Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • The Great Book I Don’t Want to Finish

    The Great Book I Don’t Want to Finish

    I bought the Audiobook American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. I’m several hours into it. This is such a well written book. It is fully realized. It is relevant to our age. It is full of depth and reflects arduous work by a talented author Kai Bird. He has written about an infamous grifter who provided a blueprint for other aspiring grifters in our post-truth, post-shame era. American Scoundrel is surely a book that helps us understand our current condition.

    But I’m having trouble getting through the book. I dread listening to it. Descending into the psyche of Roy Cohn is extremely toxic, abrasive and unbearable. The descent is unrelenting. There are no comic respites. The life of Roy Cohn is so predictably malevolent. He is such a bad actor. Combining this history with the news events of the day is overwhelming me.

    I have nine hours to go and honestly, I’m not sure I want to complete the journey, but I feel I have to. Finishing a book, in written or audio form, because of a sense of obligation is not a place I want to be in. But such are the decisions we make as readers and as part of an audience of performed books.

    I may delude myself and “take a pause” from the book and start listening to the Audiobook Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness by Lars Anderson. I haven’t watched sports in over a decade, but I usually enjoy sports biographies. They provide a pleasant diversion from the brutality of the real world.

    My aversion to Roy Cohn does not mean I’m not averse to reading about dark subjects. In fact, I am gulping with great pleasure the Kindle version of Evan Gershkovich’s memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land, which is about this journalist’s survival in a Russian prison. So there is hope for me. Reading about a Wall Street Journal writer learning how to co-exist with hardened Russian criminals is riveting. Descending into the diabolical mind of Roy Cohn is simply intolerable.

    So I’ve convinced myself to pause American Scoundrel. The problem isn’t that Kai Bird failed. In some sense, he succeeded all too well.

  • The Case for Boring Technology

    The Case for Boring Technology

    As I got older, I began to see consumer products as portals to a world I can describe only as cozy. By cozy, I mean products that give me functionality, tactile pleasure, familiarity, reliability, and control. I increasingly prefer them to products that may be more spectacular and alluring but are prone to falter or persist in feeling alien.

    In the living room, I have a $1,500 4K LG television. Despite its spectacular picture and rich sound, I despise using it. The interface is schizophrenic. One second I’m scrolling through tiles; the next, the television inexplicably switches to an annoying “magic pointer.” It’s not magic. It’s crappy. No one asked for it. It shows up like a smelly uncle at your doorstep. It adds nothing but confusion. The interface also jumps rows without prompting and sometimes kicks me out of the home screen altogether. The LG is decidedly not cozy. It’s so aggravating that I’m buying a Roku device simply to override the interface.

    Speaking of Roku, I own a budget $200 Roku TV in the bedroom. Its picture can’t compete with the LG’s, but using it is effortless. It is direct, simple, and reliable. It does what I ask it to do and then leaves me alone. That is cozy.

    For radios, I use the Tecsun PL-660 in the kitchen because I can play it while it’s plugged into the wall without electrical interference. When my hands are wet from washing dishes, I don’t want to disconnect and reconnect a power cord every time I turn on the radio. For a while, I used the richer-sounding Tecsun PL-880 and PL-990. Their speakers were superior, but using them wasn’t cozy. I was constantly worried about getting the USB plug wet and shorting the radio. Worry is the enemy of cozy. So I returned to the thinner-sounding PL-660. On balance, its dependable performance makes it the cozy choice.

    For shopping, I prefer Trader Joe’s. It is small. Walking from one end to the other isn’t an expedition; it feels like walking from my kitchen to my bedroom. I know the employees. When I’m finished shopping, I walk to the checkout aisle and interact with an actual human being. That is cozy.

    What isn’t cozy is walking into a giant chain supermarket or, worse, Costco, where the building is the size of a football stadium and almost as loud. Often there is no human to check you out. Instead, a scanner admonishes you for failing to place your groceries in the designated area. Sometimes six-foot beeping robots cruise the aisles scanning shelves and managing inventory. This isn’t cozy. It is literally alienating.

    I would never buy a refrigerator with a built-in ice maker because those things are notorious sources of breakdowns and headaches. There is nothing cozy about wondering which complicated mechanism inside your refrigerator will fail next. Give me the basic Whirlpool top-freezer refrigerator recommended by an appliance mechanic. In many cases, the more basic the machine, the cozier it becomes.

    I could continue through the entire house and garage: cars, watches, computers, fans, vacuum cleaners, toaster ovens, microwaves, tabletop ice makers, electric toothbrushes, double-edged razors. Again and again, I choose reliability over flash. Predictable functionality creates a cozy feeling that expensive, nerve-wracking gadgets often destroy with their hiccups, fussy fits, unnecessary features, and breakdowns.

    As I consider this obsession with coziness, however, I have to remind myself that life’s default setting is the opposite of cozy. Life is uncertainty and conflict. The cozy environments I construct with consumer products are, at best, small consolations against a world that can overwhelm me with its unpredictability. Coziness is the exception, not the rule.

