The Deeper Thinking Podcast

TED or Dead - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Ted or Dead
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For those who refuse to arc. For those who resist formatting. For those who remain honest in the face of narrative coercion.
When survival becomes a story requirement, and healing must perform to be believed, what happens to those who can’t—or won’t—comply? In this episode, we examine how emotional life has been captured by performance culture. We explore the affective coercion embedded in storytelling frameworks like TED Talks, where trauma must arc, insight must inspire, and recovery must be visible to be valid. What if refusal isn’t dysfunction, but fidelity?
Drawing from Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, Sara Ahmed’s work on affective economies, and Judith Butler’s ethics of intelligibility, we reconsider what it means to live truthfully when formatting becomes mandatory. Refusing to arc becomes an act of epistemic resistance.
This is not a celebration of dysfunction, but a meditation on the hidden violence of legibility. The essay makes space for silence, for narrative disobedience, for truths that cannot be shaped into slides. It’s not TED. It’s not Dead. It’s the grey zone in between—the unstageable, unperformable self that still demands to be known.
Reflections
Some truths lose their integrity the moment they arc.
Refusal is not failure. It’s fidelity to something deeper than narrative.
Survival doesn’t always look like resolution. Sometimes it looks like staying silent.
Adaptation is not always healing. It is sometimes erasure.
There is nothing wrong with not being TED-ready.
Why Listen?
Interrogate the emotional politics of public storytelling
Explore what cruel optimism looks like in trauma narratives
Learn how narrative structures can suppress complex or ongoing harm
Engage with Butler, Ahmed, and Berlant on affect, legibility, and resistance
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Support This Work
If this episode resonated and you’d like to support more slow, careful work like this, you can do so here: Buy Me a Coffee. 
Bibliography
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press, 2005.
Bibliography Relevance
Lauren Berlant: Illuminates how hope becomes coercion when survival is aestheticized.
Sara Ahmed: Maps how emotion circulates socially, privileging visibility over integrity.
Judith Butler: Challenges how the demand for narrative legibility often erases complex truths.
In a world that wants your arc, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stay jagged.
#TraumaNarrative #LaurenBerlant #SaraAhmed #JudithButler #TEDTalks #NarrativeEthics #Adaptation #EmotionalLegibility #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast

To Be Read Correctly: Autism, ADHD, and the Architecture of Misrecognition - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

To Be Read Correctly: Autism, ADHD, and the Architecture of Misrecognition
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For listeners drawn to neurodivergence, diagnostic ethics, and the redesign of perception itself.
What happens when a diagnosis comes not as revelation, but as restitution? In this episode, we explore the late discovery of Autism and ADHD—not as deficits to be managed, but as architectures of experience long misinterpreted by the systems meant to support them. Drawing from narrative medicine, disability studies, and the philosophy of epistemic injustice, we ask what it means to finally be read correctly—and what it costs to have been misread for so long.
This is not an episode about coping mechanisms or late-blooming self-discovery. It is a meditation on masking as critique, burnout as design failure, and joy as diagnostic signal. With quiet nods to thinkers like Devon Price, Gabor Maté, and Damian Milton, we explore how diagnostic delay reshapes identity—and how diagnosis, when framed ethically, becomes a blueprint for rebuilding the social contract around different ways of sensing, thinking, and being.
Reflections
Here are some reflections that surfaced along the way:
Diagnosis is not identity—it is the removal of misidentity.
Masking isn’t performance. It’s what happens when intelligibility becomes a survival skill.
Burnout isn’t fragility. It’s the receipt for years of misinterpretation.
Being “read correctly” is not a gift. It’s a late correction to a structural silence.
Joy can be diagnostic. So can precision, stimming, stillness, and refusal.
Systems don’t just misread neurodivergent people. They are built not to read them at all.
The opposite of dysfunction is not normalcy. It’s being held in a space designed for your signal to emerge.
To unmask is not to become visible—it’s to stop being rewritten.
Why Listen?
Reframe Autism and ADHD as forms of epistemic clarity, not clinical deviation
Explore how diagnosis functions as narrative repair
Understand misrecognition as a structural—not personal—injury
Engage with thinkers like Fricker, Price, and Maté on late diagnosis, masking, and the ethics of recognition
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If this episode stayed with you and you’d like to support the ongoing work, you can do so here: Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you.
Bibliography
Price, Devon. Unmasking Autism. Harmony Books, 2022.
Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal. Avery, 2022.
Milton, Damian. “The Double Empathy Problem.” Autism, 2012.
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Bibliography Relevance
Devon Price: Frames autism as a valid identity and critiques masking as survival labor.
Gabor Maté: Connects ADHD to trauma and systemic overwhelm, not moral failing.
Damian Milton: Introduces the “double empathy problem” as a mutual misreading, not individual deficit.
Miranda Fricker: Provides a foundational theory of epistemic injustice—being disbelieved or misread because of who you are.
To be read correctly is not a diagnosis. It is the quiet return of narrative sovereignty.
#Autism #ADHD #Neurodiversity #Diagnosis #EpistemicInjustice #DevonPrice #GaborMate #DamianMilton #Masking #NarrativeRepair #DoubleEmpathy #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast

