Thirty-two-year-old Carl Kinsella worries about stuff. The columnist, script writer and author of a new collection of insightful, moving and funny essays worries about his health, about his parents, about the world, about how this book will be received. He’s even worried about being interviewed. “I kind of black out when I’m speaking,” he says. “I come to afterwards and I’m like, ‘What? What did I say?’”
He needn’t worry. He’s thoughtful and funny and speaks in long, perfectly formed sentences, with an occasional tendency to portmanteaux words together when existing ones don’t do the trick. His book, At Least it Looks Good from Space: A Catalogue of Modern, Millennial and Personal Catastrophes is about the internet, anxiety, masculinity and sleep, and veers effortlessly from the personal to the sociological and political.
We meet in a cafe in Smithfield near where he lives. He has a moustache and a white T-shirt and a woolly hat. It would be tempting to label him a “voice of the millennial generation” but he rejects this out of hand. “I am the voice of maybe two dozen people,” he insists.
When Hachette first approached him about writing a book, he was “wary”, he says. “I’m a wary person. I think that’s honestly a pretty defining characteristic of mine ... It was very important to me to produce something that didn’t feel like it was trying to pander to anyone. I really just wanted to write a book that reflected my own thoughts and to try to not worry too much about what people would think about it, which is, of course, impossible.”
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The first essay, Excuses, Excuses, maps out his experience of growing up with the internet. He writes compellingly about this as a digital native who first went online to visit message boards as a child. “The internet as I understood it when I was 12 was so cool. So much of it back then was hobbyists and people who were passionate about things, just sharing with absolutely no profit incentive whatsoever.”
He talks about Unfortunate Series of Events fan groups and his Bebo page and other, stranger artefacts of the time. “I used to spend days on the internet when I was 12, reading this comprehensive blog about how Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by an impostor..” He laughs. “I loved that. For me that was what the internet was for ... I think once it became the case that they all realised that there was so much money to be made from data, we just lost the thread of what made the internet good.”
He writes about how “social media”, a place to meet people, has become “algorithmic media”, a place where we are all spoon-fed simplistic content by corporate algorithms. “It’s really not about wishing someone a happy birthday any more, or posting photo collages or organising events. It’s now designed to keep people who are not particularly internet savvy online as often as possible, watching AI slop and poorly made videos and engaging with misinformation and incendiary content.”
How does he think it’s affecting us? “I think the short-formisation of both text and video removes nuance and removes the amount of time we have to think about things. The incentives that are built into something like TikTok or Twitter are that you’re going to get more engagement if you inflame people and you upset people, and so you generate engagement that’s not thoughtful and not conducive to the furthering of our understanding of each other or any issue. [It] isn’t designed to help you understand things. It’s not designed to help you share your story in a meaningful way. It’s designed to make sure that you communicate in the most easy-to-understand way. And oftentimes, if we’re trying to make things as easy to understand as possible, you’re losing all the things that make them what they are.”
[ Has social media finally peaked? The rise of AI and decline of screen timeOpens in new window ]
His whole writing career – in Joe.ie and then the Journal – emerged from him being slightly addicted to Twitter in its pre-Elon Musk days. There he made keen observations and jokes and enacted, from time to time, funny pranks. Once he spread a rumour that the Luas was free, and Transport Ireland had to release a statement. “I was unemployed at the time. I was living in London. I was working on a novel. This was towards the tail end of the second year of Covid, so it was quite a nihilistic time. I’m not totally sure exactly what my mind frame would have been. In the book I use the word Knoxvillian [after Jackass host Johnny Knoxville] to describe it. That Jackass impulse, to be mildly disruptive and create some degree of mischief.”
He loved Jackass. “If there was some way I could establish some sort of Irish Jackass, I would do it. With [online comedians and his friends] Michael Fry and Sean Burke ... I’d love if they’d let me stampede them with a herd of buffalo. When I look at Johnny Knoxville getting stampeded by buffalo, I’m like, ‘I desperately want this to happen to me’.”
Going viral online, as he describes it, is a little like being stampeded by a buffalo. It’s as anxiety inducing as it is satisfying. “Once you put something out there, it just escapes your own sphere. You’re sharing it for your audience, but once you hit a different audience it changes. If you live online it bleeds into your personality ... On social media I think your inside voice becomes your outside voice, and then the internet’s voice becomes your inside voice. So the whole thing is just a very noxious cycle of not thinking hard enough about what you’re saying, not thinking hard enough about what you’re reading, and not making any progress towards any healthy goals.”
[ Challenging myths about OCDOpens in new window ]
Even without the internet, he has a tendency towards anxiety. In another essay he writes very movingly about having OCD and experiencing disturbing intrusive thoughts. “I think OCD’s been misrepresented on TV and in the movies,” he says. “People think that the user-end symptoms – the washing of one’s hands – that that’s the core problem. If someone with OCD is washing their hands a lot, it’s because they’ve gotten themselves into a head space where they’re convinced that something truly abominable is going to happen to them or their loved ones ... and for whatever reason the washing of the hands in some way relieves that anxiety.”
He gives an example of what he was going through. “My dad gave me a driving lesson once, and I crashed the car into a railing. And that was distressing enough. It was just a railing in a council car park. There was nobody around, but I fully got it in my head that I hit a child. I would go to my mam, ‘Could you please get dad to go back and check there’s no body, no blood.’ And it’s just ludicrous, completely insane. I have no explanation for why I’m so convinced that I had just hit a child with my car.” He laughs and adds: “If there’s going to be a quote in bold on top of the article that’s definitely not the quote I want.”
He likens it to having “a puppet regime installed in your head. And the bits of you that you can still hold on to are like a government in exile trying to keep the population calm.”
