Cinemorphosis

Tag: relationships

  • Divorced, Not Damned: Meghan Daum and the Art of Letting Go

    Divorced, Not Damned: Meghan Daum and the Art of Letting Go

    In The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s 2016 essay “The Broken-In World” explores divorce with the same dry clarity one might use to describe cleaning out a fridge: inevitable, necessary, and oddly liberating. At 45, Daum finds herself in the middle of an amicable divorce—the kind without cheating, bruises, or courtroom melodrama. No one threw a lamp. No one stole the dog. Instead, it was just the slow, steady rot of benign neglect. Quirks once considered “charming” metastasized into full-blown repulsions. “Irreconcilable differences,” she concludes, isn’t a cop-out. It’s a dignified admission that entropy won.

    She discovers, to her great relief, that she is significantly less insane living alone. No more haggling over dinner, toothpaste caps, or passive-aggressive silences. Just peace. Divorce, in Daum’s telling, isn’t some tragic unraveling—it’s a grown-up’s fire extinguisher to a low-grade house fire of misery. It’s not weakness. It’s not moral collapse. It’s maturity, quietly slipping the ring off and stepping into air.

    Post-divorce, Daum moves to New York, joins the unofficial cult of the self-rescued, and discovers a radical truth: brokenness is the baseline. Normalcy is a myth. Everyone’s dragging a dented suitcase through life. Divorce just makes it public.

    Her real epiphany, however, isn’t just about divorce—it’s about the overinflated value of marriage itself. To Daum, marriage never felt like the final level of the video game, no Holy Grail behind velvet ropes. Monogamy had already given her a sneak preview. The ceremony, the legal bind—it was all anti-climax. If marriage is the gold standard, Daum suggests, then maybe we need a new currency.

    As a married person reading her work, you’re invited—no, cornered—into imagining a counterlife. The one where you’re single. I thought of the comedian and podcaster (soon to retire) Marc Maron: early sixties, unmarried, encircled by cats, vinyl, artisan boots, and a galaxy of fellow eccentrics. His life is cluttered, creative, obsessive. He has no wife, but he has a world.

    Daum’s point: we will find connection. If not through spouses and children, then through podcasts, group chats, improv classes, dogs, or elaborate hobbies that consume our evenings and fill the fridge of our loneliness with something edible. Marriage isn’t the only valid architecture for a life, and singleness isn’t a synonym for solitude. The real issue is connection. Not how we find it—but that we must.

    Now in her fifties, Daum is single, scraping by with podcast revenue and teaching gigs. No financial safety net. No partner to split the rent or cover her if she breaks a hip. But what she does have is agency. A voice. Essays that hum with intelligence and self-awareness. She doesn’t glamorize her choice. She doesn’t hold it above yours. She simply claims it as hers—and owns the wreckage and wisdom that came with it.

    She’s not superior. She’s just no longer married. And for her, that is enough.

  • From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    To mock Brian Johnson, aka the Liver King, feels like low-hanging fruit off a poisoned ancestral tree. The man is a walking satirical sketch, a steroid-soaked cartoon preaching “natural living” while pumping $11,000 a month of growth hormone into his glutes. He branded himself the King, his wife the Queen, and his sons with names fit for a Mad Max reboot about a paleo militia family eating spleen jerky by moonlight.

    His entire enterprise was Caveman Cosplay with a GoPro: gnawing on cow testicles at a blood-slicked picnic table, barking into the void like a tribal prophet in a trucker hat. He promised salvation to a nation bloated on Cheetos, Twinkies, and Red Bull—offering raw liver as the Eucharist for the metabolically lost.

    Netflix’s Untold: The Liver King makes a flaccid attempt at chronicling his rise and fall. The documentary is weirdly deferential, like it’s afraid he’ll burst through the screen and challenge the viewer to a push-up contest. YouTube, in contrast, has done the real exhumation—countless videos dissecting his addiction to fame, vanity, and unregulated supplements with far more insight and bite.

    Still, the Netflix film does offer one crystalline moment of pathos-turned-parody: Johnson, preparing to repent for the lies and the deception and the overpriced ancestral liver gummies, admits on camera that he’ll need to Google the words “repentance” and “atonement” before proceeding. Imagine Martin Luther, nailing his Theses to the church door—then pulling out his phone to ask Siri what “contrition” means.

    The man is a moral dumpster fire, ablaze with the fumes of self-delusion, influencer marketing, and raw meat. But that dumpster fire casts a telling glow on the cultural cave we all inhabit—where attention is currency, truth is performative, and the algorithm rewards the loudest lunacy.

