Walter Mosley, like many literary heavyweights, delivers the old warhorse of writing advice: write every damn day. Rain or shine, joy or existential despair, sit down and put words on the page. It’s less about inspiration than it is about keeping the creative battery from corroding in the garage while your ambitions collect dust. Steven Pressfield echoed this doctrine in The War of Art, a self-help sermon for writers who need a firm kick in the discipline.
But daily writing in the digital age isn’t what it used to be. Now it comes with a side of existential nausea. The modern writer doesn’t just write—they publish. Immediately. Publicly. Desperately. A blog here, a TikTok monologue there, and boom—you’re not creating, you’re performing. You’re not nurturing your authentic voice; you’re pumping caffeine into your avatar and hoping the algorithm throws you a bone. And let’s be clear: the algorithm rewards extremity, outrage, and theater. The bigger the spectacle, the better the reach. Welcome to the Faustian Bargain of digital authorship.
In this deal with the devil, we don’t trade our souls for knowledge—we trade nuance for engagement. We sculpt our “brand” to fit the machine. Our subject matter isn’t what haunts us—it’s what trends. Our tone isn’t our voice—it’s caffeinated shouting with a faux-therapist smile. We might monetize. We might even go viral. But then what? We’ve spent our creative life howling into a dopamine feedback loop. Is this writing? Or is it a slow, glittery death of the self?
To be clear, branding isn’t inherently evil. Mark Leyner is a brand. So is Annie Dillard, Toni Morrison, and T.C. Boyle. Their work pulses with personality—yes—but also rigor, substance, and voice. They didn’t let style drown out content. They didn’t slap their face on a thumbnail and shout into the void about “7 Ways to Hack Your Purpose.” Influencers, on the other hand, are often pure surface: style with no skeleton, affect with no architecture.
So what happens if you’re writing online without chasing likes, shares, or ad revenue? Are you just journaling in public? Writing as catharsis masquerading as productivity? Possibly. But that’s not inherently shameful. Writing as therapy is fine—as long as it’s therapy with syntax. Catharsis isn’t the enemy; incoherence is. Even in the trenches of personal expression, we owe our readers (and ourselves) clarity, pace, and craft.
If we’re looking for a role model in the art of the blog, look no further than Blaise Pascal. His Pensées—a blog centuries ahead of its time—is a fragmented, pithy, and piercing meditation on the human condition. Each entry was brisk, barbed, and brimming with insight. He didn’t need an algorithm. He had a point of view.
In this sense, blogging today can be a return to Pascal, not a descent into performance art. A blog can be a sketchbook of thought, a lab for style, a home for unfinished beauty. But only if we resist the pull of artificial relevance and write for something—anything—more enduring than a trending sound clip.
INTRODUCTION & CONTEXT In the not-so-distant past, writing was a slow, solitary act—a process that demanded time, introspection, and labor. But with the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Sudowrite, and GrammarlyGO, composition now has a button. Language can be mass-produced at scale, tuned to sound pleasant, neutral, polite—and eerily interchangeable. What once felt personal and arduous is now instantaneous and oddly soulless.
In “The Great Language Flattening,” Victoria Turk argues that A.I. is training us to speak and write in “saccharine, sterile, synthetic” prose. She warns that our desire to optimize communication has come at the expense of voice, friction, and even individuality. Similarly, Cal Newport’s “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?” insists that while A.I. tools may mimic surface-level structure, they lack the “struggle” that gives rise to genuine insight. Their words float, untethered by thought, context, or consequences.
But are these critiques overblown? In “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College,” Tyler Austin Harper suggests that the real danger isn’t A.I.—it’s a pedagogical failure. Writing assignments that can be done by A.I. were never meaningful to begin with. Harper argues that educators should double down on originality, reflection, and assignments that resist automation. Meanwhile, in “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?,” the author explores the institutional panic: as machine-generated writing becomes the norm, will critical thinking and close reading—the bedrock of the humanities—be considered obsolete?
Adding complexity to this discussion, Lila Shroff’s “The Gen Z Lifestyle Subsidy” examines how young people increasingly outsource tasks once seen as rites of passage—cooking, cleaning, dating, even thinking. Is using A.I. to write your essay any different from using DoorDash to eat, Bumble to flirt, or TikTok to learn? And in “Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?,” Joshua Rothman diagnoses a deeper ennui: if machines can do everything better, faster, and cheaper—why struggle at all? What, if anything, is the value of effort in an automated world?
