Thirty-two-year-old Carl Kinsella worries about stuff. The columnist, script writer and author of a new collection of insightful, moving and funny essays worries about his health, about his parents, about the world, about how this book will be received. He’s even worried about being interviewed. “I kind of black out when I’m speaking,” he says. “I come to afterwards and I’m like, ‘What? What did I say?’”

He needn’t worry. He’s thoughtful and funny and speaks in long, perfectly formed sentences, with an occasional tendency to portmanteaux words together when existing ones don’t do the trick. His book, At Least it Looks Good from Space: A Catalogue of Modern, Millennial and Personal Catastrophes is about the internet, anxiety, masculinity and sleep, and veers effortlessly from the personal to the sociological and political.

We meet in a cafe in Smithfield near where he lives. He has a moustache and a white T-shirt and a woolly hat. It would be tempting to label him a “voice of the millennial generation” but he rejects this out of hand. “I am the voice of maybe two dozen people,” he insists.

When Hachette first approached him about writing a book, he was “wary”, he says. “I’m a wary person. I think that’s honestly a pretty defining characteristic of mine ... It was very important to me to produce something that didn’t feel like it was trying to pander to anyone. I really just wanted to write a book that reflected my own thoughts and to try to not worry too much about what people would think about it, which is, of course, impossible.”

The first essay, Excuses, Excuses, maps out his experience of growing up with the internet. He writes compellingly about this as a digital native who first went online to visit message boards as a child. “The internet as I understood it when I was 12 was so cool. So much of it back then was hobbyists and people who were passionate about things, just sharing with absolutely no profit incentive whatsoever.”

He talks about Unfortunate Series of Events fan groups and his Bebo page and other, stranger artefacts of the time.