When the Infrastructure Fails...

The year is 2026. The country of my birth has just spent the holiday season raining down bombs and terror on nations abroad. Two days ago we kidnapped a foreign leader and brought him to my home city. We are two years and three months into funding and enabling one of the most horrendous human rights atrocities I've ever witnessed with my own 32-year-old eyes.

I have rewritten this essay at least three times.

Originally, this started as a professional outlet to brag about my resume, qualifications, and knowledge in advertising, media, entertainment, and the creator space. To attract potential clients—artists, entrepreneurs, athletes, digital creators—to work with me to monetize their craft and build sustainable value from the communities they've created.

But here's the truth: with every rewrite, every new client I take on IRL, and every unprecedented event I live through, it becomes more clear that the world I knew is not the world ahead of me. I've built expertise using the tools of a master I no longer believe will survive. I can be both really good at my job and totally unbelieving that my job is as effective as it once was.

When the infrastructure fails, you realize how much you were building on borrowed stability. My entire career is fluent in systems that are dying. The media landscape I mastered? Collapsing. The platforms I helped others grow audiences on? Controlled by billionaires who wake up and decide whether your work gets seen. The advertising industry that once valued creativity? Replacing brilliant humans with AI that does the job half as well.

So what do I do now? What do we do now?

I'm launching this newsletter with a confession: I don't have it all figured out. But I do have ten years of damn good pattern recognition, a wealth of practical knowledge about how to make money as a creative right now, and a growing urgency to become the artist I've been too afraid to be.

So here's what this newsletter is going to be—two things at once:

Part One: Practical Tools for Surviving the Transition
Every issue will include actionable strategies for monetizing creativity in 2026. How to build platform-agnostic communities. How to productize your services. How to own your audience before the next algorithm change or billionaire tantrum makes it disappear. I know these systems intimately because I helped build them. And while they're breaking, they still work—for now.

Part Two: My Stumbling Attempt to Become the Artist
I'm also going to use this space to find my own creative "thing." My magnum opus. The thing I'll be known for beyond my career. I'll be documenting experiments, false starts, and small victories as I try to unlock whatever has been locked inside me since I chose financial security over doubling down on my creative talents.

You get the blueprints. I get accountability. We both get community.

This newsletter is for the person who is too creative to be satisfied with their current role, but too scared, too practical, or too financially traumatized to go all in on art.

It's for the little girl I used to be—the one who thought she'd be a pop star, Broadway lead, or background singer for a high-energy gospel artist, but never pursued the arts with the fervency she pursued her education because of financial trauma. The one who would rather have been a "real" financially secure adult than a struggling artist.

It's for anyone who learned to be useful instead of free.

I entered advertising and media as an intern in 2011, working my way through high-profile corporate gigs, watching the attention economy devour journalism, watching physical media turn to websites turn to social pages turn to algorithmic feeds that steal our attention before we even realize what we came for. I followed the money from PR to paid media, and I watched media die from the inside.

Now, a decade+ in, I know exactly which levers to pull and which platforms to use to build and grow a space. I've had clients at the center of cultural conversation. I could rinse, wash, and repeat proven formulas for businesses and creators alike.

But for how long?

My stated goal is simple: Unstarve the Artist. Use everything in my professional arsenal to help creatives make sustainable livings from their work. I truly believe the internet was supposed to democratize us—remove the middleman between what we think, make, and put into the world. And for now, it's what we have.

But my secret goal? To simultaneously prepare for what comes next. Because the world is changing so quickly that I don't want to miss it when it does. And I'd like to bring you along when I do.

In this newsletter, I'll cover everything from:

This is a space for people who are figuring it out, not people who have it figured out. I don't believe in the guru model anymore. I believe in scouts—people who go ahead, report back, and admit when they're lost.

Here's what I need from you to make this work:

Tell me: What's the creative thing you're too afraid to admit you want to do?

Reply to this email or comment below. I'm building this community around shared unbecoming—the process of shedding the identity that kept us safe but small. Your answer helps me know who's in the room and what we're working toward together.

Also, here's my working definition of "artist" for this space: Anyone creating something that didn't exist before. Visual art, music, screenplays—sure. But also athletes who take rigid rules and make them their own. Entrepreneurs who pull ideas from the ether and build them into reality. If you're making something, you're an artist. The tent is big here.

I see old systems collapsing everywhere. And while it's terrifying, there has never been a better time to take the place of what's dying. I see a world where people with ideas, intellectual property, and curated communities are well-compensated for their thinking. We've seen surges of this over the last decade—Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, even the much-hated NFTs showed us the possibility, even if bad actors poisoned the well.

The tools exist for us to create a digital world that makes it easier for creatives to monetize and harder for culture vultures to steal from us. We're not there yet. But the possibility is there.

I built this newsletter for me. But I'm also building it for you—if you're the creative who chose practicality over passion, who learned to make other people's visions come to life while your own stayed dormant, who knows something has to change but doesn't know what comes next.

Let's figure out the next move together.

Next issue: Platform-Agnostic Strategy 101, and my first creative experiment (spoiler: I'm terrified).

Welcome to Unstarve the Artist.
A newsletter for creatives navigating the end of one world and the beginning of another.

P.S. - If you're interested in working with me one-on-one to monetize your creative work or build your brand, you can schedule a consultation through my [Calendly]. For more on my background and services, check out my [LinkedIn].