How to Laugh in Ironic Amusement During Your Existential Crisis
How to Laugh in Ironic Amusement During Your Existential Crisis
My new book is officially here!!
My new book, How to Laugh in Ironic Amusement During Your Existential Crisis, the first ever collection of poetry + memes, is now available for purchase.
Before 2020, I was (like most people I knew at the time) an ambitious and overworked professional. I was living in New York City and working at an advertising agency on Madison Avenue. Every minute was action-packed. I was drinking too much coffee during the day and too much alcohol at night. I was working long hours at a job I didn’t like so I could fill my overpriced apartment with things I didn’t need.
To be honest, it was exhausting.
The pandemic changed everything. Suddenly the world was thrown upside down. Quarantine. Economic shutdown. Sickness and death. New regulations. Our entire society changed overnight as people scrambled to figure out “the new normal.”
Meanwhile, my girlfriend and I left New York City to move to Topanga, California, tucked safely away in the Santa Monica mountains. We got two dogs. We renewed ourselves in the California sun.
After working remotely for a few months, I lost my job because business had dried up. With no choice but to reevaluate my entire life, I fell into a deep existential crisis. What had mattered so much before – my career, my social life, my external accomplishments – suddenly didn’t mean anything. I was back to square one.
In my childhood, I was a poet. I wrote hundreds of poems as a teenager. But as I gradually became more consumed with growing my career, I stopped writing poetry altogether. I had been cut off from my imagination and intuition.
Suddenly it all started rushing back. I had the space to feel and dream again. I reconnected with my true nature below the surface of social expectations and materialistic ambitions. And with the backdrop of a society that seemed to be collapsing, I started writing poetry and making art that was a direct reflection of the world around me.
And in a world that seemed increasingly absurd, I found that the format of the internet meme was one of the best ways to communicate what I was thinking and feeling.
The culmination of this journey is my new book, How to Laugh in Ironic Amusement During Your Existential Crisis, a collection of timely (and often hilarious) memes and poetry.
We live in strange times. Information (both real and fake) is coming to us at a rapid pace, technology and social media are turning people into algorithmic data, COVID has altered the fabric of society, and the U.S. Pentagon has disclosed the existence of UFOs. It feels like the whole world is struggling to make sense of what exactly is going on.
This is a book that meets readers where they are today – in a fast-changing world that is equal parts surreal, isolating, and confusing. It’s also a book about hope, a book that cracks a joke in the middle of an existential crisis, a book that reaches out to touch readers with moments of shared humanity.
The lesson: sometimes what seems like a breakdown is actually a breakthrough. When we transmute the old self in the fire of change, we lose only the illusions we have been taught; what remains is the radiance of the true self, finally seen.