    So let us name what we’ve seen:

    • Brovangelism – The sacred zeal of gym bros converted to primal living by a shirtless messiah with abs and a coupon code.
    • Swoleblindness – The ability to overlook blatant fraud if the fraudster has veins on his deltoids.
    • Rawthenticity – Mistaking uncooked meat for unfiltered truth.
    • Cloutuary – A public, slow-motion social media death staged for likes and shares.
    • Crashfluencer – He went from virality to liability, taking his followers on a nosedive into madness.
    • Declinefluencer – An influencer whose main content is his own collapse.
    • Brandamaged – A man whose brand has outlived his dignity, but not his desperation.

    Watching Johnson spiral felt eerily familiar. It brought to mind Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I once assigned to bright-eyed freshmen before they lost their souls to TikTok. Lanier warns that algorithmic performance rewires the brain, dragging us back to our reptilian roots. It doesn’t make us more “authentic”—it makes us worse. Dumber. Meaner. Hungrier for clicks and validation. Johnson is not just a cautionary tale. He’s the caution in full, swollen flesh—drenched in growth hormone and influencer pathology.

  • Love Is Dead. There’s an App for That

    Love Is Dead. There’s an App for That

    Once students begin outsourcing their thinking to AI for college essays, you have to ask—where does it end? Apparently, it doesn’t. I’ve already heard from students who use AI as their therapist, their life coach, their financial planner, their meal prep consultant, their fitness guru, and their cheerleader-in-residence. Why not outsource the last vestige of human complexity—romantic personality—while we’re at it?

    And yes, that’s happening too.

    There was a time—not long ago—when seduction required something resembling a soul. Charisma, emotional intelligence, maybe even a book recommendation or a decent metaphor. But today? All you need is an app and a gaping hole where your confidence should be. Ozempic has turned fitness into pharmacology. ChatGPT has made college admissions essays smoother than a TED Talk on Xanax. And now comes Rizz: the AI Cyrano de Bergerac for the romantically unfit.

    With Rizz, you don’t need game. You need preferences. Pick your persona like toppings at a froyo bar: cocky, brooding, funny-but-traumatized. Want to flirt like Oscar Wilde but look like Travis Kelce? Rizz will convert your digital flop sweat into a curated symphony of “hey, you up?” so poetic it practically gets tenure. No more existential dread over emojis. No more copy-pasting Tinder lines. Just feed your awkwardness into the cloud and receive, in return, a seductive hologram programmed to succeed.

    And it will succeed—wildly. Because nothing drives app downloads like the spectacle of charisma-challenged men suddenly romancing women they previously couldn’t make eye contact with. Even the naturally confident will fold, unable to compete with the sleek, data-driven flirtation engine that is Rizz. It’s not a fair fight. It’s a software update.

    But here’s the kicker: she’s using Rizz too. That witty back-and-forth you’ve been screenshotting for your group chat? Two bots flirting on your behalf while you both sit slack-jawed, scrolling through reality shows and wondering why you feel nothing. The entire courtship ritual has been reduced to a backend exchange between language models. Romance hasn’t merely died—it’s been beta-tested, A/B split, and replaced by a frictionless UX flow.

    Welcome to the algorithmic afterlife of love. The heart still wants what it wants. It just needs a login first.

  • Cheerios, Sea Monsters, and the Jungian Breakfast of Champions

    Cheerios, Sea Monsters, and the Jungian Breakfast of Champions

    Last night I dreamed I was swimming across what had to be the world’s largest swimming pool—except, instead of water, it was filled with milk and multicolored Cheerios bobbing around like tiny life preservers for the cereal-obsessed. And, of course, because my subconscious loves a good thrill, various sea creatures—none of which belong anywhere near a bowl of breakfast—kept surfacing to snap their jaws at me. I fought them off with my muscular forearms like some kind of gladiator in a lactose-laden arena. Honestly, it was like being trapped in a fever dream where Captain Crunch had declared war on Aquaman.

    As I swam across this absurd pool—which seemed to stretch the entire length of the Atlantic Ocean—I looked up and saw the hospital where my twins were born. The place loomed over me like some ominous beacon, and as I crawled my way to the shore of this milky abyss, a nurse with a face like she’d just seen a ghost greeted me in the lobby. “Your daughters,” she said, voice trembling with dread, “they’ve got insomnia. They’re in desperate need of sleep.”

