A year ago today, one of my favorite artists, the legendary filmmaker and philanthropist David Lynch, passed away.

His name has morphed into an adjective in its own right—Lynchian—describing, depending on who you ask, something that comes close to a depiction of everyday American life but in a way that feels dreamlike, uncanny, and maybe even a bit nightmarish. The writer David Foster Wallace, who tagged along on a movie set of Lynch’s once for an article, wrote that he was unsure if the director was a genius, or insane.

Even if you don’t love his movies, or find them strange, or difficult to understand, consider the advice of Marcel Duchamp who said “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.”

And as artists of any kind, whether you draw, paint, make films, or, like me, write, we owe a great deal of gratitude to David Lynch for pushing the boundaries of his craft, and taking us along on his process for creativity.

He was a tireless advocate for meditation, specifically Transcendental Meditation, and wrote a book on his creative process titled Catching The Big Fish, which I’m currently reading.

Over the holidays, I read Dennis Lim’s David Lynch: The Man From Another Place, which was a short but wonderful biography about the evolution of Lynch’s career and how his upbringing and unique approach to art impacted his creative decisions.

The Genesis of The Art Life

When Lynch was 15 years old, his girlfriend introduced him to her friend Toby, whose father, Bushnell Keeler, was an artist. Visiting the elder Keeler’s studio, he was “shocked to learn its possible to make a living that way.” Before he left, Keeler gave him a copy of The Art Spirit by Robert Henri.

Lynch was captivated at that point by the symbol of possibility, and in that moment committed to himself that he would live what he called The Art Life.

The Lynchian Doughnut Hole

Lynch was often asked to define the term, Lynchian, as if he was the one who had coined it. And each time, he would decline, or give an evasive answer. Often, he would bring up his favorite phrase:

“Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole. A concept like Lynchian is more like the hole. If I start thinking about that, it’s dangerous.”

David Foster Wallace wrote that Lynchian is:

“…a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

Leave Room To Dream

In many interviews, Lynch was asked if he could expound on the meaning of his film’s and he would always respond with a precise “No.” Lim writes in his biography:

“Words for him are not just reductive, they are dangerous, anathema to his view of art as fundamentally enigmatic.”

Instead, he believed his films should “leave room to dream.”

Where Ideas Come From

For David Lynch, ideas have an almost mystical notion to them.

“They have a life of their own, independent of the artist, waiting to be plucked from the ether.”

He likened himself to a radio, “tuning in inspiration on odd frequencies.”

Uncertainty Is The Allure

Both Stephen King and Haruki Murakami have talked about not outlining or plotting before writing their books, believing that if the author is surprised by where the story goes, the audience definitely will be.

The same was true for Lynch for whom the uncertainty was the allure.

“Part of what makes David’s films unique is that they’re mysteries he’s trying to solve.”

We, the audience, get to watch him discover what happens as the story unfolds.

Work To Support Your Art

Aspiring artists love to romanticize the “struggling artist” who devotes all their time to their craft, even if that means living below the poverty line, when in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth for many of the greatest writers and artists in history.

This was certainly not the case for David Lynch. When his grant money for Eraserhead ran out, filming came to a halt and he scrambled to find work in order to pay his rent. He landed a gig delivering the Wall Street Journal at night, and it would take a total of four years for him to have enough money to complete the movie the way he wanted. He would study maps and routes to find ways to finish his deliveries quicker so that he could go back to his art.

Make Art That Engulfs

While in art school, Lynch called his paintings “symphonies”, a sign of the synthesia that characterized his approach to art. His goal was not only to bring his paintings to life, but “to become an environment that engulfs the spectator.”

Think of Philadelphia

The places we live in have an enormous impact on our creativity. Both Edgar Allen Poe and David Lynch, artists of the macabre and dread, spent significant time living in Philadelphia.

For Lynch, just thinking about the city he called home during his art school days was transportive.

“I just have to think of Philadelphia and I get ideas.”

