Hi, I’m David.

After working myself into the ground at the half-way passage of my life, I reached a threshold. A darkness. A liminal space.
A space where I felt scared, anxious, depressed, stuck, lonely, useless, and overwhelmed by it all.
I felt I was buried underground and sinking deeper and deeper the more I tried to get out.
Every day for more than a year I sank deeper into this darkness.

This is how I got there.

After having worked for a couple of creative agencies I started my own business. A startup studio and brand agency. I started it for 2 reasons.
1. I hated the culture of the agencies I worked for. I felt I could do better. I felt I could choose people over profit while still making a profit. And while I was a designer (or art-director, design lead, user experience designer, or whatever other pretty words we like to give ourselves when we’re younger), looking back now, culture was more important to me than the work, or the practice of work. Culture, to me, informed the way we work, the way we relate to our work, and the way we find meaning in our work. Everything is relational.
2. My partner and I were expecting our first kid and I wanted to show him that he could follow his own dreams if he wanted to (this was also the reason I called my company Moonbase, kids love space and adventure, right?).

During the pregnancy of my partner I was incredibly scared of becoming a father. Most of my close friends knew me as someone who wouldn’t get anywhere near kids. They made me feel anxious. I expressed my fear of failing as a father several times and was truly afraid I would fail in my role as a father. Some men like to imagine how cool they will be as dads, right? I was not one of them. It was a huge threshold for me. It felt like an initiation.

I truly felt I stepped into a new life the first week after James was born.

There were parts of me that needed to die, and new parts of me ready to be born. Although I wasn’t aware of it then, I followed my intuition unconsciously and did what I needed to do and went where I needed to go.

The first few years went by and during this time of running Moonbase I also co-founded several other businesses and I went through all the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and startup life. Both from a business coach and brand strategist perspective, as well as from a more entrepreneurial side.
We build our way up working with small scale local businesses to famous brands.

For a long time I felt I was doing exactly what I was here to do.
Growing, scaling up, improving, progressing,

ever ascending.

It took me a while,
not unlike Icarus,
I kept ascending for too long
to realize how far I had gone
and the signs I had ignored in my quest for growth and progress.
I blindly pursued a sense of validation from family, friends, from society.
I kept pushing boundaries and limits, because… to grow you must keep going, keep grinding, stop whining and start hustling… right?

I was working 90 hours a week while still trying to be as present as I could to James, and later also Bruce. Working early mornings and late nights in order to still also have time with the kids during the day.