“I just want to be fat and old and happy.”
—From “Like a Kennedy” by Joywave
Existential dread is the terrifying feeling that we have when contemplating the uncertain nature of our existence. This feeling is not unwarranted, considering our only certainty is that we will die. Everything else is unknown.
There are many ways for us to manage existential dread. Perhaps the most adaptive way is for us to accept that we will die and try to find some meaning in our life that grounds us and connects us to a bigger world. Another way is to make light of life. If life is laughing at us with all its absurdity and unpredictability, then we will laugh right back. But, if we can’t face our inevitable demise head on or laugh it off, we may turn to distracting ourselves in a futile attempt to avoid facing our mortality.
In talking with Daniel Armbruster, vocalist and songwriter of Joywave about their new album Possession (2020), it’s hard to escape the notion that he is perpetually grappling with existential dread. In fact, it’s as if he and existential dread are the two people entering the philosophical Thunderdome and Armbruster is determined to utilize all three strategies – purpose, humor and distraction — to ensure that he is the one who leaves.
Armbruster’s first encounter with existential dread seemed to be born out of his belief in the American Dream. “My parents were the first ones in their family to go to college. And they had seen that Boomer dream work out. You go to college, you get the degree, you get the family, you get the house,” Armbruster told me. “So, I was raised to believe that’s what works. I think a lot of people in my generation did what we were told we were supposed to do. We worked hard, went to college and we were told we’d have that 50’s and 60’s dream.”
And yet when Armbruster graduated college, he soon found that the American Dream was not readily available to him. He grew up in Rochester, New York and many of the manufacturing and industry jobs that had bolstered the economies in the area were in decline. “Kodak was the big company in town. Things started to sour for them in the late ‘90s,” Armbruster recalled. “Photographic film sales peaked in 2003 and then things went downhill and started to get bad locally.”
To make matters worse, the Great Recession of 2008 made it incredibly difficult for young people to find employment. So, the trappings of the American Dream that Armbruster had been implicitly promised was not so easily attainable. “I graduate into the Great Recession to find none of those things waiting for me. Everyone I knew growing up who went to a state school found a job unrelated to their degree – like a call center,” Armbruster recalled. “Some people who went to private school for a very specific degree may have found something – but everyone who went to business school struck out. I went to school for history and wound up working at Staples for six years.”
Armbruster began to experience a sense of existential dread and was unclear what lay ahead for him. “You’re working at Staples for just above minimum wage and you’re miserable. It was not financially beneficial … not fun,” he said. “So, at a certain point, it’s like, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
In order to not succumb to his sense of existential dread, Armbruster decided to accept the world as it was and find a sense of purpose in music. “We’ve been trying to figure out the abyss forever. We can’t. Sometimes being able to look at life and say, ‘OK, this is the worst it’s going to get, but maybe there’s another reality. That gets me through tough times. If the college degree success thing is out the window, I might as well be happy. I think it’s a lot about mindset – if I’m alive and breathing then I’m OK,” Armbruster said. “Doing music is what I really love. I could spend all of my time writing music. I got a gig deejaying one night a week to pay my phone bill. That was how I spent my time and I was a lot happier doing that.”
Part of what made his focus on music more enjoyable was understanding that his purpose in music didn’t need to be about making money. “I didn’t place any burden on myself to be financially successful … The chances of making money in music are small,” Armbruster described. “If you’re doing it, it has to be for the right reasons. Whether it’s twenty, twenty thousand, or twenty million people who like what you’re doing, it has to be because you love it.”
Armbruster and Joywave also utilized the second approach by developing a healthy sense of laughing at life. This approach echoes Dadaism in that rather than trying to make sense of an illogical world, we should mirror and revel in its irrationality. Joywave’s website which is a spinoff of Fox News appears to be – as the British call it – taking the piss. And their videos are usually tongue in cheek, to say the least. It’s as if they’re laughing at and crying with us simultaneously.
Armbruster traces back his and Joywave’s Dadaistic approach to The Colbert Show. Armbruster reflected on the irony that Joywave was able to perform on the very same show that helped forge their artistic approach. “When I was working at Staples and nothing was good in my life, The Colbert Show was the only thing that made me laugh — the satire,” Armbruster recalled. “So, it was amazing that I eventually got to be a part of that world.”
Unfortunately, sometimes purpose and humor don’t cut it and existential dread seeps into our consciousness with a fury. Armbruster will still at times fall victim to obsessive thinking and in the song, “Obsession,” he describes looking for a distraction as a way to cope: “I just need something to get me through the night … A new obsession.” And he feels that much of society is now designed to keep us distracted. “My mind is constantly going … If I don’t have something to focus on it’s trouble,” Armbruster explained. “And everything is based on an algorithm – Facebook, Twitter … All it feeds on, all it cares about is clicks.”
Armbruster does not feel that the existential dread facing his generation, and many of us, is going away anytime soon as the social and economic issues that prevent many people from experiencing the American Dream are still present, “One of the most important lines in our new album is in the song “Like a Kennedy” – ‘I want to be fat old and happy’…My generation has seen two giant recessions – the two biggest ones since the Great Depression in the years that we’re supposed to be establishing ourselves – finding a job, starting a family, and all of that. So, I think it really breaks your faith in the status quo – the traditional American Dream.”
Armbruster also finds it difficult to ignore the cyclical nature of the difficulties we face. It almost invites parody as it appears that we have resolved very little. “Everything that’s happening now has happened,” he explained. “I mean in the late 60s we had protests against racism, the space launch and in the 90s Killer Bees. Now we have protests against racism, a space launch, and Murder Hornets.”
Armbruster sees some benefit to his generation struggling with existential dread. He feels that more people in his generation are turning to pursuing their purpose and passions, if only for a lack of any other feasible or appealing pathway.
“I think the new 21st-century model is being independent and having a side hustle. I take jobs producing and writing. So, I find a lot of people finding … a calling like being a chef, or opening a restaurant, or opening a coffee shop,” he said. “Maybe it’s better because you find a way to work for yourself and find a way to be inherently creative. Any business is creative. You’re deciding what it looks like, how it operates, everything. Maybe there’s some good in it in that people were forced to be woken up from that ‘Here’s your business degree go down to the company and start work on Monday.’
“Because it allows people to be more free thinking.”
Photo by Mary Ellen Mattews
