The Observing I Podcast

Against all odds, we have reached episode one hundred and fifty. To mark this milestone of collective survival, we are taking a brief, unannounced intermission from our Realm of the Psychonauts season to turn the lens completely inward and dissect the core philosophy behind this entire show. We spend the vast majority of our lives acting out scripts written by people we have never met, frantically curating a hyper-efficient corporate avatar for an audience that isn’t actually paying attention. We buy the premium fitness gear, optimize our sleep metrics down to the millisecond, and nod sagely in endless meetings, entirely missing the dark irony of using spreadsheets and glowing pieces of corporate glass to cure a creeping spiritual death spiral.But what happens when the simulation inevitably glitches, your digital credentials are deleted, and the cardboard stage burns to the ground? Drawing on the core themes of my book, The Observing I, this episode maps out the anatomy of our existential unravelling, shifting our vision away from surface perception and into the quiet baseline of pure awareness. By stepping off the exhausting treadmill of external validation and confronting the absolute cowardice of blame, we explore what it truly means to reclaim total internal agency. It is an invitation to stop auditioning for a life you already own, secure your own psychological oxygen supply, and recognize the ultimate, heavy truth of the human condition: responsibility is the price of freedom.

We often imagine tyranny as a heavy hand from the outside, but Aldous Huxley understood a more unsettling possibility. He saw that we can be persuaded to enjoy our own containment. In this episode, we follow Huxley’s journey from the clinical satire of Brave New World to the mystical search for a conscious culture in his final novel, Island.We explore the "reducing valve" of the brain, the modern versions of soma that keep us distracted, and the fragile possibility of a truly humane future. It is an exploration of the bargain we make every day between the relief of comfort and the responsibility of attention.Much love, David x

In this episode of The Observing I, I explore the life and ideas of Terence McKenna, one of the most fascinating and controversial voices in psychedelic thought. More than just a writer or lecturer, McKenna became a symbol of something deeper: the modern hunger for mystery, wonder, and a world that feels more alive than the one we are usually taught to accept.This episode looks at both the brilliance and the danger in his vision. We examine his call to re-enchant reality, his critique of modern disconnection, and the point where insight can begin to blur into excess. At its heart, this is an episode about consciousness, meaning, and the challenge of staying open to mystery without losing our footing in the process.Much love, David xEpisode 146 of The Observing I is out now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen. But it’s ad-free, always, at theobservingi.com.

Emil Cioran was the most honest philosopher of the twentieth century. He believed, with total intellectual sincerity and forensic rigour, that being born was a catastrophe nobody asked for, that consciousness was evolution's most unfortunate experiment, and that hope was a con dressed up in better lighting. He made this case in thirty-something books, over six decades, in a language that was not his own, from a small apartment in Paris, without a salary, without an institution, without a single day of pretending he thought things were going to be fine.He outlived almost everyone.Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a village in Transylvania, Cioran arrived in Bucharest to study philosophy, encountered Schopenhauer, stopped sleeping, and never fully recovered from any of those three things. By twenty-three he had written his first book, On the Heights of Despair, a work of such concentrated philosophical anguish that Romania gave it a prize. By twenty-five he had made a political error that would follow him for the rest of his life. By his late thirties he had voluntarily destroyed his mother tongue, abandoned Romanian permanently, and rebuilt himself from scratch in French. Not because it was easier, but because it was harder, and the difficulty was the point.What followed was five decades of the most precise, most formally beautiful, most genuinely useful pessimist philosophy in the Western tradition. And a life that, looked at honestly, was proof of something Cioran would never have been caught dead saying out loud: that the accurate description of the worst of it is not what destroys you. It is, improbably, stubbornly, with considerable dark wit, the thing that keeps the lights on.This is the season finale of Fire and Ice. Eleven philosophers. Eleven lives spent finding clarity by walking directly into the thing that was trying to destroy them. Cioran closes the season not because he suffered the most dramatically, but because he suffered the most philosophically, and came back with the best sentences.The Observing I is completely ad-free. You can find every episode in full, as audio and as written word, at theobservingi.com. New episodes on YouTube, Spotify, and wherever you listen. Follow us on TikTok, Instagram, and X at @theobservingi. Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

