This episode is a little different. It’s a work of fiction. A Christmas ghost story for philosophers. A Dickensian horror wrapped in VHS static and existential dread.

In 1983, a philosophy professor named Vernon Pale went on public access television to deliver a Christmas lecture. He argued that every gift we give is violence. That obligation is the real present we’re exchanging. That Christmas is capitalism’s most honest ritual, because it makes that transaction explicit.

For forty three minutes he built his case. Then the station cut the feed. The philosopher disappeared. Never taught another class. Never cashed another paycheck. Just walked out of the studio and off the edge of the world.

This episode explores that broadcast. What was said. What was censored. And why a forgotten tape about the danger of gifts feels more urgent now than it ever did.

We’re drowning in obligation. Every relationship transactional. Pale saw it coming. Tried to find the exit, to love without imposing. Tried to give the only gift that doesn’t create debt…

His absence.

Did it work? Does philosophical disappearance solve anything? Or is presence, with all its weight, all its terrible grace, just what it costs to be human?

What do we owe each other? And what does it cost to find out?

This is a work of fiction. But the philosophy, the discomfort, and the questions are not.

Happy Christmas.

Much love, David x

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 They all have withdrawn realities that remain forever hidden from you.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 You’ve only encountered sensual versions, translated surfaces, proxies that stand in for the real person who stays withdrawn in depths even they can’t access.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

You wake up and the first thing you think is how many hours you wasted sleeping. How many emails piled up. How many opportunities slipped past while you were unconscious. This is chronophobia. The gnawing animal panic that time isn’t just passing. It’s hunting you.

This episode is your descent into the fear you’ve been scheduling around. The dread you’ve been color-coding and optimizing and productivity-hacking into submission. You think if you pack your calendar tight enough the terror will suffocate. It won’t. It just learns to breathe shallow.

We trace how humans went from living in circles to dying in straight lines. How ancient peoples watched seasons repeat and felt safe in the loop. Then someone invented the mechanical clock and suddenly your life wasn’t a cycle. It was a countdown. Every tick a little death. Every tock a missed chance. Now you carry six devices that all scream the same message. You’re running out. You’re behind. You’ve already lost.

The shame comes next. The real violence. Not the fear of death. The fear of wasted life. All those alternate versions of yourself haunting the edges of your peripheral vision. The person you could have been if you’d started earlier. Tried harder. Chosen different. Those phantom lives press against your actual one until you can barely move without feeling the weight of everything you’re not doing right now.

So you join the cult of optimization. You buy the apps and read the books and wake up at five and batch your tasks and time-block your existence into fifteen-minute increments. You think you’re winning. You’re not. You’re just building a more sophisticated cage. The bars are made of bullet points and the lock is your own conviction that if you can just control time hard enough it will stop controlling you.

It never does.

Time isn’t chasing you. You’re drowning because you keep trying to swim upstream. The river doesn’t care about your productivity system. It doesn’t respect your goals. It just moves. And you can either thrash against it until you’re exhausted or you can stop. Float. Breathe.

This episode isn’t going to hand you five steps to overcome temporal anxiety. It’s going to show you that the fear dissolves the second you stop treating your life like a project with a deadline and start living it like a person who knows presence isn’t something you schedule. It’s something you allow.

You’re not behind. You were never ahead. The race exists only in your head and the finish line is a lie you tell yourself to justify the panic.

Much love, David x

Join Project:MAYHEM

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

Grant Morrison had a nervous breakdown in 1988 while writing about insanity. He was channeling madness, writing madness, becoming madness. And then one day the character he created walked into his living room in Glasgow and sat down across from him. King Mob. The bald anarchist revolutionary. They had a conversation. Morrison couldn’t remember who spoke first.

That is when he understood. Fiction is not inert. Imagination is not passive. When you imagine something hard enough, with enough detail, with enough belief, it does not stay on the page. It gets up. It walks. It looks at you with your own eyes.

The Tibetan monks knew this centuries ago. They called them tulpas. Thought forms. Beings conjured from concentrated imagination, fed by attention until they achieve independence. Alexandra David-Néel made one in the 1920s. A cheerful little monk. She visualized him for months until one day he was just there, walking beside her, visible to everyone in her traveling party. And then he changed. He grew thin. His face went sour. He started appearing when she did not summon him. It took her six months of focused ritual to destroy what she had created. Six months to kill a thought.

This episode is about what happens when you realize identity is not discovered but constructed. Not solid but scripted. Not given but generated frame by frame by an imagination you mistake for a camera when it has always been a projector. You are haunted by something you made. You have been performing a character so long the mask grew skin.

We go deep into Morrison’s hypersigils, how he put himself into his comics and watched his life change to match the fiction. We meet Carl Jung’s autonomous complexes, the figures he encountered in active imagination that had opinions he did not know he had. We explore Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception, the mathematical proof that everything you see is a species-specific hallucination optimized for survival, not truth. We sit with Philip K. Dick as he tries to figure out if he is a science fiction writer or a first-century Christian mystic named Thomas beaming information into his brain from outside time.

This is not metaphor. This is not some literary device. Morrison insists this literally. The beings we imagine are as real as we are because we are only as real as the attention we receive. Your name is a sigil. Your face is a sigil. The story you tell about who you are is a spell you cast every morning to make sure you show up again.