Create Fully Furnished Worlds

“Lynch sees his movies as worlds to inhabit; for devoted fans they are often environments that encourage lingering.”

The author Umberto Eco once wrote that the pre-condition for a film to attain cult status is for it to create “a completely furnished world.”

Great Work Needs Nursing

Sometimes your art needs to be nursed along until people finally “get it.” Barenholtz TK opened Eraserhead in the fall of 1977, at the Cinema Village in downtown Manhattan. Only 25 people showed up on opening night.

But enough people kept coming for it to hold onto its midnight spot. To those early viewers, the film must have seemed to possess the potential to “derange the senses and confuse dream and reality.”

Open The Lid

Lynch, as I mentioned above, was always coy about what his movies were about. In an early interview in 1977, he caved and offered a subtle hint:

“Everybody has a subconscious and they put a lid on it. There’s things in there.”

On it’s face, this says very little. But read it again, and it says a lot, about his movies’ themes, and his recommendation to creating art

Do Something With Your Hands

After Eraserhead, Lynch spent his time building sheds.

“He built obsessively, constructing a garage, a painting studio, sheds for storage. It was tactile, satisfying work—a more intimate and utilitarian form of world building.”

When asked about his love of sheds in one interview, he said:

“They can be used for storage, and they can be used for little places to be.”

Show Things Normally Hidden

Blue Velvet had such a profound impact on David Foster Wallace, he wrote that the film brought home to he and his grad school friends

“…that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual, but wasn’t even fully conscious.”

Dive Deeper and Catch Bigger Fish

“His movies are the weird tales that give form to the submerged traumas and desires of our age, perhaps even to questions that have haunted artists and thinkers for centuries: how to explain evil, how to live with fear, how to hold the self together, how to keep reality as we know it from falling apart.”

In the end, what he became known for, and what we all can take as a lesson for our lives, for our art, is to dive deeper to catch the bigger fish.

The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca once wrote about making the most of out of life:

The life we are given isn’t short but we make it so; we’re not ill provided but we are wasteful of life. Just as impressive and princely wealth is squandered in an instant when it passes into the hands of a poor manager, but wealth however modest grows through careful deployment if it is entrusted to a responsible guardian, just so our lifetime offers ample scope to the person who maps it out well.

I thought about this quote from Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life, when I heard the news yesterday that Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoons and nonfiction author, passed away at age 68 after a battle with prostate cancer.

He was a controversial figure, and I didn’t always agree with his politics, but he was one of the most original and vocal thinkers of our time. He used the latter part of his life building a name for himself beyond his original fame as a cartoonist, writing books on persuasion, storytelling, and life lessons.

His estate posted his final letter on X. It’s worth a read in its entirety, but I wanted to call out the final passage, where he wrote:

“I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had.”

We should all aspire to look back on our lives, in our final moments, and be able to say the same.

I devoured all of the usual books they give to first, second, and third-graders before finding my groove with R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps. I devoured every copy of that series and its spinoffs, and started a Goosebumps book club in the fourth grade. I was obsessed. 

By the time I reached high school, I had no problem reading any of the assigned classic literature books. It never felt like “work” to me, even if I didn’t particularly love some of the stories.  I guess I mostly just assumed most people read books. Sadly, that isn’t the case anymore and it’s getting a lot worse.

Still, I can’t deny my own love of reading them and now, after many years of thinking “maybe I should” / “maybe I shouldn’t”, I’ve decided it’s time to not just read books, but to start writing them. 

There’s a lot to unpack here, whether it be about the process of admitting to yourself that you are, in fact, an artist, or how to overcome social stigma, the learning curve of entering a new field, or the perceived shame of starting over in life. All of that will have to come in time. For this post, I want to briefly touch on what I hope to do here, with this site, via a quick background story.