What do you do when the thing you used to explain everything stops explaining anything?Leszek Kołakowski was born in Poland in 1927. He grew up under Nazi occupation, educated in secret because the occupiers had made learning illegal. After the war he was handed a blueprint for a new world and he took it with both hands. He joined the Polish United Workers’ Party at eighteen, rose fast, became one of the most gifted Marxist philosophers in Poland, and believed, not as performance, not as career strategy, but as a man who had found the only answer that made sense of the rubble around him.Then he started looking too closely.What followed was thirty years of intellectual honesty so rigorous and so costly that it reshaped the political landscape of the twentieth century. Expelled from the Party in 1966. Expelled from Warsaw University in 1968. Exiled from Poland. And from his study at All Souls College, Oxford, he sat down and wrote Main Currents of Marxism. Three volumes published between 1976 and 1978 that traced the entire intellectual genealogy of the ideology he had given his youth to, and proved, systematically, that Stalinism was not a betrayal of Marx’s ideas. It was their logical conclusion.He wrote the death certificate thirteen years before the burial.But this episode is not about Marxism. It is about what Kołakowski found on the other side of the autopsy. Not a new faith. Not comfortable atheism. Something stranger and more honest than either. The argument that human beings cannot live without myth, that the need for transcendence is not a weakness to be overcome, and that a life lived entirely without reference to the sacred has amputated something essential from itself.This is the episode about what intellectual honesty actually costs. About the version of courage nobody puts on posters. About following the logic past the point where it still flatters you, all the way to the end, and then keeping going.He knew too much. The question is whether you do too.Much love, David xThe Observing I is available on all major podcast platforms. Listen on Substack for more in depth articles and to get everything ad-free. Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

What if your acceptance of death isn't wisdom? What if it's surrender with better branding? What if the most dangerous idea humanity ever had wasn't pride or violence or the will to power, but the quiet, civilized, deeply respectable decision that death deserves our peace rather than our resistance? Nikolai Fedorov, illegitimate son of a Russian prince, ascetic librarian, and the most demanding philosopher you've never heard of, spent his entire life arguing exactly that. He called our acceptance of death the original moral failure. He called the project of reversing it the Common Task. And he meant every word of both.This episode traces Fedorov's life from his birth as an unnamed, illegitimate child to his death in a Moscow hospital having refused a coat, and everything in between: the library that became his cathedral, the philosophy that shook Tolstoy and shaped the Soviet space program, the theology that turned the resurrection of Christ into an engineering assignment rather than a gift, and the transhumanist movement he predicted a century early and would have found morally catastrophic.If something in this episode makes your peace with death harder to keep, that's not a side effect. That's the whole point.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

