An Invitation to Correspondence
Introducing "The Last Existential Crisis": a book about why you'll never find yourself—and why that's the whole point.
I've spent three years writing a book about why you'll never find yourself—and why that's the whole point. Here's why I think we need a new approach to the oldest question.
The All-Too-Human Crisis
Picture this: It's 3am. You're staring at yourself in the bathroom mirror, and suddenly the question hits: "Who am I, really?" Not the roles you play, not the labels others have given you, but who are you beneath it all?
You know this moment. We all do. That sudden, piercing recognition that despite our carefully constructed identities, our accumulated self-knowledge, our sophisticated psychological frameworks—something essential feels missing. The very tools meant to deliver us to ourselves seem to scatter us further.
We live in an unprecedented age of answers. Never before have so many frameworks for meaning been available—therapeutic, spiritual, philosophical, scientific. We can consume wisdom traditions like streaming content, sample methodologies like items in a marketplace, curate our identities from an infinite catalog of possibilities.
Yet for all this abundance, something has gone eerily amiss.
Beyond the Marketplace of Answers
The Last Existential Crisis emerged from this paradox. It's written for the seekers, the skeptics, and the 3AM spirallers who've discovered that the more earnestly they pursue self-knowledge, the more elusive the self becomes. For anyone who suspects that our endless search for answers might itself be part of the problem. This isn't another framework to add to the collection. It's an invitation to encounter the crisis itself differently—through what I call "correspondence."
Think of it as a sort of philosophical jazz. Where most approaches follow predetermined theoretical scores, correspondence improvises meaning through direct encounter. It's a way of inhabiting uncertainty that transforms vexation and uncertainty itself into a strummed note of possibility. It’s like learning to dance with questions, rather than demanding they submit to answers.
The Method Behind the Madness: Crisis Correspondence
The book deliberately refuses conventional divisions. It speaks widely across the liberal/conservative, theist/atheist, optimist/pessimist divide, not by compromising either position, but by finding what precedes and exceeds both affirmation and negation. Whether you enter this inquiry as a committed nihilist, a convinced believer, or someone wandering between certainty and doubt, the method remains the same: radical openness to what is actually happening in the depths of human experience.
You'll encounter symbols throughout the book: [?], [o], [/], [...], [∞], [—], [( )]. They are conceptual landmarks rather than technical terms to master. They mark different territories of human experience—different modes of being, so to speak—the vexing questions that won't let go, the elaborate distractions we build around our fundamental uncertainties, the strange condition of being a ghost in your own shell.
The book moves through three movements: first, destabilizing inherited answers, then confronting the impossibility of final self-knowledge, and finally discovering what becomes possible when we stop demanding certainty. This isn't masochistic difficulty for the sake of difficulty—it's the necessary path through genuine existential crisis toward what can only be called grace.
Confusion and disturbance are part of the method, not a failure of comprehension. You're meant to feel occasionally lost, estranged, even frustrated. This disorientation serves a purpose—it creates space for genuine transformation through correspondence, rather than mere intellectual understanding.
In this way, the book performs the very crisis it examines, inviting you to inhabit the questions rather than escape them. Like the deliberate challenge of mystical texts or the complexity of jazz improvisation, it asks you to develop new capacities—not just for thinking, but for corresponding. What emerges isn't answers in the conventional sense, but something more valuable: a way of inhabiting uncertainty—that transfigures uncertainty into possibility.
tl;dr: this book is a dark-night-of-the-soul manifesto for anyone who's asked the deep questions and been horrified by the silence that answered.
What's Coming
Over the coming weeks, I'll be sharing excerpts from the book that explore:
Why staring at your own hands can trigger an existential crisis
Getting personal: from doubting pastor's kid to [?]
Civilisation, history, progress as an avoidance of the difficult questions
What happens when the theater of self-improvement finally collapses
Why nightmares are essential to sanity
Ultimate miscommunication in the form of the problem of suicide
What the jazz musician knows about authenticity that therapy does not
An Invitation to Correspondence
If you seek smooth narratives or neatly packaged conclusions, this probably isn't for you. But if you're willing to enter a conversation that might change not just what you think but how you exist—if you're ready for thinking that feels more like jazz than logic, more like prayer than proposition—then we begin together here, now, in correspondence.
The wild possibility that begins where the self ends is not a destination to reach but a dimension of existence to inhabit. It's available at this moment, in the space between these words, in the pause before you decide whether to subscribe.
First excerpt drops Monday. The spiral awaits. The questions are calling. The possibility of authentic transformation hovers at the edge of every genuine inquiry.
The Last Existential Crisis is coming 2025. This Substack will share exclusive excerpts, behind-the-scenes insights, and ongoing correspondence about what it means to be human in an age of infinite, lossy answers. → HERE IS THE MANIFESTO.