The Observing I Podcast

On the last Tuesday of the month, I do a live session with whomever wants to drop in. There’s a short essay to start, and then a casual Q&A. It’s more of a hang out with the listeners than anything serious. If you’re interested in joining the next one, it’ll be on Tuesday 27th October. You don’t have to be a subscriber to join. They are hosted on Substack (theobservingi.com), and everyone is welcome.---Every time I schedule one of these monthly subscriber calls, I convince myself I’m going to run a tidy, disciplined session. I’ll read through a short essay, answer three sensible questions about the text, and be in bed by one thirty. AM. That plan never survives past the ten-minute mark.We started off on the unexamined axiom. That greasy, low-level panic that hums behind your ribs on a quiet Sunday night when the rent is paid, nobody is knocking on your door, and your nervous system decides you’ve forgotten something that will inevitably ruin your life. It’s an ancient bit of survival kit that simply outlived the emergency. You learned the rule when you were twelve so an unpredictable parent wouldn't shout at you, and now you’re forty, pacing the kitchen floor in full plate armour while your tea goes cold.Once the essay was done, the wheels came off in the best possible way. I had an empty pipe in my hand to look vaguely sophisticated/ The chat took us all over the place. We argued over whether people are inherently decent or entirely broken, which dragged in George Carlin’s line about an individual being great until three of them form a group. From there we drifted into Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes, Philip K. Dick convincing himself he was trapped in ancient Rome while hopped up on speed, the Roman cult of Mithras sitting under an office block in London, and a bizarre historical tangent about whether Victorian Britain actually burnt millions of cats to use as fertiliser (which, as it turns out, is true). At nearly two in the morning, for me at least, that all made total sense.It all circled back to the same awkward theme: why we make ourselves so miserable. Having just recorded the episode on René Girard, we spent a fair bit of time on why big tech feels completely devoid of guilt, how people use Marcus Aurelius or The Art of War as corporate manuals to feel like suburban princes, and why trying to manipulate your peers is just cowardice masquerading as strategy. Even Machiavelli entered the picture at some point.The full recording is above. Have a listen if you want to watch me lose my thread, talk through London jazz spots, and threaten to dress up as Rasputin for the Halloween call. And if you have an unexamined rule running your weekends, drop it in the comments. We might as well audit the ghosts together.Much love, David x

Why do we never seem to want anything until someone else tries to pick it up first? In this episode, we look at the work of French thinker René Girard and his unsettling theory of mimetic desire—the idea that our ambitions, envies, and rivalries are rarely our own, but borrowed directly from the people standing on our own patch of carpet.From the quiet friction of group chats and family gatherings to the glowing glass in our pockets, we trace how admiration curdles into competition and why modern crowds are so quick to find an enemy. It’s an unvarnished look at the mechanics of envy, the illusion of self-authored taste, and what it actually takes to catch the machinery running before you join the mob.Much love, David x

Epictetus is usually reduced to one clean Stoic idea: focus on what you can control and let go of the rest. But his actual philosophy is stranger than that, especially once you start asking what is really “up to us” when even our thoughts, emotions and circumstances refuse to cooperate.In this episode, I look at Epictetus through the gap between what happens and what we decide it means, from unanswered messages and broken relationships to coercion, injustice and the limits of inner freedom. The question is not whether you can control your mind. It is whether the first story your mind tells deserves to become the truth.Much love, David x

U.G. Krishnamurti spent most of his life chasing enlightenment, then decided the entire search had been a mistake. He rejected gurus, methods and the promise that enough spiritual work would eventually produce a better version of you. What interested him instead was the seeker itself: the part of us constantly comparing who we are with who we think we ought to become.Some of U.G.’s claims are difficult to defend, particularly his account of the biological transformation he called the “calamity”. But the problem he kept pointing at is harder to shake off. A useful practice can become another way of grading yourself, and self-improvement can quietly turn into permanent self-surveillance. Can we change the things that genuinely need changing without turning ourselves into a permanent renovation project?Much love, David x--Join the conversation on our Discord server https://discord.gg/yUJGTCUmS5

What happens when the mind catches itself in the act? This episode explores self-awareness, metacognition and the strange moment where a thought, reaction or impulse becomes visible before it turns into behaviour.But more self-awareness isn’t always better. We look at rumination, cognitive defusion, choice blindness and the limits of introspection, asking whether noticing the mind gives us any real control over it, or simply gives us another layer of thought to get trapped inside.Much love, David x