The first two hours of the movie follow Marty as he lies, schemes and hustles his way across the New York tri-state area, trying to scrape together enough money to get to Japan for the table tennis world championships and a rematch against Endo, the Japanese phenom who beat him in London a few months prior.

“This is just Uncut Gems with ping-pong,” I thought to myself as I was watching. “They already made this movie. Actually, Uncut Gems is just a lesser version of Good Time. So they already made this movie twice. What the hell happened to the Safdie brothers in their childhood that compels them to keep making this type of film?”

But the entire dynamic flips on its head at the very end. All of the selfish and manipulative behavior that has made Marty so detestable throughout the movie actually becomes a strength when he needs to convince Endo to face him in a meaningless exhibition match. The verbal pressure tactics he’s been using to defraud friends and family are finally put towards noble ends. Endo relents, and Marty wins, his previous loss avenged. But the movie’s vibe shift doesn’t end there.

After his victory, Marty rushes back to the United States to attend to Rachel, his pregnant fuck buddy (Marty Supreme takes place in 1952, but I have no idea what the era-appropriate term would be for such an arrangement). He has denied paternity throughout the film, but his victory has changed something within him. The movie ends with a final shot of Marty standing at the nursery glass, looking at his son for the first time, absolutely crying his eyes out.

Viewers have interpreted this ending in a variety of ways. Maybe Marty is crying because he’s truly happy for the first time. Maybe he knows everything has changed, forever, and he’s mourning the end of his dream. Maybe he’s realized the insignificance and futility of everything he previously based his life on, and he’s now filled with tremendous shame for his actions. I’m sure the significance was left intentionally vague, but I know how I reacted to the ending. It made me revisit a question from my comedy days that I’d never been able to answer.

During my time pursuing a career in stand-up, I always wrestled with the concept of stability vs freedom, and whether or not a reckless disregard for convention was a necessary precursor to greatness. Or, more simply put, I kept asking myself, “Do you have to ruin your life in order to become a great artist?”

I didn’t want this to be the case. I am naturally an orderly person with a strong penchant for following the rules. If creativity required libertinism as its fuel, I was screwed.

I always maintained a day job when I was a comedian. I didn’t stay out late and abuse drugs or alcohol. I was (and remain) a relatively calm and even-keeled person. Basically, I didn’t exhibit any of the markers of the personality disorders that are so often attributed to mad geniuses. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to let these parts of myself slip a little bit if I was going to have some kind of creative breakthrough and achieve what I wanted in my comedy career. I was worried my stability was holding me back.

I was never able to fully let go. It’s just not who I am. Even if loosening up to that degree did somehow allow me to write and perform better and eventually become a regular at The Comedy Cellar, I don’t think I could have handled the constant sense of instability. I like paying my rent on time too much.

My responsibilities have only multiplied since I quit stand-up. I have an eight-month-old son. I recently started a new job that, while potentially more lucrative, demands a lot more time and mental bandwidth than any of my previous roles. My wife is back at work full-time after maternity leave, so there is the additional negotiating of schedules, childcare and general household admin work that wasn’t necessary a few months ago. “We’re out of dishwasher pods. Who is going to pick some up on the way home tonight?” is now something that needs to be actively discussed hours in advance, lest we get caught with a sink full of dirty dishes and nowhere to put our used bottles.

As a result of this, my creative work has fallen by the wayside. I’ve barely written anything over these last few months. I want to write, but I’m currently lacking the time, energy and motivation.

But this is to be expected, right? It’s why artists choose the path of freedom, so that they can live unencumbered and create without impediment. As Marty tells a very pregnant Rachel during his quest to get to Japan, “I am in no position to settle down right now.”

Here’s the thing though. I refuse to accept that reality. I don’t want to shrug my shoulders and say “Well, that’s just how it is.” That feels like true surrender. It’s disempowering.

So, what is to be done? Or, more importantly, can anything be done in the first place? Is it even possible to fully attend to the requirements of day-to-day life while still engaging in a passion project? Maybe people lean on the myth of the tortured/chaotic artist because it’s true. Perhaps you can’t achieve greatness and be a normal person at the same time. Think about the Oracle at Delphi. The link between madness and divine inspiration goes back thousands of years. It’s Lindy.

Or maybe, just maybe, people lean on that myth because it’s convenient. It looks like sacrifice but in reality it’s nothing but indulgence. It’s easy to throw caution to the wind and think about only yourself while pursuing a dream. Any asshole without a functioning conscience could do that. What if the real challenge is committing yourself across multiple domains, each with the same degree of intensity?

As I approach 40, I have a very clear vision of what I want my life to look like. Gone are the high flying dreams of my twenties and early thirties. What I want is more grounded, but sometimes, it feels more difficult to achieve.

I want to be a present and loving father and husband. I want to achieve my objectives at work and be financially rewarded for them. I want to feel healthy and be physically fit. And I want to have a regular creative practice where I share ideas that are important to me, and have those ideas resonate with others. I don’t need to make a cent off of my creativity. I just want to do it, and have it deliver some small kind of impact.

None of these aspirations are outlandish on their own. It’s the combination of them that’s the difficult part. Going from “Either/Or” to “And” with a handful of smaller goals feels harder than going all in on one major goal. It’s not as romantic or glamorous as the idea of giving everything up for a creative dream, but it’s also not as safe or boring as one might think. Discipline combined with purpose and anchored in a sense of morality might be its own form of madness. What’s crazier than thinking you can have it all?

I never made it as a comedian. I doubted my skill level plenty of times, but I never once doubted my drive or my work ethic. I threw everything I had into it, and then some. That drive still exists in me, begging to be put to good use. I want to re-activate it and channel it towards more holistic ends. What I’ve always admired about characters like Marty Mauser (Or Andrew in Whiplash or Borden in The Prestige or Mozart in Amadeus) is the unending well of vitality they drew from as they pursued what was meaningful to them. I’ve done this in the past focused on being great at one thing, but maybe now I can re-allocate that same energy, this time with the intention of being very good at multiple things.

I cut a lot of nonsense out of my life during Lent this year and I feel a greater sense of clarity than I have in a long time. This feels like the perfect moment to rededicate myself to what I want my life to look like, while shifting my perspective on what I think my ceiling is. The first step is believing that family, work and creativity don’t exist in opposition to each other, but instead are different pieces of the same whole. They can reinforce rather than compete.

I might be wrong about this, but I’ll get much closer to where I want to be trying and failing than never trying at all.

Earlier this month, Infinite Jest reached the 30th anniversary of its publication. This triggered a slew of retrospective essays from major outlets, each attempting to grapple with the book, its legacy, and What It All Means Now. Given that the late David Foster Wallace’s 1,079 page opus has come to be viewed more as a meme than a work of art these days, this was no easy task. Some focused on the social baggage of Infinite Jest, how it became a totem for a certain kind of annoying, know-it-all “lit bro” that would recommend the book to girls at parties. Others wrote about Wallace himself, dredging up the more unsavory aspects of his biography to place the work in context with the man who created it. A few leaned heavily into the prescience of Infinite Jest, a novel published in 1996 that takes place in a semi-distant dystopian future where a famous entertainer runs the country and citizens rot their brains by staring at screens all day.

Whatever angle a particular piece took, it usually landed on the complimentary, seemingly heterodox opinion that “Infinite Jest is good, actually.” After years of derision and condescending smirks, it appears the chattering class has come around.

I agree. Infinite Jest IS good, actually. But I think all these pieces are missing the point of why.

The retrospectives I saw were mostly about the discourse around the book and/or the very broad strokes of the story. They feel like they were written by someone who has Infinite Jest placed prominently on their bookshelf, but has never actually gotten around to reading it. By zooming out and focusing on the big picture, they neglected the best parts of the novel and lost sight of what makes it great.

Yes, it’s fun to marvel at how accurately Wallace predicted the future. Yes, this book is mind-bending in its scope and ambition. Yes, you absolutely need two bookmarks so you can flip back and forth between the main text and the 388 endnotes that appear at random intervals with widely varying lengths. But the best parts of Infinite Jest - the parts that stick with you and rattle around in your brain for years after you’ve finished reading - are incredibly, unbelievably small and human. They’d be more at home in a slim work of realist fiction than a massive post-modern masterpiece. And in the midst of all this hype around the 30th anniversary, these highlights have gone unremarked upon.

Infinite Jest opens on Hal Incandenza, one of the primary protagonists of the story, awaiting a college entrance interview. This scene takes place about a year after the primary action of the plot has been resolved and functions as a sort of flash-forward. The book doesn’t really kick off - in my mind anyway - until the first sentence of the second chapter: “Where was the woman who said she’d come?”

This is a question put forth by Ken Erdedy, a ravenous marijuana addict awaiting a woman who said she would come to his apartment and sell him 200 grams of high quality pot. What unfolds over the next ten pages is a deep dive into Erdedy’s psyche as he prepares for what he claims is one last debauched marijuana binge. Never mind that he’s made this claim many times before and always finds a way to relapse, whether it’s a month or a week or even a couple days later. According to Erdedy, this time he really means it, and he has a plan to enforce his decision.

He would smoke it all even if he didn’t want it. Even if it started to make him dizzy and ill. He would use discipline and persistence and will and make the whole experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and unpleasant, that his behavior would be henceforth modified, he’d never even want to do it again because the memory of the insane four days to come would be so firmly, terrible emblazoned in his memory. He’d cure himself by excess.

Of course, this strategy does not work, but I could have told you that without reading any further. It’s the same mindset I have during the week between Christmas and New Year’s when I tell myself that by eating leftover cheesecake and cookies for breakfast I’m actually setting up a massive dietary and fitness turnaround on January 1st, and that next year I will finally have abs and be able to run a six-minute mile, all because of how slothful and gluttonous I was during one reckless week. It’s cope, all the way down.

This chapter showcases what I believe is Wallace’s greatest strength. I have never come across another writer who can so clearly map out the specifics of interior life. He knows exactly how to lay bare all of the insane contradictions and rationalizations that occur when one is suffering from a debilitating sense of self-consciousness, second-guessing and over-analyzing every possible decision and action.

Erdedy describes all the disgusting ways he lies to the people around him, how he fakes sick and calls out of work, parks his car around the corner so friends and family think he’s out of town, and modulates his behavior so that he can convince one specific person to sell him an unreasonable amount of pot without being “creepy” about it. Of course, he’s doing all of this because he knows it’s wrong and that he has a serious problem. All of these mental and logistical gymnastics are just an elaborate way to avoid confronting and reckoning with what he knows is the truth: He’s an addict and he’s unable to correct his issues on his own.

Wallace shows us all of this with only a brief tour of Erdedy’s sickened mental state. Hardly anything actually happens in this chapter. Erdedy spends most of it just sitting on the couch, thinking of everything he’s about to do. But through the clarity and honesty of Wallace’s prose, we know exactly who this man is, even if he refuses to admit it to himself. We are given a front row seat to the war playing out within his own soul.

Whenever I talk to someone who is thinking about reading Infinite Jest, I tell them to read this chapter first. If they like it, they’ll probably enjoy the rest of the book.

It’s not all despair and pain in Infinite Jest, however. Yes, it’s a story filled with addicts and depressives, but there are many parts that are not sad at all. In fact, some are downright inspirational. My personal favorite is a speech given by a stern, authoritarian tennis instructor named Gerhardt Schtitt.

A large part of Infinite Jest takes place at Enfield Tennis Academy, a prep school where junior tennis players learn how to become pros. There’s a scene a little less than midway through the book that chronicles an early morning workout. Here, a collection of teenage prodigies are put through a gauntlet of conditioning drills in freezing Boston winter temperatures. Not only does Wallace do an incredible job describing what it feels like to run pre-dawn sprints while there’s still snow on the ground (When I first read this passage, my memories of off-season college football workouts came rushing back to me), but he also utilizes Schtitt to reveal a profound and powerful truth.

Once the conditioning drills are finished, Schtitt asks the players what they should do when they’re in the middle of a match and they feel too cold or too hot or too tired or they suffer an injury or their opponent is cheating or they’re not getting the right calls from the line judge or they experience any of the myriad setbacks that could befall someone playing highly competitive tennis. One young player suggests that they learn to adjust to the given conditions. Schtitt tells him, in his heavily accented broken English, that they should do the exact opposite.

Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? Is it cold? Is it wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. Different world inside. World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside.

It can be hard to parse through at first, but Schtitt is telling these players that they need to build an unbreakable world inside themselves. If they develop a secure sense of interiority, cultivated over years of discipline and effort, then what happens in the world around them won’t matter. As long as they stay the same on the inside, the outside world can never exert its influence over them. A strong, stable sense of self is the best defense against all of the difficult things life will throw at you.

About a week after I first read this passage, I found myself thinking about it while in the middle of a long run. I usually listened to music to stay motivated while running, or thought about cool scenes from movies to push through fatigue, but never in my life had I thought about a book in order to stretch myself physically. Now I find myself coming back to this scene on a regular basis, whether I’m in the middle of a difficult workout, grinding through a challenging day at the office, or taking care of my son while on minimal sleep. It’s had that much of an impact on me.

Like the Erdedy chapter, nothing really crazy or outlandish happens here. The scene Wallace describes - of young athletes pushing themselves physically and mentally - is one that has played out at countless high schools and colleges across the country. On its face, it’s nothing special. But through the power of his insight and advanced writing ability, Wallace takes something seemingly small and common and elevates it to the realm of moving and profound.

It would be hard to talk about Infinite Jest without mentioning Don Gately, a character who many readers (myself included) consider to be the true hero of the story. Gately is a former thief and opiate addict who checks into Ennet House, a Boston area rehab facility, to get clean and escape a handful of criminal charges that could land him in jail for a very long time.

The Gately-centric chapters that focus on the realities of addiction - on the mindset and decisions and choices made by someone who is in total thrall to a particular substance - are so powerful, so deep and moving and insightful and empathy expanding, that they completely changed the way I look at addicts. A few years back I was on a trip with some friends when one of our sober buddies fell off the wagon. Myself and another friend volunteered to bring him back to the hotel so he couldn’t do any more damage to himself. Once we got him up to his room, I decided we needed to wait in the lobby for ten more minutes before going back out. My other friend didn’t get it at first, but sure enough, here comes our buddy five minutes later, trying to escape into the night and head to another bar. My one friend asked me “How did you know he was going to do that?” It was because of Infinite Jest and Don Gately.

But Gately’s story is ultimately one of triumph, and the pivotal moment takes place while he’s lying in a hospital bed, suffering from bullet and stab wounds, trying desperately not to ingest the painkillers the doctors have prescribed to him.

Towards the end of the novel, Gately is shot and stabbed while defending his housemate from a handful of vicious gang members. He then spends the last hundred or so pages in a feverish dream state, fighting like hell to try and stay sober in the face of unimaginable physical pain. He eventually comes to the below realization.

No single instant of it is unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants lined up and stretching ahead, glittering.

…He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen.

…It wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for the Substance: everything unendurable was in his head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.

It’s a metaphor for AA’s “One day at a time” mantra, but it’s also the perfect companion piece to Schtitt’s directive to build a world inside yourself. While Schtitt tells you what to do, Gately tells you how to do it. And it’s not with some vague advice about “staying present in the moment,” there’s a visual metaphor of hopping walls and looking ahead that you can imagine and embody to make the advice feel real and actionable. “Don’t hop the wall” is what I tell myself when I’m in the middle of a difficult task with no end in sight. It’s fantastic advice that I’ve visualized and implemented many times since I first read Infinite Jest, and it usually works.

There’s a tinge of sadness to all of this considering that Wallace, a lifelong depressive, eventually committed suicide in 2008. One day he hopped the wall and believed the unendurable news he reported back to himself. But even though his end was ultimately a tragic one, we can never know how many times he actually endured and made the correct decision to stay with us. All you have to do is lose that argument with yourself one time, and the outcome is final. But winning it just means you have to do it again the next day. He had a pretty phenomenal batting average, due in large part to the fiction he wrote. It was the one loss that ended his story.

While I’ve focused exclusively on the small parts, I won’t deny that the big, flashy parts are also pretty awesome. The lore and world-building in Infinite Jest are phenomenal. During the six weeks it took me to finish, I felt like I was inhabiting an entirely different universe. It’s like The NeverEnding Story for nerdy adults. It’s fun to go down Reddit rabbit holes to try and decode who it was sending the killer video tapes, what Madam Psychosis looks like under that veil, or what actually happened when Hal, Wayne and Gately went to dig up James’s Incandenza’s head.

But while these moments are very large, it’s the small moments that have the most scope. During these scenes, you inhabit someone else’s interior life. You sit with them and bear witness to everything going on inside their head and their heart. That’s way bigger than an international espionage plot involving government spies and wheelchair bound Québécois separatists. And by witnessing that reality, by seeing the grandeur that everyone carries within themselves, you accomplish the goal that Wallace always had for his fiction. You feel less alone.

It’s now been over a month since Jacob Savage published “The Lost Generation.” For those who are offline enough to not know what I’m talking about, this was an essay in Compact Magazine alleging that straight, white, Millennial men had been systematically shut out of prestige institutions like journalism, academia, and entertainment over the last ten to fifteen years. It kicked up a hornet’s nest within the online right, for obvious reasons. It also received a lot of pushback among the online left, although I’m getting that information secondhand as I don’t have a Bluesky account. Vice President Vance even tweeted about it, calling the essay “an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.”

If it’s been that long since “The Lost Generation” came out, why am I writing about it now? Well, first, I spent the last few weeks of December sleep-training a baby and didn’t have the time to write about it then, so cut me some slack. Second, there are still a lot of conversations happening downstream from this piece and its impact. Third, and maybe most importantly, I am exactly the type of person it was written about.

I started performing stand-up comedy in December of 2008 and kept at it all throughout the 2010s, eventually stopping at the end of 2023. I tried as hard as I could to build a fruitful career, but wasn’t able to make it happen. After years of spinning my wheels, I eventually hung up the microphone feeling burnt out and beaten down.

I’m also a straight white guy. I was born in 1986, which means I grew up watching 90s Nickelodeon, experienced a childhood free from the internet, and graduated college during a once-in-a-lifetime global financial crisis. That qualifies me as a certified, purebred Millennial.

One might think that these demographic factors have nothing to do with my failed comedy career, but according to Savage’s essay, they’re inextricably linked.

It’s hard to write about this stuff for a general audience because you’re always at risk of upsetting somebody. If you believe this happened and acknowledge it in any sort of forthright way, the left calls you a bigot and a fascist. If you acknowledge it but don’t express the proper amount of outrage, the right deems you a coward and a cuck.

I’m going to attempt to do both.

I really am of two minds about this entire situation. My thoughts seem diametrically opposed to each other, but I hope I can convince you they’re not.

My response to Savage’s piece is as follows:

1. This absolutely happened, and anyone who argues otherwise is deluding themselves.

2. On a personal level, I don’t really care.

The stats Savage lists in his piece are staggering. In 2013, Vox Media was 82% male and 88% white, which befits a startup made in Ezra Klein’s image. By 2022, the company was 37% male and 59% white, with 73% female leadership in 2025. Tenure track positions at Harvard from 2014-2024 went from 49% white male to 27%, while in the humanities they went from 39% to 21%. In 2011, white men were approximately 60% of TV writers. In 2025, they were less than 12% of lower level staff writers, while women of color made up over 34%.

Shifts this dramatic don’t happen by accident. They’re the result of intentional policy, animated by the progressive worldview that dominated American culture throughout the last decade.

Others have argued that white men still make up a large percentage at many of these institutions, but that’s not exactly Savage’s point. The real story lies not in the organizations in totality, but who in the Millennial cohort was brought in and who was excluded. Savage is focused on the younger people who were just starting out in their careers and attempting to get their big break. They were the ones that bore the brunt of these new policies.

When zeroing in on Millennials, the bleak nature of these numbers comes into focus. One prime example is The Disney Writing Program, a major stepping stone to a career in Hollywood for young creatives. Over the last decade the program has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships, none of which went to white men. Meanwhile, over at The New York Times, only 10% of the 220 year-long fellowships awarded since 2018 have gone to white men.

There’s also the anecdotal evidence provided by Savage’s interview subjects. Said one newspaper hiring editor: “For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys. It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person…It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”

Or this, from a former assistant to a white male Gen X showrunner:

“You could read a white guy’s script, but there was no way in hell that person was going to get staffed on the show. Showrunners only had a couple of spots for white people, and they kept those for the 40- or 50-year-old white guys they’d known for years.”

Savage provides plenty of other examples like these two, but I won’t belabor the point and list them all here.

While reading this essay, I was shocked but not surprised. The scope of the situation was astounding, but I didn’t need data or stories to be convinced of its truthfulness. I lived this reality on the ground for over a decade.

Savage doesn’t include any demographic breakdowns of New York City comedy shows between 2012 and 2023 - the years I was active in the city - but if he did I’m certain it would look a lot like his other stats. As the decade wore on, there were fewer and fewer white guys on those lineups, especially when it came to the hip independent shows of Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan. Usually there was just one straight white dude going up on stage. A lot of times there were none. The same could be said of comedy festivals, late night TV spots, and other markers of industry success.

I’ve written at length about why I didn’t make it in comedy, with the primary reason being that I wasn’t funny enough. But having fewer opportunities to get on stage and grow certainly didn’t help matters. I don’t think it’s out of line for me to say that these changing norms had at least some negative impact on the trajectory of my comedy career.

