Beyer - I dont really love you: and other gentle reminders of existential dread in your everyday life

Now, if I were to start things off the way I really wanted to, this introduction would go something like this:

In the solemn bleariness of morning, I often watch the sun trying to touch the city, following my train, and me with it. Some days I wonder if today is the day, if I were to initiate the count, that its light would finally cease in the five hundred seconds it takes me to travel through space. Then I wait, in eight minutes of moribund expectation.

However, if I did that youd stop reading, and doubt if I actually had any friends.

So lets change the subject to something more comforting: Existential Dread. Some people think thats about dark truths. Others might call existential dread a pretentious attitude that attacks the absurdity of the world. I have always chosen to bring dread back to its primary tenet: authenticity.

Admit it. Its easy to go weeks and years in the routine of our lives, orbiting each other but never moving anywhere. Then the night comes and you cant sleep and the world shakes at the importance of its own acknowledgment: You Will Not Live Forever.

You know, fun stuff like that.

Against this backdrop, it is perhaps only natural that my preferred art seems to be the kind that most leaves the spectator with a sense of confused emotion. An upbeat, jangling song, punctuated by desolate, venomous lyrics. A finely painted masterwork about the end of the world. That dichotomythats where I choose to live.

And it is the foundation for my project, 365 Days of Dread, as well as the book before you now.

Over the past few years, I have taken photos of animals and pets from around my life and received a number of submissions from others in my city of Philadelphia. Using these images, I have been able to slowly grow and refine 365 Days of Dread in its online form as the Existential Pets series.

What a long way to say that I like sad stuff.

Thats why I started this project. The Existential Pets touches on this aspect of uncomfortable and unclear emotion. It also examines and remarks on all media, whether it is social, published, or otherwise. From selfies to baby photos to the obsession with pictures of our pets, I want this project to serve as a reminder of an element of dread that still exists within the everyday, as we feel both closer to and farther away from one another in the digital age. We are obsessed with constant content to feel fulfilled. I think its important to remind everyone that all human history will one day be burned away by a dying sun.

Also, pets. Come onthey are the absurdly perfect foil for the melancholic realizations we suffer in the modern era. But Ive always wanted this project to have a tangible formone that can be gifted and shared in a new way. And this is just that.

So here it is: my anti-devotional, my daily un-devotional. Call it whatever youd like. Just choose to either accept or deny the ephemeral nature of all things, because in the end were still spinning through space. Laugh, but dont forget.

ALEX BEYER

PHILADELPHIA, PA