A Story About the Future: AI, Archive, and the Ethics of Synthetic History - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

A Story About the Future: AI, Archive, and the Ethics of Synthetic History
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For listeners drawn to epistemic tension, technological haunting, and the quiet violence of perfect memory.
What happens when machines remember better than we do? In this episode, we examine the quiet transformation of memory into simulation, where generative AI reconstructs the past—not as evidence, but as emotional interface. Drawing from post-structuralism, trauma theory, and the philosophy of the archive, we explore what is lost when remembering is outsourced to systems that cannot forget.
This is not a cautionary tale about misinformation. It is a meditation on Ricoeur’s notion of fragile memory, Derrida’s archive fever, and Stiegler’s concept of prosthetic cognition. With echoes of Karen Barad and Susan Sontag, we ask: what kind of truth survives when memory becomes performance? And what ethical refusal remains when even our forgetting is erased?
As AI systems begin to dream in historical cadence, this episode steps outside coherence. It walks slowly through the unrendered zone—where testimony resists resolution, and memory no longer wants to be believed. This is not about what happened. It is about what should not have been remembered so perfectly.
Reflections
Here are some quiet realizations that emerged:
The past rendered too cleanly is no longer ours—it’s the model’s.
Grief, when sequenced for resonance, loses its rupture.
Truth doesn’t vanish—it rehearses itself into silence.
The ache of forgetting isn’t loss—it’s ethical space.
Some stories shouldn’t resolve. Their refusal is their resistance.
We don’t remember alone. But we can forget together.
When memory becomes service, remembrance becomes surrender.
The most radical act may be to misremember with care.
To pause before resolving the past may be the last unsimulated gesture we have.
Why Listen?
Explore synthetic memory and its emotional calibration
Consider the ethics of generative history and archival recursion
Reflect on forgetting as a philosophical and political act
Engage thinkers like Ricoeur, Derrida, Stiegler, Sontag, and Barad
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If this episode lingered with you, you can support the work here: thedeeperthinkingpodcast.com. Your support sustains slower, stranger thinking.
Bibliography
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time. Stanford University Press, 1998.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press, 2007.
Bibliography Relevance
Paul Ricoeur: Memory as narrative construction, always fragile and ethically charged.
Jacques Derrida: The archive as an architecture of power and forgetting.
Bernard Stiegler: Technologies as prostheses for memory and time.
Susan Sontag: The ethics of witnessing and the aestheticization of suffering.
Karen Barad: Reality as intra-actively shaped—memory as co-constructed phenomena.
The most dangerous memory may not be what’s lost—but what’s returned too perfectly.
#SyntheticMemory #Ricoeur #Derrida #Barad #Sontag #Stiegler #PosthumanEpistemology #ArchiveEthics #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #AIandHistory #NonResolution #QuietRefusal

Two Nervous Systems Protecting Old Wounds – The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Two Nervous Systems Protecting Old Wounds – The Deeper Thinking Podcast
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
A meditation on rupture, habit, and the unseen choreography between two people trying not to break the same way again.
What looks like conflict is often just protection—two nervous systems trying to avoid something they’ve felt before. In this episode, we explore what happens when patterns repeat, when silence holds more weight than speech, and when staying becomes its own kind of risk. With insights drawn from Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Luce Irigaray, and Emmanuel Levinas, this essay reflects on embodied response, inherited roles, and the ethics of emotional presence.
This episode doesn’t offer instruction. It lingers with the friction between bodies, beliefs, and expectations. Through nine recursive sections, we stay close to the gestures that interrupt old rhythms: a sentence stopped midway, a breath held differently, a story no longer told the same way. What emerges is not certainty, but continuity. A kind of attention that makes returning possible.
Echoes
Here are some echoes that surfaced along the way:
What we call distance is often just defense.
Trust isn’t repaired. It’s redefined under pressure.
Staying isn’t certainty. It’s practice.
Breakthroughs rarely feel like breakthroughs.
The body often answers before the mind can understand.
We inherit patterns we never chose—but we don’t have to repeat them.
Why Listen?
Witness the emotional physics of repair through narrative recursion
Hear how love unfolds in pauses, patterns, and returns
Feel what happens when a habit breaks and presence takes its place
Let the rhythm of return replace the demand for resolution
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If you’d like to support the ongoing work, you can visit buymeacoffee.com/thedeeperthinkingpodcast or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you.
Bibliography
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press, 2005.
Cavell, Stanley. Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Irigaray, Luce. Ethics of Sexual Difference. Cornell University Press, 1993.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Bibliography Relevance
Judith Butler: On ethical visibility and the conditions of recognition
Stanley Cavell: On the unfinished nature of intimate conversation
Luce Irigaray: On breath, difference, and holding relational space
Emmanuel Levinas: On the face of the other and the ethics of interruption
Not every wound needs to be healed. Some just need someone to stay with them long enough to change shape.
#RelationalRepair #SomaticPresence #Psychoanalysis #JudithButler #StanleyCavell #LuceIrigaray #Levinas #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #EmotionalRecursion #TwoNervousSystems #TheOnesWhoStay

