Aging Out, by Adam Lehrer

Reflections on career shifts and lapses in creativity

Between 2019 and 2024, I experienced what can only be described as a creative fever dream. Looking back, the volume of work I produced feels almost impossible, as though I had stumbled into some transcendental current and, for a few miraculous years, forgot what it meant to struggle. It began when I came out as a right-winger in 2019 and, seemingly overnight, lost nearly every writing contract and artistic connection I had. I wrote an essay about the experience, self-published it on my website, and, to my surprise, it went viral.

Everything seemed to cascade from there. In the aftermath, I started the System of Systems podcast in late 2019 and, not long afterward—2020, or was it 2021?—I opened this blog. I wrote hundreds of essays, stories, and poems. I wrote three books, and got two of them published (the third still lies dormant in the Cloud.) I started a performance art rock n’ roll band, Botched Chadification, with one of my best friends, and what began as an absurd joke somehow became a full-length album and, even more ridiculously, actual concert bookings. Several of my favorite artists became close friends—the surest sign, I think, that you’ve stumbled onto something genuinely interesting—and I found myself cultivating a real audience of disaffected, disappointed readers, mostly men, though plenty of women came along too.

When I look back on that period now, I find myself asking: What propelled that manic work rate? It wasn't drugs. Give or take a couple of ketamine binges, I'd already left most of that behind, and my days of serious partying were years in the rearview. There were practical reasons, I suppose. The pandemic freed me from my day job and convinced me to take the internet seriously—not merely as a distribution platform, but as a medium in its own right. So I consumed art with almost monastic discipline. I watched films, read books, listened to music, wandered through paintings, and everything I absorbed I did so with a singular intention: to alchemize it into ideas, into sentences, into essays, stories, books, songs, new projects. Nothing was allowed to remain merely consumption. Everything had to become fuel.

But if I'm being honest, I think the real creative impetus was desperation. I had crossed into my mid-thirties, and it felt like now or never, my last real chance to establish a voice in public before resigning myself to obscurity. Then the work started finding readers, and the feedback became its own addiction. My blood would boil with anticipation as I watched people react with equal measures of enthusiasm and fury to what, to me, often felt like throwaway lines dashed off in an afternoon. The detractors became as intoxicating as the supporters. In fact, the more evenly divided they were, the more convinced I became that I was onto something. Nothing truly worthwhile is greeted with universal praise. (Sinners has a 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, after all. Lol.)

Since 2025, my output of raw creative work has slowed considerably, which only makes sense given how radically my life has changed. I got married in 2023. At the end of 2024, my favorite teacher from my NYU days, the writer David Samuels, reached out and changed my life by offering me a salaried position at Tablet magazine, a job I take with absolute seriousness and one that necessarily takes precedence over whatever transgressive conceptual art project might otherwise seize my imagination. Then, in 2025, I became a father to a beautiful and increasingly spunky little boy, Rustin.

By the time I’ve finished work and gotten him to sleep, I’d usually rather watch some shitty television or fuck my wife than crack open another difficult book. And when I do read, I find myself reaching for Karl Ove Knausgaard or Stephen King, writers I know I’ll simply enjoy instead of mining for quotations to dutifully transcribe into the Apple Notes app, where they’ll wait to be repurposed into some future essay. The relationship has changed. I don’t experience every novel, film, or painting as raw material anymore. Relaxation and pleasure, sure, but it feels considerably lower stakes.

Needless to say, life is different. Making art is, in many ways, a selfish act, requiring a kind of obsessive self-possession that borders on solipsism. At least for now, my responsibilities require a measure of selflessness. For perhaps the first time in my 37 years, I have people I love more than I love my own ideas.

Sometime in the middle of 2025, I became convinced that I was washed up. And I don’t mean washed up as in “going through a funk.” I mean Anderson Silva seven fights into his career-ending losing streak washed up. The muse had packed her bags, and I was already rehearsing the story I would someday tell about that brief, improbable period when everything had come so effortlessly.

The absurdity, of course, was that I hadn’t stopped writing. Spend five minutes on my author page at Tablet and the notion that my career had somehow ended is obviously ridiculous. But writing for a publication has never carried quite the same feeling of limitless freedom as writing simply to discover where a sentence might lead. Journalism is creative discipline. Art is drifting into a dream.

I think that’s why, after dabbling in photography, music, performance, and a dozen other creative pursuits, I always return to writing. It’s the endlessness of it. A blank page is an abyss, and somehow the act of projecting consciousness into that void causes narrative and form to materialize where there was previously nothing. Four hundred years of technological upheaval later, the essential act remains unchanged. In that sense, writing is no different for me than it was for Shakespeare. It is simultaneously ancient and contemporary, primitive and inexhaustibly modern. That’s the sublime quality of it.

But just because my first creative renaissance may be behind me doesn’t mean there won’t be others. Maybe they’ll arrive when Rustin is an angry teenager and no longer needs me hovering over him. Maybe they’ll come in my fifties, when my body starts protesting its own existence, or in my sixties, when my libido finally gives up. Maybe they won’t arrive until I’m an old man staring down death itself. Who knows. For most of my life, I believed the tragedy was that life is short. I’m no longer convinced that’s true. Life is astonishingly, almost unbearably long. Long enough to become several different people. Long enough to exhaust one imagination and discover another waiting quietly beneath it. The trick, I suspect, is learning not to mourn the ebb quite so much that you miss the tide returning.