    Sociologist Anthony Giddens would give my quest another name: ontological security, a fundamental sense of continuity, order, and trust in one’s world. Familiar routines and dependable objects help sustain that feeling. My cozy products create miniature islands of ontological security within a life whose default condition remains uncertainty and conflict.

    Let me be clear, however. I am not a Cozy Purist. I know this because perhaps the coziest appliance ever made is one I no longer use: the vintage swan-neck coffee percolator. You can still find them on eBay. The old models with American-made heating elements seem capable of surviving several human generations. Perhaps the most beloved is the GE Immersible, though Farberware, Universal, and Sunbeam made wonderful ones as well. Few appliances are cozier. A percolator makes a soft, rhythmic burbling as heated water rises through the stem and splashes against the glass dome. The sound is mechanical but gentle, as reassuring as rain tapping against a window.

    I enjoyed the percolator’s cozy ritual for several years until I committed the fatal mistake of conducting a taste test. I compared percolated coffee with slow-drip coffee. The slow-drip coffee was far better: richer, more complex, less bitter. It wasn’t close.

    So now I use a modern slow-drip coffee maker. It may last six years. It may last six months. In that respect, it isn’t cozy at all. But the coffee tastes better. I may be a creature who craves cozy comforts, but I have my limits.

  • You Can’t Take the 403(b) With You

    You Can’t Take the 403(b) With You

    Jean Chatzky is concerned about retired money hoarders, people who have amassed a considerable sum and are terrified of watching it dwindle. They have spent decades baking a magnificent chocolate cake. Why eat it when it looks so beautiful sitting untouched in the windowsill?

    But this is folly. The money was saved for a reason: to enjoy life, fulfill bucket lists, and eventually circulate back into the economy. Citing the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study in her essay “Americans Aren’t Spending Their Retirement Savings,” Chatzky identifies a “retirement consumption gap”: many retirees spend considerably less than they could while remaining financially secure for the rest of their lives. She puts the gap at about 8 percent for middle-income retirees and as high as 53 percent for the wealthy. The result is an enormous reservoir of money sitting in retirement accounts rather than being used by the people who spent their lives accumulating it.

    This reluctance to spend isn’t merely bad for the economy. It can be bad for the spirit. Chatzky argues that retirees may be better off spending more of their assets in exchange for a higher quality of life. The goal, after all, was never to die with the largest possible account balance. The money was supposed to finance the life.

    Her argument is persuasive, but it doesn’t fully address one deep psychological reason for hoarding money: a large portfolio can sustain the fantasy that we aren’t going to die. The money becomes a chimera of immortality. It whispers, “Look how big I am. As long as I remain intact, I will protect you. But let my numbers dwindle, and perhaps your remaining years will dwindle with them.”

    This condition has a name: Symbolic Immortality. Accumulated wealth becomes something that psychologically transcends mortality, and the retiree begins treating the endurance of the portfolio as evidence for the endurance of the self. More broadly, symbolic immortality appears whenever we invest an object, achievement, institution, or legacy with the hope that some representation of us will survive our biological death. Ernest Becker’s work and later Terror Management Theory explore this human impulse. We live through our children, our art and writing, our careers, buildings bearing our names, and, of course, our money. We dignify these things with grand words such as “legacy,” but lurking underneath the grandeur is something more primitive: we are terrified of disappearing.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with leaving something behind. Children, books, charitable gifts, institutions, and inheritances can extend our influence beyond our lifetimes. The trouble begins when the symbol stops serving life and life begins serving the symbol. The portfolio that was supposed to provide freedom becomes something its owner must protect. The chocolate cake was baked to be eaten, but eating it now feels like destroying it.

    That is why we should take Chatzky’s warning seriously. A large retirement balance can represent prudence and security, but hoarding money merely because spending it makes mortality feel more real is something else entirely. At that point, preserving the money has become more important than living the life the money was accumulated to support.

    Eat the cake.

  • Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    When you retire, you may imagine the trajectory of your final chapters in Hollywood terms because Hollywood has spent your entire life telling you what life is supposed to look like, regardless of how little its stories resemble reality. You may picture yourself as one of the endearing geriatrics in Cocoon, blissfully swimming with friends in a pool that functions less as a swimming pool than as the Fountain of Youth. Hollywood has been selling you fantasies all your life. Eventually, those fantasies seep inside you and become your own.

    It is therefore imperative to understand the kinds of stories Hollywood tells. Hollywood essentially gives us two: the Centripetal Story and the Centrifugal Story. When I explain these narratives to my students, I draw two diagrams on the board.

    The centripetal diagram consists of circles moving inward, becoming progressively smaller. One arrow points toward the center. I call this Circle A. The centrifugal diagram consists of circles moving outward, becoming progressively larger. One arrow points away from the center. I call this Circle B.

    Without explaining what the circles mean, I ask my students to raise their hands if they want their lives to resemble Circle A or Circle B. The overwhelming majority choose Circle B.

