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

Martin Heidegger doesn’t waste time with the easy questions. He doesn’t ask what truth is, or what justice means, or whether God exists. He asks the question everyone avoids, the one buried under chatter and distraction: what does it mean to be? Once you hear it, you can’t shake it. Heidegger drags you through the foundations of your existence, showing you that you were thrown here without consent, that you hide inside the routines of everydayness, that your anxiety is the sound of your own Being clawing at the walls. He says you are already being-toward-death, that your life is framed by finitude, and that authenticity only begins when you stop running and face it.

But the man behind the philosophy isn’t clean. Heidegger put on the Nazi uniform. He gave speeches praising Hitler. He, who warned against dissolving into the they, dissolved into it at its most grotesque. His thought is a masterpiece haunted by betrayal, a philosophy that forces you to ask whether brilliant ideas can survive a corrupt messenger.

This episode takes you into the forest of Heidegger’s philosophy and doesn’t let you out until you’ve stared into the abyss. It’s not comfortable, it’s not uplifting, but it is real. And the only question left at the end is whether you’ll keep hiding, or whether you’ll live before your time runs out.

Much love, David

Life isn’t a journey. It isn’t progress. It isn’t destiny unfolding like some golden road. According to Arthur Schopenhauer, life is a pendulum. One side is pain. The other is boredom. Back and forth, forever.

This week on The Observing I, we dive headfirst into the black hole of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The world, he says, isn’t made of matter, or reason, or God. It’s made of Will. Blind, endless hunger that never stops gnawing. Every desire you chase, every victory you clutch, every kiss, every paycheck, every like on your phone. It’s just the Will wearing another mask. Relief is brief. Hunger reloads. And the cycle never ends.

But here’s the twisted beauty: Schopenhauer doesn’t just diagnose the disease. He shows us the exits. Temporary, fragile, but real. A song that suspends you outside yourself. Compassion that cracks open your own prison by recognizing everyone else is trapped too. Or the nuclear option: renouncing the Will entirely, starving it out, refusing to play the game.

We’ll trace his philosophy through his grudges, his dogs, his hatred of Hegel, his obsession with suffering. And we’ll see how his bleak gospel infected Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner, and still bleeds into our scrolling, binge-watching, over-consuming world today.

Schopenhauer won’t give you hope. He’ll give you something better: permission to stop lying to yourself. To see the machine for what it is. To breathe inside the suffering without expecting salvation.

Because maybe the only way to survive life is to stop pretending it isn’t hell.

Much love, David