This prompt asks you to grapple with a provocative and unavoidable question: What is the future of human writing in an age when machines can write for us?
ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS
Write a 1,700 word argumentative essay that answers the following question:
Should the rise of generative A.I. mark the end of traditional writing instruction—or should it inspire us to reinvent writing as a deeply human, irreplaceable act?
You must take a clear position on this question and argue it persuasively using at least four of the assigned readings. You are also encouraged to draw on personal experience, classroom observations, or examples from digital culture, but your essay must engage with the ideas and arguments presented in the texts.
STRUCTURE AND EXPECTATIONS
Your essay should include the following sections:
I. INTRODUCTION (Approx. 300 words)
Hook your reader with a compelling anecdote, statistic, or image from your own experience with A.I. (e.g., using ChatGPT to brainstorm, cheating, rewriting, etc.).
Briefly introduce the conversation surrounding A.I. and the act of writing. Frame the debate: Is writing becoming obsolete? Or is it being reborn?
End with a sharply focused thesis that takes a clear, defensible position on the prompt.
Sample thesis:
While A.I. can generate fluent prose, it cannot replicate the messiness, insight, and moral weight of human writing—therefore, the role of writing instruction should not be reduced, but radically reinvented to prioritize voice, thought, and originality.
II. BACKGROUND AND DEFINITIONAL FRAMING (Approx. 250
Define key terms like “generative A.I.,” “writing instruction,” and “voice.” Be precise.
Briefly explain how generative A.I. systems (like ChatGPT) work and how they are currently being used in educational and workplace settings.
Set up the stakes: Why does this conversation matter? What do we lose (or gain) if writing becomes largely machine-generated?
III. ARGUMENT #1 – A.I. Is Flattening Language (Approx. 300 words)
Engage deeply with “The Great Language Flattening” by Victoria Turk.
Analyze how A.I.-generated language may lead to a homogenization of voice, tone, and personality.
Provide examples—either from your own experiments with A.I. or from the essay—that illustrate this flattening.
Connect to Newport’s argument: If writing becomes too “safe,” does it also become meaningless?
IV. ARGUMENT #2 – The Need for Reinvention, Not Abandonment (Approx. 300 words)
Use Harper’s “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College” and the humanities-focused essay to argue that A.I. doesn’t spell the death of writing—it exposes the weakness of uninspired assignments.
Defend the idea that writing pedagogy should evolve by embracing personal narratives, critical analysis, and rhetorical complexity—tasks that A.I. can’t perform well (yet).
Address the counterpoint that some students prefer to use A.I. out of necessity, not laziness (e.g., time constraints, language barriers).
V. ARGUMENT #3 – A Culture of Outsourcing (Approx. 300 words)
Bring in Lila Shroff’s “The Gen Z Lifestyle Subsidy” to examine the cultural shift toward convenience, automation, and outsourcing.
Ask the difficult question: If we already outsource our food, our shopping, our dates, and even our emotions (via TikTok), isn’t outsourcing our writing the logical next step?
Argue whether this mindset is sustainable—or whether it erodes something essential to human development and self-expression.
VI. ARGUMENT #4 – Why Write at All? (Approx. 300 words)
Engage with Joshua Rothman’s existential meditation on motivation in “Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?”
Discuss the psychological toll of competing with A.I.—and whether effort still has value in an age of frictionless automation.
Make the case for writing as not just a skill, but a process of becoming: intellectual, emotional, and ethical maturation.
VII. COUNTERARGUMENT AND REBUTTAL (Approx. 250 words)
Consider the argument that A.I. tools democratize writing by making it easier for non-native speakers, neurodiverse students, and time-strapped workers.
Acknowledge the appeal and utility of A.I. assistance.
Then rebut: Can ease and access coexist with depth and authenticity? Where is the line between tool and crutch? What happens when we no longer need to wrestle with words?
VIII. CONCLUSION (Approx. 200 words)
Revisit your thesis in a way that reflects the journey of your argument.
Reflect on your own evolving relationship with writing and A.I.
Offer a call to action for educators, institutions, or individuals: What kind of writers—and thinkers—do we want to become in the A.I. age?