He found OCD cathartic to write about. He has, after all, been thinking about it for a very long time. Other essays in the book were more difficult emotionally, he says. “Probably the most draining part was the seventh essay where I write about a friend who passed away in secondary school,” he says. “A big theme in that essay is the idea of losing people who are once in your life. And that ties in, I suppose, with thoughts of my parents getting older ... Those aren’t things that I chew my friends’ ears off about. They’re not things I tweet about. They’re not things I’ve written columns about. Writing about that kind of thing was very new for me, and that made it more of a shock to the system when you see it laid out in text in front of you.”
I sense people like Peter Thiel want to do away with people who live lives of quiet meaning
— Carl Kinsella
He also writes really well about masculinity and identity. He paints his younger self as a confused My Chemical Romance-loving footballer. “I played for my local football team,” he says. “And I remember coming back from whatever summer holiday I was on, being 13 years old, having long hair, really not looking like a soccer player at all. And I don’t know why, but I painted my nails black to go to training. Even at the time, I was like, ‘What are you doing? You’re looking for attention. Everybody’s going to hate this.’ I felt like I was hard to categorise, and so I wanted to subject everyone else to how hard to categorise I was.” He laughs. “How obnoxious.”
He’s a very good columnist, writing about Irish society and politics. But he still feels like an outsider in the Irish media environment. “If you look at the kind of people who have the privilege of commenting on what’s going on, it’s usually a certain type of person. They’re usually over a certain age, they’re usually of a certain background, whether that’s ethnically or financially.”
He thinks Irish media needs more diversity. In his own columns, he says he’s completely disinterested in discussing political tactics or realpolitik, and wants to talk about how policies affect real people’s lives. “There’s a traditionalist bent in Irish media where there’s a level of comfort with the status quo,” he says. “I find the status quo very uncomfortable. When it comes to the lack of access to housing and healthcare, there are hundreds of thousands of people whose lives are being constrained and curtailed and damaged ... Ultimately the overall system and order of society under which we live is not conducive to producing people-first outcomes. It is conducive to making money for a very small handful of people, and until there’s a crystallisation of that for everyone, we’re going to be stuck making at best piecemeal improvements to transport and healthcare and housing.”
He thinks this is most obvious when you look at tech chief executives. “Thatcher, I think, saw people as drones and as workers and as people who could be ground up in a mill and produce economic outcomes. I think the tech CEOs don’t even see people as that. I think they see people as an obstacle and a nuisance who will maybe be of use to them for the next five to 10 years, after which all of the human beings will be replaced by AI. If you listen to people like Peter Thiel [the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder who is close to Donald Trump], their worldview does not include us. I definitely get a sort of primordial fear watching them, afraid of them in an almost evolutionary sense. I sense that they want to do away with people who live lives of quiet meaning.”
In the history books he reads, he says, there are kings with names like “Louis the Mad” or “Charles the Insane”. “And then you look at the cognitive decline that Joe Biden was experiencing in his presidency, and the total unreality that Donald Trump presents to the world. I don’t want to make it seem as though we’re living in the 1600s, but there’s a through line.”
Listening to Kinsella, sometimes it feels like maybe he is a “voice of a generation”. He shakes his head in horror. “If anyone could credibly lay claim to being the voice of a generation, unfortunately it’s not someone who writes books,” he says. “If you were streamer or a YouTuber you’re probably better attuned to the whims and desires and inclinations of my generation than I am. I could maybe speak on behalf of some of my friends.”
If anything, he says, he feels more of an affinity with Generation X. “One of my absolute favourite books is Generation X by Douglas Copeland. And I loved The Simpsons. I love Daria. Certainly, in terms of my physical capacities, I think I’m a slacker. Millennials and Gen Zers give the impression of being quite energetic people. I definitely identify more with a slacker thing.”
Indeed, he has a whole essay on his relationship to sleeping, which he likens to almost a “hobby”. Has he ever read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, which is about a young woman who takes to her bed? He has. “There have been times in my life where I’ve taken maybe eight months to a year off work and I’ve just hung around writing and living off my savings and dossing off. And I definitely have felt in those moments, like I am Year-of-Rest-and-Relaxationing myself. But I never really get anywhere when I take that approach to life, when I try to wrap myself up in my duvet and hide away from the world, because that is really my instinct when I’m feeling any kind of distress ... I still spend a lot of time hiding, and a lot of time avoiding social interactions.”
Nonetheless, his mental health is a lot better these days. He’s working on a novel (as well as Douglas Copeland, he loves Donna Tartt and Eleanor Cattan). He’s much more offline these days, and he collaborates with comedy writers such as the aforementioned Seán Burke and Michael Fry.
After all his consideration of identity, what does he want to be? He considers this for a while. “I wish I was a human muppet.” (I tell him that that will probably be the pull quote). “That’s the kind of content I want to make. I’m nowhere near as wholesome as the Muppets, and there’s a cynicism that exists now that maybe didn’t exist in [Muppets creator] Jim Henson’s time, or maybe Jim Henson was just immune to it. But I think it would be very hard to create something now that reflects those sensibilities. It still had undercurrents. Gonzo was true self-destruction. Sam the Eagle is a critique of American patriotism. It’s funny and incisive and there’s a degree of warmth to it. Kermit was a guy who ran a theatre and ran a variety show and had this cavalcade of freaks.” He pauses and laughs. “I just like that idea of an artistic collective that’s pulling together. So if you ask me who I admire, my answer is Jim Henson.”
At Least It Looks Good From Space: A Catalogue of Modern, Millennial and Personal Catastrophes by Carl Kinsella is published by Hachette Books Ireland