This all might sound like sour grapes, but I’m simply attempting to tell you what happened during my time as a comedian in New York City. I also want you to know that, even though I could be angry about my experience, I’m not. As I stated earlier, I don’t really care.

More accurately, I can’t allow myself to care. The moment I start pointing outwards and blaming nebulous, uncontrollable forces for my failure is the moment where I begin to lose my sense of personal agency. Even if I were correct in blaming the shift away from white guys in comedy for my lack of success, what does that ultimately change? What redress does it allow? None. It only permits me to stew in bitterness without forcing me to confront what I could have done differently. It lets me get away with ignoring my own faults.

And my faults were legion. Beyond simply not being funny enough, I also didn’t trust myself to the degree I needed to. I was too reliant on institutions to help advance my career, all during a time when institutions were simultaneously shutting out guys like me and losing their influence.

When I started stand-up in 2008, the conventional career advice was to get on stage as much as possible, write as much as possible, be around as much as possible, and eventually something will click. You’ll get an opportunity to be accepted at a comedy club, which could lead to landing an agent or manager, which could lead to industry heat followed by a development deal with a network, and then it was on to TV and movies and life as a successful touring comic. All you had to do was work on your act and these major institutions would take care of the rest. They were the only ones with the tools necessary to put you in front of bigger and better audiences.

How did that hold up over the 2010s? Not well, to say the least. When was the last time a spot on late night TV supercharged someone’s career? Has Comedy Central even released a stand-up special over the last five years? What unknown comedian has recently broken out by getting their own sitcom on NBC, ABC, Fox or CBS?

Everything moved online, both in terms of how people consumed content and in how talent promoted themselves and built their careers. While all of this was happening, I stayed stuck in that old world way of thinking, hoping some gatekeeper with the power to change my life would deem me worthy of their largesse. I was waiting for permission from someone else to be successful.

To call myself a late adopter in the new media landscape would be an understatement. I never posted anything on YouTube as it was becoming the largest entertainment hub on the planet. My Twitter account was practically dormant and never grew above 1,000 followers. I used Instagram for mostly personal stuff. I refused to start a TikTok account during COVID, telling myself “I don’t need another app to scroll.” I let every single opportunity to build my own organic fanbase pass me by. When I decided to finally get on board towards the end of my career, it was already too late and most of the market share was taken up. It would have been so much easier to grow an audience in the early days of a given app, but I snobbishly considered that sort of thing beneath me and not “real art.” My definition of “real art,” apparently, was telling jokes to ten disinterested people in the back of a Brooklyn dive bar for the better part of ten years.

So yeah, the major institutions of the world were shutting out straight white guys during my prime growth years, but I shouldn’t have let that affect me to the degree that it did. Plenty of straight white guys became wildly successful during this time period, and they did it by building their own thing outside of the major institutions. I’m thinking of guys like Andrew Schulz, Chris Distefano, Nick Mullen, Stavros Halkias, Adam Friedland, and Shane Gillis. Some might point to Shane being publicly fired from SNL as the launching point for his career, but that’s not totally accurate. How many people who have been fired from SNL are on sold-out arena tours within five years? Shane owes the majority of his massive success to his podcast and his self-produced stand-up special Live in Austin, currently sitting at 50 million views on YouTube.

I pursued a career in stand-up comedy during a peak era of exclusion for guys like me. But I also pursued a career in stand-up comedy during a peak era for making your own way. I could have been an early adopter of this new technology and figured things out on my own. Maybe I would have developed an audience, and a voice that was worth listening to, along the way. Instead, I chose to rely on the institutions that were shunning me for my identity. That choice, and my subsequent failures, lie with me and me alone. That is ultimately why I don’t get too worked up over my “Lost Generation” status.

Look, I understand some might feel I’m being flippant about the systematic exclusion of a certain group of people based on their race, gender, and sexuality - all of which was done in the name of “equality.” When I say this stuff doesn’t bother me on a personal level, I just mean related to my own experience. I still find it infuriating on a macro level that so many people had doors shut in their face due to identity and grievance politics. We can’t allow this type of ideology to come back into power and gain mainstream acceptance ever again. It’s corrosive and cheapens everything it touches.

But think about what was actually lost during this time period. Were these institutions offering anything that was really all that special?

Substacker clarified things for me with his recent piece on the subject. Here he chronicles his unrealized dream of becoming a college professor. But he doesn’t despair over this loss, because he understands what his dream was truly signaling.

I wanted to teach bright young people about all the wonderful things I’d studied; that’s what I do now as a [private high school] teacher. I wanted to write about the things that moved me - I have my Substack. I can provide for my family and be real, without having to add pronouns to my bio to do it. And best of all, I get to help others with the same vision I have.

Say he had gone after that professor job like he initially intended. He would have eventually been ground down and discarded, similar to Savage and his thwarted aspirations as a screenwriter. Even if he was lucky enough to make inroads and establish himself, he’d still be forced to signal constant ideological alignment or risk alienation and probable termination.

Instead, LoC enjoys the freedom of doing what his heart calls him to do without any outside interference. The only thing that’s missing is the prestige that comes with teaching at a high-end university. But prestige is always dependent on others. It’s a reputational Ponzi scheme that relies on people, most of whom are strangers, to validate your actions and decisions. The whims of the crowd are fickle, and you need to constantly contort yourself to stay in their good graces. Is that freedom? Is that success? When viewed through this particular lens, it certainly doesn’t sound like it. This is why I’m glad my plans for institutional success in comedy never came to fruition.

I’m not totally delusional here. I know that being a popular, touring stand-up comedian is almost certainly preferable to working a normal office job five days a week like I currently do. But I do feel as if I’m better off in some way. I can say with absolute certainty that my relationship to my creative drive is so much healthier than it was a few years ago. I write what I feel like writing, when I feel like writing it. Sometimes it does well and gains a bit of traction, sometimes it’s forgotten the next day. Either way, it doesn’t matter. The burden of expectation and the hope of advancement have been removed. All that’s left is the creative act, and that act only needs approval from one person in order to take place - me. If I had achieved the kind of success I was looking for, the kind that is owed to gatekeepers and large institutions, I’d always have to worry about keeping them happy.

Savage’s piece ends on a somber note as he reflects on how to share his failures and frustrations with his two young sons. “What do I say when my boys ask about my old hopes and dreams? What do I tell them when they ask about theirs?” he laments.

Savage doesn’t provide an answer, but I know what I’m going to tell my son. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t ever, ever surrender your sense of self and willingness to determine your own future to an outside source. Institutions come and go, their power and influence fades, what they value changes. If you keep your destiny in your own hands, you’ll outlast them. You’ll find the type of success that they can’t provide for you. That success might not look like what you initially imagined. It might not be as grand or important, but it will be more real than anything they can offer. And who knows, maybe you’ll be one of the lucky few that far surpasses your peers and builds something stellar and lucrative on your own. But no matter the size of your success, as long as it comes from your individual spirit and efforts, you’ll know that it was truly earned.

Every other cliché description of parenting, however, has been completely true. I’ve operated on levels of sleep previously thought to be insurmountable. I’ve changed more dirty diapers and wiped up more vomit and pee than I could even begin to quantify. If you showed me some kind of Spotify-esque “Bodily Fluids Wrapped 2025” I’m sure the final tally would both astound me and seem completely reasonable. When parents tell you what life is like once you have a baby, believe them. It’s all true. In fact, they might be underselling it.

All of this stuff has been difficult but manageable. The lack of sleep was debilitating at first, but now I’m so used to being tired that it doesn’t impact me the same way anymore. Blown out diapers are no longer a catastrophe, they’re just another recurring part of my domestic life, like brushing my teeth or washing the dishes. I’ve developed a sort of mental immunity to these small, daily challenges.

But there’s one challenge that’s been far more difficult than all of the others. The hardest thing about parenting, for me at least, has been the complete loss of personal agency.

Agency is something I value very highly, as I mentioned in my very first post on this Substack. I believe the greatest gift we have as human beings is our ability to dictate the terms of our own life. No one is ever in complete control of their destiny, the world is simply too chaotic for that. But, through sheer effort and will, we can shape our lives to more closely resemble what we want. This was the central tenet of my personal philosophy when I was doing stand-up and after I quit. I’ve always strived, to the best of my ability, to control where I put my time and energy.

That’s all gone now. My time is no longer my own. It is instead occupied by the tasks I’ve listed above, among many others. I know that’s what you sign up for when you become a parent, but understanding it intellectually and accepting it in reality are two different things.

Even after my wife and I put the baby to bed and are able to take a minute to breathe, something still feels off with me. I can’t relax, and I don’t feel comfortable or at ease. I think this is because, for the past five months, I haven’t been able to exercise, read, or write. I can’t engage in any of the major activities I use to emotionally regulate myself. At a time where I need them the most, they’re no longer available to me.

In my previous life, if I was having a rough day or feeling agitated for some reason, I could always count on exercise, reading or writing to level me out. Most days I was able to do all three. I could rest my head on my pillow at night with some semblance of peace. Now, after a long day of professional obligations and childcare duties, I just try and get to bed as quickly as possible so I can rack up a decent amount of sleep before the baby wakes up and the day’s tasks start all over again. There’s no time for anything else.

This has compounded over time, and the effects have been noticeable. This is my first Substack post in nearly three months. I’ve read two (2) total books since my son was born, neither of which I’ve enjoyed. I was surprised to find myself losing weight throughout the Fall, but I soon realized that I was just losing muscle mass and I’m now at a skinny-fat version of my goal weight. Sometimes I’ll touch my biceps and their doughy softness causes me to reflexively frown.

The hardest part of each day has been the few hours after I get home from work. Our son is very restless and needs constant stimulation, otherwise he starts crying. So my job after I get home from my day job is to constantly move around and keep him occupied while my wife makes dinner and prepares his bedtime routine. It’s great to see him after nine plus hours at the office, and the smile I’m greeted with is the highlight of my day, but my physical and mental energy starts to flag twenty minutes in as I continuously move him from his bouncer to his playmat and back to his bouncer, rotating through different toys along the way, working overtime to avoid any potential infant meltdowns.

I realize this is all objectively positive. There are countless people out there who want nothing more than this experience, myself included. I prayed for a son with a strong Will to Power and an excess of spirit, and God delivered. But all the while I still feel my brain aching for a moment, just a brief moment, of peace and solitude so that I can reacquire some temporary measure of internal stability.

So yeah, the past five months have been challenging to say the least.

But - let me interject with a major, major - BUT! While I’m feeling all of this, one thing remains glaringly obvious to me. I know this frustration isn’t what makes up the core of my experience as a father. It’s merely surface level, a superficial emotion that obscures the transcendent truth underneath. That truth is hard to articulate, so I’ll have to use an example from a TV show.

The Leftovers is about what happens when 2% of the world’s population suddenly disappears with no explanation whatsoever. One second these people are all here, walking and talking and taking up space, and the next they vanish into thin air. Most of the show focuses on the aftermath of this event. What is the world like a few years after something this devastating and inexplicable happens? But there is one flashback scene that showcases the moment itself, and it’s stuck with me ever since I saw it way back in 2014.

It’s actually a montage of several different scenes from the day of the “Sudden Departure”, but one sequence in particular stands out. A woman is doing her laundry in a public laundromat while on the phone, engaged in some kind of customer service bureaucratic nightmare (“Are you the same person I was just talking to? I don’t HAVE the reference number!”). All the while, her baby is crying in a portable car seat next to her. After finishing her laundry - but not before experiencing that uniquely modern indignity of having to put money into a poorly functioning machine to buy a card to pay for the laundry instead of just using quarters like everyone did in the past - she carries the baby out to her car in the parking lot. She’s on the phone again, this time explaining something banal and mundane to her husband as the baby continues to cry. She’s clearly at the end of her rope, having experienced one frustration after another all day, and the noises coming from the car seat are only making matters worse. It’s one of those moments where, as a parent, your only wish is for your child to just shut up.

Unfortunately for her, she gets her wish.

While she’s preoccupied in the driver’s seat of the car, the crying stops mid-scream. She turns and looks behind her, only to find an empty car seat. She then has a complete mental breakdown, as does everyone else around her as they search for their own suddenly missing loved ones.

While the baby was still present and screaming, I’m sure all she wanted in that moment was to not have to deal with him. She had too much on her plate, and an inconsolable child was the last thing she needed. But once the baby is gone, the trivial nature of everything else is laid bare, exposed once she loses the only thing in her life that actually matters.

That’s the best way I could describe the emotional state of being the parent. It’s unbelievably exhausting and frustrating. It adds an unfathomable degree of difficulty to once simple tasks. It breaks you down both physically and mentally. It robs you of your autonomy and sense of self. But if it all ended tomorrow, it would be the single worst thing that had ever happened to you.

This is what I need people who don’t want kids or are unsure about having kids to understand, and what people who already have kids intuitively understand. Yes, all of the negative things you hear about parenting are 100% true. It’s as hard as they say it is, if not harder. But that’s not even close to the totality of the experience. The problem is that the hard stuff is easy to describe. The positive stuff is not. And since non-parents only hear about the hard stuff, that’s what they fixate on.

Chappell Roan caused a bit of an online controversy last year with some comments she made on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast. When talking about her friends with kids, she said:

All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I actually don’t know anyone who’s like, happy and has children at this age. Like, a one-year-old, three-year-old, four and under, five and under, I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.

Her perception is straight up incorrect. Even though I’m always tired, I am certainly not in hell, and there is still plenty of light in my eyes. However, I can’t say I blame her for thinking this way. That seems to be the totality of parenthood from the outside. But what Chappell and those who think like her don’t understand is that having kids ultimately exists outside of simple binaries like happy or unhappy, good or bad. Yes, all of those challenges are real, but your frame of reference for them is completely upended. Your life becomes more difficult, but also more full in ways that you can’t properly describe. Even the phrase “unconditional love” doesn’t do it justice.

In my experience, a lot of the positivity in parenting is found through the sense of fulfillment you get from caring for this small, innocent baby that needs you every second of every day. They’re depending on you and trusting you to nurture and love them, and when you’re able to do that day after day, you feel a wholeness that is impossible to achieve anywhere else. What could possibly compare? What could feel better than that? Those sleepless nights are difficult, but that wholeness is strong enough to make you get out of bed every single time. This is why that woman was so despondent in The Leftovers. She was never going to feel that wholeness ever again.

And let’s not forget the fact that there are plenty of genuinely happy moments in between the challenging ones. Even if they’re grossly outnumbered, they still feel incredible. I relish the time after every bath where we wrap our son in a towel and he looks like an AI generated image of a baby, optimized for maximum cuteness. I still laugh my ass off every time he lets out an adult-sized burp after finishing a full 8 ounce bottle. I’ve never felt the type of relief I felt when his week-long diaper rash started to clear once we found the right combination of topical creams. Again, there’s a higher volume of difficult moments, but these happy ones provide a welcomed, momentary break from them. They are little pockets of peace that accumulate over time.

And here’s something else that’s important to remember about the difficult moments: they don’t last forever. I now see some light at the end of the tunnel for my wife and I. We spent the last two weeks of December sleep-training our son and he is now reliably sleeping through the night, going to bed at 8pm and waking up between 6:30 and 7am. I’ve since been able to string together a handful of 8-hour nights of sleep and I feel nearly superhuman. A reliable sleep schedule also means I know when he’ll wake up, and I can now start planning early morning trips to the gym. My goal is to get back into pre-baby shape by my 40th birthday in May. I still have no idea where I’m going to find time to read and write more consistently, but I’ll figure it out eventually. It won’t be happening as frequently as before, but I trust that I’ll be able to carve out moments for it, even if it’s just on the weekends.

I sometimes imagine what I’d be doing during a given moment if I didn’t have a baby. This past Christmas break certainly would have been more relaxing if I didn’t have to worry about anyone else but myself. I probably would have taken more naps and gone to see Marty Supreme. But I know that would have felt hollow, like something incredibly important was missing. I’ve crossed the Rubicon now. I’ve burned the boats. There’s nothing you could possibly offer that would make me want to go back to the way things were before, even if that life was orders of magnitude easier. I’m content right where I am. Even if I don’t have the level of agency I want, what I do have in my life is more than enough.

I can never forget how truly privileged I am to be this exhausted.

When I was five years old, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, my parents let me watch The Shining.

This wasn’t done intentionally. It’s not like they sat me down and said “Hey, we know you’re mostly into Ninja Turtles, but we think this could be right up your alley.” It was just on TV one evening and they left it playing while I was in the living room.

I don’t know if this is the point in the movie where they tuned in, or if it’s just where my memory activated, but my first recollection of the film is watching young Danny Torrance shuffle across the bedroom while chanting “Redrum” over and over, scrawling it on the bathroom door right before Jack Nicholson breaks in with an axe. So yeah, I didn’t exactly get a chance to ease into the more intense aspects of the film.

I know I watched until the end because that image of Jack Nicholson frozen in ice is burned into my brain. It’s what I saw in my nightmares that night, right before I woke up screaming. I had to sleep in my parents’ room for a few nights after, and they realized they should probably keep a closer eye on what I watched on TV.

What’s so striking about this experience is that I had absolutely no context as to what this movie was about or what was going on, and yet it still disturbed me on a primal level. I didn’t need to know the plot or the characters’ relationship to each other. The images and sounds coming from the TV were more than enough to unsettle me in a way I can still viscerally feel today.

This is a testament to Stanley Kubrick, a true filmmaking genius who operated at a level that was head and shoulders above his peers. I believe Kubrick was unparalleled in his ability to put images on a screen that would affect the viewer in ways they weren’t aware of. A lot of directors appeal to a viewer’s conscious mind, stimulating their intellect or desire to be entertained. Kubrick, on the other hand, aims straight for the subconscious.

What is he subconsciously trying to get at in The Shining? There are a lot of theories out there. Most of them are covered in the documentary Room 237. Maybe the entire movie is an allegory for the genocide of the Native Americans. Maybe it’s Kubrick’s coded confession that he helped fake the moon landing. Maybe it’s actually meant to be watched in reverse. All of these are possible (Including the moon landing one. I didn’t believe it at first, but then I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, realized it came out almost 10 years before Star Wars, and walked away thinking “Ok, there’s a non-zero chance Kubrick did that shit.”), but I think there’s something else going on here. I believe it’s something that’s deeply personal to Kubrick and, apt for a man obsessed with the subconscious, it begins with Sigmund Freud.

Kubrick is on record stating that during the writing process for The Shining, both he and his co-writer Diane Johnson were influenced by Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” According to Freud, the uncanny comes from encountering a person or situation that feels comfortable and familiar on the surface, but a closer inspection reveals something that is not quite right. Examples include doubles and doppelgängers, inanimate objects with a life of their own, and broken spatial perception. All of these elements are present in The Shining, but they’re small potatoes compared to the insidious dynamic at play within the Torrance family.

This being Freud, the psychodrama of the family unit might be the ultimate instance of the uncanny. After all, what’s more uncanny than a seemingly happy family being the battleground for Oedipal and castration complexes? In Freud’s world, the Norman Rockwell painting on the surface obscures the angst and terror that lives below. Because of this dynamic, every family dinner has the potential to devolve into the uncanny.

I feel compelled to say that I don’t necessarily agree with this worldview. In fact, I kind of hate Freud. I find his theories to be too simplistic and, quite frankly, juvenile. I’m more of a Carl Jung guy. But Freud is beyond influential and his ideas must be contended with. You have to work through them to end up at something resembling a redeeming truth, and Kubrick forces you to walk that path in The Shining via the Torrances. Like the hedge maze at the end of the film, you need to run straight into the darkness if you’re going to make it out the other side safely.

What do we know about Jack Torrance, the father figure we meet after the opening credits finish rolling? It’s never explicitly stated, but if you read between the lines you can tell that the guy is a massive loser. When asked what he does for a living, Torrance replies “Formerly a schoolteacher. I’m a writer. Teaching has been more or less a way of making ends meet.” That’s all well and good. I’m certainly no stranger to pursuing an artistic dream while working a job to pay the bills. But when you scratch below the surface, you find out Jack’s not much of a writer either.

“I’m outlining a new writing project and five months of peace is just what I want,” Torrance says when asked what appeals to him about living in a secluded mountain hotel for the winter. But once he actually gets behind the typewriter, his creative output is minimal.

Wendy, his poor wife, does her best to encourage him. “Any ideas yet?” she asks him one morning, when he’s still in bed at 11:30am.

“Lots of ideas. No good ones,” he replies.

“Well, something will come. It’s just a matter of settling back into the habit of writing every day.”

“Yep, that’s all it is,” he says, with a poorly concealed look of contempt.

The mask comes off and things start to boil over when Wendy approaches him at his desk one evening, asking if he got a lot written that day.

His temper escalating with every word, Jack tells her:

“Wendy, let me explain something to you. Whenever you come in here and interrupt me, you’re breaking my concentration. You’re distracting me, and it will then take me time to get back to where I was! Understand?

We’re going to make a new rule. Whenever I’m in here and you hear me typing or whether you don’t hear me typing, whatever the FUCK you hear me doing in here, when I’m in here, that means that I am working. That means don’t come in. Now, do you think you can handle that? Fine. Now why don’t you start right now and get the fuck out of here?”

You might think these outbursts are caused by the hotel driving him mad. But this attitude was already present before the Torrances arrived. Watch this scene as the family drives to the hotel at the beginning of the film.

Listen to the “Mh-hm” and “Yes” he gives Wendy and Danny when they address him. It’s the sound of every exasperated father nearing the end of his rope. Except this isn’t Jack at the end of a long and trying day. It’s his default setting. He’s ready to murder them before he ever sets foot on haunted soil. This is a man who hates his family.