REQUIREMENTS CHECKLIST
Word Count: 1,700 words
Minimum of four cited sources from the six assigned
Direct quotes and/or paraphrases with MLA-style in-text citations
Works Cited page using MLA format
Clear argumentative thesis
At least one counterargument with a rebuttal
Original title that reflects your position
ESSAY EVALUATION RUBRIC (Simplified)
CRITERIA
DESCRIPTION
Thesis & Argument
Strong, debatable thesis; clear stance maintained throughout
Use of Sources
Effective integration of at least four assigned texts; accurate and meaningful engagement with the ideas presented
Organization & Flow
Logical structure; strong transitions; each paragraph develops a single, coherent idea
Voice & Style
Clear, vivid prose with a balance of analytical and personal voice
Depth of Thought
Insightful analysis; complex thinking; engagement with nuance and counterpoints
Mechanics & MLA Formatting
Correct grammar, punctuation, and MLA citations; properly formatted Works Cited page
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Black Mirror’s The Entire History of You are thematically bound by a shared anxiety: the dangerous seduction of technological control over memory. In Eternal Sunshine, memory erasure is marketed as emotional liberation—a clean slate for the brokenhearted. Similarly, in “The Entire History of You,” the brain-implanted “grain” promises perfect recall, total clarity, and the ability to replay moments with photographic precision. Both stories probe a fundamental question: if we could edit our pasts—delete pain, scrutinize joy, control the narrative—would we be better off, or would we unravel?
Both works reveal that tampering with memory doesn’t resolve emotional suffering; it distorts and magnifies it. In Eternal Sunshine, Joel and Clementine attempt to erase each other, only to circle back into the same patterns of love, longing, and dysfunction. Their emotional chemistry survives the purge, suggesting that memory is not simply data but something embedded in identity, instinct, and the soul. “The Entire History of You” flips the dynamic: instead of forgetting, the characters remember too much. Liam’s obsessive rewinding of moments with his wife becomes a self-inflicted wound, each replay deepening his paranoia and unraveling his sense of reality. The technology doesn’t heal him—it traps him in a recursive loop of doubt and resentment.
The irony in both narratives is that the human mind, with all its flaws—forgetfulness, bias, emotional haze—is actually what allows us to forgive, to grow, to love again. Eternal Sunshine presents memory loss as a form of mercy, but ultimately asserts that pain and connection are inseparable. The Entire History of You warns that perfect memory is no better; it turns love into surveillance, and intimacy into evidence. In both cases, technology doesn’t enhance humanity—it reveals its brittleness. It offers a fantasy of control over the uncontrollable: the messiness of relationships, the ambiguity of feelings, the inevitability of loss.
Thus, Eternal Sunshine serves as a philosophical and emotional precursor to “The Entire History of You.” Where one is melancholic and lyrical, the other is clinical and chilling—but both reach the same conclusion: to be human is to remember imperfectly. Whether we erase the past or obsessively relive it, we risk losing what actually makes relationships meaningful—our capacity to feel, forget, forgive, and fumble our way forward. Memory, in both stories, is less about accuracy than emotional truth—and trying to mechanize that truth leads only to alienation.
New Yorker writer Joshua Rothman asks the question that haunts every creative in the age of algorithmic assistance: Why even try if A.I. can do it for you? His essay “Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?”unpacks a cultural crossroads: we can be passive passengers on an automated flight to mediocrity, or we can grab the yoke, face the headwinds, and fly the damn plane ourselves. The latter takes effort and agency. The former? Just surrender, recline your seat, and trust the software.
Rothman begins with a deceptively simple truth: human excellence is born through repetition and variation. Take a piano sonata. Play it every day and it evolves—new inflections emerge, tempo shifts, harmonies stretch and bend. The music becomes yours not because it’s perfect, but because it’s lived. This principle holds across any discipline: cooking, lifting, writing, woodworking, improv jazz. The point isn’t to chase perfection, but to expand what engineers call your “design space”—the evolving terrain of mastery passed from one generation to the next. It’s how we adapt, create, and flourish. Variation, not polish, is the currency of human survival.
A.I. disrupts that process. Not through catastrophe, but convenience. It lifts the burden of repetition, which sounds like mercy, but may be slow annihilation. Why wrestle with phrasing when a chatbot can generate ten variations in a second? Why compose from scratch when you can scroll through synthetic riffs until one sounds “good enough”? At some point, you’re not a creator—you’re a casting agent, auditioning content for a machine-written reality show.