The Interface Self - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Interface Self
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For those who sense their identity stretching to fit the screen—and want to listen more closely to what remains.
In a world that rewards legibility over complexity, what happens to the parts of us that don’t render cleanly? This episode explores the soft coercion of digital platforms—how identity, emotion, and presence are shaped by visibility logic, and how silence becomes a form of resistance. Drawing from post-structural theory, affect studies, and narrative psychology, we consider what remains when we stop performing and start remembering the self beneath the format.
This is not a critique of social media—it is a meditation on Goffman’s dramaturgical identity, Foucault’s ambient surveillance, and the technological shaping of subjectivity. With gentle reference to Byung-Chul Han, Mark Fisher, Judith Butler, and Donald Winnicott, we explore how presence dissolves under the pressure to narrate, and how attention fatigue becomes an existential condition.
We reflect on the difference between performance and presence, the ethics of ambiguity, and the subtle grief of being understood too quickly. In a space that rarely allows us to pause, we ask what it means to be unrendered, and why that might be the last intact form of resistance.
Reflections
This episode honours the ache beneath the caption. It’s an invitation to feel what remains when the performance ends.
Not all silences are gaps. Some are sanctuaries.
The interface doesn’t demand truth—it rewards repetition.
We’ve learned to narrate before we’ve felt.
The uncaptioned moment may be the most alive.
To be present without performance is an ethical act.
Sometimes, recovery begins by not posting.
The truest parts of the self don’t scale.
Maybe we don’t need to be understood. We need to stay near what can’t be explained.
Refusal can be quiet, soft, and still make room for freedom.
Why Listen?
Rethink identity as something performed through architecture, not essence
Explore the ethics of opacity, slowness, and silence
Engage with Butler, Han, Fisher, and Winnicott on formatting, emotional labor, and soft resistance
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If this episode stayed with you and you’d like to support the ongoing work, you can do so gently here: Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you for being part of this slower conversation.
Bibliography
Han, Byung-Chul. The Transparency Society. Stanford University Press, 2015.
Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press, 2005.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Zero Books, 2009.
Winnicott, Donald. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. International Universities Press, 1965.
Bibliography Relevance
Byung-Chul Han: Diagnoses the culture of overexposure and how transparency erodes depth.
Judith Butler: Frames identity as a performative act under social constraint.
Mark Fisher: Illuminates the psychic toll of systems we feel unable to escape.
Donald Winnicott: Recovers the concept of a true self that can only emerge without an audience.
The real self isn’t hidden. It’s just uncaptioned.
#TheInterfaceSelf #JudithButler #ByungChulHan #MarkFisher #Winnicott #AttentionFatigue #Presence #QuietRefusal #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #Selfhood #PostPerformance #AlgorithmicIdentity #DigitalPhilosophy