But, of course, he doesn’t really hate his family does he? He hates himself for his failure as an artist, but he’s unable or unwilling to confront that directly. Danny and Wendy are merely the people closest to him, and therefore the easiest targets for his displaced feelings. It’s so much easier to take things out on an innocent woman and child than to have a frank and honest conversation with yourself about your shortcomings. I’ve had to do it, and it’s not pleasant.

This, to me, is the crux of the entire movie, and the driving force for Kubrick’s vision. I believe The Shining is a self-portrait of Kubrick in his imagined worst case scenario.

Stanley Kubrick wasn’t exactly known for being a chill director. He forced actors to do dozens, sometimes hundreds of takes for seemingly no reason at all. He spent years doing research before starting a film. He developed complex technical specifications for the cameras and lighting he wanted to use. This is a guy who convinced NASA to let him borrow the camera lenses they used to photograph the dark side of the moon so he could shoot scenes in Barry Lyndon entirely by candlelight. He had an exacting vision and he would go to obscene lengths to realize it.

He was also a husband and a father who lived in a secluded country manor with his family.

Kubrick was not a failure the way Jack Torrance is. Far from it. But what if he was? What if he had the same drive for success, the same passionate desire for artistic expression, but was hampered by failure and the needs of his wife and children? How would that make him feel? How would it make him feel about himself, and more importantly, how would it make him feel about his family? The Shining is Kubrick’s answer to that question, and the answer is terrifying.

I understand I might be reaching here. But there’s one element of the film that makes me believe I might be on to something. It’s the fact that Kubrick goes to great lengths to make Jack Torrance sympathetic, and tries his hardest to make Wendy and Danny come across as unbelievably annoying.

The importance of casting Jack Nicholson in this role cannot be overstated. He’s one of the most, if not the most, charismatic and likable actors of all time. Whenever he shows up on your screen, you’re happy to see him. This is especially true when he plays a villain, like The Joker in Batman or Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men. And because most people want to be Jack Nicholson, they’re always willing to put themselves in his characters’ shoes.

Everyone in the movie aside from Jack (Notice how the actor and character have the same name? Another bit of alignment by Kubrick, as well as a nod to the doppelgänger concept) speaks in this sort of corny, stilted, Leave It To Beaver tone of voice. They all sound like a 1950s Betty Crocker commercial. Jack mirrors their speech patterns out of obligation at the beginning of the film, but you can see the struggle and angst behind his eyes. He’s uncomfortable and bothered by the world around him, as are we. We empathize with him so much that when he finally unloads on Wendy and her “Golly gee” nonsense, we’re practically cheering him on. Kubrick has put us in the shoes of the domestic abuser.

Critics have previously noted how obnoxious Wendy is throughout the film. A couple examples include:

“Shelley Duvall transforms the warm sympathetic wife of the book into a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric.” - Variety - 1979.

“Shelley Duvall is just so whiny and dense as increasingly unstable Jack Torrance’s wife that it makes it nearly impossible not to root for him to turn her into a lampshade for the hotel lobby. Her high-pitched speaking voice and shrieks just add fuel to our rage.” - Complex.com – 2012.

I believe this was completely intentional. Kubrick terrorized Shelley Duvall on set, giving her contradicting directions and driving her to the point of exhaustion. This was all done in service of how he wanted Wendy to come across on screen. Kubrick wants us to hate Wendy and empathize with Jack. This forces us to acknowledge our own dark impulses, to remind us that we’re not necessarily above the behavior we’re seeing Jack exhibit on screen. If we can be seduced by a few scenes in a movie, how different are we really from this monster terrorizing his family?

Kubrick’s approach works. Because Nicholson is so effortlessly cool and Duvall’s portrayal of Wendy is so grating, we’re practically rooting for him in the below scene. I know any time I stumble across it on TV, I can’t help but laugh when he coyly asks Wendy “What are you doing down here?” My wife, on the other hand, doesn’t find this nearly as funny.

Kubrick is admitting to something major here. Much like the Overlook itself, he knows there is a deep, ugly darkness that resides within him. If he wasn’t able to be Stanley Kubrick, if he was just some failure getting nagged by his wife and children, he’d absolutely lose his mind. Why else would he pick this novel to adapt into a movie and make these incredibly specific choices with it? He wants to get those feelings out into the light and, in turn, force us to admit our own potential for darkness.

It’s a bold and daring choice. In my opinion, Kubrick unquestionably succeeds. The real question, though, is what comes next? Kubrick has forced us to acknowledge our darkness, but what do we do with that darkness once we’ve acknowledged it? Is there any kind of opportunity to overcome and transcend it? This is where we bump up against the limits of Freud and The Shining itself, and need to explore outside sources to find the answer.

The answer for me, personally, can be found in 2019’s Doctor Sleep, written and directed by Mike Flanagan. This movie is a direct sequel to The Shining, featuring Ewan McGregor as a middle-aged Danny Torrance protecting a young psychic girl from energy vampires that want to murder her and steal her powers (The plot is slightly more complicated than that of its predecessor). Towards the end of the film, Danny brings the girl to the abandoned Overlook Hotel, attempting to use it as a Home Alone-style booby trap against their enemies. It’s here where Danny walks into the grand ballroom and finds himself face to face with the ghostly bartender. He calls himself Lloyd, but we know who it really is: Jack Torrance.

A lesser director would have used a digitally de-aged Jack Nicholson in this scene. Flanagan instead picks an actor (In this case Henry Thomas, aka Elliot from E.T.) who mostly resembles Nicholson in appearance and demeanor. There are enough similarities and enough differences (Flanagan’s own use of a doppelgänger!) to telegraph the intention while still making the experience uncanny. It’s a masterful stroke by a talented auteur.

The most unsettling part of this scene is the monologue that Jack gives at the end. It’s essentially an explanation for why he drank and tried to kill his family.

“A man tries. He provides. But he’s surrounded by mouths. A family. A wife. A kid. Those mouths eat time. They eat your days on earth. They just gobble them up. It’s enough to make a man sick. And this [drink] is the medicine. So tell me pup, are you going to take your medicine?”

It freaks me out how much I relate to “Jack” in this scene, with this specific line of thinking. I’ve been married for five years, and a father for almost three months. I’ll admit there have been times, especially recently, where I’ve felt put upon, like my sense of agency and control were being ripped from my hands. In my weaker moments, I’ve even felt pangs of resentment. If only I had more free time to write, or read, or work out, or sleep or just go for a simple goddamn walk to clear my head. How much better off I would be! But this is a trap, one that you have to resist with all of your soul.

Danny eventually responds to Jack’s “Are you going to take your medicine?” question. He nervously but decisively says, “I’m not.” It’s a response that appears simple on the surface, but is belied by years of hard work and personal reflection.

At the beginning of the film, Danny is a chronic alcoholic who is haunted by his past and the literal ghosts he sees around every corner. He eventually works his way through the 12-Step program and finds peace as a hospital orderly, helping terminally ill patients transition from the world of the living to the afterlife. He has confronted the worst parts of himself and safely integrated them into his psychic life. That’s what allows him to tell his father “No” when he offers him a drink, sitting on the exact same barstool from 40 years ago.

This specific example is why I prefer Jung to Freud. Freud stops at acknowledgment, Jung is more focused on overcoming and integrating. I don’t believe your problems are meant to be your problems forever. They’re meant to be defeated. To merely acknowledge or name something is only the first step. I believe it is possible to take that problem and become aware of it on a meta-level, to see where it affects you in the rest of your life and get it under control. You keep it at arm’s length, close enough to see and understand it but far enough away where it doesn’t control you. From there, you can make decisions that stop you from following its dark path.

I didn’t fully understand the concept of “Integrating your Shadow” until I watched this scene from Doctor Sleep. Only by recognizing my own potential for anger and resentment did I rob it of its power and allow myself to keep it close without being corrupted by it. So now, whenever I feel that resentment over lost time bubbling up, whenever I identify with Jack pouring drinks behind the bar or sitting angrily at his typewriter, I remind myself of where that road leads and I choose an alternate path. Like adult Danny, I consciously decide “I’m not” even though I know I easily could. Being able to wrap my mind around that has been transformative for me as a husband and as a father. I have to remind myself of it frequently, but I know it’s an option. And I have Kubrick’s interior bravery and meticulous cinematic execution to thank for that. Doctor Sleep closed the loop, but The Shining illuminated the path and got me started. It showed me who I might be if I didn’t humble myself, and quickly.

I obviously had no idea all of this was going on in The Shining when I first saw it at five years old. The surface level uncanny elements were what terrified my still developing mind. But through age, experience and reflection, I was eventually able to see what the movie was truly pointing to, and how horrifying that reality is. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to close my laptop and go hang out with my infant son. You know what they say about all work and no play…

A few years ago, my wife and I went to see Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch in theaters. While I’m not the biggest Anderson fan (Rushmore is a stone cold classic, but I find his later work to be too fussy) my wife likes him and we needed a night out. I don’t really recall what the movie was about. I think it was a series of vignettes and Timothée Chalamet played a socialist revolutionary? It doesn’t matter. What matters is the one scene that managed to burn itself into my memory. Here, art dealer Julian Cadazio (played by Adrien Brody) explains the nature of abstract art to a group of collectors.

“One way to tell if a modern artist actually knows what he’s doing is to get him to paint you a horse or a flower or a sinking battleship or something that’s actually supposed to look like the thing it’s supposed to look like. He could paint this beautifully if he wanted, but he thinks [the abstract painting] is better.”

In two sentences, Cadazio answers the question everyone has the first time they see a Jackson Pollock. “If I can do it, is it really art?” The answer is yes, but only if the artist has mastered the basics first. They must fully grasp the form before they can step outside of its boundaries.

I thought of this scene a few months ago when I went to see seminal emo-rock band Brand New perform at the UBS Arena out on Long Island. While most known for their 2003 breakout album Deja Entendu, Brand New has an extensive, genre-bending catalogue that runs all the way up to 2017’s Science Fiction. As they played their way through deep-cut favorites like “Out of Mana”, “Sink” and “You Won’t Know”, my mind drifted to the songs they weren’t playing, namely anything from 2001’s Your Favorite Weapon.

Your Favorite Weapon is the Platonic ideal of a Y2K-era emo album. It has driving guitars and drums, pointed lyrics about heartbreak, and insanely catchy melodies. Most bands from that era struggled to make anything half as good with their second or third albums. Brand New absolutely nailed it on their first try. A lot of this success can be attributed to lead singer Jesse Lacy, one of those uber-talented frontmen whose band is viewed less as a collection of musicians and more as an extension of their personal vision (à la Adam Granduciel of The War On Drugs), but every member plays their part perfectly here. Each note is precise and crisp. There are no skips or filler tracks, just 41 minutes of emo pop-punk perfection.

The rest of their albums, however, sound nothing like this one. Good luck finding those poppy “Do do do”s from “Failure By Design” anywhere else in their discography.

Deja Entendu comes the closest. It has the vague shape of an emo album, but its qualities are more dreamy and ethereal, best exemplified by the standout “Jaws Theme Swimming.” It exists in a transitory space between where they started and where they were going.

This pivot was completed with 2006’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. I remember listening to it, on the day it was released, while driving home from college for Thanksgiving break. I didn’t like it at all. I found it to be too slow, boring, and inaccessible. The lead track “Sowing Season” left me wanting, as did what came after. Where were those big, booming melodies from the first two albums? It took a few months (and a gnarly breakup) for me to understand what they were going for and how great this record truly was. It’s now easily one of my top ten favorite albums of all time.

I say all of that to say this. I don’t think any of this growth would have been possible if Brand New hadn’t built such an impenetrable foundation with their first album. They mastered the basics of their genre right out of the gate. Only then, armed with impeccable fundamentals, were they able to branch out and create a sound that was wholly unique to them. They could have kept making the same type of record if they wanted to, but they thought this new experimental sound was better. And they were right. But those dense and challenging songs I was listening to at the UBS Arena could not have existed without the more straightforward tracks of Your Favorite Weapon preceding them.

This phenomenon isn’t only limited to music or painting. I’ve seen it in plenty of other art forms, including stand-up comedy. Many know about the origins of George Carlin and Richard Pryor, both doing squeaky clean, TV-ready comedy in the 1960s before evolving into the iconoclasts we’re now familiar with in the 1970s.

The transformations of Carlin and Pryor certainly had an outsized impact on the history of comedy, but there’s another comic who went through a similar transformation that had a great impact on me personally: Mike Birbiglia.

It was Thanksgiving weekend 2006 (I’m just now connecting the dots as I write this, but holy shit, Thanksgiving 2006 was an incredibly formative holiday in terms of my artistic tastes) and I was up watching Late Night With Conan O’Brien. Closing out the show was Birbiglia, a comedian I had never heard of. I loved stand-up at the time and certainly had my favorite comics, but I found most comedy to be unfunny and forgettable. However, what I saw from Birbiglia that night forced me to sit up in bed and pay attention.

The combination of the traditional late night “Tight Five” plus Birbiglia’s goofy and disarming personality immediately won me over. I thought, “I need to hear more from this guy.” The next morning (I’m showing my age here) I drove to my local Best Buy and bought his debut stand-up album Two Drink Mike.

(Quick aside - That voice you hear introducing Birbiglia at the beginning of the album? That’s a fresh-out-of-college John Mulaney)

Two Drink Mike was the perfect extension of Birbiglia’s Conan set. His voice was fully formed, and he utilized it to deliver hard punchlines that both generated laughs and revealed who he was as a person. At the end of that album, you completely understood his point of view and wanted to go along for the ride because it was so damn funny and enjoyable. Like Brand New, Birbiglia mastered the basics on his first try.

And like Brand New, Birbiglia could have kept doing more of the same. Instead, he decided to experiment. Rather than deliver more straight ahead stand-up specials, he branched out into the world of storytelling and one-man shows. Now, the knock on one-man shows is that they’re boring and overly sentimental, essentially stand-up comedy without the jokes. But because Birbiglia’s comedy fundamentals were so strong, he resisted falling into this trap.

His first one-man show, Sleepwalk With Me, was about his REM behavior disorder. Here Birbiglia deftly weaves together stories about his sleepwalking and how it has impacted his life, but he remembers to be funny first and foremost. There’s always a punchline lurking around the corner. Because of this, your attention never flags, and that in turn makes you more invested in the stories he’s telling. It’s a victory on two levels.

In the years since Sleepwalk With Me’s 2009 debut, Birbiglia has put on numerous one-man shows, each anchored around a very specific topic: monogamy, children, death, the meaning of life, etc. He’s been incredibly successful in this space. But even now it feels wrong to simply call his performances “one-man shows.” They’re so funny and joke forward, it feels more accurate to call them something like “stand-up deep dives.” Rather than bounce from topic to topic like a normal stand-up special, Birbiglia focuses on one major theme and attacks it from every conceivable angle while relating it to experiences from his own life. It’s incredibly powerful. But, again, none of it would be possible if he hadn’t mastered the form with Two Drink Mike. Once he did that, he could begin to strike out and experiment, using his superior joke writing ability to build something truly unique.

Analyzing Birbiglia’s path makes me reflect on my own failed stand-up comedy career and all of the different places where I went wrong. I think one reason I never made it in comedy (among many others) is that I never truly mastered the basics the way I was supposed to. I wanted to be like Louis CK right out of the box, complete with deep, personal revelations and esoteric digressions. The standard setup/punchline mechanics felt boring and constraining to me. Only now do I realize how important they actually are, and how much I lost by not starting with and mastering them.

If you’re an aspiring artist, don’t build your castles on quicksand. It’s tempting to try and strike out on your own, working to immediately separate yourself from your peers, both in terms of style and career growth. But this is a fool’s errand. Only through the steady, boring work of building your fundamentals can you even begin to consider experimentation. It won’t be glamorous or fun or cool. But if you take your time and get the little things right, it will be worth it. All you have to do is look at the greats. If it worked for them, it can work for you too.

Author’s note: I don’t normally write fiction. I’ve certainly never shared any fiction publicly. But this is a story I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while and I felt compelled to get it out. It’s not auto-fiction (For one thing, the furthest I ever made it in the playoffs during my high school football career was the state semi-finals), but it is hyper-personal. I hope you enjoy it. And if you don’t, be gentle.

Charlie stood at the back of the tunnel, looking out at his teammates ahead of him. Some were jumping up and down, slapping their helmets and pads. Others were more reserved, a slight side-to-side sway the only movement that betrayed the emotions roiling beneath the surface. Through the walls, muffled cheers rang out from the far side of the stadium. Their opponent had just taken the field. The state championship was moments from kickoff.

“This is our last game,” Charlie thought to himself. It was an obvious fact, and something the team had been harping on all week in practice, but the reality of it fully dawned on him at that moment. “Win or lose, this is the end.”

Charlie craned his neck and peered towards the mouth of the tunnel. Even from all the way in the back, he could easily spot Dan Curtis. Dan, a hulking all-state defensive lineman with scholarship offers from every major college program in the country, was the obvious choice to lead the team onto the field. He was bigger than most adults. Imagine being a teenager and having to line up against someone who could kick your dad’s ass. Charlie had to do it in practice sometimes. It was terrifying.

He remembered a moment from summer practice heading into their freshman season. Dan was a man amongst boys on the freshman team, demolishing his peers with seemingly little effort. In a few weeks, he would be called up to varsity, mostly because of his ability but partially for the safety of the kids he was tossing around like rag dolls on a daily basis.

They were lined up opposite each other in a tackling drill. Charlie was the ball carrier, Dan the defender. When the coach blew his whistle, Charlie ran diagonally while Dan mirrored him in pursuit. Charlie tensed up right before the moment of impact, waiting for the crunch that his other teammates had experienced. Except the crunch never came. What he felt was more like a light tap. Dan pulled up at the last moment, taking it easy on Charlie. The fact that Dan held back, showing something resembling pity, felt worse than getting hit full force.

“THIS TITLE BELONGS TO US!” Dan bellowed to his teammates as Charlie snapped back to attention. “SHOW THEM WHO WE ARE! LET’S GO!” He turned and sprinted onto the field, bringing the rest of the team with him. As the tunnel cleared, Charlie followed.

He was greeted by a gray, overcast sky on this mid-December afternoon. For a team that had played every game at night for the last three months, entering a field covered in natural light felt surreal. It underscored how unique this particular game was. They were the same team, wearing the same uniforms and running the same plays they had all season. Nothing about them had fundamentally changed. But the frame of reference was slightly off. It was like being in a dream about playing a football game.

Charlie took his spot on the sideline, where he would remain for the rest of the afternoon. As with most games in his football career, there was no chance Charlie was going to play today. He only saw the field during blowouts when his team was up multiple touchdowns. In a game of this magnitude, victory would not come so easily.

Charlie watched as the captains departed the sideline and walked to midfield for the coin toss. A few moments later, the referee signaled that they had won the toss and would kick off to start the game. As the captains returned and the kickoff team got set, Charlie felt a powerful sensation permeate his body. He was nervous.

He was usually nervous before big games like this, but the intensity of his feelings was unlike anything he had experienced before. His throat was tight. He could feel his bones vibrating as the ball flew through the air during kickoff and landed beyond the end zone.

The sensation grew once the defense took the field. He watched the first few plays - a tackle behind the line of scrimmage by Dan, an incomplete pass, a quarterback scramble for a first down - and felt an almost unbearable tension. The stakes of every block, every tackle, every step, were readily apparent to him. Each snap could make or break their chance at a state title. If he was feeling like this on the sidelines, what must it feel like to actually be out there on the field?

He remembered one particular play from earlier in the season, during one of the few instances where he got in a game. As the ball was snapped, he ran towards the line of scrimmage from his linebacker position. There was a giant opening in the A gap, right next to the center, exactly where his assignment placed him. He had a clear view of the running back barreling through the hole. All he had to do was bring his body forward and make the tackle. Except when the moment came, he flinched. He didn’t “stick his face in the fan” as his position coach liked to say. Instead he sidestepped the runner and attempted to make the tackle with his arms. The ball carrier blew right through his half-hearted effort and ran for the first down. That would be the last play of the game.

Charlie watched the clock wind down to zero and trotted off the field, hanging his head. Because the result was already well in hand, nobody was really paying attention to what was occurring on the field. But Charlie knew what had happened, and he had to sit with that shame for the rest of the night.

Dan never made those kinds of mistakes. On the very next play, he burst into the backfield and collided with the running back at full speed. Charlie saw the ball drop to the turf. He heard the sideline erupt half a second later. Carter Diggs, the team’s best linebacker, dove on the ball. The cheers grew louder as the fans in the stands realized what was happening. Once the referees blew their whistles to signal the end of the play, Carter emerged from the scrum and ran back to the sidelines, holding the ball aloft for all to see.

Carter Diggs. Charlie really did not like that guy. In fact, he hated him. Carter was rude and dismissive towards Charlie, but that wasn’t the root of the problem. The real reason Charlie hated Carter was that all of the girls in their grade loved Carter. You could hear it in the way they said his name out loud. They let that first R in his name hang for an extra beat - Carrrter. Nobody said Charlie’s name that way. But why Carter? He wasn’t particularly attractive, funny, or charming. One thing that Charlie did notice, however, was that Carter never seemed to need or seek out the approval of others. This made him a hot commodity.

Charlie was glad they recovered the fumble. He just wished someone besides Carter got to the ball first.