    Without missing a beat, I sprinted up several flights of stairs like a man possessed. When I finally reached the nurses’ station, I found my teenage daughters lying on what looked like a giant operating table, their faces twisted in grumpy desperation, practically begging me to do something, anything, to help them sleep. And that’s when the superhuman strength kicked in—because, of course, I suddenly had the strength of ten men, which is exactly what every sleep-deprived dad needs in a crisis like this.

    With a heroic grunt, I lifted the entire table—daughters and all—over my head with one arm. Yes, you heard that right, one arm, like I was the world’s most overqualified waiter balancing the world’s most precious (and cranky) cargo. I started rocking the table back and forth, shifting the weight from my thumb to my forefingers and back again, like some kind of human metronome. My daughters, who moments before looked like they were auditioning for a remake of The Exorcist, gradually succumbed to the soothing motion and fell fast asleep, their grumpy expressions finally relaxing into peaceful slumber.

    A team of nurses watched the whole spectacle with admiration, their eyes practically glowing with awe. I could hear them murmuring to each other, “He’s the father, the strongest man I’ve ever seen, the protector of the family!” I stood there, basking in the glory of my newfound superhero status, wondering how I’d ever top this one when I woke up—because let’s be real, after this, changing a lightbulb just wasn’t going to cut it.

    If Carl Gustav Jung could’ve pulled up a leather chair beside my cereal sea of subconscious absurdity, I imagine he’d have looked at me, chin thoughtfully perched on hand, and said something like:

    “So. You swam through milk, eh?”

    I’d nod sheepishly.

    “Cheerios bobbing like archetypes—tiny, edible mandalas. You’re not just swimming, my friend. You’re navigating the numinous chaos of fatherhood, drenched in the nourishment of your own psychic regression. That milk? Pure maternal archetype. You’ve returned to the source, not to wallow, but to confront the primordial forces that made you.”

    “Okay,” I’d say. “But what about the sea creatures trying to eat me?”

    “Ah,” Jung would say, eyes twinkling. “The Shadow. Those snapping beasts are the parts of you you’ve tried to bury—rage, fatigue, perhaps even your occasional longing for a quiet, childless breakfast. They surface not to destroy you, but to be integrated. You fought them off like a gladiator. That is… admirable, if a bit performative.”

    I’d squint at him. “And the hospital?”

    “Ah yes, the birthplace of your twins. But more importantly, the anima’s cathedral. When that nurse appeared to tell you your daughters couldn’t sleep, she wasn’t just talking about them. She was voicing your own inner unrest. Your psyche—tired, stretched, anxious. And yet, what do you do? You charge up the stairs like a mythic hero.”

    “You mean when I lifted the gurney over my head with one arm?”

    “Precisely. That’s not strength—it’s symbolic function. You became the archetypal Father—the Protector, the soothing hand of structure in a chaotic world. You rocked them to sleep not with muscle, but with the rhythmic power of reliability. That motion—the back and forth—is the dance of integration. Thumb to finger, self to role, ego to responsibility.”

    I’d pause. “And the part where the nurses called me the strongest man they’d ever seen?”

    Jung would smile, not unkindly. “That is your ego talking. Let it have its moment. You’ve earned it. But beware: the Hero archetype casts a long shadow. Today you’re Hercules. Tomorrow, you’re just a guy trying to fix a dishwasher while muttering about socket wrenches.”

    I’d sit in silence for a moment. “So what do I do with all this?”

    He’d lean forward, eyes fierce with ancient knowing. “You write it down. You tell the story. You turn the absurd into meaning. Because every milk-drenched monster, every insomniac child, every fever dream is not just chaos—it’s your soul, begging to be decoded.”

    And with that, he’d vanish—leaving me soggy, humbled, but strangely seen.

  • Marriage as a Three-Headed Beast: A Review of The Four Seasons

    Marriage as a Three-Headed Beast: A Review of The Four Seasons

    I’ve worshipped at the altar of Tina Fey’s comedic brilliance for decades, so when The Four Seasons popped up on my Netflix feed, I was dismayed. This didn’t smell like Fey’s usual ambrosia of wit and subversion—it reeked of midlife schlock. I swatted it away like a pop-up ad and went back to Black Mirror Season 7, content to wallow in algorithmic despair. But then the critics on Larry Mantle’s AirTalk (KPCC 89.3, for the culturally literate) described the show as “a good hang.” That faint praise intrigued me. My wife and I hit play, expecting light entertainment. What we got was a surprise: not only was it watchable, it became quietly addictive—then, unsettlingly, admirable.

