DOSSIER // 01 — BACKGROUND & WORKING ARCHIVE

Justin Lockridge

Justin Lockridge is a professional connoisseur of the invisible and the improbable, operating out of Milwaukee. It is a town of long, brutal winters, hard edges, and absolute zero patience for pretension. Having realized that a standard personality was far too efficient for modern life, he decorated his psyche with the heavy drapery of religious theory and the shimmering, often blinding, sequins of relentless optimism. He spends his days navigating the intersection of “Everything is Meaningless” and “Look at That Sunset,” usually while wondering if spiritual forces are just the static electricity from his own confusion.

He is a thought leader for people who find the abyss a bit too cliché and prefer their existential dread served with a side of sharp irony. Justin views humanism not as a solemn duty, but as a daring experiment to see if the species that invented both the Sistine Chapel and the deep-fried butter stick can go five minutes without setting the ethical furniture on fire.

Most of what he writes comes down to pulling old, battered ideas off the shelf, blowing off the accumulated dust, and seeing if they still hold up when you really lean on them.

His first book, Unpacking the Optimist Creed, took Christian D. Larson’s hundred-year-old philosophy and stripped away all the naive greeting-card platitudes. He went through it line by line with a dry, skeptical eye, writing for the pragmatists who know that real optimism isn’t about pretending the world isn’t on fire. It is about the sheer guts to walk straight through the wreckage with your head still attached to your shoulders. That pragmatic optimism is not just a theory, either. He is deep in the trenches of civic and non-profit work, sitting on enough boards to lose count, tackling youth advocacy, gay rights, harm reduction, poverty, and economic development. He is so deep into Optimist International they even handed him a Presidential Citation for it, which mostly proves he is willing to sit through endless committee meetings if it means fixing something broken.

Then came The Alpha Edition Bible: The Book of Genesis. He went straight after the ultimate origin story, dumped the dry academic preachiness, and gave the ancient lore a shot of adrenaline. He is the guy who looks at a burning bush, wonders if it is a divine revelation or just a very dedicated horticultural accident, and writes about why both options are equally exhausting. Because when you actually read the damn thing, it is pure, messy human drama, cosmic reboots, and family chaos that is just as wild as anything you would binge on a Tuesday night.

Right now, he is working on You Were Right the First Time. It is a survival manual for Generation X. It is about growing up with a latchkey hanging around your neck, navigating the neighborhood on instinct and skinned knees, and realizing that the analog grit we were told to trade in for slick digital screens was the right answer all along.

Lately, he likes to call himself an aspiring typewriter poet. He has the words, the cadence, and the appetite for raw ink hitting real paper. He just needs to find the damn machine. He would also love to try his hand at stand-up comedy, but honestly, all that standing just sounds like too much work.

And to keep himself honest, grounded, and far away from the navel-gazing literary crowd, he spends his working hours as a certified coach running a neighborhood bowling alley. It is real work. Heavy steel pinsetters turning, vintage gears grinding, and cold beer pouring for people who actually work for a living.