about the american existential hotline
Do Americans feel existentially safe?
That’s the question at the heart of the American Existential Hotline—a public-facing art and media project inviting Americans to speak anonymously into the void.
Part confessional, part cultural temperature check, the hotline exists to capture the hopes, fears, numbness, joy, rage, and confusion that define American life in this moment. Callers are prompted to leave an anonymous voicemail sharing whether or not they feel existentially safe—and why. There are no right answers, no scripts, and no interruptions. Just your voice, and the space to speak freely.
Inspired by projects like The Apology Line (Allan Bridge, 1980), the wind phone in Otsuchi, Japan, and This American Life’s “No Fair,” the American Existential Hotline is designed to bypass the algorithms and performance traps of social media, creating a raw and unfiltered archive of what it means to be alive—and uncertain—in the United States today.
These anonymous messages are collected and curated to form a growing public narrative. Selected voicemails may appear in future journalistic or creative works exploring American identity, political communication, and emotional life in the 21st century.
Whether you whisper or rant, reflect or rage, your voice matters here.
“No, I don’t feel existentially safe right now...I get this kind of ongoing sense of dread...it’s always in the background...this sense of a real danger being there. Because it’s like a low key dread, the concern is that it sneaks up on you, right?”
“I don’t feel existentially safe today. I read an article about a meeting that Paul Tudor Jones had with the leaders of AI. They came to the conclusion that there’s like a 20% chance in the next twenty years that artificial intelligence destroys half of humanity.”
“On an individual level, I feel existentially safe, at least in the short term. I have a job. I have a home. I have family and friends who I would consider a support network, so I think personally, or individually, I feel existentially safe, in the near future. I think as a broader, like, existential safety of the human race, I think, uh, perhaps I have some bigger doubts there.”