The offense took the field, led by their quarterback, Andrew Teller. Teen comedies conditioned people to believe that the starting quarterback is supposed to be a huge asshole, but Andrew was probably the nicest guy on the entire team. It’s like he was so thrilled with how awesome his life was, he couldn’t help but radiate joy to everyone around him. That was Andrew off the field. When he broke the huddle, he played with an intensity unmatched by anyone else within those white lines. He wasn’t the best passer in the state, but he more than made up for it with his leadership, grit, and ability to run the ball, always powering through would-be tacklers for extra yardage.

Charlie’s nerves flared up again before the first offensive play. They needed to capitalize on this turnover. He watched as Andrew took the first snap and ran a quarterback sweep for eight yards.

He remembered the last day of third grade. He and Andrew were desk mates for the entire year. At the end of the day, right as they were preparing to leave, Andrew showed Charlie the underside of his desk. It was completely covered with dried up, crusted boogers.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Andrew asked him, a proud smile on his face.

Charlie had memories like this, going back over ten years, with nearly everyone on the team. They had grown up together, been in the same classes, gone to each other’s birthday parties. And it had all led to this game. His nerves became even worse. He thought he could feel his chinstrap shaking.

The offense marched methodically down the field, as was their game plan. Their opponent employed a fast-paced, high-scoring passing attack. If Andrew and the offense could run the ball and control the clock, they’d limit the number of possessions in the game and tilt the odds in their favor.

The plan was working perfectly so far. Before long, the offense was just a few yards away from the end zone. Andrew took another direct snap and ran straight into the line of scrimmage. An opposing linebacker filled downhill to make the tackle, but it was no use. Andrew plowed right through him, still standing when he made his way into the end zone. Touchdown. The extra point was good, and the score was 7-0.

Charlie jumped up and down, cheered, and high-fived his teammates. The excitement radiated from the field to the sidelines and all the way up to the fans in the stands. The game couldn’t have gotten off to a better start. With a momentum shifting play on defense and a slow, grinding scoring drive on offense, everything was going exactly the way it was supposed to.

That all went out the window on the following kickoff.

Their opponent’s greatest asset was their speed, and they made use of it when they ran the kickoff all the way back for a touchdown. Charlie could tell it was going to happen after the returner took only a few steps. He was too quick, his angle to the wide side of the field too sharp, to be stopped.

Just a few seconds after their initial touchdown, the score was now tied 7-7. The energy on the sideline quickly deflated, and that nervous feeling announced itself once more.

The next few series ended in stalemates for both teams. Offensive drives stalled. Defensive players locked down their assignments. As the teams traded punts back and forth, Charlie observed the environment as it swirled around him.

Assistant coaches were loud and animated, signaling and screaming out to their charges on the field. But in the middle of all of that, their head coach was a picture of steely calm. A physically imposing presence even in middle age (their starting center had once described him as “a brick shithouse”) he stood stoically on the sidelines, arms folded across his chest, staring intently out onto the field. He called plays and gave directions into his headset. He coached his players up when they came back to the bench. He was the gravitational center the team anchored itself around.

At the start of the second quarter, Dan tackled someone with such force that he cracked his facemask. He ran back to the sideline and worked with the equipment manager to get a new one screwed on, both moving with the ferocity of a NASCAR pit crew. Once finished, he ran back out onto the field and sacked the quarterback on the next play. Nothing could stop him, not even the impediments created by his own superhuman strength.

Towards the end of the half, hoping to find some relief from the stress of what was happening out on the field, Charlie turned around and looked up into the stands. He saw his parents. He saw a few teachers from his school. He saw Kevin Zhang, the quiet kid from his AP Calculus class. He had never seen Kevin outside of that classroom, and here he was at the state championship. Out of all the elements that made today special - the finality of their season, the advanced skill level of their opponent, the college football field they were playing on - the fact that Kevin Zhang was there might have been the most significant. If this kid came out to watch the game, you knew it was important.

Moving on, Charlie’s eyes wandered a couple rows behind Kevin. That’s where he spotted Claire.

Claire moved to town at the start of junior year. She and Charlie were in the same English class together. He remembered walking into class on the first day of school and freezing in his tracks the moment he saw her. Part of it was the surprise of seeing someone new, someone unexpected in a school full of familiar faces. It was also because she was the most beautiful girl he had ever laid eyes on in person. A tuning fork went off in his chest, and it resonated within him for the rest of class.

As he had with other attractive girls at school, Charlie pushed his feelings down and did his best to ignore them. Girls like that were never going to talk to him, so what was the point of getting his hopes up?

Except Claire did talk to him.

English was Charlie’s favorite subject. It came naturally to him. He never failed to be captivated by the reading assignments, and found great joy in breaking down the texts and analyzing the important themes. He was a constant vocal presence in class, always raising his hand to give answers and add to the discussion. It was the only area of his life where success seemed to come naturally.

Surprisingly, Claire was like this too. Both her and Charlie were the two most active participants in class, and their talks often spilled out into the hallway after the bell rang. One time, they were both waiting to be picked up by their parents after school - she was working late on an art project and he had just gotten out of offseason weightlifting - and they spent close to 30 minutes talking about The Great Gatsby. It felt like the most important afternoon of Charlie’s life. He could hardly believe the fates had aligned to bring them together for such a moment.

By the end of the year, Charlie had resolved to ask Claire to prom. But one spring morning, while he was still in the early planning stages of his promposal, he happened to overhear a classmate’s conversation in study hall.

Charlie was sitting in front of all-star pitcher Grant Marks and finishing his Chemistry homework as Grant told another kid on the baseball team about a party from the previous weekend.

“Oh yeah dude, it was a wild night,” Grant began. “My cousin ended up getting us three kegs, some random kids from Valley showed up but we kicked them out, Carter fucked that girl Claire…”

Charlie’s blood ran cold when he heard it. He wasn’t friends with Grant, so he couldn’t turn around and ask him about it. He just had to sit in silence with his head down, eating his feelings, until he felt confident that he could look up from his notebook without crying. That was the end of his prom planning. He felt ridiculous for even thinking it was possible in the first place.

As the second quarter was winding down, Andrew was leading the offense on a promising drive down the field. Charlie was standing on his own towards the end of the sideline. He had a perfect view of the end zone as the offense fought to get points on the board before halftime.

With less than ten seconds left and just five yards until paydirt, Andrew took another direct snap and ran towards the goal line. It looked like the exact same play they ran for their first touchdown, until it wasn’t.

Once he was at the line of scrimmage, Andrew stopped and jumped up, gently lobbing the ball to the tight end who had slipped towards the back of the end zone. He was wide open, which somehow always becomes the hardest catch to make. The ball hung in the air as both the defense and the fans in the stands realized what was happening. Everyone on the sideline collectively held their breath. Charlie felt like he was going to explode. But they all let that air out in a raucous scream once the catch was secured. Touchdown.

Charlie was in awe at what he had just witnessed. What could it possibly feel like to make a big play like this, on such an important stage? How do guys like Andrew always seem to come through when it matters most?

Most of Charlie’s friends were not on the football team. They weren’t really interested in sports. One ran cross country, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing. Because of this they always asked him why he bothered with football. He rarely saw the field, and it’s not like he was close with any of his teammates. He had some acquaintances in the locker room, but no one he ever really saw outside of school. Charlie was never able to give a straight answer to his friends, but he thought it might have something to do with a desire to unearth attributes that lay dormant within him.

He didn’t want to be the kind of player he was in that moment earlier in the season, the one who shied away from contact. He wanted to be like Andrew, running through defenders. He was loath to admit it, but he also wanted to be like Carter, the way he dove on that fumble with reckless abandon. He played football because he was searching for the part of himself that wouldn’t flinch, that wouldn’t turn away during a crucial moment. The search had been fruitless throughout his career, but he still felt compelled to look. He always believed that it was in there, somewhere.

But that can be hard to articulate to someone, so he usually just shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s fun, I guess.”

The team went into the locker room up 14-7. The momentum was on their side, but there was still a lot of football left to play. There was no room to get complacent.

Charlie loved halftime. The scope of the entire football experience shrank in an instant. When they walked through those locker room doors, things went from grand and chaotic to personal and intentional. The boundless sky gave way to a low ceiling. Gone were the crowds and the noise they generated. Instead, players gathered with their position groups to quietly discuss strategy. Carter and the other starting linebackers spoke with their coach about their opponent’s blocking schemes. Andrew diagrammed plays on a whiteboard with the offensive coordinator. Charlie, having nothing to contribute, stood by and observed.

Before heading back out for the second half, their head coach gathered them in the center of the locker room for one final message.

“Alright, listen up!” he started as the players snapped to attention. “I want to make sure you understand one thing before we go back out there.” Every single pair of eyes in the room were now locked on him.

“We all know what’s on the line in the second half. But I want you to know that it doesn’t really matter. The state championship doesn’t matter. Getting a shiny ring and a banner to hang in the gym doesn’t matter.”

A few players looked at each other quizzically.

“What matters is the guy next to you. You all grew up together. You went to the same schools and played on the same Little League teams together. And now you all get to finish this game, together. Nothing is more important than that.”

Everyone was dead silent. Nobody moved. But you could feel the vibrational energy of the room begin to pick up.

“So you all have a decision to make right now. When you look back on this game, five, ten, twenty years down the line, how do you want to remember it? When you’re grown men with jobs and families, and you get together at a bar and talk about this game over a beer, what are you going to say? Are you going to say that you held back? Are you going to say that you could have played harder? Are you going to say that you were scared?”

A few players shook their heads “No.”

“Or are you going to say that you played your ass off? That you gave everything you had during each and every snap you were out on that field?”

The intensity of his voice began to increase.

“Are you going to tell each other ‘I had your back, you had mine, and there was nothing they could do to stop us?’ ARE YOU GOING TO SAY ‘WE PLAYED LIKE CHAMPIONS!?’”

Players were now nodding their heads in agreement. A few even offered a verbal “Yes” or “Yes sir.”

“ARE YOU!?”

“YES SIR!” they all screamed in unison.

“Then let’s go out there and make that memory. Captains, lead us out.”

The team stood up and let out a unified roar. The quiet part of halftime was over. They were soon back in the tunnel, ready to go out for their final half together.

Charlie sprinted onto the field at full speed. But once he got to his spot on the sideline, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He was fired up from his coach’s halftime speech, but there was nowhere to put that energy. His teammates that were in the game could transfer it to their play. All Charlie could do, all he was allowed to do, was stand there and watch.

He so desperately wanted to be like the starters, to be relied upon in important moments, to be a contributor. He always worked hard in the offseason, lifting weights and running conditioning drills. But once summer practice rolled around, he was still a step too slow, a few Newtons too weak. He never found himself around the ball the way other defenders did. And so he stayed confined to the sidelines, watching.

But Charlie didn’t want to feel useless in this moment. He didn’t want to feel like a bystander. Everyone on this team had a role. Some were meant to be out on the field deciding the game. Others, like Charlie, were meant to watch and be a supportive teammate. And since that was Charlie’s role, he decided to play it to the best of his ability.

So Charlie watched the second half, but this time he watched with intent. He put all of his focus on the in-game action, zeroing in with laser-like precision. He cheered until his lungs burned. If the starters were giving their all out on the field, he would give his on the sideline.

He watched their first offensive drive stall out. Their opponent had made adjustments at halftime. They were filling gaps and getting to the ball more quickly. On a third down run, four defenders swarmed Andrew and stalled his progress before he could cross the first down line.

He watched their opponent take the ball and swiftly advance down the field. A 12-yard slant here, an 8-yard counter there. Before long they were on the doorstep of the end zone. A wide receiver screen got them across. Touchdown. The score was now 14-14.

He watched his teammates' ferocious response on the next drive. Andrew seemed to take that last touchdown personally and responded in kind. He threw his entire body into potential tacklers and guided his passes with intention and zip. On a third-and-goal from the 8-yard line, he ran straight up the middle for another score. Touchdown, or so it seemed.

Because he was watching so closely, Charlie saw the referee take the yellow flag out of his pocket and throw it on the ground mid-play. A holding penalty would negate the touchdown and bring up third-and-goal from the 18. Andrew’s next pass attempt fell short. The offense had to settle for the field goal and a precarious 17-14 lead.

While locked in on all of this action, Charlie noticed something. Or, more accurately, he noticed an absence. There was no tight feeling in his throat, no uncontrollable vibration throughout his body. His nerves were gone. He wasn’t thinking about the past or what might happen in the future. There was only the present moment. The next play was all that existed. His vision was a tunnel that blocked everything except for what he trained his eyes on. In this focus he found peace amidst the chaos of the second half.

With only five minutes left in the game, and the defense holding on to a slim three point lead, disaster struck. A cornerback tripped and fell, leaving a massive hole in their coverage. Their opponent exploited it, taking a pass more than fifty yards for a touchdown. They had surrendered their first lead of the game, and were now down 21-17.

It was do or die for the offense. They would only get this one last possession to make things right. Charlie should have been more nervous than ever, but he resolved to do what he had been doing for the entire second half. He would focus, cheer on his teammates, and fully immerse himself in the game. As the offense took the field, Charlie locked in.

They made steady progress down the field. A hitch. A draw. But the clock continued to bleed. With less than two minutes left, Charlie knew they would soon have to make an explosive play if they were going to reach the end zone before time expired.

The moment came on a third-and-one from midfield. Logic said to run the ball here, to get the first down and open up your entire playbook for one last push. But that’s not what they did. Andrew faked a handoff to the running back, set up in the pocket, and threw the ball downfield. It was at that moment that wide receiver Tyler Kincaid - the same kid who got suspended for a week in seventh grade after he put a cone in his shorts during gym class, walked up to a group of girls and asked “What’s up ladies?” - hauled in the pass and crossed the goal line untouched.

There was pure jubilation on the sideline. They had gotten the touchdown they needed, but there was one more trick up their sleeve. Rather than kick the extra point and go up three, allowing the opportunity for a game-tying field goal, their coach decided to gamble and go for the two-point conversion. In what would be the final play of his high school career, Andrew took the snap and once again ran straight through the line of scrimmage and into the end zone. The two-point try was good.

Up 25-21 with just 1:30 left, the responsibility of finishing the game fell on the defense. If they kept their opponent out of the end zone, the state championship was theirs.

The final drive was a blur. Armed with a sense of desperation and no timeouts, their opponent began heaving the ball all over the field in search of chunk plays. When one connected, they advanced closer and closer towards the end zone. When one missed, the clock stopped, saving time for more attempts. Their opponent’s speed, which had been neutralized for most of the game, became too much to contain. The ball was soon past midfield. There were less than 30 seconds left.

At the 32-yard line, Dan was inches away from getting another sack and draining the clock before the quarterback escaped his grasp and threw 30 yards downfield to his receiver. The receiver fully extended his body, laying out to make the reception at the two-yard line. After the catch was marked complete, their opponent sprinted to the line of scrimmage and spiked the ball with only three seconds left, setting up one final play.

Charlie took a deep breath and collected himself. This was it. The game would be decided here.

Charlie saw it all. He saw both sides get set. He saw the quarterback take the snap and fake a handoff to freeze the defense. And before he pulled it back in preparation for a pass, Charlie saw the tight end release his block and run into the end zone. Charlie opened his mouth to scream “PASS!” but it was already too late.

Carter bit hard on the fake handoff, anticipating a run. This put him half a step behind the tight end as he slipped out into the flat. When the article recapping the game ran in the paper the next day, the picture they used was of the tight end catching the ball in the end zone, Carter reaching out in vain behind him.

The final score was 27-25. The game was over. They had lost.

Charlie could feel the tears well up in his eyes before he had even processed what happened. He hung his head so he didn’t have to witness their opponent celebrating out on the field, but he could still hear them and their fans cheering their victory. Once everything settled down a few moments later, he approached the handshake line with wet cheeks.

Both teams repeatedly said “Good game” to each other as they went down the line and tapped hands, but only one side meant it. Once they made it through their procession, Charlie and his teammates gathered in the end zone and took a knee as their coach addressed them.

Charlie couldn’t fully focus on what his coach was saying. Something about being proud of how they fought for the entire game, and how this hurts now but they’ll appreciate the experience when they’re older. He didn’t catch the entire speech because he kept looking around at his teammates. An overwhelming majority of these young men were crying. He had never seen most of these guys cry before. If he had, it happened early on in elementary school, when the cafeteria was out of ice cream or something. It was disorienting to watch everyone break down like this.

One particularly loud set of sobs came directly from Charlie’s left. He turned and looked to find their source. It was Carter.

Carter was a great player, but not big or fast enough to play in college. This was the end of the road for him. The last play of his football career would be giving up the touchdown that lost his team the state championship. That was the memory he’d have to live with for the rest of his life.

As Charlie watched Carter cry, he felt immense compassion for him. A face that normally filled him with rage instead elicited empathy. Charlie knew what it felt like to come up short, to not get the end result you were hoping for, to be deeply disappointed in yourself. Seeing Carter go through that, he knew exactly what he had to do for his teammate. It was what he had always needed himself.

Charlie reached out and placed a hand on Carter’s shoulder pad. He leaned in and whispered to him, “It’s okay, man. It’s okay. You did your best.” Carter cried harder and covered his face with his hand. Charlie kept his right where it was until the coach told them to get up and break the huddle one final time.

As the team meandered towards the locker room, still in a daze, Charlie knew that he would remember. Not just today, but everything. He would remember offseason workouts, the thrill and satisfaction of bench pressing two plates for the first time. He would remember summer training camp, sitting in the cool air-conditioned hallways of his school, drinking Gatorade in between the grueling practices of two-a-days. He would remember running onto the field for his first varsity game last season as a junior. He would remember pep rallies. He would remember the pride he felt wearing his jersey to school on Fridays. He would remember how terrified he was the first time he got into a game. He would remember standing and listening to the national anthem, the “home of the brave” crescendo mirroring the anticipation within his own heart. He would remember the excitement of the students, teachers and parents when they exited the field after each victory. He would remember beating their crosstown rival for the first time in five years. He would remember senior night, walking out onto the field with his parents to be recognized. He would remember their playoff run, the regional championship they won and the euphoria of victory in the state semi-finals, knowing they would soon be competing for the ultimate prize. He would remember the week of practice leading up to the championship and how seriously everyone took it. He would remember the bus ride down to the stadium, the moments of tension in the locker room right before they took the field.

Most importantly, he would remember the game itself. Beyond what had happened on the field, he would remember its lesson of focus, of paying attention, of looking directly at the things that scare you. If there was one thing he couldn’t allow himself to forget, that was it.

Charlie had flinched in football. But there would come a time, during a meaningful pursuit later in his life, where he wouldn’t flinch. In that pursuit, a crucial moment would present itself. It would be his ultimate test, and he would not turn away. He would step into it full force and stick his face in the metaphorical fan. And that victory, when it arrived, would have its roots in his time on the high school football team. Charlie didn’t fully understand it yet, but that was why he played.

All of that would come later. For now, there was only the present moment. So he stepped off the football field for the last time and walked into the next phase of his life.

My wife is in the end stages of her pregnancy and has been handling the recent New York City heat wave like a champ. The nursery is set up. The stroller is assembled and ready to roll. After months of preparation and reading and endless TikToks about pregnancy and childbirth (Alright, that last one is mostly my wife), we’re mere days away from welcoming our son into the world.

I’m obscenely excited about the whole thing. A lot of the joy I’ve felt in the last nine or so months comes from visualizing early fatherhood moments - going for walks in the park with our dog, laying on the couch together and watching college football, filling his tiny little head with my insane theories about the nature of art, etc. I’ve even caught myself looking ahead to the next decade and beyond. I recently read a post by where he mentioned showing his teenage son Fight Club for the first time and I got super emotional thinking about showing my son all of my favorite movies when he’s older (Including Fight Club). I just hope he loves The Matrix half as much as I do.

But in spite of all of my mental planning, I still have no clue what’s about to happen. I know that fatherhood will change me in a profound way, but I have no idea what that change will actually look and feel like. I just know that change is coming. It’s as if I’m walking into a completely dark room. I know there is something really awesome in that room, but I don’t know what the room looks like, how big it is, or how the furniture is laid out. I’ll need some time to figure it out after I walk in.

This is why I’m taking a month-long paternity leave.

I’m taking it from my actual job, but I’m going to take it from writing and posting as well. I want to focus exclusively on the baby and immerse myself in the world of fatherhood. Navigating something this monumental will require my full attention and I want to give it all of my focus, for the sake of both my son and my wife. Once I get the lay of the land and have settled into this new role, I’ll start to integrate the rest of my life back into the picture.

Right now, I keep to a pretty strict routine. I wake up early, I write, I exercise, I go to work, I come home, I hang out with my wife and dog, and then I go to bed early so I can do it all again the next day. I’ve really gotten into a groove this year and feel very content. All of these behaviors are comfortable and familiar to me. Now, something new is coming into the picture that will supersede all of that and take center stage. It will become the central component of my life, and I’ll have to see how all of these other pieces fit around it.

I definitely do not want to discard those other pieces. I want to be a great father, but I also want to stay active with writing and exercise. I want to do well at my job. And I want to be a supportive husband and partner to my wife. I just don’t know what all of that looks like on a day-to-day basis yet. But once that central element of fatherhood falls into place and I get a sense of what it’s going to require of me, I can start to build a new routine that encompasses everything.

I believe that’s the best thing I can do for my son. In the long term, I want him to see me fully engaged with life, working to integrate all of its necessary elements into one harmonious flow. The execution won’t always be consistent. Life is simply too messy and complicated for that. But the attempt will be, and that’s the most important part. I can’t think of a more meaningful behavior I’d want him to emulate.