    In eight breezy half-hours, The Four Seasons somehow captures the slow psychic erosion of long-term marriage with unsettling accuracy. Tina Fey and Will Forte play Kate and Jack, a couple who seem… fine. Functional. Even affectionate. Until the cracks begin to spread like hairline fractures on a windshield. By episode three, they’re in the car, both shouting expletives at the realization they need couples therapy. Not because they’re broken, but because their marriage has mutated into an ungovernable third organism—a beast with its own moods, tantrums, and existential despair. Therapy is no longer optional. It’s marital chemo.

    And so they go. They learn the rules: de-escalation, boundary-setting, “I” statements. The fights stop, which sounds good—until they stop talking altogether. What remains is a dried-out husk of a relationship, padded with therapy-speak and mutual avoidance. Every conversation is a minefield of affirmations and self-soothing clichés. They’ve traded rage for beige. No more screaming matches, but no more real connection either. They look like two grad students in a toxic group project, just trying to pass the semester without killing each other.

    Yet somehow, this truce counts as a win. The marriage is stable. Homeostasis, if not happiness. It’s better than divorce, which they watch unfold in their friends’ lives with morbid fascination. Their pal Nick leaves his wife for a younger woman named Ginny, who speaks in TikTok euphemisms and bathes him in fresh-eyed adoration. Nick is euphoric, weeping with gratitude like a man who’s just discovered fire. But Kate and Jack look at him the way you’d watch someone dancing on the deck of the Titanic. They’ll take their muted misery over the exhausting ecstasy of dating a woman who thinks Kenny Loggins is a type of sourdough. And who can blame them?

  • The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    About ten years ago, I found myself standing on the sun-scorched lawn outside the campus library, chatting with a colleague who was edging into his sixties. I was freshly minted into my early fifties, just far enough along to start scanning the horizon for signs of irrelevance. Naturally, our conversation slid into that black hole topic older academics can’t resist: retirement—or, as my colleague eloquently rebranded it, “a form of extinction.” According to him, the day you stop teaching is the day your name starts sliding off the whiteboard of history. You don’t just stop working—you vanish. The world changes its locks, and your keycard stops scanning.

    From there, the conversation took its next logical step—death. And that’s when I said something that was equal parts earnest and glib:
    “Even at my lowest, most gut-punched moments, I’ve always had this strange, burning desire not only to live—but to never die.”
    Why? Because I am possessed by a compulsive need to know how it all turns out.

    On the grand scale:
    Was Martin Luther King Jr. right? Does the moral arc of the universe really bend toward justice—or is it more like a warped coat hanger, twisted in a fit of cosmic indifference?
    Will humanity eventually outgrow its primal stupidity and evolve into a species guided by reason?
    Or will we just become meat-bots—part flesh, part firmware—hunched under the cold glow of the Tech Lords who now sell us grief as a service?
    Will thinking, one day, come in capsule form—a sort of Philosophy 101 chewable tablet for those who can’t be bothered?

    But my curiosity isn’t all grandiloquent and philosophical. I want to know the dumb stuff, too.
    Who’s going to win the Super Bowl?
    What will dethrone the current Netflix darling?
    Who will succeed Salma Hayek as the reigning goddess of unattainable beauty?

    Like every other poor soul conscripted onto Planet Earth, I didn’t ask to be born. But now that I’m here, uninvited and overcommitted, I can’t help it—I want to see how this mess plays out.

    Still, I sometimes wonder: Am I just a naive late bloomer clinging to a plot twist that isn’t coming?
    Is there some ancient nihilist out there—smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and muttering aphorisms in a grim little café—who would look at me and sneer, “What’s the fuss, kid? It’s all the same. Same story, different soundtrack.”

    Maybe.
    But I think there’s a stubborn ember in me that keeps expecting irony to trump monotony, that believes the cynic’s spreadsheet of life’s futility has a few formula errors. Maybe my refusal to give up on surprise is what keeps my inner candle burning.

    And maybe, just maybe, that makes me an optimist in exile—still walking the fence between wonder and weary resignation, while the true cynics stand on the other side, arms crossed, whispering,
    “Don’t worry, you’ll be like us soon enough.”

  • Field-Testing FOMO: A Preteen Cautionary Tale

    Field-Testing FOMO: A Preteen Cautionary Tale

    One warm California afternoon in the spring of 1973, after sixth-grade classes had spit us out like a bad punchline and the school bus rumbled off down Crow Canyon Road, my friends and I embarked on our sacred post-school ritual: a pilgrimage to 7-Eleven to score a Slurpee before the long, punishing hike up Greenridge Road. Inside that fluorescent-lit temple of artificial flavors, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” crackled from the tinny store radio, bouncing off racks of bubble gum, jerky, and preteen dreams.

