I miss my old Genie garage door opener and the vanished age of competence it represented. The old Genie operated according to a refreshingly primitive philosophy: electricity goes in, button gets pushed, garage door goes up. It demanded nothing more from its owner than a functioning thumb and a basic understanding of cause and effect. It belonged to a world where machines served human beings rather than requiring human beings to audition for the privilege of operating them.
The new Genie belongs to a different civilization entirely. It greets you like a twenty-year-old Silicon Valley intern conducting a security clearance. Before the garage door will consent to rise six feet into the air, you must download an app, create an account, verify an email address, enable Bluetooth, grant permissions, update firmware, agree to seventeen pages of terms and conditions, and perhaps burn a small offering before the altar of the Cloud. The old Genie made you feel like the master of a machine. The new Genie makes you feel like a bewildered medieval peasant petitioning an invisible digital bureaucracy. Nothing reminds an aging homeowner of his mortality quite like discovering that the garage door now speaks fluent smartphone while he still speaks fluent button.
Wanting buttons instead of apps is a sign of misalignment. The older I get, the more I recognize this condition. Misalignment occurs when the world quietly changes languages while you continue speaking the old one. It is one of the defining afflictions of the geriatric class. At sixty-four, I found myself replacing the Genie of Old with the Genie of New, and I required assistance from my wife. This was not a proud moment.
Together we entered the garage. I watched as she climbed a ladder, removed the white plastic cover from the unit, located the Bluetooth button hidden somewhere in its technological intestines, and synchronized our phones. She programmed the second remote I had purchased from Amazon. She solved every problem that had defeated me. When I thanked her, she responded with the kind of observation only a spouse can deliver: gentle in tone, devastating in effect.
I was, she explained, exactly like one of her sixth-graders. I had no patience. I wanted the universe to suspend operations until my problems were solved. Unfortunately, the universe had declined my request. New problems kept arriving. New technologies kept appearing. My misalignment with the world kept widening.
At that moment, I realized I had entered a new phase of life. I was no longer merely impatient. I was becoming dependent. My brain still functioned perfectly well, but it no longer possessed the elasticity it once had. Technology evolved like a city rebuilding itself overnight. I evolved with the speed of continental drift.
In that moment of horror, my thoughts turned to Moria.
When you’re old, you must prepare for what I call Morian Drift: the gradual sensation that the world has moved on without you, leaving you to wander through the ruins of once-intuitive systems while younger people navigate effortlessly through technological labyrinths you barely understand.
Moria was once the magnificent underground kingdom of the dwarves, a city of glittering halls, colossal pillars, and staggering wealth. But the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. They awakened the Balrog, a primordial demon of shadow and fire, and their civilization collapsed into ruin. By the time the Fellowship arrives, Moria has become a haunted tomb filled with darkness, crumbling bridges, and the lingering memory of greatness.
That is how aging sometimes feels.
You find yourself standing on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, staring at a technological Balrog that younger generations dismiss as a routine software update.
The Balrog itself is one of Tolkien’s great monsters: a towering demon wrapped in shadow and flame, carrying a fiery whip and trailing a serpentine tail. It embodies chaos, power, and the consequences of pursuing progress without restraint. During the battle, Gandalf confronts the beast upon the bridge. He wins. The bridge shatters. The monster falls.
Then comes the whip.
As the Balrog plunges into the abyss, its fiery lash coils around Gandalf’s legs and drags him down into the darkness. The injury is not merely physical. It becomes a life-altering ordeal that carries him through the depths of Moria and up the Endless Stair. The battle ultimately kills him. Victory itself becomes the instrument of his destruction.
That image stayed with me as I stared at the new Genie opener.
The garage door was my Balrog.
Not because it was especially difficult. Not because Bluetooth pairing is inherently terrifying. But because it revealed a truth I had been trying not to notice. My accumulated competence had encountered a new reality and failed. The problem was not the garage door. The problem was the widening gap between myself and the world I inhabited.
The new Genie delivered what I now call a Balrog Moment: the sudden realization that one’s hard-earned expertise no longer guarantees mastery, forcing a confrontation with aging, obsolescence, and the necessity of reinvention.
After defeating the Balrog, Gandalf dies. Later he explains his experience in a single haunting sentence:
“I strayed out of thought and time.”
That line has haunted me for years because it captures something profound about growing older. You wake up one day and discover that the culture, the technology, and the assumptions that once felt natural have drifted away from you. You have not left the world. The world has left you.
Fortunately, Gandalf does not remain dead. He returns transformed. The old wizard gives way to a new one. He emerges wiser, stronger, and better suited to the task ahead.
That is the lesson I took from my garage-door apocalypse.
The new Genie showed me that I had strayed out of thought and time. But it also showed me that the answer is not surrender. The answer is reinvention. The alternative is permanent residence in Moria, wandering among the ruins while the rest of civilization marches onward without you.
Cinemorphosis 