But until then, at least for this first month, he’s getting all of my attention. I’ll see you all once football season rolls around.

This is Mad Men’s Don Draper, delivering one of the more iconic monologues in television history as he pitches his advertising services to Kodak. In the process of trying to secure a new client for Sterling Cooper, Draper reveals what truly lies at the heart of nostalgia. While seemingly happy on the surface, it’s actually rooted in feelings of pain, yearning, and loss.

I’ve been thinking about this scene a lot as my wife rewatches The OC this summer. It’s one of her favorite shows of all time, but I’ve never seen it. I remember it premiering in 2003, at the beginning of my senior year of high school. But while a lot of girls in my grade were obsessed with The OC, I never paid it much attention. I was more interested in Chappelle’s Show.

Here’s a quick summary of the show for those who are unfamiliar. The OC is about a troubled teen named Ryan Atwood who is taken in by his rich public defender attorney, Sandy Cohen. Sandy and his wife Kirsten have a teen son, Seth, who becomes Ryan’s best friend. Marissa Cooper is the literal girl-next-door and Ryan’s love interest. Her best friend is Summer Roberts, who also happens to be Seth’s longtime unrequited crush. The show is about the lives of these four youths and the assorted characters that populate their world.

The plot lines range from standard teen soap opera fare (Who is taking who to the big dance) to the more dramatic (Ryan’s alcoholic mother dropping in and out of his life, Marissa’s dad being arrested for embezzlement, etc). All of the action takes place within the wealthy enclave of Orange County, California, the “OC” of the show's title. I don’t think anybody ever called Orange County “The OC” before this show, but that’s beside the point.

So as my wife cycles through episode after episode on Hulu while I read on the couch or tidy up around the apartment in my typical OCD manner, I’m taking it all in for the first time. I thought I’d be able to treat it like any other show she watches that I have no interest in: as background noise. Instead, I find myself drawn to the screen by the potent pull of nostalgia. But it’s not the whimsical kind, the “HEY GUYS, REMEMBER THE ORIGINAL GHOSTBUSTERS!?” nonsense our culture so often runs on these days. It’s the classic Greek version Don Draper spoke of. I see it and literally experience an acute pain in my chest.

Why am I feeling this way? How can I be nostalgic for a show I’ve never seen before? I believe it’s because what I’m feeling has nothing to do with the show itself. It’s about the age and memories the show is evoking within me. Like the Carousel slide projector Draper describes to Kodak, The OC is a time machine. I watch it and I’m suddenly back in 2003, sitting with the feelings I had and confronting the choices I made that defined the subsequent years of my life.

The first thing that stood out to me about The OC was the clothes. Since trends are cyclical, Y2K fashion is now back in style. But seeing Instagram models in 2025 wearing the fashions of my youth never feels quite right. It’s like watching a kid play dress up and pretending to be a doctor or a cashier. You can tell they’re aping something that they saw somewhere else. Obviously, there’s none of that on The OC. The actors weren’t dressed up in Y2K style, with choices made through the careful research of a costume department. They were simply dressed in the actual style of the time. This is something no modern nostalgia-bait TV show or movie set in the early aughts could replicate. I didn’t feel this same ache when I saw Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, also set in 2003.

But I watch Ryan talk to Marissa at a party, a party that’s only happening because someone’s parents are out of town, and suddenly I remember exactly what it felt like to pine for a girl in low-rise jeans and an Abercrombie tank top. I’m no longer in 2025 New York, I’m in a classmate’s basement in suburban Virginia during the first Bush administration, trying to work up the nerve to talk to a girl while Ludacris plays in the background. I don’t have to go searching for these memories or feelings when I glimpse a scene from The OC. They arrive of their own volition, an intrusive thought that’s been hovering in the background for the better part of two decades.

It’s also been revelatory to look at the actors themselves on screen. When you’re a teenager watching a show about teenagers, the actors meant to be your age appear to you as fully grown adults. It kills some of the suspension of disbelief. Ben McKenzie and Adam Brody (Who played Ryan and Seth, respectively) were in their mid-twenties when The OC premiered. When you’re 17, 25 seems like a comically old age. You can’t conceptualize what being that old feels like. You’re not even in college yet. What frame of reference could you possibly have for post-grad life?

But watching it now, as a 39 year old man, the main characters look like actual children to me. When you’re almost 40, 25 and 17 don’t feel that far apart. It all gets lumped into the hazy era of your youth, before you assumed the mantle of serious adulthood and all of its attendant responsibilities (Mortgage, marriage, children, etc). So I watch The OC now, and while I see a 25-year-old on screen, I can buy the fact that I might be looking at a high schooler. Because of that, I see my teenage self reflected in (Or perhaps refracted through?) these characters. It draws me into the show and makes these evocative memories more resonant.

However, the true nostalgic trigger point of The OC isn’t the fashion or the narratives built around teen drama. It’s not even the SD picture quality, which brings back memories of watching TV on a glass tube instead of a 4K LED screen. What really hits home for me is the entire existence of Seth Cohen as a character. I see him, and I feel like I’m looking through a portal to a version of myself from an alternate timeline.

Back in high school, I thought of myself as an athlete. Or, more accurately, “athlete” is the personality type I attempted to construct for myself. I wanted girls to like me and find me desirable, so I built my identity around my spot on the football team. Never mind the fact that I wasn’t a very good player. I never even started one single game. I was just tall and I tried hard, and that was enough to keep me in the playing rotation on the defensive line. But I thought this was the only way I could get girls. My friends were great athletes, and they always had female attention, therefore I had to be an athlete if I wanted girls to look my way. The problem was, I don’t have a jock’s personality. I’m not tough, and I’m certainly not a cool guy. I’m a goofy dork with esoteric interests. In other words, I’m Seth Cohen.

When we first meet Seth, he’s in his pajamas, sitting on the floor of his parents’ house playing video games. It’s an image that made me laugh out loud when I saw it, because that was a position I frequently found myself in while I was in high school. Freshman year, I didn’t have a date for Homecoming. I didn’t even really know what Homecoming was, or that we were expected to secure dates to it. So I just stayed home and played the recently released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. I won’t lie, it was a pretty fun night.

As we get to know Seth, we learn that he loves sci-fi, indie rock, reading, and is constantly at war with his own self-consciousness. You can put a check mark next to all of those things for teenage me as well (Adult me still loves sci-fi, indie rock, and reading. Thankfully, I’ve managed to get my self-consciousness under control).

But here’s what’s so cool about Seth. He doesn’t run from these things. He leans into them. He fully embraces who he is and doesn’t try to act a certain way because it works for other guys. If he attempted to play the same bad boy role that Ryan does, he knows it would ring hollow. Instead, he confidently moves through the world as his sensitive, dorky self, and it works out for him. It only takes a handful of episodes for him to get close to Summer and kiss her for the first time. His self-awareness and sense of humor end up paying huge dividends.

As I watched Seth Cohen on my TV screen, one thought came to my mind:

“I could have easily been this kind of guy in high school.”

That would have been a much more accurate reflection of my real personality than the version I chose to adopt. I would have felt more comfortable in my own skin, and probably would have been more effective in my end goal of making girls look my way. I mean, that’s what worked for Seth, right? He stayed true to himself and he ultimately got the girl. I, on the other hand, pretended to be someone I wasn’t for the benefit of others and still ended up falling flat on my face. It was the worst of both worlds. If I had watched The OC senior year and picked up on Seth as a potential mimetic model, the next five or so years of my life might have gone much differently.

I say the next five years because my assumed personality as a wannabe athlete didn’t end in high school. I actually stuck with football throughout all four years of college as well. The full story is too long to get into (You can read a post with all of the details here), but the short of it is that I doubled down on football even though it wasn’t inherent to who I truly was. I loved the sense of striving that came with football, but I was not built for the game at all, either physically or mentally.

If I had to do it all over again, I would definitely still play football in high school. I had too much fun and made too many great memories with my friends to give that up. It also helped me cultivate a sense of discipline, without which I’d be lost. I wouldn’t make football the central part of my personality, but I would still choose to put on the pads. The answer as to whether or not I would still pursue football in college, however, is much less clear.

I don’t regret my college football experience per se, but with the benefit of hindsight I can see that I was out of my element and might have been better served taking a different path. I’m clearly someone who has an intense passion for the arts, and it might have helped to cultivate that part of myself earlier rather than spending my college years getting physically demolished and emasculated on a near daily basis. It certainly would have helped my self-esteem to dive into something I had a genuine passion and aptitude for in the middle of an extremely formative time.

I’m confident the end point would be the same. I still would have come to New York to pursue stand-up comedy. That dream had been in my heart ever since I watched Seinfeld for the first time at ten years old. But the path I took to get there would be different, and probably more enjoyable, than what I ended up subjecting myself to.

That’s what my OC-inspired nostalgia is really about, the old wound that’s being re-opened. I’m forced to look at an inflection point in my life and see a potential divergent path, one where I could have lived more authentically at an earlier age. I hear the theme song’s opening piano chords and I wonder what might have been if I had allowed my true Seth Cohen nature to come to the forefront instead of attempting to be someone I wasn’t. Maybe things would have been easier, or more fun, or I’d emerge from it with a clearer sense of self. Because this all exists within my imagination, the possibilities are endless.

However, I know there’s no going back. It’s interesting to think about, but you can’t change the past. There’s no point in dwelling on it. So I press play on the next episode, and keep moving forward.

The reason I believe this has nothing to do with money, or power, or anyone’s alleged ketamine-inspired crashout. It has nothing to do with EV mandates or government contracts or top secret FBI files. My belief revolves around one simple, indisputable fact.

Donald Trump is one of the funniest people on the planet, and Elon Musk is so incredibly unfunny it causes me physical pain.

It’s not just that Elon is unfunny. That’s ultimately unimportant. There are plenty of unfunny people in the world, and it has no bearing on whether or not others like them or take them seriously. The real problem with Elon is that he tries so hard to be funny, all the time. It’s the constant effort, the desperation and the sweatiness, that people find off putting.

Here’s a guy who is one of the richest and most intelligent men in modern history. He’s a billionaire many times over, and he figured out how to catch a rocket falling from the sky. You’d think he’d be content with that, to go about his life making boatloads of money while contributing to massive technological advancements. But no, that’s not enough for him. On top of everything else, he wants people to laugh at his jokes.

He’s always trying, to the point where it feels like pleading, to get a laugh from some unseen audience. He does it on Twitter, he does it on podcasts, he does it during speeches and interviews. It never ends. The jokes are terrible, but it’s his desperation that’s the true anathema to comedy. Desperation alienates you from an audience. They can smell it on you, and it makes them uncomfortable. And if they’re not comfortable, they’re not going to laugh.

But man, let’s not gloss over how awful the jokes are. Elon’s sense of humor operates like an LLM. He’s incapable of generating an original comedic thought. He just recycles what he’s seen elsewhere online and spits it out like it’s a novel or unique insight. Whether it’s calling himself “Kekius Maximus” on Twitter (A mashup of the “kek” meme and the Right’s valorization of the Roman empire), first-thought jokes about pronouns, or believing someone calling themselves “Big Balls” is the height of subversive humor, it all reads as stale retreads of already well-worn bits. It’s what made his recent “legalize comedy” rant fall so flat. Your side won pal. If people aren’t laughing at your jokes, it isn’t because they’re too woke. It’s because the jokes are bad and you’re trying too hard.

I want to point out that I’m criticizing Musk from a place of understanding. I absolutely know what it’s like to try, and fail, to win people over through humor. And it’s not just because I spent fifteen years pursuing a career in stand-up comedy. Do you think my desire to make people laugh started at my first open mic? Of course not. It started in school, wanting my peers to think I was funny. And often my attempts at humor ended up having the opposite effect.

Humor is a great barometer as to whether or not people like you. If you’re able to make them laugh, that means they view you in a positive light. But it all hinges on what animates the jokes you’re telling. If they emerge naturally from your personality into the social situations you find yourself in, they’ll go over well. If you’re starting from the place of looking for a joke, of putting the end goal of laughter first and searching for some way, any way, to get there, there are two negative outcomes. First, nobody laughs. That’s difficult in and of itself. But more importantly, people can tell that you’re trying to make them laugh, that you’re in need of their approval. This pushes them further away. It’s honestly one of the great tragedies of human interpersonal relations. Reaching out in need often backfires and leaves you feeling lonelier than before.

Elon tries to make humor the central aspect of his personality when it’s clearly not his strong suit, and the jokes land accordingly. Contrast that with Trump, who is so effortlessly funny that we all take it for granted at this point. He offhandedly drops words and idioms that quickly make their way into the cultural lexicon, and he does it all seemingly without trying. He always appears to utilize the right word, delivered with the perfect timing, to generate a laugh. It’s just a natural part of who he is, and it’s served him well in both his business and political careers.

Meanwhile, Elon’s is constantly trying to force 2014 Reddit style humor on us. Remember “Let that sink in?” I was as thrilled as anyone to see Twitter liberated from the censorious hands of the old regime, but corny-ass puns being brought to life started to make the bargain feel more Faustian in nature. We abandoned Millennial leftist cringe and were soon delivered into the hands of Boomer-tier memes. Free speech came with a cost, and that cost is Elon’s unfunny tweets showing up in our feed even when we’re not following him.

But that’s been the deal the New Right has made with Elon. Elon delivers meaningful outcomes for the cause (Freeing up Twitter, providing financial and cultural support for Trump’s re-election bid, debloating the government, etc), and they indulge Elon as he engages in his annoying little stunts and jokes. The influential figures of the New Right could have eviscerated him for jumping in the air like an addled toddler at Trump’s rally, or his “I am become meme” nonsense at CPAC, or any other number of missteps along the way. But he was helping them achieve important ends, so they let it slide.

That’s all out the window now. He counter-signaled the boss, and the fake laughter is the first thing to go. The Right’s support was based on his ability and willingness to advance policy goals. Without that, he’ll find that his personality and sense of humor aren’t enough to keep them on his side.

Bottom line: Elon can’t get a laugh from the crowd. Trump can. It’s how he’s won many of his battles in the past, and it’s how he’ll win this one too.

Jerrod Carmichael is one of those people.

Carmichael began performing stand-up in 2008, moving to Los Angeles from North Carolina at 20 years old. Within three years, a nanosecond in comedy time, he was selected for the prestigious Montreal Just For Laughs Festival. Three years after that, he released his first comedy special, the Spike Lee directed Love At The Store, on HBO. Six years into his career, a time where most comedians are still trying to figure out how to make money doing the thing they love, Carmichael had already secured one of the shiniest brass rings a comic can aspire to.

A 2016 New York Times profile includes this revealing early anecdote.

The comedian Neal Brennan, a creator of ‘‘Chappelle’s Show,’’ was an early mentor…Even so, the speed of Carmichael’s ascent took him by surprise. ‘‘In 2010 or so, we got something to eat, and I explained everything that was gonna happen in his career,’’ Brennan said. ‘‘And I was right, except I mapped out way more hardship than he encountered.’’

I remember being very aware of Carmichael when I moved to New York in 2012. Even though he was an LA-based comedian, his presence loomed large over comedy as a whole. He was this young guy who hit it big early on. I’m sure that led to some jealousy in a lot of comics, but I personally found it inspiring. If so much good stuff could happen to him in such a short amount of time, that meant things could quickly turn around for me too, provided I was able to find my voice and stand out the way that Carmichael had. Was this incredibly naive and delusional? Absolutely. But naiveté and delusion have powered plenty of careers, both in and out of comedy.

However, once Carmichael made the transition from meteoric up-and-comer to established star, something interesting happened. You started to see the first bits of blowback after Love At The Store aired. He received a lot of criticism for the slow pace of the special. Even for a laconic, soft-spoken comedian, like Carmichael was at the time, the amount of space between punchlines was noticeable.

He also frequently checks his notebook on stage during the show. Comedians regularly do this, only it wasn’t happening in the middle of new joke night. He did it during his very first stand-up special. That’s not the venue for playing around and trying new bits. You’re supposed to be sharing your best and your brightest jokes, honed over years of touring.

The notebook usage was intentional, an attempt to deconstruct the performed nonchalance of stand-up comedy, but even that conceit ruffled some feathers. Is your first special, which is being directed by Spike Lee and airing on HBO, really the place to attempt that kind of meta-commentary? Carmichael seemed to think so, but a lot of the old guard disagreed.

Here’s a quick, name-droppy aside. Many years ago I was opening for Michael Che at my home club in Washington, DC. At the time, he was preparing to film his first stand-up special. I asked him what advice he had received, and he told me “Chris Rock said, ‘Do me a favor. Just don’t bring your notebook on stage.’”

Carmichael doubled down on this style in his 2017 special 8. But this time around, he took the slow pace to an extreme, so much so that the special feels antagonistic. It doesn’t read as stand-up comedy, it’s stand-up thoughtful pauses. Carmichael often sits in silence, his thumb and forefinger placed deliberately on his chin, the jokes fewer and farther between. I heard a rumor that director Bo Burnham had to interrupt the show and tell him to wrap it up because they ran out of film. That’s how long he had meandered. I don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

I remember watching that special and feeling confounded. Why was Carmichael, someone who I thought was incredibly funny when he wanted to be, doing this? What was the point of stringing the audience along at this pace? Was he simply attempting to play with the form of stand-up to see what would happen, experimenting for his own amusement? Does stand-up really need to be deconstructed to this degree? Why couldn’t he attempt to innovate while also placing a premium on laughs?

Carmichael claimed his approach was all about honesty, but the tone never registered as honest. It registered as avoidant. What, exactly, was holding him back from just being himself while telling great jokes?

With his 2022 special Rothaniel, we finally get the answer. It’s a special that’s all about secrets. He reveals his real first name (The titular Rothaniel). He discusses his father’s lifelong infidelity and secret second family. He also comes out of the closet as gay.

The first forty minutes of the special are phenomenal. They’re revealing, captivating, and funny to boot. The pauses that Carmichael was known for are still there, only this time the subject matter is so compelling that they don’t derail the special. I think they actually enhance it. The pauses underscore the reticence that Carmichael has around sharing who he truly is, making his moments of confession even more impactful.

The last fifteen minutes are harder to watch. This is when Carmichael discusses his mom’s inability to accept him once he came out to her. His pain is very genuine and apparent. He doesn’t make any real jokes about it, probably because he’s not able to just yet. It’s more of a lamentation than a comedy act, but as a viewer you’re willing to give him grace because of everything he’s just shared with you.

In spite of the duress he was clearly under, I felt happy for him when I finished the special. That’s a huge weight to be carrying around, and he finally allowed himself to put it down. And as a fan, I was interested to see where this unburdening would take him creatively.

Which brings us to his newest special, airing last Saturday on HBO, called Don’t Be Gay. The title alone is already funny, and it gave me hope for the content of the special itself. Would Carmichael finally deliver one hour of true, genuine, stand-up comedy, without any attempts at deconstruction or meta-commentary?

The answer is a resounding yes.

The first thing that stands out about Don’t Be Gay is the pacing. Gone are Carmichael’s thoughtful pauses. In their place is a constant stream of jokes, insights and stories, each captivating in their own right. He’s certainly averaging far more words, and jokes, per minute than ever before.

He’s also much more physically animated in this special. He moves fluidly about the stage, gesturing emphatically to drive home the points of his punchlines. For a guy who sat down for the entirety of his last special, and slowly paced about during his first two, this is a massive shift. His new penchant for movement is reflected in the camerawork of the special as well. The camera glides along with him, matching his pace, with occasional quick zooms in and out, in a handheld style. It reinforces the energy of Carmichael’s new mode of presentation. The medium and the message are in complete alignment.

Most noticeably, Carmichael can’t stop smiling throughout the hour. And it’s not the slight, mischievous smile of his earlier specials, the look of a kid who thinks he’s getting away with something. It’s a smile rooted in joy. For the first time, he seems like he’s having fun on stage.

More than anything, Carmichael appears to feel free, which makes total sense. He isn’t hiding anything like he was in Love At The Store and 8. He isn’t tentatively confessing his inner secrets like in Rothaniel. He’s sharing the ins and outs of his full life, not holding anything back. The honesty he so often championed earlier in his career has finally been delivered.

This new, genuine honesty also has a positive impact on his material. The stuff he talks about is knotty and complicated. He discusses his open relationship with his boyfriend, how he responds to online hate, and the mixed feelings that come with financially supporting his entire family. And yes, he’s finally able to tell jokes about his mother and her feelings towards his sexuality. But no matter how thorny the subject matter is, Carmichael always finds a way to make it funny, to infuse a moment of pain with a punchline. And by taking the more challenging route, by sharing all the raw and messy details, the jokes he tells hit even harder. The difficulty of the journey enriches the payoff.

A lot of times the laughter comes from Carmichael’s uncanny level of insight. In stand-up, a laugh is typically generated through tension and release. You present the audience with a problem and then resolve it through some type of surprise. This surprise can involve word play, call backs, or an interesting turn of phrase. But Carmichael has the ability to take a supremely unique conclusion, something that wouldn’t occur to anyone else, and share it with the audience to release the tension built by his set-ups. The sheer novelty of the insight, the logical jump from Point A to B, is enough to generate a laugh. The late, great Patrice O’Neal was a master at this. It’s probably the hardest laugh to get in comedy. It’s a laugh where the audience says “I never thought of it that way, and that is exactly right.”

Don’t Be Gay is an excellent watch, and I’d recommend it to anyone who loves comedy, or any type of art that centers on heartfelt personal expression. As a longtime fan, it was great to see Carmichael finally put it all together. The promise of the young upstart comic from his early days has been fully realized.