This is the creep of A.I.—not Terminator-style annihilation, but frictionless delegation. Repetition gets replaced by selection. Cognitive strain is erased. The design space—the sacred ground of human flourishing—gets paved over with one-size-fits-all templates. And we love it, because it’s easy.
Take car shopping. Do I really want to endure a gauntlet of slick-haired salesmen and endless test drives? Or would I rather ask ChatGPT to confirm what I already believe—that the 2025 Honda Accord Hybrid Touring is the best sedan under 40K, and that metallic eggshell is obviously the right color for my soulful-but-sensible lifestyle? A.I. doesn’t challenge me. It affirms me, reflects me, flatters me. That’s the trap.
But here’s where I resist: I’m 63, and I still train like a lunatic in my garage with kettlebells five days a week. No algorithm writes my workouts. I improvise like a jazz drummer on creatine—Workout A (heavy), Workout B (medium), Workout C (light). It’s messy, adaptive, and real. I rely on sweat, not suggestions. Pain is the feedback loop. Soreness is the algorithm.
Same goes for piano. Every day, I sit and play. Some pieces have taken a decade to shape. A.I. can’t help here—not meaningfully. Because writing music isn’t about what works. It’s about what moves. And that takes time. Revision. Tension. Discomfort.
That said, I’ve made peace with the fact that A.I. is to writing what steroids are to a bodybuilder. I like to think I’ve got a decent handle on rhetoric—my tone, my voice, my structure, my knack for crafting an argument. But let’s not kid ourselves: I’ve run my prose against ChatGPT, and in more than a few rounds, it’s left me eating dust. Without A.I., I’m a natural bodybuilder—posing clean, proud, and underwhelming. With A.I., I’m a chemically enhanced colossus, veins bulging with metaphor and syntax so tight it could cut glass. In the literary arena, if the choice is between my authentic, mortal self and the algorithmic beast? Hand me the syringe. I’ll flex with the machine.
Still, I know the difference. And knowing the difference is everything.
If you only watch one episode of Black Mirror, let it be Joan Is Awful—especially if you have a low tolerance for tech-dystopian fever dreams involving eye-implants, social scores, or digital consciousness uploaded to bees. This one doesn’t take place in a dark tomorrow—it’s about the pathology of right now. It skewers the Curated Era we already live in, where selfhood has been gamified, privacy is casually torched, and we’re all trapped in the compulsion to turn our lives into content—often awful, but clickable content.
Joan, the title character, is painfully ordinary: a mid-level tech worker trying to swap out one man (her manic ex) for another (her milquetoast fiancé) and coast into a life of retail therapy and artisanal beverages. Her existence—Instagrammable, calibrated, aggressively average—is exactly the kind of raw material the in-universe Netflix clone Streamberry is looking for. They turn her life into a show called “Joan Is Awful,” starring a CGI deepfake Salma Hayek version of Joan, who reenacts her life with heightened melodrama and algorithmically-optimized awfulness.
This isn’t speculative fiction. It’s just fiction. Streamberry’s vision of a personalized show for everyone—one that amplifies your worst traits and pushes them out for mass consumption—is barely an exaggeration of what Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are already doing. We’ve all become our own showrunners, stylists, and publicists. Every TikTok tantrum and curated dinner plate is an audition for relevance, and the platforms reward us for veering into the grotesque. The more unhinged you become, the more “engagement” you earn.
“Joan Is Awful” works both as a laugh-out-loud satire and as a metaphysical gut-punch. It invites us to contemplate the slippery nature of selfhood under surveillance capitalism. At its core is the concept of “Fiction Level 1”: the dramatized version of Joan’s life generated by AI, crafted from data scraped from her phone, her apps, her browsing history. Joan doesn’t write the script. She doesn’t even get to protest. She’s just the original dataset—fodder for narrative extraction. Her real self is mined, exaggerated, and repackaged for mass appeal.
Sound familiar?
In the real world, we all star in our own low-budget version of “Joan Is Awful,” plastered across social media feeds. These platforms don’t need deepfakes. We willingly create them, editing ourselves into marketable parodies. We offer up a polished persona while our actual selves starve for air—authenticity traded for audience, spontaneity traded for algorithmic approval.
You can enjoy “Joan Is Awful” as slick satire or you can unpack its metafictional mind games—it rewards both approaches. Either way, it’s easily one of Black Mirror’s top-tier episodes, alongside “Nosedive,” “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” and “Smithereens.” It’s not science fiction. It’s just a very well-lit mirror.