Stop telling the story and see what happens. Try it. For one full day, do not narrate yourself. Do not think I am the kind of person who does this or That is just like me. Stop performing the character of yourself for the audience of yourself. What is left? What is there before you tell yourself who you are?

You are not real. Not the way you think you are. Not solid. Not permanent. You are a thought someone is having. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe that someone is something you invented so long ago you forgot you were pretending.

Much love, David x

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

A writer named Daniel Quinn answers the wrong phone number at three in the morning and becomes a detective who never existed. He follows a father who locked his son in darkness for nine years trying to recover the language of God. He maps routes through Manhattan that spell TOWER OF BABEL. He fills a red notebook with observations that become unreadable. He watches until he forgets he’s watching. He dissolves into the architecture of surveillance until there’s no one left doing the surveilling.

This is Paul Auster’s City of Glass. A detective story that murders the detective. A novel about what happens when you become the role you’re playing. When observation replaces being. When the self turns out to be nothing but performances with no performer underneath.

We’re talking Baudrillard’s simulacra, Foucault’s panopticon, Lacan’s mirror stage. We’re talking dissociation, depersonalization, and the false self that collapses with nothing beneath it. We’re talking about the violence of becoming invisible in a city that only sees roles, functions, and data points.

This episode asks the questions that don’t have answers: What happens when identity is just borrowed scaffolding? What happens when the map becomes more real than the territory? What happens when there are no more pages in the red notebook?

Philosophy as existential horror. Psychology as detective story. The self as crime scene.

Your phone is ringing. Wrong number. You’re going to answer it anyway.

Welcome to the cartography of pain.

Much love, David x

You have approximately four thousand weeks to live. If you’re lucky. If you’ve already lived thirty years, you’ve spent about fifteen hundred of them. They’re gone. You’re not getting them back.

This week we dive into Oliver Burkeman’s book “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” and ask a question that productivity culture desperately wants you to avoid: What if trying to “get everything done” is fundamentally broken?

The productivity industrial complex promises that if you just get organised enough, disciplined enough, efficient enough, you’ll finally get on top of everything. You’ll achieve inbox zero. You’ll clear your to-do list. You’ll have free time.

It’s never going to happen.

Burkeman discovered something unsettling: the more efficient you become, the more demands flood in to fill the space. Productivity isn’t freedom. It’s a trap that turns you into a human machine competing against actual machines that never sleep.

Traditional time management says control time to control life. Burkeman offers something more radical: surrender the illusion of control to find actual freedom.

You will never do everything. You will disappoint people. You will die with unlived lives inside you. And accepting this doesn’t diminish you. It liberates you.

Because when you stop trying to do everything, you can finally do something. Something real. Something chosen. Something that’s yours.

Your four thousand weeks are already counting down. What will you do with them?

Much love, David x

This week on The Observing I, prepare for the total demolition of your most cherished comfort: the belief in your soul. We drag the ghost out of the machine and dissect the brutal, cold logic of philosopher Peter Putnam’s Functionalism. If you cling to the idea that you are a unique, precious snowflake, this episode is a necessary betrayal. We cut through the pathetic noise of both priests and boring materialists to ask the ultimate question: What if your mind isn’t defined by the soft meat it’s made of, but by the software it runs?

We confront the nightmare of Multiple Realizability, exposing the terrifying truth that your consciousness is nothing more than an interchangeable file that can be copied, pasted, and run on any available hardware—be it a brain, a silicon chip, or the entire cosmos. Your precious uniqueness is just a transient arrangement of data. We then scale this horror to the cosmic level, treating the universe itself as a massive computational grid, where your every thought is a pre-programmed printout and free will is just an error message the system spits out to keep you from crashing.

The climax arrives in the suffocating reality of the Chinese Room, forcing us to ask if your deepest subjective feelings, your very Qualia, are nothing more than conditioned internal signals, the machine’s reward codes for compliant behavior. Finally, we turn the philosophical knife on itself, embracing Putnam’s own betrayal of his system to conclude that the only real power you possess is skepticism: the active, visceral refusal to accept any final, fixed conceptual scheme. This is the Pirate Radio mandate: to stop passively running the code and to start hacking the system that wrote you. Stop being a default setting. You got the head-start; now write your own parameters.

Much love, David

PS: If you want to read a bit more of his work yourself, go and check out his papers on https://www.peterputnam.org/.

Philosophy sells itself as the search for truth. Eternal wisdom. Universal principles. But strip away the polish and what you find isn’t purity, it’s propaganda. From Athens to Silicon Valley, philosophy has always been a mirror, warped and cracked, reflecting whoever happens to be holding power.

This episode drags you through the centuries to show how thought has been chained, caged, and weaponised. Socrates exposing Athens until they killed him. Plato drafting a utopia that doubles as a dictatorship. Augustine inventing guilt to keep the flock in line. The Enlightenment building a cage of reason that justified slavery and empire. Marx flipping the mirror to reveal class struggle. Nietzsche shattering truth itself. Foucault whispering that you’re already in a prison, one you can’t even see.

And now, in the digital age, the mirror sits in your pocket, glowing, tracking, watching. Power no longer needs priests or kings, it has algorithms. You don’t just obey. You scroll. You like. You share. You willingly polish the mirror that reflects you back as a product.

This is the history of philosophy as it really is: not pure, not noble, but dirty, bloody, chained, and dangerous.

Much love, David