    Hollywood has taught them well.

    The Centrifugal Story dominates Hollywood because it offers what audiences want: transformation, expansion, heroism, and redemption. With notable exceptions, Hollywood has little appetite for the Centripetal Story.

    To explain the difference, I begin with a movie Hollywood rarely makes anymore: Citizen Kane. It is not a traditional Hollywood movie because the protagonist is rotten at the beginning and proceeds to rot more thoroughly. My college fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez called this process centripetal development. The character does not fundamentally change; he becomes an increasingly concentrated version of what he already is. Charles Foster Kane begins as an egotistical, controlling man hungry for love and recognition. Wealth and power magnify these qualities until they consume his relationships and leave him isolated. Kane does not become someone else. He becomes more completely Kane.

    American moviegoers generally don’t want to watch a character rot. They want transformation and redemption. They want the Centrifugal Story. Casablanca provides the classic example. Rick Blaine begins emotionally closed, cynical, and committed to self-protection: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Unlike Kane, whose defects become increasingly concentrated, Rick moves outward from the imprisoned self toward other people, moral responsibility, and sacrifice. His love for Ilsa initially tempts him to retreat further into private desire, but in the end he relinquishes her so she can leave with Victor Laszlo and contribute to something larger than any of them. Rick becomes less enclosed by the ego.

    Rick has undergone the classic Hollywood character arc. His old life is finished, and he enters a new world as a new man. Hollywood did not invent this narrative. It inherited it from the conversion story, most famously Augustine’s Confessions. Meghan O’Gieblyn calls this narrative structure the Autobiography: thoughtful reflection on a former life followed by a new life vastly superior to the old one. The structure is seductively tidy. You were lost. Then you were found. The movement is linear. There is no returning because you are dead to the person you once were. Revelation has compelled you to let go of your wastrel existence.

    The problem, O’Gieblyn observes, is that “You cannot understand the meaning of your life while you are still living it.” The conversion narrative solves this problem by allowing you to die without actually dying. Once dead to the old life, you can stand outside it, interrogate it, and contrast that decrepit existence with the person you have become. As O’Gieblyn writes, “Augustine is the father of the genre because he is the one who discovered the crucial loophole: die, then go on living.” Renounce the old life, be born again, and you acquire a second life from which to narrate the first.

    The conversion narrative is also the Hollywood narrative, and if you’re retiring, as I am, you want your final chapters to resemble that unmistakable Hollywood circle: centrifugal, with the arrow pointing outward.

    But after struggling with addiction, recovery, and relapse, O’Gieblyn finds this narrative as hollow as it is seductive. She fought like hell to beat her addictions and make her life “a perfect dovetail of conversion and deconversion narratives.” She wanted a trajectory as tidy as Augustine’s. Life refused to cooperate. She fears that instead of moving confidently outward, she may be traveling in circles. “My life has lost its arc,” she writes, “and I fear that it’s become less a narrative than one of those demented children’s songs that goes around in circles.”

    Yet O’Gieblyn is no nihilist. She still burns for understanding. She still feels compelled to write autobiography as a way of making sense of her failures and triumphs. She still hopes to find some form of wholeness within her contradictions.

    Perhaps those contradictions should not discourage her. Perhaps Augustine’s narrative is simply too neatly ordered to be true. Perhaps children crave cozy narratives while adults learn to tolerate the real stuff, even when the real stuff refuses to provide a feel-good ending.

    Dara Horn explores this problem in her provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Jewish literature couldn’t care less about my centripetal and centrifugal circles. Life is too unruly for either trajectory. It is a mishmash of paths. Horn considers our hunger for satisfying endings after a reader complained that her novel The World to Come, centered on the survivor of a pogrom, wasn’t “uplifting” enough. The complaint revealed something curious. Even sophisticated readers want stories to gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We want endings that reassure us that the universe is fundamentally coherent, that every life can finally be rendered as Circle A or Circle B.

    Horn is suspicious of this craving.

    Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolution owes much to Christianity. Christian history moves toward fulfillment. Its central drama is redemption. The scattered fragments of existence are ultimately gathered into a meaningful whole. Jewish storytelling, by contrast, is often more willing to refuse closure. The Hebrew Bible ends not with final resolution but with an unfinished journey. Questions remain unanswered. Promises remain unfulfilled. The story continues beyond the final page.

    That difference fascinates me. Christianity often invites us to see history as one enormous redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it asks us to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it teaches us to inhabit ambiguity with patience and humility. These stories do not pretend that chaos can always be conquered. They suggest that wisdom may consist in remaining faithful while chaos refuses to yield. I wonder whether remaining faithful amid the madness resembles the kind of attention Simone Weil asks us to cultivate as we approach our problems with calm, patience, and perhaps even faith.

    Perhaps that is the more mature vision. Perhaps the Augustinian character arc can infantilize us when we mistake it for a description of how life actually works. Hero stories easily become propaganda because they give us the emotional resolution we crave, whether or not reality warrants it.