    That’s when the Horsefault sisters burst through the door like a blonde tornado.

    They were tall, freckled, sunburned Valkyries from the far reaches of suburban myth—bohemian chaos in halter tops. One was an eighth grader; the other, a high school sophomore with the kind of don’t-care confidence that could collapse a twelve-year-old boy’s worldview with a single sideways glance. They lived in a crumbling farmhouse behind the store, surrounded by the ghosts of chickens and a rumored pony.

    “Wanna see a rabbit in a cage?” the younger one asked, her grin full of bad intentions and orthodontic defiance.

    I didn’t care about rabbits. I cared about girls who looked like they had stepped out of a beer commercial set in a wheat field. And so I followed, fully aware I was marching into a trap and fully unable to care.

    The promised rabbit, of course, was a fiction. There was only a rusted cage yawning open like a rural Venus flytrap and the pungent perfume of hay, alfalfa, and whatever was left of last week’s poultry. The ambush was swift. The sisters descended with whoops and laughter, a feral tag team of dusty mischief trying to stuff me into the iron cage like I was tomorrow’s 4-H exhibit.

    I fought back. I was stocky, wired with sixth-grade testosterone and Charles Atlas dreams. We tumbled in the grass in a chaotic montage of limbs, dust, and feathers—a scene less like a flirtation and more like a deleted sequence from Deliverance if Deliverance had a laugh track.

    Eventually they gave up, giggling, breathless, their cheeks streaked with dirt and conquest. I bolted through the field, leaving behind my Slurpee and what might’ve been the preamble to an adolescence worth bragging about.

    But here’s the thing: they never kissed me.
    They never flirted. Never winked or smirked in that conspiratorial way older girls sometimes do when they’re letting you in on a secret you can’t yet handle. They tried to lock me in a cage and laughed when they couldn’t. That was it.

    And that—not the dirt, not the missing rabbit, not the poultry apocalypse—is what still lingers decades later: the almost. The sense that something wild and electric passed me by, and I walked away not transformed but merely dirty.

    That was my first real encounter with FOMO—before the word existed, before social media turned it into a lifestyle disorder. The regret wasn’t that I was almost caged. It was that I didn’t emerge with a story soaked in danger and romance. I didn’t get the wink. I didn’t get the kiss. I didn’t get them.

    I went home and turned on the TV to find Barbara Eden cooing in her harem pants, still radiant, still unattainable, still safely contained in her bottle. And I realized that day: I didn’t want to summon Jeannie. I wanted to be summoned—chosen, winked at, whispered to. But the Horsefault sisters were not granting wishes. They were disrupting ecosystems and giving boys premature nostalgia.

    And I, poor idiot, had missed my moment.

  • The Gospel According to Lalo: Watches, Inadequacy, and the Quest for a Better Self

    The Gospel According to Lalo: Watches, Inadequacy, and the Quest for a Better Self

    Yesterday, the tour bus wheezed to a stop and dumped us in Little Havana like a sack of reluctant tourists. We wandered through downtown under a punishing sun, the air thick with the scent of café Cubano and bravado. That’s when I saw him: a man who looked exactly like Lalo Salamanca, minus the drug empire—crisp white shirt, swagger in his step, and two kids in tow. He wasn’t just crossing the street; he was gliding, chin up, radiating unfiltered, unstudied masculinity. And he wasn’t alone. Little Havana was teeming with these men—fathers who looked like they’d stepped out of a sepia-toned photo labeled Pride, circa Always.

    Meanwhile, there’s me—63 years old, 30 pounds overweight despite daily exercise and good intentions. My daughters joke that I look like Charlie Brown, and not in the charming, animated special way—more in the “existential dread in khakis” sense. I don’t walk across intersections like Lalo. I trudge. And if I’m holding hands, it’s probably because I’m being led away from a pastry counter.

    But as I watched those fathers—their confidence, their presence—I began to realize the true pathology behind my watch obsession. I wasn’t just collecting watches. I was searching for transformation. If I could find the watch, the perfect timepiece, it might just alchemize my Charlie Brown soul into something closer to Lalo—proud, magnetic, quietly heroic.

    Enter the Seiko Astron Nexter—$1,700 of satellite-synced wizardry and horological lust. It gleams. It commands respect. It’s whispering, “Buy me, and become the man you were meant to be.” But let’s be real: I barely go anywhere these days. My public appearances are limited to grocery store aisles and accidental mirror encounters. I’m not a man about town; I’m a man about tuna salad and ibuprofen.

