he paints it as nothing short of a demonic force hellbent on sabotaging your higher self. It doesn’t just nudge you toward procrastination; it actively conspires to keep you from doing anything meaningful. It thrives on your fear, swells with power whenever you’re on the cusp of finishing something worthwhile, and works tirelessly to convince you that life is a low-stakes game of distractions and indulgence.

    Interestingly, therapist Phil Stutz arrives at the same conclusion, albeit with a different branding. He calls this malevolent force Part X, but the function remains identical: an invisible saboteur that keeps you stuck in mediocrity, endlessly scrolling, doom-looping, and putting off your real work until tomorrow—which, of course, never arrives. Like Pressfield, Stutz insists that Resistance is baked into the human condition and that pretending it doesn’t exist is the surest way to let it consume you.

    In this sense, Pressfield and Stutz aren’t just self-help gurus; they’re high priests of a secular, no-nonsense religion: You are broken. The world is against you. And your only path to salvation is relentless discipline. Where many pop psychologists coddle their audiences with affirmations and vague pep talks about “self-care,” these two take a more Calvinist approach: Get to work. Expect suffering. Resist Resistance. The stakes, as they present them, are nothing short of existential—fail to fight back, and you risk not only losing your dreams but your very humanity.

    While Stutz takes a broader view, Pressfield zeros in on the artist, especially the writer. According to him, Resistance manifests in a litany of self-destructive behaviors: compulsive procrastination, fixation on meaningless relationships, and a penchant for creating unnecessary chaos—all to avoid sitting down and doing the real work. He argues that many of us invite drama into our lives simply because it provides an excuse not to write. The more absurd, the better.

    Case in point: Pressfield would have a field day with the stories I see on the medical drama The Pitt, where patients flood the ER for spectacularly self-inflicted disasters. One woman flew across the country to let a TikTok stranger inject industrial-grade silicone into her backside—only to end up fighting for her life. Another, a social media influencer, poisoned herself with black-market beauty products laced with mercury, resulting in a psychotic break. These people didn’t just stumble into chaos; they practically RSVP’d to it. Pressfield would argue that their tragicomic misfortunes weren’t just poor decisions but acts of subconscious sabotage—distractions from the real, difficult work of self-improvement.

    And if I’m being honest, I see shades of my own dysfunction in these cautionary tales. For years, I convinced myself I was a comic novelist, spinning out unreadable manuscripts like a literary assembly line worker with no quality control. But was I really writing novels? Or was I just using the idea of writing as a nervous tic, a way to avoid more meaningful work? The answer is painfully clear.

    By Pressfield’s definition, I wasn’t an artist—I was a graphomaniac. If trichotillomania is the compulsive need to pluck out your own hair, Graphomania Nervosa is the compulsive need to churn out unpublishable novels, deluding yourself into thinking you’re “making progress” while really just spinning your wheels. The symptoms? Excessive keyboard abuse, delusions of literary grandeur, and an uncanny ability to ignore decades of failure. I wasn’t battling Resistance; I was collaborating with it. And that, I now realize, was the ultimate act of self-sabotage.

    How insidious is Resistance? According to Pressfield, it’s the invisible puppet master behind an entire industry of syndromes, disorders, and afflictions—many of which, he argues, are little more than theatrical productions staged by our own subconscious. It’s so pervasive that most people don’t miss work because of actual illness, but because of what he calls self-dramatized ailments. In other words, Resistance isn’t just an obstacle; it’s a world-builder. It conjures up entire pathologies, complete with a supporting cast of “experts,” a library of bestselling self-help books, and a pharmaceutical buffet of magic pills designed to “treat” the very conditions it invents.

    These manufactured miseries feed into a culture of victimhood, where suffering—real or imagined—becomes a lifestyle brand. The narcissist doesn’t just endure their personal afflictions; they curate them, transforming their burdens into a kind of tragic, self-congratulatory art. Pressfield published The War of Art in 2002, long before TikTok turned self-diagnosis into an Olympic sport. But if he were writing it today, he’d have a field day watching an entire generation swap productivity for performative ailments, trading ambition for an endless loop of “What obscure mental illness do you have?” quizzes. Resistance has upgraded—now it comes with filters, hashtags, and a monetization strategy.

    The passage in The War of Art that truly floored me—the one that made me put the book down and stare into the abyss—was Pressfield’s take on choosing a mate. He writes: “Sometimes, if we’re not conscious of our own Resistance, we’ll pick as a mate someone who has or is successfully overcoming Resistance.” He admits he’s not entirely sure why this happens, but speculates that perhaps we’re drawn to those who radiate the strength we so conspicuously lack, as if their sheer competence might rub off on us through prolonged exposure.

    That hit a little too close to home. My wife, for example, is a master of keeping Resistance at bay. She doesn’t get derailed by distractions, doesn’t spiral into existential meltdowns over minor inconveniences, and certainly doesn’t spend years chasing some ill-fated literary delusion. She’s disciplined, focused, and—here’s the real kicker—consistently gets things done. Meanwhile, I have the emotional resilience of a soufflé in an earthquake. One unexpected hiccup in my day, and I’m either catastrophizing or indulging in some elaborate form of procrastination disguised as “creative struggle.”

    Pressfield argues that when an underachiever pairs up with an overachiever, the real villain isn’t just personal inadequacy—it’s Resistance itself, warping love into a lopsided power dynamic. He writes: “This is how Resistance disfigures love. The stew it creates is rich, it’s colorful; Tennessee Williams could work it up into a trilogy. But is it love? If we’re the supporting partner, shouldn’t we face our own failure to pursue our unlived life, rather than hitchhike on our spouse’s coattails?”

    Translation: if you’re the slacker in the relationship, maybe instead of basking in your partner’s competence like a freeloading houseplant, you should actually do something with your life. The hard truth is, Pressfield doesn’t just suggest that people like me might be hitchhiking on our spouse’s ambition—he flat-out states it. And honestly? He’s right. Maybe instead of cranking out unreadable novels no one asked for, I should grab a ladder and start clearing the rain gutters.

    Facing the reality of my failed novelist career doesn’t mean I should retire my keyboard and resign myself to a life of watching my rain gutters fill with leaves. Yes, I lingered in the fiction world like an uninvited guest at a dinner party, well past the point where someone should have taken my coat and quietly ushered me to the door. But if Pressfield’s The War of Art has taught me anything, it’s that surrendering to Resistance—believing its insidious whisper that I have nothing to contribute—is the fastest way to irrelevance.

    Resistance tried to pull the same trick on Pressfield himself. It told him he was a novelist, not a self-help guru, and had no business writing a manifesto on creativity and spiritual stamina. But he ignored that voice, wrote The War of Art anyway, and watched it outsell every other book he’d ever written. Resistance took a brutal loss that day—but like a bad ex, it never really disappears. It always circles back, lurking in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to convince you that quitting is the rational choice. The trick is seeing it for what it is: a con artist with the same tired sales pitch. And I, for one, refuse to buy in.