    Hollywood has little incentive to tell us otherwise. It traffics in grand mythologies designed to activate our deepest cravings. Consider the 1985 movie Cocoon. It offers a saccharine myth of centrifugal time in which old age becomes an opportunity for expansion rather than contraction. Its elderly characters escape physical decline, rediscover vitality, romance, friendship, and adventure, and ultimately transcend mortality itself by leaving Earth with aliens. Instead of time narrowing their lives toward death, time opens outward toward limitless possibility. Hollywood takes aging, one of life’s great experiences of diminishment, and transforms it into liberation.

    The Centrifugal Story is alive and well.

    The trouble is that it may be more myth than life.

  • The Problem with Becoming a Better Person

    The Problem with Becoming a Better Person

    In her memoir Will and Attention, Meghan O’Gieblyn reminds us that exhortations to listen more, engage more fully with the world, and pay closer attention to what is happening around us are easier said than done. Part of the struggle comes from the tension between the voices inside our heads and the voices in the outside world. When the internal voices become loud enough, they drown out everything else, making genuine attention nearly impossible. Nor are these thoughts necessarily useful or interesting. O’Gieblyn describes her own as “circular, deterministic, and relentlessly self-excoriating.”

    That last word, with its suggestion of self-laceration, reminded me of something writer Ana Marie Cox once said on her now-defunct podcast. Just as she had been addicted to alcohol, she suffered from another addiction: self-hatred. Her therapist warned her not to pick up the liquor bottle of self-loathing and drink from it. Yet she would lift this metaphorical bottle to her lips as compulsively as an alcoholic sipping vodka. Once such a habit becomes deeply entrenched, paying attention to it becomes extraordinarily difficult because the behavior feels almost as involuntary as breathing.

    As O’Gieblyn struggles to follow Simone Weil’s advice to abandon the will and replace it with attention, she learns that she must engage with the world “without the distorting lens of the ego.” She must confront what William James called the “sick soul,” the soul divided against itself. We cannot simply will these divided selves into wholeness. In the tradition of the great religions, wholeness often requires surrender to a power greater than ourselves. But O’Gieblyn no longer finds the tenets of religion useful to her, nor even the more universal spiritual tenets of AA. “Letting go” too often returns her to the original problem: the egotistical self doing the letting go.

    Rather than seek surrender in the traditional religious sense, O’Gieblyn turns toward the kind of surrender Simone Weil associates with attention. Attention is not merely focus. It involves what Weil calls the “indirect method,” an idea she never explicitly defines. We can infer, however, that the indirect method requires us to approach a problem with calm and patience rather than demand immediate results. We engage with our problems from different angles, remain attentive to what they reveal, and hope to plant seeds that eventually bear fruit.

    But this approach presents a maddening problem. It requires maturity, and maturity may be the very state we are trying to attain. If we need maturity to approach life’s challenges with patient attention, we arrive at a bootstrapping paradox: We need the capacity we are trying to develop in order to develop that capacity.

    We all need maturity, poise, and wholeness, but the patience required to travel that path may be precisely what the immature person lacks. A patient person is therefore better equipped to practice Weil’s indirect method and bear fruit. An impatient person may become frustrated, abandon the endeavor, and regress into deeper forms of infantilization and addiction. Thus, he who has, more shall be given; he who has not, more shall be taken away. This is the psychological Matthew Effect: maturity creates conditions for greater maturity, while immaturity can create conditions for deeper immaturity. The rich get richer not merely in money but in psychological resources.

    As I reach retirement age, I find myself caught inside this very problem. I am trying to live as long as possible so I can collect as many monthly retirement checks as possible, turning myself into a commodity in the name of gaming the system on the metaphorical game show I call Beat the Actuary. Intellectually, I know this is spiritual madness, but I cannot simply will the impulse away. Nor do I appear to possess the patience necessary to attend to it in the calm and mature manner Simone Weil describes.

    Fortunately, I remain genuinely amused by the comic absurdity of my predicament. Without that amusement, I might tumble into despair. But despair eludes me for now. I am content to read Meghan O’Gieblyn’s meditations on will and attention and hope that, by the time I finish her book, I will have become a slightly better man.

  • You Can’t Retire from Yourself

    You Can’t Retire from Yourself

    When you retire, you wage battles with institutions, time, younger generations, health, and “old age,” but your biggest challenge is yourself. This is the old you that has always plagued you, now acclimating to the fact that, like it or not, your remaining years have been gamified by actuarial tables. The longer you live, the longer your family receives a revenue stream. This strange condition threatens to turn the old you into an even more intense version of yourself.

    In my case, the old me is a worrywart, an obsessive, a malcontent, and a neurotic. Now the final chapters of my life have been gamified, and I fear what this worrying, malcontented self might become. I cannot change him through an act of will. I have to pay attention to him.