You are not one person. You never were.This is not a metaphor about complexity or depth. This is not inspirational content about containing multitudes. This is a structural diagnosis of how consciousness actually works, and the moment you understand it, the monologue you call your identity starts to crack.Mikhail Bakhtin understood something so fundamentally destabilizing about human consciousness that Stalin’s regime tried to bury it. He understood that the self is not a singular, coherent narrative. The self is a dialogue. A conversation with no final word. A collision of voices that never resolves into one clean answer. And every day you spend performing coherence, curating a finished identity, optimizing yourself into a brand, you are committing a small act of violence against the most alive thing about you.We live in a culture obsessed with the finished self. The optimized self. The self that has figured it out, that posts the proof, that performs completion like a product launch. LinkedIn is a graveyard of finished selves. Instagram is a museum of people who have already arrived. And every single one of those selves is a lie. Not because people are dishonest. Because the self was never meant to be finished.The Dialogue That Makes You RealBakhtin called it polyphony. Multiple voices. Not the inspiring kind where everyone gets heard and we all feel validated. The uncomfortable kind where voices contradict, compete, refuse to resolve. You think you have one voice, one coherent position, one true self. But you contain multitudes. You are the person who wants to be good and the person tired of being good. The person who loves your life and the person who wants to burn it down and start over. These are not phases. These are not glitches. These are voices. And the more you silence them, the louder they scream from the basement.You did not build your self alone. Every opinion you hold, every value you defend, every fear that keeps you awake at night was given to you by someone else first. Your mother’s voice. Your teacher’s expectation. Your friend’s judgment. The stranger who looked at you a certain way when you were seventeen and something inside you shifted forever. You are not a monologue. You are the echo chamber of a thousand voices that spoke to you before you even knew you were listening.This is what Bakhtin called addressivity. Every thought you have is addressed to someone. Even when you are alone. Especially when you are alone. You are always speaking to an imagined listener. You are always performing for an invisible audience. And that audience shapes what you say before you say it. Your internal monologue is not a monologue at all. It is a dialogue where you play both parts and pretend you are in control.The Authoritative Word vs. The Internally Persuasive WordThere are two kinds of voices living inside you. The authoritative word arrives with credentials, with institutional backing, with the collected wisdom of everyone who came before you and decided how things should be. It does not negotiate. It announces itself and waits for you to comply. Your parents spoke it. Your religion spoke it. Your culture spoke it. And you absorbed it so completely that by the time you were old enough to question it, you could not tell where the voice ended and you began.The internally persuasive word is different. It emerges from dialogue. From the messy, uncertain process of testing ideas against experience. It is the thought that keeps coming back even when you try to ignore it. The question that will not let you sleep. The feeling that something is wrong even though you cannot articulate what or why. The internally persuasive word does not give you answers. It gives you better questions.You change through dialogue. Through conversation where neither person walks away the same. Where words move between you and transform in transit and come back different than they left. But most people never make it past the authoritative word. Because the internally persuasive word is uncomfortable. It says maybe everything you were told was wrong. Maybe the life you built is not the life you want. Maybe the person you have been performing is not the person you are.The Threshold: Where You Actually ExistBakhtin had a word for the place where you are actually alive. He called it the threshold. Not the self you perform or the identity you curate. The threshold is the space between. The edge of one thing becoming another. The moment before the decision. The second after the mask cracks. The threshold is where you stand when you do not know who you are anymore and you have not yet figured out who you are going to become.Dostoevsky’s characters live on thresholds. In doorways. In stairwells. In prison cells and streets at midnight. They exist in spaces where the normal rules of social performance collapse and something raw breaks through. Raskolnikov does not confess in a church. He confesses in a crowded square because the threshold is where your internal dialogue becomes external. Where the voices you have been suppressing suddenly have witnesses.You cannot see your own face. You cannot know your own expression. You need other people to reflect you back to yourself. Not the polite reflections. Not the version your friends confirm and your family recognizes. You need the uncomfortable reflections. The moments when someone reacts to you in a way that does not match your self-image and you feel that spike of panic because they are seeing something real and you are not in control of what it means.This is why isolation destroys people. Not because humans are social animals who need companionship. Isolation destroys people because the self only exists in relation. Put someone in solitary confinement and watch what happens. The voices do not stop. They multiply. They become louder, stranger, more hostile. The self, deprived of real dialogue, starts creating imaginary dialogue just to keep existing. Because a self without an other is not a self at all. It is a ghost haunting an empty room.The Great Time: Ideas That Refuse to DieBakhtin wrote his most important work under Stalin. Under a regime that demanded singular truth, official narratives, one voice speaking for the entire nation. And Bakhtin wrote about polyphony. About dialogue. About the fundamental impossibility of a single authoritative voice ever capturing the full truth of human consciousness. He watched his books get pulped. Watched his name disappear from the academic record like he never existed.But the ideas did not die. They went underground. They survived in fragments. In student notes. In conversations people had in private where the walls might be listening but the ideas were too important to kill with silence. And then, decades later, after Bakhtin was already exiled, already forgotten, someone rediscovered his work. Someone recognized that these ideas were answers to questions the culture was finally ready to ask.Bakhtin called this the great time. The time of ideas that outlive their authors. Ideas that get buried and forgotten and declared irrelevant and then, decades or centuries later, come roaring back because someone finally understands what they were trying to say.You live in a culture with no concept of the great time. You live in the time of the algorithm. The news cycle. Planned obsolescence where ideas are designed to expire as soon as the next quarter starts. You consume content made to be forgotten. You build your identity around references that will be incomprehensible in five years. You have been taught that relevance is the highest value. That if something is not trending it does not matter.But the great time does not care about relevance. Bakhtin died in 1975, largely forgotten, his work still suppressed. He did not live to see the explosion of interest in his ideas. He did not live to see his concepts become foundational to how we understand narrative and consciousness and the structure of the self. He wrote into the void and the void wrote back but he was already dead by the time the reply arrived.Stalin is dead. The Soviet Union is dead. The regime that tried to silence Bakhtin is a historical footnote. But the ideas survived. The ideas are in the great time now. And that means they are beyond the reach of any authority that tries to kill them.What You Do With ThisYou stop trying to finish yourself. You stop treating your identity like a project with a deadline. You stop performing coherence for an audience that is not even watching. You acknowledge that you are multiple. That you contain voices. That some of those voices contradict each other and this is not a bug. This is the structure of consciousness. This is what it means to be alive.You start listening to the internally persuasive word. Not the voice that arrives with authority and demands obedience. The voice that arrives as a question. As a possibility. As something that keeps coming back even when you try to ignore it. You let that voice speak. You let it argue with the other voices. You let the dialogue happen inside you instead of pretending there is only one true self that needs to win.You stand on the threshold. You let people see you before you are ready. You stop editing yourself into acceptability and you risk the encounter. The real encounter. Where someone might see something you did not want them to see and you do not immediately retreat back into performance. You stay there. Exposed. Unfinished. You let the other person complete you in ways you cannot complete yourself.And you think in the great time. You stop measuring your worth by what trends today. You stop shaping your thoughts to fit the algorithm. You trust that if you are saying something true, something real, something that touches the actual structure of human experience, then it will find the people who need it. Maybe not today. Maybe not in your lifetime. But the great time is patient. The great time does not forget.You are not finished. You were never supposed to be finished. The question is whether you are brave enough to live like it.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