    At 63, how many years of wrist real estate do I even have left? How long before I’m just another well-accessorized ghost, my legacy a drawer of luxury regret? The whole ritual—buying, flipping, rationalizing, repenting—is starting to feel less like a hobby and more like a slow, polished breakdown. This isn’t taste. It’s compulsion with a tracking number.

    Maybe it’s time to quit. I’ve got five watches already—each one a chapter in the memoir of my delusions. Maybe the next chapter isn’t about adding to the collection, but about burning the altar down.

    Here’s a wild idea: make self-denial the new dopamine hit. Let the new obsession be calorie restriction instead of case diameter. Let others chase sapphire crystals and ceramic bezels—I’ll chase a slimmer waistline, a clean mind, and the kind of inner quiet no chronograph can measure.

    Because maybe happiness isn’t behind a glass display case. Maybe it’s not ticking on my wrist. Maybe it’s the empty space where the craving used to be.

    Still… the Astron is beautiful. And it would look damn good on Lalo.

  • Punchlines and Prenups: Why Comedians Make Surprisingly Solid Spouses

    Punchlines and Prenups: Why Comedians Make Surprisingly Solid Spouses

    In her essay “What Comedians Know About Staying Married,” Olga Khazan throws us a curveball: stand-up comics, those neurotic jesters fueled by dysfunction and oversharing, somehow have enviably strong marriages. Yes, the very people whose livelihoods depend on broadcasting their most humiliating personal stories to drunken strangers in dark clubs have—brace yourself—functional, long-lasting relationships.

    This sounds like the premise of a dark joke: A comedian walks into a marriage… and it actually works out?

    Khazan rattles off an eyebrow-raising list: Bert Kreischer (who once famously performed shirtless while talking about binge-drinking with Russian mobsters), Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Tina Fey, Conan O’Brien, Adam Sandler, Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen Colbert, Tom Papa, Jim Gaffigan, and Nate Bargatze. Not exactly a group of low-key, emotionally regulated nine-to-fivers. And yet, many of them are married to the same person they were with when they were broke, bombing open mics, and sleeping on stained futons.

    So what’s the secret sauce—besides not cheating with the club manager or moving to L.A. for “more stage time” and never calling home again?

    According to Khazan, it’s that these comics are astute students of human nature. Their job is to analyze and exaggerate the absurdities of life, especially their own. They live in a constant loop of self-examination and observational sharpness, and when that lens is turned inward—not just for laughs, but for emotional insight—it becomes a tool for longevity. In other words, they have weaponized their neuroses for good.

    By that logic, therapists, philosophers, professors, and other caffeine-dependent, overthinking professionals should also have excellent marriage stats. (Spoiler: they don’t.) So the real takeaway isn’t that comedy makes you marriage material, but that a reflective worldview and the ability to call yourself on your own crap might.

    Still, Khazan digs deeper and finds another ingredient: collaboration. These comic couples are often not just married; they’re co-creators. Podcasts, YouTube channels, touring schedules, editing sessions—they’re not just paying the bills together, they’re building something. It’s the opposite of what she calls “mutual stagnation,” that slow marital death by couch, where both parties rot in front of The Great British Bake-Off, silently aging into human-shaped throw pillows.

    I had a flashback reading that: Estes Park, Colorado, 2002. I was the best man at my friend’s wedding. As I helped the priest unload a boxy camcorder from his Volkswagen Beetle, he said, “My brother’s getting divorced. No affair, no drama. They just didn’t grow.” That phrase haunted me. They just didn’t grow. They watched TV every night until they turned into living wallpaper.

    In contrast, the comic couples Khazan describes are building together, or at least sharing war stories from the front lines of the road. They’re not roommates with mutual dental insurance—they’re comrades. And while the rest of us are debating whether to splurge on Disney+ Premium, they’re debating how far they can push a bit about their sex life without getting served divorce papers.

    Khazan points out that this delicate dance—what to say on stage about your spouse and what to leave in the vault—requires real communication. These couples talk about boundaries. They negotiate what’s sacred and what’s fair game. That kind of honesty may not always be funny, but it’s the opposite of resentment.

    And the road? Turns out, time apart isn’t marital poison. It’s oxygen. When one half of the couple is in Omaha doing five shows in three nights, they’re not growing sick of each other’s chewing or laundry pile. They’re getting some much-needed space. Absence makes the heart grow fonder—and also less likely to stab someone for breathing too loudly.