    This is the theme of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s memoir Will and Attention. In the book’s opening pages, she quotes a sentence from Simone Weil that she keeps on an index card above her desk: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”

    O’Gieblyn has had ample opportunity to examine the failures of will in her long struggle with alcoholism. She writes that she nearly drank herself to death in her twenties, got sober for more than a decade, and then started drinking again, even while giving AA talks and dispensing a wisdom that could not save her. One of the things that confounds her about the relapse is that during her years of sobriety she was happy. Why give up happiness? To complicate matters further, when her relapse was exposed and she told her AA friends all the right things about needing to do the work and not taking life for granted, the pieties sounded false. Reflecting on that period, she writes, “I can see now that it was a problem of authority. I had lost the privilege of narrative distance. I no longer had an ‘old life’ and a ‘new life’; I had only this muddle of my own making.”

    As I reflect on O’Gieblyn’s words, much of her torment seems to come from living in a state of chaos. Having an old life and a new life creates a clean, well-ordered trajectory that appeals to us. But what if the lines become blurred? What if life becomes a mishmash of conflict and ambivalence as we vacillate between our worse and better impulses?

    O’Gieblyn could not will herself off alcohol. At the same time, she observes, she could not will herself to become a Catholic. Having rejected the fundamentalism of her family, she hungered for a return to religion, this time through Catholicism. But this failure dovetailed with her return to alcohol and represented, she writes, “a larger pattern of regression” that defied her intellectual understanding of the dangers of losing one’s spiritual anchoring. “I know a lot of things in theory,” she writes, “and none of it seems to be of much help in the trenches of everyday life.”

    She had written a book about losing her fundamentalist faith while seeking a path toward Catholicism by meeting with a priest and attending Mass. She comes to see both her return to alcoholism and her attraction to institutionalized religion as forms of self-sabotage. In both cases, she is seeking oblivion, a way of losing herself to forces greater than herself. Intellectually, she sees the danger, but emotionally she remains compelled. She must therefore confront compulsion versus will. Did she really choose to return to alcohol or to the certainty of religion? Did she even understand what the words will and choice meant?

    Then she encounters Weil’s argument that we fail to cure ourselves through will but may succeed through attention. The sentence hits her hard, arriving “as the signature of truth, the conviction that you are learning for the first time something you have always known.” But it takes her a long time to grasp what Weil means. At first, she understands only the failure of will because repeated failure has made that part painfully obvious.

    Her book becomes, in large part, a refutation of the will. If human agency exists, the will does not necessarily unlock it. Indeed, the more meaningful the endeavor, the more likely brute effort is to fail us. “The most important things in life completely elude the will,” O’Gieblyn writes. Effort alone cannot summon happiness, piety, faith, seduction, love, productivity, or genius. It is especially futile in the face of addiction. Nor can you simply will yourself into a life of faith, which makes me think of Paul’s admonition to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

    Part of the problem is that the will is an unreliable bedfellow. Is it even pure in its intentions? Do we really want the things the will supposedly guides us toward? O’Gieblyn thinks otherwise. She describes herself as a divided soul whose actions reveal that she does not necessarily want what she tells herself she wants. “My will is scattered, directed toward many contradictory things, and easily distracted.” The will is therefore an untrustworthy character, one Paul warned us about in his famous Epistle to the Romans.

    If the will fails us, what then of attention? What does it mean to apply Weil’s words to our lives? What would it mean to put the will in the back seat and let attention drive?

    First, we have to understand what the will is. Nietzsche believed “that the illusion of willpower rests on our tendency to identify with the part of our soul who commands, not the part who obeys.” But O’Gieblyn observes a contradiction that complicates the idea further. “On one hand,” she writes, “the will is desire (both will and volition come from root words meaning ‘wish’ or ‘desire’). On the other hand, the will is necessary only when you need to act against your desires, or overcome them.” The will therefore “both wants and wants not to want.” To cheat on your diet is not simply a lack of will but an excess of conflicting wills. “The person who breaks his diet wishes for things at once: to eat and to refrain.”

    Her argument is powerful, persuasive, and liberating, almost Pauline in its cogency. No wonder the will fails us. It is a contradictory beast. Its right hand doesn’t know what its left hand is doing. The will is therefore a bad companion. We should stop the car and toss it onto the curb.

    Now that the will is gone, we need a replacement. That replacement is attention. But learning to pay attention to what matters is not a skill acquired overnight. We may first have to unlearn habits accumulated over decades before we can even begin. That unlearning may prove every bit as arduous as the learning that follows. Both will require focus, engagement, and the very faculty we are trying to cultivate: attention.

  • Beat the Actuary

    Beat the Actuary

    So, do you want your retirement revenue stream to be as large as possible but stop when you die, leaving your family without that monthly cash injection? Or do you want a significantly smaller amount with the advantage that your spouse and children will continue receiving monthly cash flow after you die?

    If you want the former, you click the Member-Only Option. If you want the latter, you click the Beneficiary Option. Your spouse’s age gets calculated into the equation. Actuarial tables are consulted. You are essentially making a wager on how long you think you will live—and how long you can maintain relatively good brain function while defying dementia—to determine which button you click.