After ninety minutes of hammering out lesson plans in my academic cave—also known as my college office—I realized my legs had entered that special purgatory between rigor mortis and a blood clot. So I stood up, performed a stretch that felt like a rusty marionette being yanked upright, and took a walk down the hallway.
Out in our little shared faculty suite, I found my colleague from Foreign Languages hunched behind a desk like a war-weary translator decoding enemy communiqués. She looked up briefly from a pile of student papers, and when I asked how she was holding up, she gave the most honest answer academia ever produces: “Exhausted.” It was 2 p.m., and she still had a five-hour sentence left on her campus shift. I nodded grimly. The semester was two-thirds over, the point in the academic calendar when everything begins to sag—mood, posture, faith in humanity.
“I get it,” I told her. “The late-semester ennui is baked into the profession.” I’ve been battling it for decades. It seeps into your bones and makes your students shuffle into class like underfed extras from a Civil War hospital drama—late, listless, and visibly haunted by their own poor decisions. Their faces are a collage of sleep deprivation, existential dread, and the dawning realization that the syllabus waits for no one.
This is when you have to throw them a curveball. You can’t coast on grammar worksheets and MLA citation reviews. The status quo is the problem. I tell them to try yoga, breathing exercises, isometrics. If they’re feeling especially apocalyptic, I might even roll a zombie movie and spin it as a cautionary tale about pandemics and the erosion of civic trust. It’s a reach—but sometimes you need to swing for the fences, even if all you hit is a foul ball.
Most of these tricks will fail. The semester will end the way all semesters do—in caffeine, chaos, and emotional triage. But at least you went down swinging. At least you reminded yourself, in that bleak final inning, that you’re not just a grading machine—you’re still alive.
One of my most cherished moments of accidental transcendence happened somewhere between the cow-scented fields of Bakersfield and the fog-choked sprawl of San Francisco in the spring of 1990. I was climbing the Altamont Pass in a battered 1982 Toyota Tercel that handled like a shopping cart when The Sundays’ “Here’s Where the Story Ends” crackled to life on the radio. Harriet Wheeler’s voice—equal parts cathedral and confession booth—floated through the speakers, and suddenly I wasn’t commuting through California; I was levitating above it. I wasn’t driving—I was ascending. In that moment, I stumbled into something bigger than myself, gifted by two Brits, David Gavurin and his partner Wheeler, who recorded their luminous dispatches, then vanished from the stage like saints escaping the tabloid apocalypse.
They made beauty, and then they walked away. No farewell tour, no social media mea culpas, no sad attempts at reinvention. Just a few perfect songs and the audacity to say, that’s enough. They’re my heroes—not for what they did, but for what they didn’t do. They resisted the narcotic of attention. They said no to the stage and yes to obscurity, which in our fame-gluttonous culture is the moral equivalent of monkhood.
I, by contrast, never quite shut up.
I’ve been peddling stories since high school, where I’d hold court at lunch tables, unspooling feverish tales of misadventure like a cracked-out bard. At 63, I still haven’t kicked the habit. But unlike the craven influencer class, I hope I’m not just hustling dopamine hits. I tell stories because I need to make sense of this deranged carnival we call modern life. It’s an instinct, like blinking or checking the fridge when you’re not even hungry.
Some stories are survival tools disguised as art. Viktor Frankl wrote to preserve his sanity in a death camp. Phil Stutz prescribes narrative like medicine. And when I hear a brilliant podcaster dissect the absurdity of daily life, it feels like eavesdropping on salvation. It’s not just performance—it’s connection. Human beings, after all, are just gossiping apes trying to explain why the hell we’re here.
Storytelling is the futile, glorious act of forcing chaos into coherence. It’s pinning butterflies to corkboard. Life is all noise—emails, funerals, fast food, missed calls—and stories give it a beat, a structure, a moral, even if it’s just “don’t marry a narcissist” or “never trust a man who wears sandals to a job interview.”
So why not keep it to myself? Why not scribble in a journal and hide it in the sock drawer next to my failed dreams and mismatched batteries? Because I find journaling about as appealing as listening to my own Spotify playlist on repeat in a sensory deprivation tank. No thanks. I don’t want to be alone with my curated echo chamber. I want a café. A digital one, maybe, with only a few scattered patrons. But still—voices, questions, and the hum of others trying to make sense of it all.