    But ultimately, the golden ticket, according to Khazan, is metacognition: the ability to think about how you’re thinking. It’s that moment where you pause mid-freakout and realize, “Oh. I’m spiraling like a lunatic. Maybe I should stop yelling about the dishwasher and step outside.”

    It reminded me of a moment in my own marriage two decades ago. My wife and I were in the thick of some knock-down-drag-out verbal joust over—well, I have no idea. Whatever it was, we were spiraling fast. But then, mid-argument, I had an out-of-body experience. I hovered above the room like a judgmental ceiling fan and watched myself—a grown man—losing his mind over who knows what. In that moment of clarity, I clutched my stomach, declared I had “intestinal distress,” and locked myself in the bathroom for 45 minutes. Crisis averted. Marriage preserved. Thank you, metacognition.

    So maybe that’s the real lesson. You don’t need to be a comedian to make your marriage work. But it helps to be someone who’s spent a lifetime poking around in the attic of your psyche, who can recognize your own absurdity in real time, and who knows when to quit the bit and retreat to the bathroom before you say something irreversible.

    Marriage isn’t a punchline. But if you’re lucky, it’s a running joke you both keep writing together.

  • An Essay Is Born of Conversation

    An Essay Is Born of Conversation

    One morning, I found myself performing the sacred rites of domesticity—washing dishes, chugging my second cup of dark roast like it was holy water, and catching snippets of Howard Stern’s radio show in between the clatter of silverware. Stern, the man who’s built an empire on the backs of potty humor and shock jocks, suddenly ditched his juvenile antics for something more personal. What followed nearly made me spit out my coffee. The King of All Media, a man who’s made millions by talking non-stop, admitted that he has no friends. Let that sink in—a professional chatterbox with zero pals. My immediate thought? Here’s a guy so wrapped up in his own celebrity bubble, buried under endless meetings, and tucked away in his cozy cocoon with his family, that he’s practically marinating in his own solitude. 

    Stern’s confession hit me like a cattle prod straight to my existential crisis, jolting me through the cobwebbed back alleys of my own past. Thirty-five years ago, when I was a baby-faced college writing instructor with more hair and less cynicism, my landline phone wasn’t just a device; it was an extra limb, surgically attached to my ear. I wasn’t just talking to friends—I was engaged in marathon sessions of verbal gladiator battles, the kind of conversations where we didn’t just solve world problems, we dissected the universe down to its subatomic particles.

    We’d exchange stories so absurd that Kafka himself would rise from the dead, throw his manuscript in the trash, and declare, “I can’t compete with this!” We laughed like it was an Olympic sport, the kind of laughter that made your ribs ache, your eyes tear up, and your bladder question its loyalty. These were the days when human connection wasn’t just a handshake and a nod; it was full-contact rugby for the soul, complete with head injuries and emotional bruises.

    Back then, phones had cords—literal leashes that tied you to the landline, forcing you to stay in one place for hours, committed to the conversation like it was a prison sentence with your best friend as the warden. Every call was a saga, a never-ending odyssey through every absurd thought, half-baked philosophy, and stupid joke that popped into our heads. There were no text messages to hide behind, no quick emojis to slap onto an awkward silence. You had to talk, and by God, we talked. Hours on end, as if the fate of the cosmos depended on our ability to debate the merits of Star Wars versus Star Trek for the thousandth time.

    Nowadays, those conversations are as dead as pay phones. And my phone? It’s just a sad rectangle of glass and regret, used more for doom-scrolling and sending passive-aggressive emails than for any real human connection. I’ve traded in deep conversations for shallow interactions, where “likes” and emojis have replaced belly laughs and epiphanies. It’s like swapping out a gourmet meal for a microwaved hot dog—and not the good kind.

    Now, fast forward to this glittering dystopia we call the present, where I’ve amassed a veritable army of so-called “friends” across social media platforms—each one just a pixelated speck in the vast, soulless void of the internet. Sure, I might occasionally lob a carefully filtered photo of a family vacation into the void, fishing for a few paltry likes and insincere comments. But once I’ve collected my meager dopamine hits, I retreat right back into my hermit cave, where human interaction is about as rare as a unicorn on a skateboard.

    Despite being fully aware that friendship is as vital to mental health as oxygen is to a scuba diver, many of us somehow marooned ourselves in what I now dub the Howard Stern Condition. This self-imposed exile didn’t happen in a single, dramatic twist of fate. It was a slow, insidious descent into madness, like slipping into a warm bath that turns out to be full of piranhas. 