    In my case, other factors came into play. Because of my wife’s relatively young age of fifty, her salary, and the fact that we have already paid off our mortgage, we decided I would click Member-Only.

    After looking coldly at the numbers, the risk factors, and the actuarial tables, I now find myself living in a new dimension. It is not an easy place to inhabit. Because I have never lived here before, I find it difficult to describe. I feel as if my spaceship has crashed on a forbidden planet. I have stepped out of the wreckage to survey the terrain, and everything looks strange and frightening.

    For starters, I’m trying to live as long as possible so my family can receive as much cash flow as possible. Of course, everyone wants to live a long life, but fighting time to maximize monetary rewards makes me feel as if I’m competing on a game show. It’s called Beat the Actuary. The longer I live, the better I game the system.

    Turning my desire for longevity and good health into a form of gamification strikes me as unhealthy, morbid, and deleterious to my spiritual health. Once I start trying to live as long as possible to maximize my family’s cash flow, I am no longer a human being. I am a commodity. The soul takes a back seat. Optimization takes the wheel.

    Optimizing is not living. It’s constantly calculating.

    Cheesecake followed by eggnog at a Christmas party? Tick two months off your life.

    The stress of missing an airline connection from Madrid to New York to Los Angeles? There goes another six months.

    Not taking statins with borderline LDL? Subtract another three years.

    Not embracing the vegan lifestyle? Shave off another five.

    Optimization makes me feel like a fragile egg that must be nestled inside layers of cotton, silk, and cashmere. I am no longer a human being. I am a mausoleum piece inhabiting a glass reliquary, protected from the harsh elements.

    Optimization is not life. It is death.

    So as I walk the terrain of this strange planet and confront these new fears, I am trying to maintain my dignity and live more like a human being and less like a TV game-show contestant.

    But my morbid imagination already gets the better of me. With my birthday coming up in a couple of weeks, I can imagine appearing on Beat the Actuary and being celebrated for surviving another year. The studio audience erupts in applause. Confetti rains down upon me as host Soupy Sales, wearing a banana-yellow blazer, congratulates me for making it through another year.

    At the center of the Beat the Actuary stage stands a twelve-foot-tall hourglass enclosed in a gleaming brass frame, its two enormous glass chambers filled with fine white sand. The sand continues its slow, merciless descent.

    Soupy Sales stares ominously at the giant hourglass. Then he turns toward the camera and fixes the television audience with mock solemnity.

    “Will Jeff McMahon be back next year? Only the hourglass knows for sure.”

  • The Nut Beneath the Sink

    The Nut Beneath the Sink

    Our kitchen sink features what is called a brushed stainless-steel U-spout faucet centered over a steel basin. It has a single handle that adjusts the water temperature: down for cold and up for hot. Three and a half years ago, the faucet base came loose, so you had to hold the faucet with one hand and operate the handle with the other to keep the entire assembly from rotating round and round. I bought a RIDGID telescoping basin wrench with a built-in LED light. As I recall, my wife, who is more of an engineer than I am, got under the sink and tightened the nut.

    A few days ago, the base loosened again. My wife, who is recovering from surgery, said I’d have to do it. I went into the garage, retrieved the telescoping basin wrench, and showed it to her.

    “Do you remember how you used this?” I asked.

    She looked at the device as if I had handed her the blueprints for a NASA space mission.

    “I don’t even remember if I used that,” she said. “I might have tightened it another way.”

    So I went on YouTube and watched demonstration videos. The device did not look user-friendly. One reviewer, a plumber, said it was kind of weird.

    I thought I’d give it a try.

    I first cleared everything from under the kitchen sink: liquid dishwasher detergent, dishwashing soap, kitchen cleansers, water filters, a mini-sized fire extinguisher, sponges, brushes, mineral oil, and other supplies that had accumulated over time. I put everything into several canvas Trader Joe’s shopping bags and placed a towel on the bottom of the empty cabinet.

    Even emptied, the cabinet was difficult to maneuver in because of the garbage disposal and the under-sink water-filtration unit. Through trial and error, I learned that I could get farthest underneath by leaning on my left shoulder and angling my body in from the left. I held my phone camera inside the cavernous crevice and took a photograph of what I was aiming for.

    The photo, taken from inside the cabinet looking upward toward the underside of the sink and countertop, showed three prominent assemblies crowded into a tight space. On the left was a dark circular component with a black hose. Near the center were braided metal water-supply lines and additional plumbing. To the right was the important part: a shiny, horseshoe-shaped metal mounting bracket pressed against the underside of the countertop, with a copper-colored threaded shaft and fastener extending downward from the faucet. Another black hose hung through the area, making the mounting hardware even harder to see and reach. The photograph made clear why the repair was so awkward: the faucet fastener was tucked high against the countertop amid hoses and plumbing, with almost no room to maneuver a wrench.

