Age of Reason: A Young Man’s Journey Out of the 80s

I wrote this series of essays in the 6 months either side of my 21st birthday trying to capture where I was in my life. There are nuggets of truth in all of them, but there is also some extreme hyperbole. Now 23 years later I have decided to publish it, as my life has gone in very different directions from where I was at that point, and I feel that it is important to honour the dreams and wishes that I had back then, and to give the confused and sad young man who wrote it a hug and the assurances that life would get better.

I now look back at that young man searching and exploring a world that made little sense to him, while he tried to figure out who he was, what he wanted and how he was going to move forward in the world. He was had few skills to live in the workaday world, but knew how many tynes a fish fork has and enjoyed reading Kafka in German. He could walk down a catwalk with the appropriate flare, but struggled to pay bills or understand the basics of day-to-day finances. As a father now, I feel warmth and love for that young man, as well as a deep sorrow. He hid behind a raft of insecurities and grabbed pleasures from anywhere he could in order to try and lessen the pain. In fact much of his purpose in life was to live in an ongoing state of pleasure, because then he could lose himself.

This is not the best written book, as I have decided to keep it true to how it was originally written, but it gives a very honest window onto my life, dreams, and feelings at that point in time.