I left the corporate world at the end of 2022 and decided to instead build a life around time freedom. I wanted to figure out how to be a creator, whatever that meant, build an audience, and mostly spend more time with my kids. I experimented with growing on X, writing on Substack, and eventually, around April 2024, I decided I wanted to write a book. A nonfiction book to be precise. I was reading a lot at the time about the field of consciousness research and landed on a specific angle that captured my imagination. I smelled an interesting story and decided I would be the one to write it. 

After tracking down the relevant people for the story and convincing them to agree to let me interview them, I set about writing. Every day, at 4am, I would sneak out of bed, tiptoeing down the hall to avoid waking my wife or kids, heat up some water for a tea, and begin writing. I committed to writing 1,000 words every morning before the rest of the world woke up. After about 40,000 words, roughly halfway through, the project began to show cracks. Some of the people I’d interviewed began to get cold feet. Agents and editors told me that nonfiction basically requires a massive author platform to even be considered. And I started to lose the initial excitement I had for the project. 

After all was said and done, the entire project took up almost a year of my life, only to end with nothing to show for it. By this point, I had stopped posting on social media, stopped emailing my newsletter subscribers (to all of you who stuck with me, thank you). In addition, my severance had long run out and we were now relying mostly on my wife’s income which didn’t make me feel good about any of it. It was a shame filled part of 2025 that felt like waking up from a bad dream. 

To get my life back on track, I spent the last part of 2025 putting my head down and looking for consulting work. After a few different experiments I landed on something I both enjoy and had clear market need. And a software product I was involved in finally started to grow, adding to my personal cashflow. With a bank account that started to go up again I felt I could breathe. I asked myself what it was I truly wanted to do heading into the new year.

After wrestling with a few directions for a bit, I finally admitted that what I really loved was stories. And the way to tell stories with zero handcuffs was to write fiction. I just never had the balls to admit to myself that I could (A) be a good fiction writer, and (B) make a living at it.

Solving for those two things was incredibly simple in hindsight, but I had to get over a lot of internal B.S. to arrive at the answers. Those answers were, in order:

(A) Who says you have to be good? Good is something readers will decide, not you. Your job is to write.

(B) Who says you have to make any money at all doing it? If you love something, just do it. There are plenty of ways to make money to support the things you love. And many writers worked full-time jobs in completely different fields as they wrote their first few books.

Perhaps it’s the immigrant-scarcity-mentality that was drilled into me from a young age? Who knows. Maybe I’ll explore that at a different time.

What I do know is that once I solved for that, and let go of any status-seeking that previously plagued my creativity, everything felt lighter. As if a weight from my shoulders was removed and I could feel myself again, moving lightly through the world. I smiled again. I started meditating again. I became more present with the family. With my wife. I started to drop body fat and get back into shape. And with this renewed sense of enjoyment, creativity started flowing, uncontrollably, as if a firehose had been opened.

One particular day comes to mind where, as I drove my one-year old son to his daycare, I decided to not put any music or podcast on and just enjoy the sounds of traffic and the humming of the engine. In that space of stillness, the entire story for my first book came to me in a sudden flash. The entire thing, almost dangling above my head. I pulled over to the shoulder of the road, turned on the emergency blinkers, and pulled out my pocket notebook to write it all down before I would forget. And now, that’s the basis, or the skeleton if you will, for my first novel.

What I wanted to do here, in 2026, and moving forward, was to have fun documenting my process of becoming a writer. It’s so much fun to realize who you are meant to become and nothing would make me happier than for my work to find its way to the hands of eventual readers, and for this site to be a home where they (you) can binge my other writing and musings. Broadly, I will be writing about the three areas of my life where I’m most passionate: consciousness, creativity, and books. Since I love the freedom of being able to talk about whatever I want, whenever I want, and letting that authenticity be its own sort of measuring stick, expect diversions from those topics every now and then.

I’ll still be posting to Substack so sign up for my newsletter there, where I’ll be posting long-form essays, fleshed out short stories, and weekly roundups with links to any new posts that go live here on the blog. I’d love to have you join along for the ride.

Here’s to a fun 2026.