It also provides context for the disconnect in his earlier specials. He couldn’t be genuinely authentic, so he practiced faux authenticity as a workaround. Of course, that was never going to succeed, or at least succeed to the level of Carmichael’s potential. For all of his early attempts at deconstruction and playing with the form, it turns out there are two core elements of stand-up comedy that can never be deconstructed: honesty and humor.

Honesty doesn’t always mean being autobiographical, the way that Carmichael is now. It means being true to who you are and sharing your worldview as it occurs to you. It can’t be filtered, refined, or hidden from the audience. They’ll be able to sniff that out, if not consciously then certainly subconsciously. Something won’t seem right to them. This holds true for all styles of comedy, from one liners all the way to storytelling. You always have to be who you actually are. Carmichael wasn’t doing that, and it showed.

And most importantly, you have to make us laugh. While stand-up comedians can and have shared very intelligent and refined ideas on stage, ideas that have ultimately shaped cultural or political discourse, nobody goes to a comedy show just to think. They want to laugh, first and foremost. Any thinking or personal reflection that comes is just an added bonus. Personally, I’ve found that a great joke makes an idea more resonant. You’re more likely to remember it if it’s tied to a laugh.

It’s great to see a talented artist like Carmichael live up to his potential. He made the brave choice to be truly honest with his audience, and that honesty has supercharged his humor. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next, and how far he can take his immense level of talent.

He’s also the creator and star of two acclaimed comedic reality shows: Nathan For You (Comedy Central, 2013–2017) and The Rehearsal (HBO, currently airing on Sunday nights), but I mostly want to focus on the Batman thing.

Fielder is clearly brilliant. That much is obvious when you watch him on either of his shows. He concocts elaborate scenarios that pay off in completely unexpected ways. Whether he’s helping a small business compete against a corporate rival, or coaching someone through an important personal challenge they’ll soon have to face down, you’re witnessing a one-of-a-kind mind at work. To top it all off, his schemes always include a streak of surrealist humor, adding another variable to an already difficult challenge. He’s extremely talented and has more than earned his success and devoted fanbase.

I just absolutely hate everything he’s doing, and I always have.

The reason Fielder reminds me of The Riddler (If, instead of robbing banks, The Riddler landed an overall deal with Viacom) is the deviousness that underlies all of his meticulously crafted plans. There’s something incredibly mean-spirited about his process, a falseness that betrays a cold and dark worldview. It permeates everything, from the themes he engages with to the jokes that he makes, and I find it completely at odds with the way I personally experience and move through the world.

In Nathan For You, Fielder presents himself as a business school grad helping small businesses get a leg up on their corporate competition. He devises outlandish marketing schemes (Like selling plasma TVs for $1 so Best Buy has to price-match) and shares them with the business owners in his trademark deadpan cadence. The joke is that Fielder says something completely ridiculous in a very serious tone, and then the business owner is forced to react to the incongruence between Fielder’s words and his affect. A lot of times they’re so taken aback they just go along with it.

However, the comedy here is darker and more insidious than it first appears. On the surface, Fielder is the fool in these situations. He’s the one coming up with and enthusiastically executing these ridiculous plots. But Fielder is playing a character. I’ve watched enough interviews with the real Fielder to know that the man we see on the show is not the same guy. They’re similar, but TV Fielder is a heightened version of off-screen Nathan. It’s like professional wrestling, where Steven Anderson takes his genuine redneck attitude and love of beer, turns the intensity all the way up, and walks to the ring as Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Because of this distinction, it’s really the small business owners and their customers who are the butt of the joke. Nathan Fielder, the real man behind the character, is simply toying with them, like a cat with a ball of string. He’s using his superior intelligence and high tolerance for discomfort to manipulate them into going along with his plans, and putting it all on TV to boot. We, the viewing audience, are meant to find enjoyment in watching his subjects squirm. He intentionally agitates in order to get laughs.

Fielder takes this gambit one step further in The Rehearsal. Now, I’ll readily admit, I’ve only seen two episodes of The Rehearsal (The premiere, and Season 2’s “Pilot’s Code,” which I’ll get to shortly). I had planned to watch all ten currently available episodes as research for this essay, but I just couldn’t take any more of this show.

The premise of The Rehearsal is that Fielder helps everyday people prepare for stressful situations by allowing them to rehearse well in advance. In the premiere, he builds a perfect replica of a real Brooklyn bar and hires dozens of actors so someone can rehearse sharing a secret with a close friend for the first time. It’s a deeply off-putting viewing experience, and not just because everyone involved, from the confessor to the confidant to Fielder himself, aren’t the most graceful when it comes to social situations.

If The Rehearsal is to be taken at face value, it fully lays bare Fielder’s worldview. Other human beings are not perceived as embodied souls, they are simply points of data on a chart that can be measured and manipulated to suit personal ends. No one really exists, and everything is stripped of mystery or emotion. Reality is nothing more than the sum of its parts. All you need to make it through life is enough data and a reliable decision tree that you can reference. The world might as well be a computer program. It’s the bleakest kind of nihilism.

Watching someone as intelligent as Fielder operate in this way is both depressing and infuriating. Surely, he has to be aware that this is no way to go through life. He certainly hints at it throughout the show. I just don’t understand what he’s getting out of this. And if he doesn’t endorse this worldview, why spend so much time, energy and money on something that perpetuates it? Maybe there’s a deeper message that I’m not picking up on, but as it stands, I just can’t get on board with anything he’s attempting to do here.

Fielder also relies heavily on irony, another pet peeve of mine. The aforementioned “Pilot’s Code” episode hinges entirely on one joke, the butt of which is the 2003 nu metal song “Bring Me To Life” by Evanescence.

The details of this episode is too intricate to fully get into here, but essentially Fielder argues (And reenacts through increasingly bizarre set pieces) that heroic airline pilot Captain “Sully” Sullenberger was able to safely land a distressed US Airways flight in the Hudson River back in 2009 because he was listening to “Bring Me To Life” on his iPod while guiding the plane into the water. He deduces this by going through Sully’s memoir, claiming that the topic of his iPod keeps coming up and that, when discussing his favorite music, “The one band [Sully] mentions more than any other is Evanescence.”

This claim appears to be false. According to an article on Cracked.com (Not the most well-regarded source for journalism, but still) “Sully only ever mentions Evanescence once, as part of a long list of musicians he likes, which also includes Natalie Merchant, The Killers and Green Day.” So why did Fielder claim otherwise? Cracked has a theory.

“It would appear that Fielder selected Evanescence for this bit, not because Sully was necessarily a huge fan, but because, with apologies to the band, they were the hands-down funniest choice.”

What’s so funny about them? Why pick on Evanescence here? I know exactly why. It comes from what calls “Millennial Snot.” Millennial Snot is the type of humor that thinks making fun of Guy Fieri and Nickelback is the height of comedy. It’s smug, snarky and condescending, found in any kind of irony poisoned joke used by hipsters to signify how cool and over it they are. From this perspective, the mere existence of a song like “Bring Me To Life”, so inferior to the refined rock music of the indie sleaze era, is a punchline. When you can pair it with an intense real life scenario like The Miracle On The Hudson, the dichotomy makes it that much funnier.

Well, fuck those people. I like that song, and I genuinely enjoy the genre of music it belongs to. I was in the gym a few weeks ago when Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” came on, and it was awesome. I mean that with all sincerity, no hint of irony to be found.

Fielder’s worldview and sense of humor are in complete alignment. Irony and nihilism go hand in hand. If nothing means anything, then nothing is really worth joking about. The only thing you can joke about is pretending to care, hyperbolically praising and endorsing mundane, everyday, or even base things. But there’s no joy or true humor in that, it’s just one overwrought cry for help. Irony, in the words of David Foster Wallace, “is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.”

I know there are Fielder fans out there who will claim there is genuine emotion in his work. They’ll point to the Nathan For You finale “Finding Frances” where Fielder helps a Bill Gates impersonator reconnect with his long lost love. I watched that in preparation for this essay, and it did nothing for me. The final phone conversation between the former lovers was riveting, but everything around it fell flat. The journey to actually find Frances was more of the same nonsense that turned me off of Nathan For You in the first place. And don’t get me started on the B plot where Fielder gets involved with a personal escort. That was unbearable the whole way through.

Contrast Fielder’s attempts at sincerity with that of another HBO series, How To With John Wilson. Fielder serves as an executive producer on this show, but its message couldn’t be further from that of his personal projects. How To has the same sort of detached, awkward tone, but you can feel a genuine sense of wonder and appreciation for humanity coming through at all times. This is helped by the fact that Wilson himself is rarely seen on screen. He exists as a sort of roving eye, moving all over New York City, overlaying what he films with dry but sympathetic commentary. Fielder, on the other hand, is a constant presence in his shows. He’s always there, visibly judging, mocking with his deadpan stare.

One of the standout episodes of How To revolves around a group of fans of James Cameron’s Avatar. Not only do they love the movies, but they fluently speak the language of those giant blue creatures, the Na’vi. Wilson spends an inordinate amount of time with them and dives into not just the workings of the group, but the personal struggles and frustrations that ultimately led to them taking up such a niche hobby. In spite of the obvious absurdity, he never turns these people into caricatures or loses sight of their humanity. From this vulnerability, provided by both Wilson and his subjects, comes true, genuine, good-natured humor. We laugh, and we feel more connected to people who are nothing like us.

Fielder could never do this. He would try to play the Avatar fans for laughs, avoiding any opportunity for real intimacy. He could also never direct a Bon Iver music video for a song called “Everything Is Peaceful Love.” That’s just way too sincere.

There are a couple more weeks of Season 2 of The Rehearsal left on HBO. I’m sure it will culminate in another groundbreaking episode, something that nobody else would have been able to dream up, much less pull off. The praise it receives will be justified and well-deserved. I just simply won’t care. This show, and Fielder’s work so far, has nothing to offer me, and I have no desire to engage with it.

Or maybe I’m just a huge square that can’t appreciate a good prank. It’s entirely possible. I never liked Punk’d when it was on TV either.

I never came anywhere close to my ultimate goal of making a living in comedy (An explanation as to why this happened is something that deserves its own post. A discussion for another day I suppose).

I fully intended to write this post at the time, but I never got around to it (or maybe I was avoiding it). I always found another topic I was more interested in exploring. But then, a couple months ago, a reader posted that original piece to the r/Standup subreddit, and it generated a small flurry of comments. One user asked the below question:

I'm curious to hear why you think it didn't happen after 15 years. You talk about your peers making it to late night and headlining big clubs, but why weren't you moving up with them? Why weren't you opening for them? Was your material different from what was getting popular? Were you not clicking with other comics who were making it?

After reading that, I realized I had never fully explained why I didn’t make it in comedy. Well, I believe the moment has come. It’s time for me to tell you all why I never made it. Ready? Here it is.

I wasn’t funny enough.

That’s it. That’s the answer.

Well, it’s the short answer at least. You could stop reading this essay right now and be fully informed as to why I’m working in an office every weekday instead of headlining comedy clubs every weekend. The long answer, however, is a little more complicated.

The long answer is that I neglected the most important part of finding success in any business or creative scene: relationship building. “It’s all about who you know” is a well-worn cliche, but I’ve learned the hard way that cliches are cliche for a reason. They get repeated so often because they’re uniquely true and useful. The problem is that we mistake their repetition for a lack of vitality and insight and choose to ignore them, often at our own peril.

When I moved to New York in 2012, I was temperamentally averse to networking, both in real life and online. The whole thing just seemed so gross and transactional to me. I saw comics glad-handing each other at shows and complimenting/tagging each other’s jokes on Facebook and Twitter, and I was immediately put off. There used to be a very mean-spirited (but incredibly accurate) Tumblr account called Comedians Complimenting Comedians that perfectly sums up the sort of thing I’m talking about. And no, I was not behind it.

The problem wasn’t with the other comedians though, the problem was with me. In my narrow little worldview, I thought stand-up was supposed to solely be about art and merit, and that trying to network your way into a career was incredibly disingenuous. That all sounds nice and high-minded, but I don’t think my motivations were entirely pure.

Yes, I do believe that stand-up should be about who’s the funniest and most original, but that belief wasn’t the only thing holding me back. I think my aversion to networking was also based in fear. I was worried that if I tried to engage in these transactional relationships to get ahead, nobody would want to transact with me and I would have failed twice. I would have gone against my values and gotten nothing out of it. It’s like that Dostoevsky line “Your worst sin is that you've destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” So, motivated by a mixture of principles and fear, I stayed away from networking and tried to make it on funny alone.

I was relatively funny, but not funny enough to do THAT. So I sat and watched other comedians who were less funny than me get opportunities and perform on shows that they didn’t quite deserve, simply because of who they were friends with. This filled me with a tremendous amount of rage. I remember sitting in the back of many rooms, watching someone bomb their face off, and thinking to myself “They don’t deserve this. That person took MY spot.” While my sense of entitlement was not accurate, my assessment of the comedian usually was. They didn’t deserve that spot and the audience reaction proved that.

But then something interesting happened. Because a comedian (who might have been less funny than me at the time) built relationships and ingratiated themselves in the scene, they got more opportunities for quality stage time and eventually became funnier than me. Years later, I’d watch that same comic generate rolling waves of laughter with their jokes, and it would be painfully obvious that I had been surpassed.

Because I didn’t have any close relationships with other comedians, I was trying to improve by doing open mics, bar shows, late night comedy club spots, and whatever other scraps of stage time I could hustle up for myself. Every rep on stage is important, but not all reps are created equal. You can’t always get a good read on material doing the spots I was doing, and that negatively impacted my artistic growth. These other comics were performing in front of real audiences on a regular basis, and it was like they hit one of those accelerator ramps in Mario Kart. I, meanwhile, had run off the track and was spinning around in circles.

I also had a hard time relating to other comedians, mostly because our lifestyles were so different. I held down a regular office job, and most of them worked temp jobs or walked dogs for a (very meager) living. I know myself, and there’s no way I could have lived like that. I needed the stability of a regular paycheck and health insurance if I was going to make a real go at comedy. But this set me at odds with my peers. I couldn’t stay out at a bar in Bushwick until 2am on a Tuesday, even if I wanted to, because I had to wake up early for work the next day.

My job impacted my ability to relate in other ways as well. For my first three years in New York, I worked for a company that required me to wear business casual clothes every day. Since I didn’t have time to go home and change between work and open mics, I would show up to these bars and comedy clubs dressed like an extra from Office Space while everyone else was wearing jeans and comic book t-shirts. I can’t pretend that didn’t impact the way I was perceived, and the way I perceived others as well. “I’m not like these people,” I thought, and I’m sure they felt the same way about me.

With the benefit of hindsight and the personal growth that comes with maturity, I now know what I should have done differently. I should have gotten over myself. Networking was not, and is not, the painful scourge I made it out to be. It’s a necessary part of building a career. I was just too young and inexperienced to realize it at the time, and I didn’t want to listen to anyone who told me otherwise, no matter who they were.

The week before I moved to New York, I opened for Neal Brennan at my hometown club in Washington, DC. I asked him what advice he had, and he said “Worry about winning over your peers before winning over the audience.” I nodded along but ultimately chose to ignore him because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Looking back on it now, I feel like Matthew McConaughey stuck in the bookshelf in Interstellar, screaming at my younger self to pay attention.

There’s a way you can network authentically, without it being phony or hollow. You can show up someplace, be friendly, introduce yourself, and talk to people without any expectation of reciprocity. Just being around, making yourself known, and getting to know others can often be enough. When the time comes and there’s an opportunity someone can assist you with, you’ll have a genuine relationship in place that makes asking for help less awkward. But you have to lead with authenticity and genuine interest in the other person. If you’re always operating with the ulterior motive of extracting professional gain from a personal relationship, people will eventually sniff that out. It’s also a very cold and unsatisfying way to move through the world. It pays no dividends either way.

The whole thing was way easier than I was making it out to be. I should have just gone places without any expectations, talked to people and been myself. Most importantly, I should have been confident that “myself” was enough. I didn’t have to put on an act or engage in some kind of Machiavellian scheme to try and get on The Tonight Show. I just had to be the guy I naturally was and accept whatever outcome that generated. Maybe then I would have built genuine relationships with my peers, bridged the differences in our lifestyles, gotten a lot funnier, and enjoyed myself much more in the process.

I also should have brought jeans and a t-shirt to change into after I left work. Nobody wants to laugh at a guy wearing pressed khakis on stage. If Neal Brennan had told me that, I probably would have listened.

My personal affinity for Posey played a major role in this excitement. I think she’s a fantastic actress, and I was thrilled to see her working on such a high profile show. She played a great high school villain in Dazed And Confused, leaving a massive mark with a limited amount of screen time. She also stole the show in what I believe is the best episode of Louie in the entire series. Christopher Guest movies aren’t exactly my thing, but she’s been a standout in every one that I’ve seen as well.

So last Saturday night, bored and with nothing to do, my wife and I put on 1995’s Party Girl, Posey’s first breakout indie hit as a lead. It was right on the front page of Hulu, no doubt put there due to renewed interest in her work. The movie follows Mary, a New York City club kid who is forced to get a job at the local library following a run in with the law. Like most 90s indie films, Party Girl is scrappy and lo-fi and a little incoherent, but all of that lends it a tremendous amount of charm. However, my main takeaway wasn’t about the quality of the film, it was the way it made me feel. By the time the end credits rolled, I had spiraled into a minor existential crisis.

Through some weird mix of cinematic alchemy, I was finally able to intuit, on a deep, emotional level, what it felt like to be an adult without a smartphone. Not just an adult who doesn’t own one, but an adult who doesn’t even know what a smartphone is. I watched these characters go from place to place– to the club, to their apartments, to the falafel stand, to the library–carrying only a set of house keys and maybe an ID and some loose cash. I could feel their sense of presence in their current environment. They had nothing else to look at or engage with aside from the action right in front of their faces. And I fully comprehended the way their interior lives in no way resembled mine, and that there was nothing I could do to bring myself back to this analog state.

Why did Party Girl impact me to this degree? I’ve seen plenty of movies and TV shows where people don’t have a cell phone. Seinfeld is my favorite show of all time, and half of its plot lines could be resolved if George was able to text Jerry. I can’t say for sure why it resonated the way it did. Maybe it was the fact the movie was shot on grainy looking film, evoking a simpler time both in my life and the movie industry as a whole. Maybe it was the way these characters were always out and about, socializing in a way that feels foreign in the 2020s. Maybe it was because the Dewey Decimal System, a method of literary organization now rendered obsolete by the internet, plays such an outsized role in the story. But somehow all of these factors combined and mentally brought me to a time and place where rents were cheaper and the demands on our attention were far fewer.

The metaphysical problems with smartphones have been discussed to death, so I don’t think I need to rehash them here. It’s a given that they sap our attention and make us less present in the current moment. But I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with the way they’ve colonized and disrupted our interior lives. Our consciousness is fractured into multiple pieces, existing both in the real world and the digital space. When I sit at my desk at work, I’m thinking about the PowerPoint presentation I’m putting together, but also the unread text messages awaiting my reply, the new episode of my favorite podcast that’s ready for download, the promotional emails burning a hole in my inbox, and the online discourse happening around whatever the Current Thing is during that given week. These additional inputs have a way of staying with me throughout the day. If I make the mistake of looking at Twitter within an hour of waking up, my brain is bogged down with hot takes and right wing memes for the rest of the morning. This has a tangible impact on how I move through and perceive the real world.

But none of that was an option in 1995. Maybe you had the internet if you were ahead of the curve, but you still needed to power through the clang and hiss of a dial up modem to get there. Now, the internet follows you everywhere, and its contents occupy a permanent space in your brain. The volume of this stimulation is brand new and in complete opposition to how we’ve lived for thousands of years, and it’s changing us. The internet has remapped our exterior world, why wouldn’t it do the same to our interior world as well?

Watching this movie, I realized I envied the interior lives of fictional characters. They didn’t have to work to cultivate an internal stillness. It was the default setting. Even at their most frenzied, their minds were calmer than ours, their lives simpler. I felt like I couldn’t relate to them. The idea of me, an adult man living in 2025, having a completely different interior life than someone who was in my position 30 years ago is categorically insane. We never truly stop and think about it, but we’ve built something over the last quarter century that psychologically sets us apart from the many generations of human beings that came before us. We’re in brand new territory, but everyone acts like all of this is just normal, natural progress.

I feel like such a Boomer complaining about this stuff, but the fact that it keeps coming up again and again has to mean something. It’s a real problem, and admitting the scope and scale would require us to make some very serious decisions, which in itself requires an extremely clear articulation of values. But how can one have values if they can’t focus on anything, if they’re being pulled in twenty different directions at all times? How do you know what you believe if you don’t know what’s real?

All in all though, I enjoyed the movie and am glad we watched it. I give it three out of four stars.

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.

Matthew 6:5

I’m trying to keep the above Bible verse in mind while I write this essay. I don’t want to appear as if I’m spiritually showing off or bragging. “Hey everybody! Look at me over here, talking about going to church! Aren’t I great?” That’s the last thing that I want for this piece.

What I want is simple: I want to explain why I started going back to church late last year, as well as the previous 25 years that led up to that decision. Hopefully, I can do it in a way that even a non-believer would understand.