    One of the dangers of losing real conversations is that our writing is a reflection of the quality of our interactions with others. Spontaneous conversations with surprising twists and turns make for a kind of writing that is vital and engaging. But half-baked conversations degraded into mindless likes and comments creates a kind of algorithmic writing that is anodyne, soulless, and even soul-crushing. Therefore, writing instructors must teach their students how to create essays born of real conversation. The question is how is this done? 

    As I wrestle with ways to create assignments that are born of meaningful conversations, I turn to Sherry Turkle, my oracle in a wilderness dominated by endless scrolling and dopamine hits. For over a decade, Turkle in her books Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together has sounded alarms on “always-connected lives,” describing a “flight from conversation” and warning us that “we have come to expect more from technology and less from each other.” Now, more than ever, we are “satisfied with less,” content to trade meaningful exchanges for a digital mirage of connection. Turkle’s message is clear: don’t be so mesmerized by the flashing lights and instant feedback of tech, because, eventually, we have to confront the dark side of a life filled with shortcuts, plagued by a shrinking attention span, crumbling conversation skills, and the hollowing out of genuine relationships.

    So what do we call a generation content with a life that’s “good enough”—an existence that leaves us lonely and anxious, yet just distracted enough to stay docile? Maybe zombification fits the bill: living in a deadened state, either oblivious to it or too indifferent to do anything about it. Turkle is holding up a mirror, showing us our zombified selves as we expect more from our devices and less from each other, and urging us to make “course corrections” before we drift any further.

    To make these corrections, Turkle isn’t suggesting we toss our devices out the window. Instead, she wants us to dig deeper, examining how our tech dependence erodes essential qualities like empathy, social cues, and basic human decency. In this screen-saturated stupor, we risk becoming shut-ins, devoid of social skills, and isolated from genuine connection. In bypassing the trial and error of real-world interactions, we lose the etiquette and resilience necessary for life in a cooperative society. With this in mind, I developed a writing assignment that is AI-resistant in that it requires autobiographical content that defies AI generation. It is designed to explore the necessity of face-to-face interactions: 

    Writing Prompt: Lessons in Manners and Etiquette Beyond the Screen

    Think back to a time when you found yourself in a social situation where the importance of manners, etiquette, or unspoken social rules became clear to you in a way that only a real, in-person experience could reveal. In today’s world, where so many interactions are mediated by screens, we can miss out on learning the nuances of human interaction—the kind of lessons that can’t be taught through text messages, social media, or YouTube tutorials. Your task is to recount a time when an in-person interaction left you with a memorable lesson about behavior, respect, or common sense that changed the way you see social dynamics.

    The purpose of this writing prompt is to encourage you to reflect on the unique, irreplaceable lessons that come from real-world social interactions, highlighting the limitations of digital communication. In an age where much of our interaction occurs online, screen-based communication often lacks the depth, nuance, and immediate feedback that face-to-face experiences provide. By recalling a memorable in-person situation where manners or etiquette were essential, you can recognize the invaluable role of direct human contact in developing social skills that can’t be honed through social media alone. This reflection serves as a foundation for understanding how the overuse or misuse of social media might erode these essential skills, weakening our ability to navigate complex social landscapes with sensitivity and respect.

    Assignment Instructions:

    1. Setting the Scene: Start by describing the situation, the location, and the people involved. What was the environment like? Was it a structured setting (like a school or job) or something more informal (a family gathering, gym, party, etc.)? Explain your initial feelings or expectations as you entered the situation. Did you feel comfortable, nervous, or completely out of your element?

    2. The Faux Pas or Mistake: Describe the specific moment or behavior where things started to go sideways. Did you accidentally break an unspoken rule or do something that, in hindsight, seemed awkward or inappropriate? How did people around you respond? Were there direct consequences, or did someone pull you aside to “educate” you on what was expected?

    3. The Lesson Learned: Reflect on what this situation taught you about manners, etiquette, or respect. How did this experience shape your understanding of appropriate behavior? In what ways did it reveal social rules that you hadn’t fully appreciated before? Why do you think this lesson could only have been learned face-to-face, rather than through a screen?

    4. Impact on Your Future Behavior: How has this experience influenced you since? Are you more aware of how you interact in similar situations now? Describe any changes in your approach to social settings and why this particular incident left a lasting impression on you.

    In your response, use specific details and a vivid description of the moment to help the reader experience the lesson with you. Think about why in-person experiences teach us lessons that screen-based interactions often cannot, and consider how this knowledge shapes who you are today. Aim for approximately 500 words, and remember to highlight why this lesson is one that could only be learned through direct, human interaction.