Background—More

I was born in the early hours of a Pennsylvania winter, an only child whose world was a constant collision of extremes: my father's alcoholism and relentless aggression, and the profound, authentic depth of my mother's love.

My first eighteen years were split between two vastly different landscapes. The first was ice hockey — a sport I adored because of the simple, visceral grace of skating, the deep camaraderie of a team, and the inherent humility of the atmosphere. In that arena, there was rarely talk of "I," and only the collective pulse of "we." I was a highly skilled player in my youth, but as I aged, my body simply did not keep pace. I found it difficult to summon the toughness and grit required to excel in a game built for size and speed. Over time, the ice became a place of cold geometry and rigid expectation, driven by my father's unreachable standards. He was a man whose screams followed me into the car and left me in tears — a man who, I couldn't help but feel, always wished I was something I wasn't already.

The second world was the sanctuary I built for myself. A refuge. An escape. Because the environment at home was often loud enough for neighbors to intervene, I spent much of my childhood in my room, staging fictional battles between action figures and meticulously cherishing my trading card collections (Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic: The Gathering, Hockey). I was utterly obsessed with video games and the limitlessly beautiful digital landscapes they offered me. Throughout my childhood, I attended Germantown Academy, a private school where I worked relentlessly to succeed, though the traditional act of memorizing never came easy to me. I was a slow learner who struggled with rote instruction, but capable of obsessive depth when a subject truly captured me. When I wasn't on the ice or in the classroom, I spent my summers as a camp counselor for kids, whom I adored for their naively authentic honesty. I worked weekends at a local restaurant called The Bull Tavern bussing tables and washing dishes, deep in books on computer programming, jailbreaking iPhones, and studying Apple's design philosophy on slow days. Before I turned eighteen, I became obsessed with speaking the language of the machine. Obsessed with the "how" behind the beauty.

I left for the Rochester Institute of Technology as a Computer Science major, later pivoting to Information Technology to focus on web and mobile development and software engineering. I loved the "front-end" of the work — the ability to manifest ideas into reality, not just calculate them. It was during the summer after my freshman year that my path truly narrowed, though. After a significant mistake with the law left me disconnected from my friends, I spent my nights in the blue light of a monitor, refining my programmatic skills to build something out of nothing. While I spent my days mowing lawns, my nights were devoted to the craft. I wasn't doing it for a career; I was building doors to the digital world because the doors in my physical world had all but closed around me.

I returned to RIT with a new intensity, founding a club focused on the intersection of design and technology and eventually landing the internships at Amazon that would carry me from New York to Seattle, Washington. At Amazon, I began as a Design Technologist, a prototyper responsible for materializing the concepts of other designers into native code. Though I wanted to be a designer up to this point, my experience designing was almost entirely self-taught through code and in the web browser. With the help of an incredibly supportive manager and great people around me, I was given the opportunity to take on user experience design projects within Amazon Flex — one of the most intense and business-critical organizations in the company. I became obsessed with the work, self-initiating projects until I became the subject matter expert for the driver delivery experience. Seeking new horizons after a few years there, I explored voice technology in the Alexa organization before joining another team working on Amazon Glow; this project shifted my focus away from purely designing for utility and efficiency and toward design for deepening human connection and play.

It was during these years of high-stakes output that I began to create music (learning to sing, produce, and play guitar), visual and motion art (with Adobe Illustrator and Blender 3D). But I didn't just explore these mediums; I attacked them. I built rigid, intense schedules and unrelenting regimens, demanding that I become an expert in every craft I touched at night while I continued to work at Amazon by day. I treated my creativity like a second job, a desperate attempt to rescue myself from the very career I had worked so hard to build, but had so deeply lost internally. This relentless "forcing" eventually broke the very things meant to save me. The weight of my own expectations began to crush the joy out of the very mediums meant to sustain me, so much so that I eventually lost my literal voice for an entire year due to over-singing — a silencing that forced me to look at the "holistic how" of my existence deeply.

At Amazon, I was constantly authoring lengthy strategy documents to communicate my product and design thinking; this narrative rigor planted the seeds for my interest in creative writing and the exploration of philosophy. I eventually found Jack Grapes' Method Writing, began taking classes, surrounded by other writers bleeding truth on their pages, and after years of honing the craft, I discovered a literary voice that felt more like an escape than a hobby. I became enamored by the story of an old man and a boy — a mythic dialogue that acted as a mirror to my own internal struggles while aging and making sense of the world around me. I realized that this narrative work was the medium through which my soul was asking for my life to be reshaped, and that I was no longer content purely imagining these stories in a life I felt trapped in; I felt that I needed to live them in reality.

The weight of the machine eventually led me to move from Seattle to San Diego to join Riot Games, where I stepped into a Lead position. At Riot, I was tasked with more strategic ownership, carrying projects and mentoring peers while working remotely from a beautiful apartment far from LA, but the collapse of this life came more quickly; a realization that I was drowning in a life that I was merely "putting up with," using creativity (writing in particular) as a way to escape my work days. On paper, my life was "set," with a freshly remodeled home across the street from Balboa Park, a beautifully intelligent partner, and a high-paying job in creative technology. Internally, however, my soul was screaming. I was living a life of hypocrisy. My world constantly felt like a cage to me until I decided to spend time in a treatment center with the sole intention of restructuring my life entirely.

Far from easy, I recognized that my career, my home, and my relationship were in direct opposition to the values I had so-long wanted to embody, so I chose to leave my job, sell my home, and end my relationship all on the same day. Within a few weeks, I finished my home's remodeling, listed it for sale and jumped on a plane back to the Atlantic, because, after all of that pain, I finally began to understand that "enough" for me was a place I had already reached internally.

In 2026, I returned to the New Jersey shoreline to live a slender life, built on the values that are core to me: simplicity, curiosity, and serenity. Today, anchored in the small beach town of Wildwood, I live in an old condo one block from the ocean. The days are slow here, and they are built on peace. I spend my time reading fiction and philosophy, teaching yoga and mindfulness to youth in group homes, and uncovering the soul in the creative projects I choose to touch. By Caspian, my digital discernment studio, is the most honest result of this return — a practice born from the depths of technology and the quiet clarity of the tides around me.