living, work & travel
for the delightfully cynical
You have found your people if your personal hell is:
- Sitting under a fluorescent light bulb for 60 years of your life.
- Filling out TPS reports for some middle-aged man named Bob who peaked during high school football and voted for Donald Trump.
- Driving to and from the same office every day where you park in the same exact spot, eat the same exact tuna fish sandwich, and go to the same exact bathroom stall at the same exact minute of the same exact hour of each day, so help you vodka. (The little one you keep in your desk.)
- Owning a home in a suburban sub-development with wall-to-wall carpeting, cheap oak cabinets, and a husband who’s too busy to help you cook because “he’s watching the game.”
- OR, maybe husbands in general is your personal hell. Maybe you like girls. Or maybe you like someone gender fluid. OR, maybe you think marriage as an entire construct is silly.
- More personal hellishness involves robot sex that feels like someone might as well be rubbing your arm…
- Your greatest hits being taking the trash cans to and from the end of the driveway.
- Traveling to Florida for family vacation. <terrified face>
- The word “family”—you’re not even sure you actually want kids? Kids are monsters? But maybe you should have one? Who really knows?!
- The woman who told you you’d regret it if you didn’t have kids.
- Church and bibles and crosses and preachy higher-than-thou humans.
- Any organization that’s going to require you to participate in a bake sale or otherwise prove your worthiness through outdated, stereotypical female roles. Pink gingham print. (I mean, just because.)
- Matching Christmas pajamas.
- Zero creativity, inspiration or originality when it comes to living life and building your career.
- Cliché Facebook announcements.
- Never traveling outside your home country. Or maybe even leaving your county. There are people who never leave their county, you know.
- Miniature, yappy dogs as fashion accessories.
- People you can never get off the phone.
- Friends who talk over you.
- Feeling like you have no life and you've completely stagnated.
- And having one fucking credit on Audible that’s perpetually going to expire because you never seem to have time to do anything nice for yourself, much less READ.
The Middle Finger Project was created in 2009 by author and blogger Ash Ambirge who had had it with her corporate life.
(She, too, once lived in a subdevelopment with wall-to-wall carpeting and cheap oak cabinets.)
In response, she gave it all up and got on a plane to “the world’s asshole,” as the locals called it: Santiago, Chile—partly because it was as far south as she could fly, and partly because they have these amazing little sausages called “choripanes,” and who doesn’t want an amazing little sausage?
It was there that she launched her first unconventional life & work experiment: could she make a living as an independent writer from the end of the world? And would she actually be happy doing it?
Eight months and her first $103,000 later, her experiment was a success—and so was her social life. Having met three other travelers who would go on to become her dearest friends, she quickly realized that the problem wasn’t her: she just hadn’t found anyone else who shared her ideas about what a grand, daring adventure life should be.
Fast forward a decade and The Middle Finger Project—something she named one night off-hand with a chuckle and a bottle of wine—has become a global editorial brand and favorite weekly read for the curious seeking something more. Through countless travels, countries, research, essays, writing assignments, books, classes, clients, readers, fans, followers and subscribers, what started as a blog has become a platform for bravery, independence, breaking the mold, questioning the rules, thinking for yourself, and having the courage to pursue the life you really want to be living.
Whether you want to reinvent yourself, reinvent your work, or reinvent how you experience the world, there’s a gin-bottle-full of creative inspiration waiting for you here.
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If you want to do something delightfully drastic like quit your job, start a “crazy” business, travel the world, and/or make unconventional lifestyle decisions that don’t involve a crockpot full of ham, you need our weekly dose of backbone in your inbox.
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About Ash Ambirge, Founder
Ash Ambirge is an American author & entrepreneur known for developing irreverent online brands using voice-driven storytelling. True to form, she’s the founder of The Middle Finger Project Co. for Unconventional Living, Work & Travel for the Delightfully Cynical, and is the author of the new book, also called The Middle Finger Project, from Portfolio/Penguin Random House. (Literary contact: Lisa DiMona, Writers House.)
She’s a serial entrepreneur, creative writer, and “the OG millennial aunt of modern-day blogging,” which is absolutely a contender for her tombstone epitaph, along with Biggie lyrics, the recipe for soft pretzels, and that one note she wrote in the 8th grade explaining why she was too scared to have her first kiss: “I just don’t understand how our noses don’t collide.”
Thoughtful—and an excellent foray into her future career as a writer, where she would go on to analyze everything through words. (Fortunately she picked up on the kissing thing.)
Her ideas on unconventional life & work have been featured on BBC Radio, The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, Real Simple Magazine, Millie Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Startup Nation, Philadelphia Magazine, The Jenny McCarthy Show, Atlassian, The Huffington Post, Parade Magazine, Mixergy, and hundreds of podcasts.
She’s a full-time nomad who travels the globe and works remotely by design. She’s obsessed with creative writing, foreign languages, old books, historic architecture, and boutique hotels. She recently purchased a historic building in Philadelphia to renovate into an Airbnb, and she runs a newsletter for creative writers called Meat & Hair (and you thought The Middle Finger Project was wild).
Her feet are bigger than yours, and she hates fish.
“Ash Ambirge is a whole mood, and trust me, you want to be in it.” —Sarah Knight, New York Times bestselling author of The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck