At sixty-one and assuming I’ve got twenty to twenty-five years left, I’ve been trying to engineer good habits as a way of maximizing my time management and living a meaningful, purposeful life through the use of the therapist Phil Stutz’s “Tools,” which I became aware of when I recently saw Jonah Hill’s documentary about his therapy with the distinguished psychotherapist. Simply titled Stutz, the documentary is Jonah Hill’s love letter to his therapist, but even more importantly it is Hill’s attempt to spread the news that there are tools we can use to help propel us forward when we are stuck in the Maze of bitterness, resentment, depression, and narcissistic entitlement.
Watching the documentary was a bitter pill to swallow because I had to confront the fact that I had squandered much of my life in this Maze. At that moment, I had to resist the temptation to squander even more time beating my chest and lamenting that I didn’t flip a switch and take Phil Stutz’s tools seriously until I was sixty-one. This isn’t to say that I haven’t adhered to a schedule all my life, getting up, eating high-protein meals, doing an hour kettlebell workout, playing piano, and writing, but to be honest my schedule was compromised by consumerism and having the most adolescent notions of happiness. I’ve gone down so many rabbit holes on the Internet. I’ve had so many distractions. I’ve burned so many huge chunks of time. It’s not just the chunks of lost time that squander a life. It’s the brain fog in the aftermath that doubles and even triples that amount of time that gets wasted. There is no getting it back.
I learned from Jonah Hill’s documentary about Stutz and Stutz’s book The Rules that we burn time and squander our lives in essentially two ways: First, we get stuck in the Maze where we sulk and seethe with resentment and refuse to move forward with our lives until we get some kind of magical compensation for the injustices that have afflicted us. Second, we get caught up in what Stutz calls the “magical thinking” of believing that if we can achieve fame or acquire some other Big-Ticket Item, we can cease to struggle and engage with the mess of life and opt to disappear into interminable retirement: luxuriating in our own Hakuna Matata, a life of opulence without worries. It occurred to me that we struggle in life with the belief that we are hostages to the indignity of hard work, and we believe that fame will pay the ransom so we can be delivered from the bondage of hard work. But freedom is not regressing back to the womb of comfort and pleasure. This womb is a place where we become lost.
Like the Dantean concept of being lost in the woods, Stutz’s idea of the Maze is where lost souls flounder. It is where we seek, like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, some Great Payback that will heal us of all our wounds and compensate us for all of life’s perceived injustices. Of course, the Great Payback never comes and we squander our lives waiting feebly for our pain to dissolve on its own. In the Maze, we are stagnant yet foolishly hopeful for something big to happen, but this certain something never materializes.
Sometimes this “something big” is as stupid as online visual stimulation in the form of sex addiction. Or it could be consumer addiction. I could stop writing now and look at the L.L. Bean website for shirt-jackets I don’t need. Or I could get lost in YouTube videos featuring expensive timepieces. I could burn a day getting bogged down in such a consumer maze.
I can’t think about this wasted life in the Maze without thinking about a famous quote from the TV series The Wire when detective Lester Freamon warns his fellow detective Jimmy McNulty that their job will never make them whole. There will never be some grand moment of glory that will make all the hard work worth it. They are slogging in the Maze in vain. Why? Because Freamon says life “is the shit that happens while you’re waiting for things that never come.”
Waiting for things to happen is not a recipe for success in Stutz’s doctrine. Waiting for things to happen will merely reinforce our imprisonment in the Maze. To live in the Maze is to live a life cut off from higher powers. It is separation from the Life Force. Therefore, living in the Maze is a form of damnation.
As we go deeper and deeper into our self-induced Maze, we become cut off from the Life Force, the Source, and our sense of gratitude. The Life Force and the Source are terms for the divine higher power that propels us forward in our lives and keeps us focused on living our lives with deliberation, purpose, order, and creativity. We reinforce this forward-moving life by getting into the habit of reminding ourselves how grateful we are to be on this journey that the Life Force animates. Living in this manner, we continuously move forward.
But Stutz’s world is a binary one. If we’re not moving forward, we are stuck in the Maze. In this toxic inferno, we forget to be grateful for what is good about our lives, we get into the habit of summoning the Black Cloud, which is supported by all our negative thoughts, we squander the limited time life has given us, and we become essentially wastrels. Let us be clear. The Stutzian doctrine paints a clear picture of heaven and hell. Heaven is a life that connects and reconnects over and over the Life Force as the soul moves forward and progresses indefinitely.
When you’re a patient of Stutz, you don’t merely agree with him about the notion of the Life Force. Using the tools, you experience the Life Force and change your body and soul on a molecular level.
The same is true of the Maze, which is your personal hell. This hell is a form of stagnation from getting bogged down in the Maze of addiction to resentment, self-pity, instant gratification and the comfort zone. When you’re a patient of Stutz, you don’t merely agree with him about the idea of the Maze. You are languishing in the torture of it. You are earnestly working with your therapist and using the tools to escape the Maze.