Like a lot of people raised Catholic, I stopped going to church after my Confirmation. I never liked it as a kid (How many kids actually do?). My childhood memories of church mostly involve sitting there, standing when required, and waiting for the whole thing to be over. I always got excited whenever we got to the “Peace Be With You” segment of the service, as I knew Communion was next, which meant it was almost time to leave. The only true enjoyment I got out of church was going to 7-Eleven with my dad afterwards to get donuts. I was more interested in eating of a chocolate glazed than the Body of Christ.

All of that ended after my Confirmation in eighth grade, way back in the year 2000. My parents didn’t force me to go to church anymore and I had no interest in attending of my own volition. Confirmation is supposed to be a strengthening of your faith, one that enables you to live it more fully. Instead, I walked away. Little did I know that those steps were the first on a journey that would bring me back to the church a quarter of a century later.

I came into adulthood during the era of Reddit Atheism, a smug, holier-than-thou attitude which posits that no intelligent person could ever believe in God. People think the Bush years were a time when Evangelical Christianity took over the nation, but that’s only half true. Evangelicals controlled the institutions, but not the zeitgeist.

The prevailing cultural sentiment back then, at least from my perspective, was that religious people were hopelessly naive and out of touch. They weren’t even fit to be mocked. A simple raised eyebrow and knowing smirk would do. How could anyone believe in sky magic when there’s just so much science around? The fact that I graduated college the year Bill Maher’s Religulous came out perfectly sums up the cultural environment.

After college, I went out into the world as an adult. I got a job. I started doing stand-up comedy in Washington DC. I moved to New York and pursued comedy as a full time career. All the while, the thought of religion, and Christianity more specifically, never even crossed my mind. It seemed like a relic from a bygone era of my life, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Mad TV. The thing that got me back on the religious track, the first very small step that initiated my return journey, was (ironically enough) a comedy podcast.

One of the breakout shows from the original comedy podcast boom was Pete Holmes’ You Made It Weird. Pete, a former Evangelical Christian, would bring comedians on his show to discuss his favorite three topics: comedy, sex and God. After being cast out into the spiritual wilderness following a divorce, Pete remained fascinated by the concept of faith and took on all perspectives as he looked to re-integrate religious belief back into his life.

Occasionally, he would have a religious thinker or spiritual seeker as a guest. One episode, from June 2015, featured writer Alexander Shaia. The episode revolved around the four Gospels, and how each one reflects a different stage in Joseph Campbell’s Hero's Journey. I remember listening to it as I was traveling from New York to DC for a weekend of shows and being completely fascinated. It was the first time where I truly felt, in my soul, that the stories in the Bible were more than just prescriptive finger wagging meant to control my behavior. They became guideposts that, when acted out in real life, could lead to a sense of wholeness and fulfillment that is difficult to find anywhere else.

At the time though, I could only interpret this theory through a detached, intellectual lens. “Well, evolutionarily it makes sense that we created these stories to help us cope with the tragic nature of existence. Christianity is a myth which allows us to…” blah blah blah. The influence of Reddit Atheism was too strong. However, the initial seed had been planted, and there would be plenty of times over the coming decade where it would be watered.

After that, whenever I encountered Scripture or Biblical stories in the wild, my antenna would involuntarily go up. I remember rewatching Season 1 of True Detective (In my opinion, one of the best pieces of art ever committed to film) and hearing Rust Cohle say “The body is not one member, but many.” I went to look that line up, only to be hit with these verses from 1 Corinthians, Chapter 12:

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them.

There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.

There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.

1 Corinthians 12:4-6

Reading that really lit me up. I had spent a lot of time thinking about how my favorite things (jokes, songs, movies, books, college football, etc) all gave me the exact same sense of euphoria, even though they seemingly had no relationship to each other. What, I wondered, was underpinning these works that generated such a feeling? And here was the answer, in a book written over 2,000 years ago. Someone had noticed this same sensation long, long before I had and felt compelled to write it down.

There was also the time in January of 2020 when my wife and I were planning our wedding for later that year (lol) and we attended Mass at the Catholic church in Brooklyn we were supposed to get married in. Neither of us considered ourselves religious, we were just doing it to appease our family members. The church visit was mostly a premarital reconnaissance mission. But I remember sitting there, listening to the priest’s homily as he spoke about some art show in France that featured a golden toilet. He used this example to illustrate to the congregation that shiny material objects have no real value in this world. Hearing this, I thought of one of my favorite scenes in all of movies–the discovery of the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.

When it comes time for Donovan, the film’s villain, to pick which Grail to drink from, he settles on a beautiful golden chalice, saying “This certainly is the cup of the King of Kings.” Of course, he’s completely wrong, and he pays the price for his hubris. Indiana picks a simpler one, saying “That’s the cup of a carpenter.” He has chosen wisely. The takeaway in this scene is clear. Focusing on simple, meaningful things brings life. Focusing on bright and empty things brings death, both physical and spiritual.

When I walked out of church that morning, I felt so much better than when I had walked in. I loved how a story from Scripture could remind me of something meaningful in my own life. It brought on more of that “many gifts, one Spirit” feeling that I discovered while watching True Detective. But I didn’t think much of it after I got home. The switch hadn’t flipped yet.

What really put me over the edge, the tipping point in this whole journey, was watching Robert Eggers’ 2022 film The Northman. On the surface, it’s basically The Lion King but with vikings. On a deeper level, it’s a movie about the importance of ritual and belief. It argues that immersing yourself in subjective, unmeasurable experiences can have a tangible impact on your material reality. The best example of this, in my opinion, is the Berserker scene at the beginning of the film.

A group of warriors dance and chant around a fire, enacting a ritual where they turn into wolves before battle. They get down on all fours and howl as a drum beat steadily speeds up. By the end of it, these guys truly believe they are wolves.

Do they actually, in material reality, turn into wolves? Of course not. But by participating in this ritual, they summon forth a new reality. They fight harder and longer than they would have otherwise. The ritual changes them and it changes their outcome. But the crux of the entire experience is that they have to believe it is real, or at least act as if it is. They can’t intellectualize it. If they’re dancing around the fire and howling while thinking “By participating in this ritual I’m increasing my adrenaline by 75% which will make me more aggressive in battle and increase my odds of victory,” then the power of the ritual is lost. They need to let go of their conscious minds and give themselves over to belief if it’s going to have any effect.

I thought about this scene on and off for two years. Something about it stayed with me. I didn’t know what it was, but it felt like it had implications beyond one movie.

What I eventually landed on was this. It’s a big swing, but I ask that you please indulge me.

Ever since the onset of the Scientific Revolution, human beings have believed that one day we’ll be able to fully map and understand reality. Surely, we thought, as technology and measuring instruments became stronger and more powerful, as data piled on top of data, we would eventually know all there is to know about the universe. At that point, we could perfectly optimize our lives around those conclusions. The mystery of existence would be solved, and the old superstitions could be discarded.

How has that worked out so far? Does it feel like life is getting easier, more clear? Or does it feel like the opposite is happening?

Forget about the last 40 or 50 years, when families and communities fell apart as human beings were increasingly viewed as interchangeable cogs, as points of data, in a complex economic machine. How about just in the last ten years? Millennials and Zoomers grew up in an era of techno-optimism. We were told that all technological progress was good progress, that our lives would become better, freer, and more enjoyable once, as President Trump put it, “Everything is computer.”

The verdict is in when it comes to that worldview. It’s completely, undeniably wrong. I don’t think I even need to cite studies or data here. Everyone seems to accept that people today are less happy, less fulfilled, less alive than they were even in the recent past. Because of the primacy we’ve placed on material reality—focusing only on what is directly observable—we’ve lost sight of what gives life meaning and thus leads to genuine human flourishing.

Approaching the world with a rational, materialist mindset has its limits. It’s helpful when it comes to the realm of scientific inquiry, but it has nothing to offer spiritually. To paraphrase an old adage, there’s no scientific solution to a spiritual problem. You need something transcendent and ineffable for that.

Once this all clicked, I realized that I needed more ritualistic, subjective experiences in my life. After years of being drawn to Biblical stories and verses, I figured the best route would be to attend Catholic Mass, a ritual I had avoided for a long time. I would go once, just to see how it felt. Something was compelling me to attend, and I thought I should honor that.

I chose a weekend where my wife was out of town so I wouldn’t have to explain myself or my rationale (Imagine her reaction when, after asking why I was going to church, I launched into my whole diatribe about The Northman). I went to Mass, and I felt pretty good afterwards. “Maybe I’ll go back next week,” I thought to myself.

Six days later, we found out my wife was pregnant.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I should keep going to church.” That was late November. I’ve only missed one Sunday since then.

But I’m not attending church out of a sense of superstition after learning my wife was pregnant, although I’ve prayed for my son’s safe and healthy development every day and continue to do so. I’m attending church because of how it makes me feel, and what I learn when I’m there.

wrote a great piece last week about the accelerated pace of modern life. I agree with it wholeheartedly. There are hardly any times where we, as human beings, can sit and be still anymore. The days move by at such a violent speed, speed which robs us of our ability to truly feel, enjoy, and be changed by our experiences. It’s a problem I face on a regular basis, except for when I’m in church. When I’m sitting in the pew, whether I’m listening to the priest, praying, or silently waiting for Mass to start, I’m completely still and at peace. My phone is on Do No Disturb, tucked away in my jacket. Most of the time, it’s not even on my body. My mind doesn’t whir. Church is an oasis in the middle of chaos, and I look forward to it every week. What a departure from the experiences of my childhood. I don’t even need the 7-Eleven donut anymore.

Even better, all of those bits of Scripture that I would randomly come across in the past are now readily available every Sunday. I don’t have to wait for them to come to me, I go to them. I’m hearing old stories with fresh ears, and taking in brand new information as well. A few Sundays ago, the Old Testament reading included Sirach 27:4-7. I had never even heard of the Book of Sirach, let alone these words, which read:

When a sieve is shaken, the husks appear; so do people’s faults when they speak.

The furnace tests the potter’s vessels; the test of a person is in conversation.

The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had; so speech discloses the bent of a person’s heart.

Praise no one before he speaks, for it is then that people are tested.

Sirach 27:4-7

Hearing about the importance of watching your words, laid out in this beautiful language, had a profound impact on me. It’s the reason I’ve focused so intently on abstaining from taking the Lord’s name in vain during Lent. It’s something I’m taking seriously, but it’s not only about following the Second Commandment more faithfully. There’s a secondary benefit at hand as well.

The goal of refraining from taking the Lord’s name in vain isn’t simply to stop dropping GDs and JFCs whenever I miss the bus or spill a cup of coffee. It’s to be incredibly intentional and precise with my language. To stop saying those words for 40 days, I have to carefully monitor what comes out of my mouth. That practice has benefits far beyond avoiding a few curse words. Like the Berserkers dancing around the fire, following the ritual generates real world outcomes.

And that’s a perfect summary of where I’m at with my faith right now. I’ll be honest, I’m still not fully there when it comes to viewing the Bible as a historical document. If I said I was, I’d be performing. I can’t yet say with certainty that these things happened exactly as they’re written, but I’ve chosen to act as if they did. Because what I have faith in at this moment–what I believe is absolutely capital-T True, even without definitive proof–is that if I live the way the Bible instructs me to live, if I follow the teachings of Jesus, my life will be better because of it. I believe the words, wisdom, morals and lessons imparted to me every Sunday are as real as anything gets, and I desperately need them in my life.

Right before Lent, I decided I had one more ritual to enact. I was going to attend Confession. I hadn’t been since right before my Confirmation, and I was afraid to tell the priest it had been 25 years. I thought he was going to make me do some kind of crazy intense penance, or even admonish me. Instead, when I told him the amount of time that had passed, he greeted me with just two words, the same two words the Prodigal Son heard when he finally came home.

“Welcome back.”

The concepts of woke and cancel culture have been so ubiquitous for so long, so baked into the cake of American discourse, that it’s almost impossible to remember a time before their existence. The other day, I tried to recall where it all started. What was the inciting incident that kicked off this past decade of backlashes and public shamings and backlashes to the initial backlashes, followed by backlashes to those backlashes explaining how the original backlash was good, actually? Then, recalled from the recesses of my memory, one hashtag sprang to mind. #CancelColbert.

It seems impossible to imagine, but there was a moment in recent American history where Stephen Colbert drew considerable ire from the left. Yes, that same Stephen Colbert whose current late night show wouldn’t have a point of view if he didn’t utilize President Trump as a foil at every possible turn. Yes, that same Stephen Colbert who gave us timeless cringe classics like “The Vax Scene” and “Skibidi Biden.” But this wasn’t Late Show Stephen Colbert that got into trouble, it was Colbert Report Stephen Colbert.

For those who don’t remember, Colbert used to have a show on Comedy Central that aired after The Daily Show called The Colbert Report in which he played a caricature of right wing talking heads like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. In March of 2014, he did a segment about the Washington Redskins refusing to change their name and paying lip service to Native Americans by creating a charity called The Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation. After the episode aired, the show’s official Twitter account posted this line, lifted directly from the segment that aired on TV:

It’s a little clunky out of context, but the joke here is obvious. You’d think everyone would just move along after seeing it, right? You thought wrong. Enter Suey Park.

My first thought after looking back on these tweets is to marvel at how there was a time when people earnestly used hashtags. They’ve existed as a punchline for so long now that you forget they were once central to the Twitter experience. My second thought is to recall Park’s aggressive and obstinate style during this moment, how off-putting it seemed at the time, and how normalized it became over the rest of the decade.

Look, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Park’s argument here. If you’re a minority, it has to be annoying to see a smug liberal white guy throw around slurs, even (or maybe especially) if it’s done in the context of being an “ally.” But she did herself no favors with how obnoxious she was throughout the entire process. Her hall monitor attitude didn’t bring anyone over to her side.

You can see it in the initial tweet, which ended with two words: Trend it. She might as well have included two other words: Or else. Wokeness has always operated with an implicit threat lurking beneath the surface. Get in line, or suffer the consequences.

The consequence she was trying to enact here was to cancel Colbert. Not Colbert the person, “cancelling” him in some metaphorical sense. She wanted The Colbert Report to be literally cancelled and taken off the air. There’s some debate here as to whether this was her true aim, or if she was just being hyperbolic to draw attention to her message. Either way, she was calling for Comedy Central to cancel the actual show. I don’t know if this was the true origin of the term, but it certainly was the first time I ever heard the word “cancel” used in the context of political grievance.

Once other leftists hopped on the bandwagon, #CancelColbert ended up trending on Twitter and the mainstream media latched onto the story. From a modern perspective, it’s hilarious to look back on their reaction to Park’s campaign. They were completely against it at the time. If this incident had occurred just a couple of years later, they’d be cheering her on. But the prevailing sentiment back then was that Park did not understand satire and should not be taken seriously. Watch this interview she did (With the Huffington freaking Post of all places) which is conducted under the assumed premise that she’s an insufferable idiot.

I distinctly remember watching this interview at my desk at work and thinking to myself “Oh, this woman is mentally ill.” The breathless, rapid fire way she spoke, the complex academic jargon she used, and her entire political worldview came across as so abnormal, so divorced from everyday reality, that it was impossible to take her seriously. I chalked it up to the rantings of an overeducated leftist getting their moment in the sun and went about my day. Surely, I thought, this was just an isolated incident. No sane person would ever actually want to act this way.

But, as we all know, this wasn’t some odd blip on the cultural radar. Park’s affect and belief system were merely a sign of things to come. #CancelColbert was the canary in the coal mine.

Park’s point of view went from fringe to mainstream in a relatively short amount of time. Pretty soon everyone was talking about concepts like allyship, white privilege, marginalized groups, and a bunch of other buzzy leftist phrases. But all along that initial feeling I had while watching Park’s interview, that there’s something else animating these beliefs and enforcement methods, stuck with me. I maintained a healthy skepticism of the left, especially as I watched their philosophy take over most of the New York comedy scene.

Comedians continued posting jokes about current events on Twitter and Facebook like they always had, but from about 2015 onward the jokes featured a more prominent streak of left wing politics. Same goes for the jokes they told on stage, particularly in the leftist stranglehold of Brooklyn. Over time, it felt like there wasn’t much of a difference between certain comedy shows and the homepage of Mother Jones. Much ado was made about the rise of “Clapter” during this time period, and with good reason. I was there man, it was fucking brutal.

It got to the point where, whenever something particularly egregious happened, comics would abandon all pretense of jokes and post an earnest statement, much like a politician would. But everybody that was reading their post already agreed with what they were saying anyway. This was the mid-2010s, the peak era of echo chambers on social media. So what was it that made comedians act this way? It was The Woke Sword of Damocles that hung over everyone’s head, ready to drop at a moment’s notice if you didn’t demonstrate the proper pieties. Nobody wanted to be the one person who didn’t post about social justice online.

I remember when Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people at an all black church in South Carolina, there was the usual round of sincerity posting done by comedians. I don’t mean to make light of a mass shooting, but what did these posts ultimately accomplish? What was the point? It was in this moment that the incomparable Nick Mullen (Who in my opinion is one of the funniest people on the planet) posted the following. It’s not available online anymore because his previous Twitter account was nuked by the old regime, but I remember it word for word because it was so perfect:

Guys, I’m going to say it. I’m going to be the only one brave and smart enough to say it.

The shooting was bad.

This has been another serious post brought to you by one of the good white guys.

Doesn’t that say it all? Doesn’t it lay bare the empty and performative nature of this specific kind of political theory, at least in the way it's practiced online? It has no true bearing on reality, it doesn’t change outcomes for any of the groups that it purports to help. It exists only as a social game, a pathway for status and acceptance

And look, I was guilty of this stuff too. Let he who has not posted a black square on Instagram cast the first stone. There have been times in my life where I was psyoped into aligning with prevailing leftist orthodoxy. The panopticon of New York comedian social media is a powerful one, especially when getting booked depends on how much other comics like you. But looking back it’s kind of wild that, culturally, we got in as deep as we did for so long. What was considered fringe in 2014 became compulsory by 2020. You could get in trouble at work for not vocally supporting these ideologies.

It looks like we’re starting to leave all that behind, thankfully. We probably did hit “Peak Woke” in 2020, and the wave is now receding. The Democrats lost the last election so badly that you now have 2028 DNC frontrunner Gavin Newsom hosting Steve Bannon on his podcast and saying biological men don’t belong in women’s sports. How unthinkable would that have been just a year ago? What’s next, Bronze Age Pervert stops by The View for a chat?

It also makes me wonder what “woke” and “cancel culture” even mean anymore now that the New Right is culturally ascendant. I mean, AOC took her pronouns out of her Twitter bio. Sweetgreen is advertising salads with high protein and no seed oils. The White Lotus, HBO’s flagship Sunday night show, just featured a five minute monologue about autogynephilia. After more than a decade of rule, the left’s cultural hegemony is over.

Some right wingers, including a handful of comedians, refuse to give up the ghost. Much like modern-day Colbert needs Trump as a constant villain because he has nothing meaningful or interesting to say on his own, so to do right wing comics need the specter of wokeism to rail against. It’s almost like they want some blue haired maniac out there attempting to defund the police just so they can complain about it. Without “You can’t say anything anymore!” they simply have nothing to say.

It’s time to move beyond all of that. The battle is over, and woke lost. I know there are still idiots out there setting Teslas on fire and drawing swastikas on Cybertrucks, but they’re starting to feel like the exception that proves the rule. The best antidote to the cultural insanity of the far left is not continuing to fight it but to look past it, to create an alternative so superior and convincing that no doubt remains as to what path society should take. Their side never had the numbers, they were just the loudest. Normal, everyday people don’t want anything to do with their ideology.

I agree with Substacker that what is needed now is “not a defense of what is but a renaissance of what can be, born of what has been and always is.” What that means to me is that we shouldn’t be fighting cultural battles based on the parameters set by the neoliberal order of the last 40 years. We should be aiming for something higher. By aligning ourselves with timeless virtues, instead of the constant back and forth pendulum swings of ressentiment, the Suey Parks of the world and what they stand for will become a distant cultural memory. If we stay down in the muck with these basket cases, we’ll eventually wind up right back in 2014, ready to get cancelled all over again.

What I did was get off my couch, and then immediately sit back down. Except this time I sat down at my kitchen table and started writing.

There had been an idea for an essay percolating in the back of my mind for the better part of a week, and I just wanted to get it started, to take it from that theoretical space in my brain to the concrete space of text. As long as I got a paragraph or two down to generate some momentum, I would consider myself satisfied. Two hours later, I had written all 1,600 words I needed to complete the piece.

The shift in my mood from when I began writing to when I finished was drastic. I went from feeling heavy and sluggish, not excited about anything, to light and airy, consumed with a general sense of well-being accompanied by a slight euphoric buzz. What happened within those two hours that caused such a change?

What happens when anyone engages in a creative act? Who knows for sure. What stood out to me was the fact that I kept writing even when I passed the minimum threshold that I had set for myself. Once I completed the first couple of paragraphs and was allowed to call it a day, I decided it felt better to keep going than to stop. If I had closed my laptop at that point, I probably would have found myself back in the same emotional state I was in when I sat down to write. I knew finishing the essay would be challenging, but a difficult challenge was more appealing to me than an afternoon of uneasy comfort. Only one choice provided me with the outcome I desired.

The most concise way I could describe how I felt after I finished writing was unburdened. Not only did I accomplish an important task (writing a new essay for my Substack) but I also got some stuff off my chest. Understanding something internally is one thing, but actually translating it to prose, seeing it laid out neatly before you instead of existing as a jumbled mess inside your mind, provides a tangible measure of relief. It’s like unloading a heavy bag that you’ve been carrying.