I’ll never be famous. I’ll never go viral. But if someone reads my ramblings and thinks, me too—then that’s enough. I’m not trying to be an algorithm’s golden child. I’m just trying to find some order in the mess. Just like I always have.
In the summer of 2023, during a family odyssey through Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — a trip defined by heat, dehydration, and regrettable buffet choices — I noticed my then-13-year-old daughter entering what I can only describe as her Headphone Phase. Once she slipped on her wireless headphones, she ceased to be a participant in family life and transformed into a sealed capsule of teenage autonomy.
The headphones weren’t just streaming music — they were constructing a perimeter, a force field against the chaos of the outside world and the more treacherous chaos within. Wearing them allowed her to filter reality through a private soundtrack, to shrink the overwhelming noise of adolescence into something manageable and rhythmic. For those six months, she was rarely spotted without them, a small island of basslines and daydreams moving among us.
By fifteen, she abandoned the habit. Now the headphones make rare appearances, the way childhood toys do after the magic has leaked out of them. But that long season of constant headphone use stuck with me — especially yesterday, when I slipped on my own new pair of Sony noise-canceling headphones for a nap. The experience was ridiculous: pure luxury, pure oblivion. I was catapulted into a faraway world of softness and distance, so relaxed I half-expected to wake up with a boarding pass to another galaxy. I understood at last how Headphone Mode could become addictive — not just helpful, but a crutch, or worse, a replacement for unmediated existence.
This thought kept circling as I recently lost hours reading headphone reviews online. At first, I encountered the usual suspects — audiophiles earnestly parsing treble decay, bass extension, and soundstage geometry. But then I fell into a stranger subculture: headphone reviews written not as technical evaluations, but as love letters to support animals. Some reviewers described wearing their headphones all day, every day, as if they had permanently grafted the devices to their skulls, forming a new biological organ. These weren’t mere tech accessories anymore — they were portable cocoons.
The reviews lavished obsessive praise on tactile details: the pillowy yield of the earcups, the tension of the headband, the specific heat footprint generated after six hours of wear. Weight, texture, elasticity — it read less like consumer advice and more like audition notes for adopting a service animal that hums quietly in your ear while you disappear from the world.
It made me think of my old satin blanket from toddlerhood, a filthy, beloved scrap of fabric I once clung to so fiercely my father eventually hurled it out the car window during a drive past the Florida swamps. He didn’t consult me. He simply decided: enough. I wonder if some of these headphone obsessives are at the same crossroads — but with no father figure brave enough to wrest their adult security blanket away. They may have crossed a threshold where life without permanent auditory sedation has become not merely unpleasant, but unthinkable.
Three weeks ago, crammed into a flying aluminum sausage between Los Angeles and Miami, I found myself envying the travelers swanning around with $500 AirPods Max clamped over their smug skulls. Meanwhile, I was roughing it with a $10 pair of gas station earbuds, gamely trying to absorb Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty on Audible — Charles Leerhsen’s excellent biography about the famously complicated, mercurial baseball legend.
It wasn’t just the status parade that triggered me. It was the simple, physical longing for some real insulation from the shrieking toddler in 34B and the endless snack cart rattle. Add to that my growing irritation with my usual setup: cheap wireless earpods for napping, which jam into my ears like corks in a wine bottle, utterly ruining my quest for a gentle, dignified snooze while listening to my favorite podcasters.
When I got back to Los Angeles, I plunged headfirst into the shimmering, self-defeating abyss of headphone reviews. After hours of caffeinated obsession, I settled on the Soundcore Q85s — on sale for $99, and allegedly a bargain. They arrived dead on arrival. Not just sleepy-dead. Full weekend-at-Bernie’s dead. After 24 hours of desperate charging attempts, I admitted defeat, boxed the corpse, and sent it back.
Then I struck gold — a sale on the Sony WH-CH720N noise-canceling headphones for a criminally low $89. I ordered them, and then — naturally — descended into the familiar buyer’s spiral: Had I gone too cheap? Should I have splurged on Sony’s crown jewel, the WH-1000XM4s, on sale for $248? Was I an idiot forever exiling myself from sonic paradise for a lousy $159 savings?
Before I could drown in regret, the WH-CH720Ns arrived. I checked the fit–very comfortable for my big head. Then I downloaded the Sony app, dialed in noise-canceling, jacked the equalizer to “Bright,” and hit play.