September 1922. A German steamship loaded with Russia’s most dangerous weapons. Not bombs. Not guns. Philosophers. Seventy intellectuals who committed the ultimate crime against the Soviet state. They wouldn’t stop thinking.Among them, a man named Nikolai Berdyaev. Aristocrat turned Marxist turned mystic turned professional pain in the ass to every authority that ever tried to tell him what truth looked like. Lenin personally approved his deportation. Think about that. The man who orchestrated a revolution was scared of a philosopher. Not scared enough to kill him. Scared enough to make him someone else’s problem.Berdyaev’s scandalous idea, the one that got him exiled, was this: Freedom doesn’t come from God. Freedom comes before God. It’s not a gift. It’s not earned. It’s the primordial chaos that existed before anything existed, and even God has to respect it.We follow Berdyaev from his aristocratic childhood through his revolutionary phase, watching him get exiled once by the Tsar for being too radical, then exiled again by the Bolsheviks for being too free. We explore his core philosophy: that humans aren’t here to obey. They’re here to create. That every system - communist, fascist, capitalist - tries to turn persons into things, subjects into objects, unrepeatable individuals into predictable units.We watch him survive Lenin, Stalin’s early terror, Nazi occupation, spending twenty-six years in exile writing warnings nobody wanted to hear. Warnings about the mechanization of the soul. The objectification of persons. The slavery we volunteer for because comfort is easier than freedom.Berdyaev died in 1948, but he saw your life coming. The algorithm-curated existence. The dopamine-harvested attention. The productivity-optimized, self-quantified, perpetually-performing version of yourself that you mistake for freedom. He watched the Bolsheviks try to engineer New Soviet Man, and he’s watching you engineer yourself into the optimal unit for whatever system you’ve decided to serve.The question Berdyaev asked for seventy-four years, through revolution, exile, occupation, and loneliness, is the same question waiting for you right now:Are you a person or a thing? Are you creating or consuming? Are you choosing freedom or choosing comfort? Are you living or are you performing life for an audience that’s also performing for you while nobody’s actually present?Berdyaev chose exile over silence. Chose the terrifying responsibility of freedom over the comfort of any system that promised to tell him who to be.So if you need to hear that creativity isn’t a luxury, it’s a spiritual necessity, or if you’re tired of being a function and want to remember what being a person feels like, then I dedicate this episode to you.Much love, David xWarning: This isn’t comfortable listening. Berdyaev doesn’t offer you five steps to a better life. He offers you a choice you’ve been avoiding. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