    At about six feet and more than 230 pounds, I had limited mobility beneath the sink. Add my claustrophobia, which made me want to bolt out of the cabinet as quickly as possible, and I decided it was time to call my engineering friend Pedro.

    I’ve known Pedro for more than sixteen years. He is much shorter than I am and about a hundred pounds lighter. He was coming over anyway to take a couple of computers I no longer used. He planned to give them to his sister, also an engineer, who had some use for them.

    Unlike me, Pedro was able to make sense of the YouTube demonstration videos. He understood how to position the spring-loaded jaws around the mounting nut and flip the wrench head so the jaws would grip when turned in the tightening direction. As I held the faucet base steady from above, he tightened the nut from below.

    He then thanked me for giving him the opportunity to learn how to use a basin wrench. As the landlord of a couple of properties, he explained that he might someday need to perform the same repair for his tenants.

    But neither of us was convinced that this $70 wrench was the best way to go. RIDGID also makes a much cheaper tool, the $30 EZ Change plumbing wrench. Rather than using a spring-loaded jaw, it uses interchangeable sockets. You have to select the correct fitting, which may require some trial and error, but I’d rather deal with a socket than that jaw. Pedro felt the same way.

    After the faucet crisis was over, Pedro and I spent an hour talking about the rivalry between Honda and Toyota, the problems with turbo engines, speeding tickets, and his preference for Linux over other operating systems. Eventually, he had to head home. As I carried an old iMac to his car and he carried an old laptop, I told him I’d be sixty-five in a couple of weeks.

    “How old were you when I first met you?” he asked.

    “Forty-seven,” I said. “My wife was pregnant with the twins when you took my writing class.”

    Over those years, I watched Pedro go from state-champion boxer to firefighter to electrical engineer. He is now a landlord of several properties and the proud owner of a Lexus RC 350 F Sport in obsidian black. About a decade ago, my father-in-law recommended Pedro to a friend who hired him at his engineering firm. Because of his work ethic and ability to solve problems on the fly, Pedro quickly became the number-one employee. He is the go-to person for putting out fires and making sure projects meet their deadlines.

    So it didn’t surprise me that what was, for me, an anxiety-laden nightmare involving an inaccessible nut beneath the kitchen sink was, for Pedro, a useful learning experience—a practical skill he could add to his landlord repertoire.

    I am grateful to have Pedro as a friend. But I am also worried. What do I do three years from now when that nut comes loose again? Do I bring out the intimidating basin wrench with its spring-loaded jaw? Or should I buy the cheaper socket version?

    By then, Pedro will probably have invented a device that allows anxious homeowners like me to tighten the nut from above the sink.

  • A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    A Belly Laugh Is Worth a Thousand Likes

    Like many of my fellow Boomers, I’ve gone down a commonly trodden and forlorn path in the realm of dwindling friendships. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I took friendship for granted. It came as naturally as going to the gym, shopping for clothes, going to clubs, and eating lunch at a cafe. These endeavors were often accompanied by friends. In the 80s and 90s, long conversations on landline phones were also part of the fabric of my social life. That I merited a two-hour phone conversation was no big deal. People found me engaging. My self-worth wasn’t something I questioned. It was simply a matter of fact that I was worthy of a two-hour conversation on random topics.

    Spending time with friends diminished in my late thirties and forties. I would go to a restaurant once every other month or so with colleagues. As I grew apart from some of them and others retired, I did not notice that their disappearance was not accompanied by replacements. My friendship count went down. Meanwhile, I acclimated to life in the cave, my expression for retreating into a suburban enclave and learning to entertain and distract yourself as you disconnect from the beehive of life.

    As engagement farms sprouted up around 2010 and offered frictionless, half-baked social interaction, my habits of isolation worsened because superficial parasocial interactions substituted for in-depth, messy, real ones. These digital engagements proved unsatisfactory. Engagement on these platforms was not authentic friendship. It was a brief burst of dopamine. When the dopamine died, you were left hungry for real social interaction. These engagement farms, in other words, were the equivalent of junk food. You could overconsume the processed stuff while remaining emotionally malnourished.

    Fifteen years of this social deprivation, combined with the chaos and false euphoria of attention-capture platforms, lulled Boomers like me into a state of social isolation that became our new normal.

    There could be a gender factor here. My wife maintains real friendships, and she notices my deprivation in that department. She wants me to put time and energy into my “social health,” as she calls it. I agree that engaging in real friendships would be good for my social health and, in turn, put less pressure on her. The problem is that I don’t have a magic wand. I can’t say abracadabra and have a friend materialize like a genie from a bottle.

    Social entropy is a real and insidious thing that can’t be reversed overnight. I worry that you reach an age and become so entrenched in routines and habits that you cross the Isolation Rubicon, making a return to a normal and healthy social world extremely difficult.

    In this new landscape, where landline phones and two-hour conversations have become extinct and we spend much of our time in parasocial engagements, I can appreciate some of these mediated communications. By and large, people are friendly on my YouTube channel and Instagram page. I don’t diminish these interactions. I simply see them for what they are. They are limited because they exist in the digital sphere. They cannot substitute for real interaction.