That’s why it felt better to keep going than to stop–it wasn’t time to put down the bag yet. The journey wasn’t finished, and no true relief could be found until it was.

I sometimes wonder what the point of this Substack is. There are a handful of readers that engage with it, all of them thoughtfully, but it doesn’t have a ton of subscribers. Some posts do well and get a higher than average amount of views, likes and comments, while others land with a relatively thud. But that’s just the nature of creative output, especially in the era of the algorithm. Writing for digital engagement isn’t really the point, and you won’t last long if that’s your primary goal. So what is the point then?

This Substack exists for moments like last Sunday. It’s for when something just doesn’t feel right, and the only thing that will improve my mood is to get words down on a page. Taking those words and then putting them out into a public forum is also a major part of the relief I feel. It just wouldn’t hit the same if I were to keep everything in a Google Doc, locked away for no one else to see. Sharing with an audience, and getting feedback from that audience, no matter how small, is the final step that enchants the entire process.

Not only does this act benefit me, it benefits others in my life as well. When I write, I feel better. When I feel better, I’m an easier person to be around. I’m sure my wife appreciates it whenever I dissolve whatever internal strife I’m carrying around. I also do a better job at work when I’ve recently written and shared something. I find myself to be more agreeable and willing to actively confront complex problems.

For me, the writing process has holistic benefits. Moving with the spirit of effervescence that comes after writing, instead of sad-sacking around like a human Eeyore, pays dividends in my immediate real world environment. This holds true in both personal and professional scenarios.

Substacker recently published an overview of pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran. One particular quote stood out to me. About writing, Cioran said:

Everything I’ve written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, suffocation. It wasn’t from inspiration, as they say. It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe.

I don’t exactly know why I have this affliction, this need to write (in the present) and to do stand-up comedy (in the past). Something about the way I’m wired compels me to attempt to synthesize ideas and put them out into the world. I’m just glad I have a way to ease the agitation that comes with this compulsion and I’m grateful for the positivity I feel when I finish writing. I believe, on the whole, it’s better to suffer, strive and feel relief than to never feel that initial suffering in the first place. Action beats inaction every time.

So I keep writing.

It was December of 2022. I was sitting in the back of a comedy club, waiting for my turn to go up in front of maybe a dozen audience members in a room that could easily seat a hundred. The clock was creeping closer to midnight on a Monday evening, and I had to wake up early for work the next morning. My wife was at home, asleep in bed with our dog, and I was about to go onstage to get middling laughs from a bunch of strangers who’d forget about me the second I left the room. Nothing about this situation was positive, inspirational, or aspirational. It did not feel like a valuable use of my time, or a rewarding sacrifice to be making. The juice was simply not worth the squeeze.

It was around this moment when I thought to myself, “Maybe I need to stop doing stand-up comedy.” I ultimately decided to give it one more year–all of 2023–for a final attempt at a viable stand-up career. I pushed hard, expending more effort and energy than I had since before COVID, but by mid-August the writing was on the wall. My comedy “career” was finished. I now needed to shift my focus to what I had ignored for most of my adult life in favor of comedy.

recently shared a piece titled “Would You Rather Be A Forgotten Success Or An Immortal Failure?” where, among other things, he mentioned that he’s close to finishing the first draft of a new novel. However, its eventual completion will come at a cost:

“I’ve never been fully engaged at my day jobs and my career is middling, at best. I’ve discovered I like writing at night, so in trying to finish this novel, I’ve had to give up the gym (not to mention the increased drinking and smoking) because no way am I waking up early on a workday to work out. My personal life has suffered too because the neuroses that fuel the incessant need to write also poison the chances of happy and long-lasting relationships. In another life where I didn’t have this incessant need to write, I may have a family by now (I’m now at an age where I’m increasingly aware that each passing year is one less year that my parents won’t have with their potential grandchildren).”

This passage hit me hard because I made similar sacrifices throughout my comedy career, and I’m now having to pay the (both literal and metaphorical) bill for them.

The job piece is the biggest one for me. Ever since I graduated college, my jobs were just that - jobs. They were ways for me to earn money so I could pay my rent and pursue my actual career - stand-up comedy. I never went the extra mile, never stayed late, never actively pursued a promotion. Doing any of those things would have gotten in the way of comedy. As a result, I basically have the same job now that I had when I moved to New York 13 years ago, albeit with a decent pay bump that comes with years of experience and cost of living increases.

However, I find it deeply humiliating that most of my peers at work are in their 20s, while I’m still chugging along at 38 (About to be 39). I feel like Ray on Girls when Elijah calls him “Old Man Ray.” I’d gotten so used to thinking of my bosses as older than me that it was a genuine shock when I realized the VP of my department, a man who is multiple levels above me within the company, graduated college a full four years after I did. Imagine going back to visit campus as a 23 year old and asking a first year frat pledge for a raise. That’s where I’m at right now.

The financial component is huge too. Without those promotions and commensurate raises, I’m radically behind my age group in terms of yearly income. That kind of stuff is a big deal when you’re trying to purchase a home in the midst of a global unaffordability crisis. No amount of skipping lattes and avocado toast can make up for that difference. Luckily, I’m married to a woman who took her career seriously and has advanced in accordance with that, so I don’t have to stress out about us going broke. But when it comes time to do our taxes and I look at the vastly different totals on our W-2s, I can’t help but feel emasculated. I have a lot of catching up to do.

On the bright side, my marriage is the one element of my life where comedy did not get in the way of eventual success. Comedy certainly got in the way of past relationships, but those were never going to work out anyway. It’s only through blind luck, Divine Providence, or both, that I managed to find and stay with my wife. She’s been incredibly patient throughout the nearly ten years we’ve been together, and I realize not every struggling artist is going to happen upon a partner who will gladly stand by them through all of their failures and frustrations. To be frank, I think the fact that she’s seven years younger than me went a long way. When we met in her early 20s, she wasn’t in as much of a rush for marriage and kids as someone my own age would have been. I had a longer leash to work with.

Things could have easily gone the other way though. I can totally see a world where I never met my wife, or she decided she had enough of my self-absorbed nonsense early on in our relationship, and I’m sitting here today single and nearing 40. My mom has a handful of relatives on her side who never married, and one of my big fears in my 20s was that I would eventually grow to join their ranks. Your 30s are a crucial time where you’ll either zig or zag in that direction. Luckily I zigged, but a potential zag was never far off.

If you’re an artist with a decent head on your shoulders, you’re somewhat aware of these sacrifices as you’re making them. You know that you’re giving up career stability, financial growth and potential romantic fulfillment in pursuit of your artistic goals. You’re just betting that your sacrifices will pay off and any future success will help close the gap that you surrendered in your younger years.

Who cares that you didn’t get that promotion at work? You made it as a writer/comedian/actor, and now you’re rich. Take that Director of Accounts job and shove it. All those relationships you left behind in your 20s don’t matter anymore either. If you’re a successful artist in your mid-to-late 30s, you won’t have any problem dating attractive women in their mid-to-late 20s. All good, right?

But not everyone makes it. In fact, most people don’t. And if you don’t, good luck out there. Good luck explaining the ten plus years on your resume where you bounced around multiple companies, all while never advancing or changing job titles. Good luck making a downpayment on a house with all the “exposure” you got performing at comedy festivals for free. And good luck finding a romantic partner in the rapidly winnowing dating pool. No Gen Z girl is excitedly telling her friends about the new middle-aged guy she’s dating and saying “He’s the total package: old AND unsuccessful!”

I understand this is kind of a gross thing to talk about, but just because something is unappealing doesn’t make it less true, nor does it excuse us from recognizing and acknowledging that truth. I think the one saving grace of artists, at least the sensible ones I mentioned earlier, is that we’re inventive and find it easy to aspire to things that seem outside of our grasp. We never fully lose hope, whether it’s in pursuing our chosen craft, or re-stabilizing our lives after that initial pursuit falls flat. An emotionally intelligent artist has a much better chance of finding a profitable second act career or a suitable spouse than an accountant of a similar age.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I’ve spent the last year or so attempting to get my house in order after neglecting the practical elements of adult life since I left college. I made my sacrifices, they didn’t pay off, and now I have to square that debt to try and get back on equal footing with my peers. It's not easy, but at least it’s a struggle worth undertaking.

Now that we’re in the Lenten season, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of sacrifice, and the different sacrifices we can choose to make. When I was pursuing comedy, I sacrificed stability. Since I gave up on comedy, I have more stability, but I’m now sacrificing a wider sense of possibility. Even when things were at their bleakest with comedy, there was always a hope in the back of my head that said, “Hey, maybe this time it works out.” I was still afforded the luxury of dreaming big. That’s gone now.

But I believe it’s time for me to make this particular sacrifice. I had fifteen years where I was able to think “Just maybe…” while ignoring more practical realities. That was all well and good when I didn’t have other people counting on me, but now I have a nascent family that I need to provide material support and model values for. That initial sacrifice had its time in the sun, and it’s no longer a pragmatic or worthwhile one to make. It’s time for a new sacrifice to rise up and take its place. And if it allows me to be at home every night with my family instead of wallowing in the back of a comedy club, well, that’s even better.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that, at the present moment, smoking weed is probably the lamest, most uncool, least rebellious thing you could do. State licensed dispensaries are starting to pop up around New York City, blending perfectly into the urban topography. There’s one around the corner from my office, situated right next to a cupcake shop. Call me old fashioned, but the idea of taking a break from filling out Excel spreadsheets to go buy an eighth and stop off for a bourgeois buttercream treat, all while wearing a quarter zip and khaki pants, feels antithetical to the entire weed smoking experience. In that instance, you are not Bob Marley. You are Bob Saget.

And when you enter one of these dispensaries, what are you greeted with? An entire product suite meant to cater to any THC ingestion preference you might have. Is smoking actual weed too harsh for you? Then try a vape that you can rip in public while sharing a sidewalk with the elderly and new mothers pushing their babies in strollers, all without a second glance from anyone. Don’t feel like ingesting nickel and aluminum and microplastics into your lungs with a vape? Consider one of these Willy Wonka looking edibles. Don’t eat the whole thing though. It’s extremely potent and anything beyond one bite will have you convinced that everyone you know hates you and/or that you’re about to die. But we all know that’s the best part of getting high—the abject terror.

There’s also a wide assortment of tinctures, sprays, creams, and even THC infused bath bombs. Nothing says countercultural drug use like unwinding in the tub for a little “me” time after a long day of sending emails at your 21st century girlboss job.

Are you a man nearing 40 whose hips are tight from sitting in a desk chair for nearly half of your waking life? Maybe a THC/CBD combo balm can ease that for you. Forget about the fact that you used to smoke pot so you could listen to Radiohead and think brand new thoughts but it now only functions as pain relief for the aching in your joints brought on by the ceaseless march of time and the life-suppressing perils of modernity. It’s a miracle drug!

The worst part of it all though, I believe, is the total cultural permissiveness around weed. People openly discuss edible usage at work, in the same manner they would talk about last night’s episode of The White Lotus, and nobody bats an eye. I feel like if I showed up at the office on Ash Wednesday with a giant cross on my forehead I’d get more sideways glances than if I casually mentioned I ate a 100mg chocolate bar the night before. Whatever happened to shame? The whole appeal of an illicit activity is that you can’t tell everybody about it. It doesn’t hit the same if it’s fair game for discussion at the place that funds your 401k.

All joking aside, I do worry about what’s going to happen to the kids. Not that they’re going to smoke weed, that’s something teenagers are supposed to do. Although the schizophrenia inducing strength of modern weed strains does give some pause. Teens are more likely to have a Reefer Madness style freak out smoking on CIA grade Banana Berry Kush than whatever ditch weed was available to Millennials during the Bush years. No, what I’m worried about is the relative ease of the current weed smoking experience, and the loss of meaning that comes with increased access.

(Pardon me for starting a sentence this way, but) BACK IN MY DAY getting high was a whole thing. You had to call around (Good luck getting Gen Z to pick up the phone and dial a number) to see if anyone was holding. If you were lucky enough to find someone (Which was no guarantee. An entire Saturday night could pass without triangulating a proper pot source), you had to go meet them in some random McDonald’s parking lot, clumsily make the exchange away from the prying eyes of your suburban neighbors, and return to a secluded location–preferably the basement of a friend’s house when their parents weren’t home–before you could begin ingesting any controlled substances. The method of smoking was always up in the air (No pun intended) as well. No one in my friend group was stupid enough to keep used drug paraphernalia in the same house where their mom cooked dinners and their dad paid taxes. Those two worlds shouldn’t mix. Sometimes we smoked out of a cored apple, or a crushed Diet Coke can, or via a very poorly rolled joint, all after manually breaking up the low quality pot we bought. That’s another thing. All of the pot I see in dispensaries now is soft and fluffy, just one giant bud the size of a cotton ball. This is a cultural loss. Kids these days don’t even know what it’s like to pick out seeds and stems, and they’re worse off for it.

So contrast what I experienced versus what the experience is today. Think about how easy it is for a teenager to get pot, how overpowering it is, and all of the different ways they can ingest it, as highlighted above. When something is easy and accessible, when you don’t have to work for it or try as hard to get it, it doesn’t mean as much. It loses its value and its sense of sacredness. This is what’s happening with pot now. And because of this proliferation and subsequent loss of meaning, it doesn’t have the same transformative effect.

When I was younger, smoking pot felt like a shamanistic ritual. For fear of getting caught holding it, or having adults smell it on you, you’d go somewhere dark and secluded and secure where you wouldn’t be bothered. You literally had to separate yourself from society to enjoy it. And it’s in this separate space where the magic occurred. There was nothing around you except for your close friends and any artifacts or totems you had on hand to aid you in your journey (In my case - movies, music, video games, stand-up comedy specials, etc). But most importantly, you had yourself. In those quieter moments when your friends would be in another room, or outside on the phone, or off hooking up with some girl that had come over, you’d come face to face with your own thoughts, which now appeared with more clarity and vibrancy than they ever had before in your sober life. These are the transformative moments you need as you move into adulthood. This was the whole point of smoking pot in the first place. Whether you knew it or not, the end goal was always individuation. Eating junk food and laughing with your friends was just an added bonus.

There’s a lot of talk online these days about the “Disenchantment of the world.” What this phrase means, at least to me, is that we’ve optimized our society to such a degree that we’ve taken all the joy and meaning out of important things. We’ve approached deep and moving subjective experiences with a cold, rationalist worldview, broke them into pieces for examination, and discovered that they were always more than the sum of their parts. Smoking weed is cool and fun, right? What if we made it more readily available? That would certainly be a net positive, wouldn’t it?

What this kind of utilitarian approach fails to recognize is that there are so many hidden and unspoken pieces of an experience that make it what it is, that bind the structure together. Removing obstacles doesn’t make a good thing better. More often than not, the obstacle is what makes it worthwhile in the first place.

Last week, while walking to work, I saw a kid no older than 15 smoking a joint before heading into school. Now, kids getting high before the bell rings isn’t anything new. But there was something about the entire situation—the fact that the joint clearly came pre-rolled (sold that way in a storefront right next to a Chase bank), and that he was smoking while nonchalantly walking down a crowded New York City sidewalk at 8:30 in the morning—that really bummed me out. I’m sure he’s thrilled that pot is so easy for him to acquire, that it’s totally acceptable for him to smoke it in public, and that he seemingly doesn’t have to fear the wrath of any adult who catches him. But all I could think as I watched him walk away was “This poor kid doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

I wasn’t always like this. Just a short while ago, I was all over New York practically every night.

I spent twelve years trying to make it as a stand-up comedian in New York City. For over a decade, I’d be out at different comedy events and shows, sometimes in multiple boroughs, every single evening. It wouldn’t be abnormal for me to go to an open mic in Queens, a comedy club in Manhattan, and a bar show in Brooklyn within the span of six hours. All the while I’d be traversing different neighborhoods on foot, taking in the scenery and soaking up the energy. Those walks added depth and color to my comedy experiences and made them more memorable. The first time I did a paid gig at Caroline’s on Broadway, I walked all the way home to the Upper East Side, listening to Billy Joel as I strolled along Central Park South under a full moon. I don’t know if there actually was a full moon out that night, but in my memory I’ve never walked under a moon so bright in my entire life.

Aside from the art of comedy itself, I think that’s what I miss most about my previous career in stand-up. When I wasn’t on stage, I got to experience all of New York as both a participant and an observer. Say I had two shows that were three hours apart in start time and one mile apart in distance. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I’d slowly walk from one to the other, meandering around the city on no clearly defined path. I just walked in the general direction of my destination. During these walks, I observed the people and the environment around me.

I saw young professionals out on dates at fancy restaurants, even younger college students enthusiastically piling into bars, schizo vagrants muttering to themselves on the corner, tourists skating in Rockefeller Plaza, random drum circles in Washington Square Park, uncovered windows in luxury apartment buildings providing insight into both the lifestyle and decor choices of the uber-rich. I got to sample everything that makes New York what it is without being directly involved in it. I was everywhere and nowhere, living all the corny Sex And The City cliches come to life.

Because I did this so many times over a long enough period, I also saw entire neighborhoods change before my eyes. I was there through the frozen yogurt boom and bust cycle, watching as East Village mom and pop shops became 16 Handles before eventually being converted into illegal dispensaries. I witnessed Long Island City go from an afterthought to a beer garden filled banker enclave. I watched as Williamsburg changed from the cool, gritty backdrop of Girls to an extremely fashionable and obscenely wealthy neighborhood that now has a Chanel store. There are no more hipsters on Bedford Avenue, just hypebeasts and scions of foreign nationals.

Not only did I walk around New York, but there was a four year period where I lived in Astoria and was lucky enough to have a car, so I got to experience New York behind the wheel as well. Two memories from that era stand out to me. One was from the summer of 2016. Frank Ocean’s Blonde had just come out, and I was driving towards the Midtown Tunnel from Brooklyn with a full view of the Manhattan skyline ahead of me. The sun was setting at the perfect angle, coating the sky and the skyscrapers in a beautiful pink and white hue, right as “Pink And White” started playing. That image and its accompanying soundtrack are seared into my memory. It’s still one of the most serendipitous and beautiful moments from my time in New York.

While that memory took place driving into Manhattan at sunset, the other took place driving out at sunrise. Well before I met my wife, I was leaving a former girlfriend’s apartment very early on a weekday morning so I could drive home and shower before taking the subway to work. It was around 6am, but it was summertime so daylight was already starting to peek through the buildings. I drove up Fifth Avenue, catching every green light as the sun rose. Before long, I noticed something strange—the streets were completely empty. I was literally in the opening scene from Breakfast At Tiffany’s. I had become so used to fighting my way through aggravating traffic that driving always made me feel tense. But the open road I faced that morning completely disarmed me. I haven’t experienced a drive as peaceful as that before or since.

But like I said at the beginning, all of that is over now. I sold my car many years ago when I moved from Astoria to Manhattan. I now have no shows to go to, no open mics to attend. These days, I just have my job and my apartment. Of course, my wife and I still go out a few times a month, but I’m in my late 30s and she’s in her early 30s. Our mutual desire for nightlife is starting to wane with each passing year. We now place value on comfort rather than novelty. I honestly can’t remember the last time I went downtown. I think there might still have been leaves on the trees.

I suppose I could continue to walk around New York if I decided to just get up and do it. But it wouldn’t be the same. Walking all over New York was the byproduct of an activity, not the activity itself. The animating force behind that walking is gone. If I took the subway downtown and walked around Greenwich Village for no reason in particular, I’d feel like I was putting on an act. The overt effort negates the meaning of the action.

So what is it that I actually want? I miss that time where I used to walk around, but I don’t want to go back to it, for multiple reasons. One, I don’t want to go back to doing stand-up. Two, going back is literally impossible. I also don’t want to actively seek out solo walking opportunities during this new phase of my life. So maybe what I truly want has nothing to do with New York at all.

This might scandalize some readers, especially any who have lived in New York for an extended period of time, but what I want is a new environment. I want space and peace and solitude. What I want is the suburbs.

I’ve spent enough time living in small apartments and walking on crowded sidewalks, surrounded by human bio-mass on all sides. I now want a backyard where I can sit and stare at the grass, throw the ball with my dog, and play with my future kids. I want a home office with shelves that I can neatly fill with books instead of having them stacked on top of each other due to lack of space. I want a car where I can drive and sing along to Y2K era indie-rock on my way to go pick up groceries. I want all of the things I haven’t been able to get in New York for the last 13 years.

New York is about trade offs. You sacrifice all of the stuff I mentioned above for two rewards: activities and proximity. New York has fun things to do, as well as industries and people you want to be close to. Well, I’ve had enough of the activities. I’m too old for them at this point. And I no longer need to be in the city so I can be out doing comedy all night. Riding the train into work a few times a week sounds alright to me. Long commutes are what podcasts and books are for.

I’ve had my fill of what New York can offer. It's not for me anymore, so I need to give up my space to someone who can properly enjoy and take advantage of it. Out with the old, in with the new.

My wife and I have talked about it. This transition won’t happen immediately, but it will be happening soon. I’m more than ready for it. Hopefully, by the time next spring rolls around, we’ll be happily ensconced in some enclave in Connecticut or New Jersey or Westchester. I’ll be glad to finally have all of the suburban perks I now crave. But beyond that, I’ll be glad to not carry any regrets or worries of a wasted youth. There will be no mid-life crisis lurking around the corner because I’ll know I did the absolute most I could with my 20s and 30s while I was here. It will be a peace that I’ve earned, step by step, across all of those walks over the years.