First test: Josh Szeps interviewing Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen on Uncomfortable Conversations. I was so blissfully submerged in the sound that 72 minutes evaporated — I barely surfaced in time to stagger into my office hour Zoom call, looking freshly abducted.
Later, drunk on my own tech triumph, I sampled music on Spotify: SZA’s “Good Days,” MorMor’s “Whatever Comes to Mind,” LoMoon’s “Loveless,” Nao’s “Orbit,” and Stephen Sanchez’s “Evangeline.” The music sparkled. The instruments had space to breathe. The sound was bright, crisp, separate — not the muddy sonic stew I’d suffered through before.
Which left me wondering: What black magic could the Sony XM4s possibly possess to be worth more than double the price? Because right now, $89 felt like grand larceny — I didn’t buy these headphones, I stole them. And considering how easy it is to lose or destroy a pair of headphones in an airport stampede, maybe it’s time to quit while I’m ahead and leave the luxury models to the Instagram aristocracy.
A poolside pestilence was Roland Beavers. He was the type of poolside companion that nightmares are made of. Imagine, if you will, a pudgy man in his early thirties with dishwasher-blond hair clinging lifelessly to a scalp that seemed perpetually annoyed at its presence. His physique was more doughy than daring, his chin seemingly having taken an early retirement. And yet, this fine specimen insisted on strutting around the pool in a pair of lava-red terry cloth trunks so undersized that they clung to his hips for dear life, revealing a set of stretchmarks that looked like they’d been painted on by a vengeful graffiti artist. Roland, of course, had an explanation ready for anyone who dared make eye contact long enough to hear it. Those stretch marks? Oh, they weren’t the result of his love affair with powdered donuts. They were the battle scars from his days as a world-class daredevil, hurling himself off the cliffs of Acapulco. You could practically hear the collective eye-roll from the pool regulars every time he regaled them with his tales of high-flying heroics. But Roland’s true calling wasn’t acrobatics; it was unsolicited public broadcasting. Armed with a crumpled newspaper, he’d park himself by the pool and provide live commentary on every “news bit” that caught his eye, apparently under the delusion that everyone within a 20-foot radius was breathlessly awaiting his next headline. His audience, meanwhile, mumbled curses under their breath, desperately wishing he’d take up a hobby that didn’t involve public speaking. Maybe knitting—somewhere indoors. Roland’s social cluelessness reached its peak when playful couples would toss a football or frisbee in the water. For Roland, this wasn’t a game he could just watch; it was an invitation. He’d leap into the pool with all the grace of a boulder, wading into their game like an uninvited ghost at a family reunion. The couples, now robbed of their carefree fun, would give him the kind of look reserved for people who talk during movies before stomping off in search of a Roland-free zone.
And heaven help the women trying to sunbathe in peace. Roland, ever the gentleman, took it upon himself to offer his “services” to any woman within spraying distance. Whether it was spritzing their backs with a pump bottle of water or offering to rub sunscreen on their shoulders, Roland never missed an opportunity to “help,” oblivious to the fact that his mere presence was enough to ruin their entire tanning experience.
Of course, these endless days at the pool weren’t just for Roland’s entertainment; they were an extension of his bizarre domestic life. His mother, Nadine, a woman who looked like she could bench-press a Buick, frequently leaned over the balcony of their apartment—muu-muu billowing in the desert wind—barking orders at Roland to “slather on more sunscreen.” With her hair twisted into tight curls that looked like they might pop loose at any moment and neck veins throbbing like they were signaling an SOS, Nadine’s concern for her son was a constant, vocal presence. “Get inside and eat something, Roland! You’re wasting away!” she’d holler, seemingly unaware that Roland had about 40 extra pounds he could “waste away” without anyone noticing.
You’d think with all this doting and nagging, Roland might be motivated to get a job, maybe contribute something to society—anything to give the rest of us a break. But alas, Roland and Nadine were comfortably cushioned by the settlement from a lawsuit stemming from Roland’s failed attempt at flight school in San Diego. Apparently, the other students in the dorm took one look at Roland’s face and decided it needed to be rearranged, leaving him with a fractured skull and a big fat check to sit around and bother the rest of us for the rest of his natural life.
And so there he was—our unwanted poolside companion—who, thanks to his mother’s coddling and that lawsuit cash, was free to spend his days lounging in his ridiculous red trunks, delivering headlines no one asked for, and making our lives just a little more unbearable, one stretch mark at a time.
Cinemorphosis 