    I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with two Trader Joe’s clerks, both in their late twenties. One was scanning my food items. The other was bagging them. I told them that 99% of the time I shop at Trader Joe’s at eight a.m., and I want to be out of the store by 8:45 because I notice that each passing hour brings more people, stress, and anxiety. I told them that one time I had to come in at three p.m. for emergency provisions when my wife’s friends from out of town showed up. I walked into a crowded Trader Joe’s and didn’t even recognize the place. Nor did I recognize the customers.

    “These aren’t my people,” I said.

    My dismay at feeling like an alien during my afternoon shopping spree made the clerk, a short woman whose arms were generously covered with tattoos, stop scanning my groceries. She let out a loud belly laugh. I could see the self-abandoned joy in her face. Making her laugh in that moment was more gratifying than a decade of social-media engagements. You cannot substitute real engagement with parasocial interplay.

    But real engagement is increasingly rare. If I shop at Target, there is no clerk. I scan the items myself while a robot admonishes me if I don’t place them in the designated bagging area.

    A lot of my social deprivation is of my own making. I am lazy, sullen, egotistical, and introverted. While I can be entertaining, I am usually tolerated in low doses. Regardless of what I think about myself, the world does not owe me a bevy of friends waiting on my doorstep to join them in some madcap adventure or other.

    I feel dumb that back in 2010 I was enticed by the so-called social-media corporations. Relying on engagement farms for a morsel of social interaction while curating some energetic persona full of moxie and frisson was pure chicanery. The fact that I substituted this curated nonsense for real life was my fault. I played myself. I let the engagement-farm companies play me as well.

    I don’t have an easy solution to my social health, but I can see the landscape clearly. I am sobered enough after decades of curating a dazzling persona to end that folly. Wherever life takes me from this point on, I’m going there without the fakery.

  • Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    When I was in my late thirties, I was visiting my wife’s family for a summer barbecue in Long Beach. Her brother and some of his friends were there. We were standing on the front lawn talking about some of my habits and routines: eating dinner no later than five; going to bed no later than ten; eating sufficient fiber; abstaining from alcohol but deriving great pleasure from sipping chilled prune juice, analyzing its complex flavors with the panache of a sommelier; driving to movie theaters an hour early to make sure I get a parking space and a good seat; avoiding long drives because I find them mentally taxing; and buying a car only after scouring the reliability data in Consumer Reports.

    At one point, one of my brother-in-law’s friends, Shane, a tall, Viking-like figure with light blue eyes and shaggy blond hair, casually looked at me and said, “Dude, you’d make a great eighty-five-year-old.”

    I can understand Shane’s comment. I am not a risk-taker. I like predictability and routine. I like reliable outcomes. I am drawn to things that give me assurance and safety.

    Take cars, for example. I am drawn to Honda. I have been buying Hondas for the last four decades. I like the interiors. They are familiar. I know how to use the controls. The ride is smooth. There is no drama. The styling is not too busy. It tends toward vanilla. I even like the word Honda. It sounds angelic, whispery, and soothing. Repeating the word over and over is a form of ASMR.

    My connection to Honda runs so deep that my wife and I both own Honda Accords. Hers is a 2014 with a 2.4-liter naturally aspirated engine, and mine is a 2018 with a 2.0 turbo. When our twins get their driver’s licenses, we plan on buying another Accord, a hybrid that gets around 50 mpg. Or perhaps a Camry Hybrid. Whichever brand is the most reliable when I’m ready to buy. Because I am willing to share my Accord with my daughters, I can hold off on buying my next car. I think I might wait until the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. By then, Accords and Camrys will probably get over 60 miles per gallon.

    Regardless of what I do, I will be anxious because a big purchase entails risk. I am risk-averse. To minimize risk, I seek monotony, routine, and familiarity. I subscribe to the adage that it’s better to be with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

    This does not mean I’m provincial. I’d be just as happy having a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast as I would a bowl of Korean bibimbap. I find both dishes comforting. Both are familiar to me. Both are reliably delicious.

    So I’m a bit riled that in the summer of 2000 Shane said I’d make a great eighty-five-year-old. Actually, I would not. I can lift more weight than most men half my age. I love international food, the spicier the better. I watch daring, often subversive television, movies, and documentaries. I am, in other words, youthful and adventurous when it comes to exercise, eating, and entertainment.

    On the other hand, I am admittedly overly cautious and ridiculously obsessive when it comes to maintaining my routine and making big consumer purchases. But I think my contradictions should be appreciated. Labeling me prematurely old is inaccurate and demonstrates weak analytical skills.

    I love Shane. I wish him the best, and I am eager to locate him, if for no other reason than to discuss his appraisal of me as an exemplar of an eighty-five-year-old on my wife’s family’s lawn that summer day in 2000.

    I might even politely challenge him to an arm wrestle.