Welcome to 2026. The calendar flipped, but the gears didn’t stop grinding.Most people think Franz Kafka wrote fantasy. They think he dreamed up giant bugs and invisible judges because he had a colourful imagination. They’re wrong. He wrote the user manual for the meat-grinder of modern life.He spent his daylight hours at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, putting a dollar sign on human misery. He was the guy who decided exactly how much a crushed pelvis was worth in the eyes of the law. He was a suit. A corporate drone. A high-performing variable in a bureaucratic equation that never quite balanced.At night, he performed the surgery. He took the sterile, bloodless prose of the office and used it to describe the smell of the machine that eats us alive.In our first episode of the new year, we’re tearing the skin off the machinery of modern dread. Consider it a survival guide for the cubicle. We’re diving into the logic of the eternal Trial, where you’re guilty by default and the charges are redacted for your own protection. We’re looking at the Metamorphosis, where the horror isn’t turning into a vermin, but worrying about missing the 5:00 AM train while you’re doing it.We’re talking about the Castle, that god of Middle Managers, where authority is everywhere and nowhere, and “help” is always one more form away. We’re witnessing the Penal Colony, where the company handbook is carved directly into your nervous system with glass needles until you finally “understand” the policy.You’ve been standing at the gate for long enough. You’ve been waiting for an acquittal that isn’t coming and a permission slip that was never printed. The machine only has power as long as you believe it has a purpose.If you’ve ever felt like a glitch in someone else’s software, this episode is for you.The court is in session. Don’t bother bringing a lawyer.Much love, David xJoin Project:MAYHEM Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

What if everything around you has a secret life you’ll never access?Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology makes a radical claim: objects aren’t just props in the human drama. The hammer in your toolbox, the coffee cup on your desk, the chair holding your weight. They all have withdrawn realities that remain forever hidden from you. They exist in depths you can’t penetrate, no matter how hard you grip them or how much you think you understand them.This episode explores Harman’s philosophy of withdrawal, where every object, human and nonhuman, hides its true nature in an inaccessible core. We examine how this changes everything: causation, relationships, art, and what it means to live in a world populated by billions of entities that are fundamentally unknowable.You’ve never actually met anyone. Not really. You’ve only encountered sensual versions, translated surfaces, proxies that stand in for the real person who stays withdrawn in depths even they can’t access. Every conversation is between ambassadors of hidden kingdoms. Every touch is between surfaces while the real entities watch from somewhere you’ll never see.But maybe that’s not loneliness. Maybe that’s reality. Maybe the unbridgeable gap between objects is what makes relation possible at all. We explore Harman’s democracy of objects, where dust mites and black holes and human consciousness all have equal ontological status. Where nothing is special and everything matters in its own withdrawn way.This is a philosophy that makes the familiar strange and forces you to see the world differently. From vicarious causation to aesthetic encounters, from the terror of withdrawal to the relief of accepting you’ll never fully know anything, this episode takes Harman’s ideas and makes them visceral, urgent, personally devastating.The hammer dreams of nails. You dream of being understood. And somehow, in all that mutual withdrawal, reality keeps happening anyway.Welcome to the secret lives of objects. Welcome to a universe where you’re not special. You’re just here, withdrawn and strange, forever beyond anyone’s grasp. Even your own.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

