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 They all have withdrawn realities that remain forever hidden from you.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 You’ve only encountered sensual versions, translated surfaces, proxies that stand in for the real person who stays withdrawn in depths even they can’t access.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

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