People don’t have to be familiar with the language or doctrine of Phil Stutz to recognize on an intuitive or unconscious level when they encounter me that I am a man who is too often lost in the Maze, a man whose brain is hijacked by various addictions and my addictive behavior cripples me, puts me in a bubble, and prevents me from growing and flourishing into a full human being. This makes me both self-conscious and ashamed.
As an example, I will focus on just one of my addictions: timepieces. Since 2005, I have been addicted to watches, especially Japanese diver watches. I can’t seem to get enough of these divers even though my wife says they all look the same. I also suffer from anxieties from not having enough time to wear and bond with the watches that I have, so I’m constantly selling some to minimize my collection only to miss them and rebuy them over and over. This buying and rebuying is an endless cycle that speaks to being stuck in the Maze or what my fellow watch addicts call The Weeds.
My watch addiction is worsened by the fact that I constantly think and talk about watches. If people give me the opportunity to overwhelm them with my watch obsession, I will do so, and sometimes I don’t even wait for them to give me the opportunity. I remember around 2010 I had a college writing student from Korea who wore an expensive U-Boat to class, and we bonded over his love of the watch followed by his troubles with getting the mechanical Swiss movement to work properly. When I saw him on campus three years later and I immediately started talking about watches, he recoiled in disgust, screamed, and walked away from me. He could tell on an intuitive level that I was a man trapped in the Maze, and he didn’t want to see his instructor, a man for whom he had at one time a certain amount of admiration, to be so conspicuously crippled by his addiction.
For another example, we have to fast-forward to 2022 and discuss my frequent visits to Watch City at the Del Amo Mall in Torrance. I have purchased a few watches there for my wife, but mainly I go there for bracelet adjustments or bracelet swaps because I never learned to be proficient with a spring-bar pusher tool and the like. For over seventeen years, Raffi the owner and his second-in-command Matt have been kind, friendly, and helpful in my quest to get the ultimate bracelet fit. I am no doubt addicted to going to Watch City, not just for a bracelet adjustment but to commiserate with Raffi and Matt about watches.
Recently, however, when I bought an expensive Seiko SLA055 limited edition diver and could not decide which strap to put on it, I became more obsessed than ever with frequenting Watch City. Sometimes, I’d show up three times in one week for several weeks straight, and my favor at the store curdled. Matt could not hide his exasperation with my over frequent visits. When I thanked him for doing what was probably the twelfth strap swap on my Seiko and told him that I was at last at peace with my strap decision, Matt said with a certain derision in his voice, “See you tomorrow.”
I need to make it clear that I harbor no animosity for Matt. I want to make it clear that had I been in his shoes, I would have had the same contempt for a customer who is always anxiously frequenting the store with the need for a strap swap the way a drug addict is waiting for his next fix. Matt could not help but see that I was in the throes of addiction, and it pained him to see a man in his early sixties so debilitated and so lost in the Maze of his own making.
I became acutely aware that Matt saw in me a man who was like a crack addict and this brought me shame. I could never unsee Matt seeing me in this fashion, and around this time I had watched the documentary Stutz and this caused me to reevaluate my life from the therapist’s worldview. I felt compelled to incorporate Phil Stutz’s Rules into my life. I bought a professional-grade spring bar tool and forced myself to learn how to do my own strap and bracelet swaps and adjustments. For pride’s sake, I no longer wanted to be an annoyance to Matt. He is a kind and generous man who did my strap swaps for seventeen years. He probably had not read Phil Stutz’s rules, but he knew on an unconscious level that I was a man lost in the Maze.
Because I have invested much time and energy in creating my own Maze, to use Stutz’s term for a place where we hibernate from real life, seek instant gratification, and undergo a sort of entropy or moral dissolution and because I am too old to afford time-wasting mind games and deceptions that I’ve honed over my lifetime, I have been eager to use Stutz’s tools explained in the documentary and his book The Tools to push myself out of the Maze and to seize the “Higher Powers” Stutz claims will help bring creativity, meaning, and order out of the chaos.
By trying to incorporate Stutz’s tools at the age of sixty-one, I feel like a fool who realizes late in life I have spent my lifetime eating spiritual junk food and hope I can reverse the process by “eating clean,” as it were, in order that I may emerge from my personal chaos and entropy.
This personal chaos is borne from spending most of my time in my Comfort Zone, a place where I seek convenience, pleasure, and escape from the type of challenges that would make me grow and lead a fulfilling life. Stutz also refers to this Comfort Zone as a “warm bath,” a place that lulls us to sleep, and eventually, if we slumber long enough, we expire irretrievably. We seek massage recliners, memory pillows, remote-controlled living room entertainment centers, and streaming platforms that organize our media menu at the wave of a hand.
All this obsession with finding the comfort of the Warm Bath strikes me as a fool’s quest that will result in a squandered life. Will we be judged for the life we squander? To answer this question, I refer to Dale Allison’s small but riveting book Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things in which he writes that near-death experiences are universal. Every culture throughout time has had similar reports of people experiencing a Great Accounting in which they must vouch for the life they lived here on Earth.
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