The Architecture of Debt Is Not Broken — It Is Working

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

For many young people, debt is not a temporary problem. It is the condition of adulthood itself. In this episode, we explore how debt has supplanted ownership as the foundation of civic identity, economic structure, and personal possibility. Debt does not merely delay the future—it redesigns it. And it does so not as a glitch in the system, but as its intended logic.

This is not a financial advice podcast. It is a philosophical investigation of how David Graeber reframed debt as a moral architecture, how Byung-Chul Han diagnosed fatigue as the affect of freedom, and how Nancy Fraser demands we understand care and extraction as twin forces. We follow the thread of unpaid bills, missed rent, and survival budgets—not as isolated problems, but as the material vocabulary of a deeper social contract.

This episode is about design: of systems, of silence, of what becomes normal. It asks what happens when economic survival becomes the only form of participation. And it listens carefully to those moments—at kitchen tables, in late-night spreadsheets, in involuntary quiet—where something like refusal begins. Not resistance as spectacle, but as a structural reimagining of who we are allowed to be, and what we are allowed to owe.

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