The universe is falling apart. That is not a metaphor. That is physics. That is the second law of thermodynamics. That is entropy winning every single time you take a breath, think a thought, care about anything at all.Drew M. Dalton and speculative realism refuse to ignore this. No transcendent meaning. No cosmic purpose. No metaphysical safety net catching you when you dissolve back into the substrate you temporarily organised yourself out of. Philosophy has spent thousands of years building escape routes from matter, insisting consciousness exists somewhere outside the physical, pretending your caring about things makes you an exception to the laws that govern everything else.It does not. You are meat that thinks about being meat. You are matter that cares about matter. Briefly. Improbably. Before entropy equalises everything back to lukewarm silence.This episode is the final descent into what entropy actually demands of ethics. Not the consoling narratives humanism offers. Not the absurd heroism existentialism clings to. Not the hope that things get better or that your suffering gets redeemed or that somewhere on some scale justice balances out. None of that survives contact with thermodynamics.What survives is this: you are here now and while you are here you can choose to increase suffering or decrease it. Not because the universe validates that choice. Because the nervous systems experiencing the effects of that choice register the difference. And their registering is the only scale where mattering happens.We move through the consolations philosophy built and why they crumble when you stop pretending consciousness transcends matter. We face the vertigo of recognisng cosmic insignificance without the safety net of transcendent meaning. We examine whether hope is luxury or necessity and whether commitment without consolation is the only honest stance left. We draw the line between meaninglessness, which is a fact about the cosmos, and suffering, which is a fact about embodied experience. And we build ethics on radical doubt, on the recognition that you cannot know ultimate truths but you can know proximate realities, that you cannot justify caring cosmically but you can practice caring locally.This is not nihilism. Nihilism says nothing matters because everything is meaningless. This says everything is meaningless cosmically and mattering happens anyway, in bodies, in pain, in the immediate interactions between complex systems that temporarily resist equilibrium before equilibrium wins.You are that temporary resistance. Your ethics are that temporary resistance. And the fact that resistance is temporary does not make it futile. It makes it urgent. It makes it the only thing you can actually do while you are here.The universe will not tell you that you matter. But the person next to you might notice whether you increased their suffering or decreased it. And their noticing is all the ethical foundation you will ever need or will ever get.This will not give you hope. It will give you clarity about what you are, what ethics can be when you stop lying about cosmic significance, and what you can do in the brief window before entropy erases all evidence you were ever here.Not because doing it matters eternally. Because not doing it matters immediately to the systems capable of experiencing the difference.And immediate is all there is.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe

You think you understand climate change. You don’t. You think it’s a problem you can solve with better recycling habits and electric cars. It’s not. It’s a hyperobject. Something so massively distributed in time and space that you never see all of it at once. You only see pieces. Symptoms. The hurricane. The wildfire. The flood. But those aren’t the thing. Those are just the thing touching you before it moves on.Timothy Morton wants you to stop pretending you’re outside looking in. You’re inside. You’ve always been inside. The apocalypse isn’t coming. It’s been here. It started before you were born and it will continue long after you’re dead. You inherited it. You’re made of it. Your body is microplastics. Your bloodstream is pesticides. Your neurons fire on coffee that required deforestation. You are the catastrophe in human form.This episode is about living inside the nightmare instead of waiting for it to arrive. It’s about hyperobjects. Oil. Radiation. Global warming. Capitalism. Entities too big to escape, too sticky to wash off, too distributed to fight. It’s about the mesh, the web of connections that makes your autonomy a joke and your choices both meaningless and essential. It’s about dark ecology, the philosophy that says nature isn’t out there waiting to be saved. You are nature. Your cities are nature. Your catastrophes are nature becoming aware of itself and recoiling.Morton doesn’t give you hope. He gives you clarity. He says here’s what’s real: you’re entangled with your own destruction. You’re intimate with your enemy. And the enemy is you. This is the philosophy for people living in the aftermath of a catastrophe they’re still causing. For anyone who knows the planet is dying but still has to pay rent, show up, pretend normal exists. This is about staying awake inside the thing that’s eating you. About grieving what hasn’t died yet and also died before you were born. About acting like your choices matter while knowing they don’t matter enough.No solutions. No salvation. Just the brutal honesty of seeing the hyperobject and realizing you were never outside it. Welcome to the age of asymmetry. Welcome to the end of the world that already ended. Welcome to the only home you’ve ever had. The belly of the beast that’s digesting you while you pretend you’re standing outside watching.If you’ve ever felt the cognitive dissonance of knowing too much and being able to do too little, this episode is for you. If you’ve ever wondered why climate change feels unreal even when you know it’s real, this is your answer. If you’ve ever needed someone to name the dread you carry in your body but can’t articulate, Timothy Morton just did.Press play. Stay awake.Much love, David x Get full access to The Observing I at theobservingi.com/subscribe