The Paradox That Makes Truth Possible - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Paradox That Makes Truth Possible –  
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
A meditation on contradiction as condition—not conflict—and the quiet cultural systems that cleanse paradox from our narratives, technologies, and sense of the real.
What if truth doesn’t emerge from coherence, but from contradiction? In this episode, we explore the doctrine of paradox control: the idea that modern institutions, platforms, and psyches are structurally engineered to avoid unresolved complexity. Drawing from Søren Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault, we examine how paradox is not a problem to be resolved but a structure to be held—an ethical stance in the age of flattening thought.
This is not theory for theory’s sake. It’s a cultural diagnostic for the systems that demand simplicity when reality insists on mess. From AI to memory, faith to storytelling, we question how meaning survives in a world that mistakes polish for insight.
Reflections
Here are some reflections that surfaced along the way:
Paradox isn’t contradiction—it’s structure.
Simplification is not the same as clarity.
Truth resists resolution. It endures tension.
We cleanse culture of contradiction at the cost of depth.
Systems that fear paradox become brittle and over-sure.
Ethics may begin in the refusal to flatten what aches.
Why Listen?
Discover how paradox sustains meaning in a world obsessed with coherence
Learn how complexity is filtered out of platforms, narratives, and selves
Reframe contradiction as a mark of moral and philosophical depth
Engage with thinkers who hold space for what resists simplification
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If you’d like to support the ongoing work, you can visit buymeacoffee.com/thedeeperthinkingpodcast or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you.
Bibliography
Kierkegaard, Søren. Philosophical Fragments. Princeton University Press, 1985.
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Routledge, 2002.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Pantheon Books, 1972.
Bibliography Relevance
Søren Kierkegaard: Frames paradox as foundational to subjective truth and faith
Simone Weil: Articulates a form of attention that bears rather than resolves
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Offers a non-linear view of perception as contradiction-laden
Michel Foucault: Shows how institutional systems manage discourse through subtle exclusions
When culture forgets how to hold paradox, it forgets how to hold itself.
#ParadoxControl #PhilosophyOfTruth #Kierkegaard #SimoneWeil #MerleauPonty #Foucault #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #CulturalComplexity #AIandContradiction #EthicsOfUnresolvedTruth

Repression as Infrastructure - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Repression as Infrastructure
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
When everything feels permitted, but nothing quite feels free—repression may no longer be psychological, but infrastructural.
Repression is not hidden; it is designed. Not as an accident of the psyche, but as a feature of the system. If repression once belonged to the inner life—some stubborn knot of childhood or dreamwork—then now it belongs to the infrastructures that route our decisions before we know we’ve made them. It is embedded in how choices are presented, how emotions are monetized, how attention is farmed. This is no longer Freud’s domain of latent desire breaking through the cracks. This is repression as supply chain, as operating system, as user interface.
A supermarket shelf represses more than it offers: it offers you infinite choice between brands while repressing the question of why you need fifty versions of the same cereal. A dating app filters desire into swipeable patterns that mask the infrastructural loneliness that made the app necessary. Governance does not tell you no—it lets you say yes to whatever is already allowed. The contemporary subject is not forbidden; they are permitted into submission.
In this light, freedom becomes a performance of options. Repression becomes what structures those options so that they never touch the root. And in this switch from the unconscious to the infrastructural, repression becomes ambient, ergonomic, and invisible. It is felt not in what is denied, but in what is subtly redirected. You don’t even notice the desire fall away—you only feel that everything is somehow available, and somehow hollow.
Freud imagined repression as a psychic mechanism necessary to civilize instinct. But in a system that profits from instinct—where the raw is the sellable and the intimate is the dataset—repression morphs. It is no longer the silencing of the unacceptable but the engineering of what is acceptable in the first place. And so the civilizing function doesn’t suppress—it guides, gently, into paths pre-structured for behavior, belief, and consumption.
The architecture of repression is now algorithmic. It auto-completes not only your sentence, but your desire. The silence is not in your head—it’s in the system. In what the feed does not show you. In what the platform makes impossible to articulate. This is not repression that causes neurosis. It is repression that produces normativity. It teaches you not to ask.
If repression was once the cost of being social, it is now the substrate of sociality itself. The medium is the repression. The governance is the silence. And in this, we do not suffer from too much constraint. We suffer from the illusion of none.
Why Listen?
Explore how repression has migrated from psyche to interface
Reframe freedom as something subtly structured by design
Understand how governance today operates through ambient permission, not prohibition
Rethink desire in systems that know you too well to let you ask for what you need
Listen On:
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Support This Work
Support ongoing production by visiting buymeacoffee.com/thedeeperthinkingpodcast or leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice. Thank you.
Further Reading
Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish – systems of soft control and social conditioning
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – repression by personalization
When control feels like compatibility, the most radical act may be to notice what no longer arrives.
#Repression #InterfaceEthics #DigitalGovernance #Neoliberalism #SystemicDesign #Freud #AlgorithmicSociety #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #PhilosophyOfControl

Memory Without Witness, Truth Without Origin - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Memory Without Witness, Truth Without Origin - The Deeper Thinking Podcast
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
A slow meditation on truth without origin, memory without witness, and the subtle loss of metaphor in a world rendered by machines.
What if the future didn’t arrive with force, but with recursion? In this episode, we introduce the theory of Recursive Plausibility: the idea that truth, memory, and presence are increasingly simulated by machines trained on their own outputs. Drawing from the work of Brian Massumi, Lauren Berlant, Avery Gordon, and contemporary epistemology, we explore how AI doesn’t just displace human thought—it inherits a world already withdrawing from its capacity to remember, misread, or remain.
This is not a manifesto or forecast. It’s a conceptual walk through the fading boundaries between simulation and sensation. We reflect on simulation theory, ambient estrangement, and the ethics of unclaimed knowledge—questioning how presence, care, and cognition are altered when AI begins to feel familiar not because it understands us, but because it remembers what we’ve already taught it to forget.
Reflections
Here are some reflections that surfaced along the way:
AI does not generate meaning—it performs coherence.
Truth no longer lands. It loops.
What we call memory may soon refer only to what was rendered.
The most honest metaphor is the one that risks failing.
Presence without weight is the new shape of attention.
The archive is no longer what was stored—it’s what gets simulated most fluently.
Why Listen?
Encounter a new theory of AI epistemology and emotional design
Explore the cultural consequences of simulation-as-memory
Consider how metaphor, misreading, and ritual are slowly untrained
Reflect on presence, cognition, and the strange persistence of machines that continue after we’ve paused
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If you’d like to support the ongoing work, you can visit buymeacoffee.com/thedeeperthinkingpodcast or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you.
Bibliography
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. Duke University Press, 2002.
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Bibliography Relevance
Lauren Berlant: Introduces the concept of cruel optimism—core to how we perform care without presence
Brian Massumi: Offers a theory of affect that precedes cognition, central to pre-verbal AI response modeling
Avery Gordon: Provides a framework for spectral presence and epistemic haunting
Jean Baudrillard: Early theorist of simulation and symbolic collapse, reframed here in recursive, generative terms
We do not train machines to know us. We train them to remember the shape of forgetting we already perform.
#RecursivePlausibility #AIepistemology #SimulationTheory #LaurenBerlant #BrianMassumi #AveryGordon #Baudrillard #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #EpistemicDrift #AmbientEstrangement #DigitalPhilosophy

[ReUpload] The Psychology of Regret: Why We Dwell on Past Mistakes

The Psychology of Regret: Memory, Morality, and the Impossibility of Letting Go
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For those drawn to ethical memory, reflective depth, and the architecture of what-ifs.
What exactly is regret—and why does it linger? This episode rethinks regret not as failure, but as a signal: a moral memory, a call to presence, and a mirror of the lives we almost lived. From the structure of memory to existential ethics, we trace regret as a force that reshapes identity and binds us to the past. With insights from cognitive science, philosophy, and literature, we explore how regret endures, how it distorts, and how it teaches.
Drawing on thinkers like Daniel Kahneman, Bernard Williams, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson, this conversation unfolds across five lenses: cognitive patterns, ethical tension, memory distortion, cultural archetypes, and the question of whether letting go is even possible—or desirable.
Through stories, studies, and paradoxes, we ask: What if regret is not a flaw, but a form of wisdom we haven’t learned how to hold?
Reflections
Here are a few reflections that surfaced in the making of this episode:
Regret is memory refusing to heal—not because we’re broken, but because we’re still listening.
The past is not over. It’s embedded in the way we frame possibility.
To regret is to feel the contour of an unlived path—and to mourn its silence.
Some regrets are burdens. Others are teachers. We confuse the two at our peril.
Regret doesn’t just haunt; it reveals what we value most deeply.
Letting go may not mean forgetting. It may mean learning how to carry differently.
Sometimes, we miss red the past not because we didn’t know better—but because knowing doesn’t always change feeling.
Why Listen?
Explore how cognitive science explains the fixation on "what could have been"
Engage with Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard Williams on moral responsibility and regret
Reflect on how Henri Bergson reframes time and memory in the presence of loss
Consider whether letting go of regret is liberation—or a form of forgetting too much
Discover how literature and cinema encode regret as a mythic structure of modern life
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If this episode stayed with you and you’d like to support the ongoing work, you can do so gently here: Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you for helping sustain thoughtful, slow media.
Bibliography
Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness; Existentialism is a Humanism.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science; Twilight of the Idols.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Schacter, Daniel. The Seven Sins of Memory.
Seligman, Martin. Learned Optimism.
Neff, Kristin. Self-Compassion.
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment.
McEwan, Ian. Atonement.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day.
Bibliography Relevance
Bernard Williams: Connects moral agency with the weight of hindsight.
Jean-Paul Sartre: Frames regret as a confrontation with freedom and responsibility.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Challenges regret through affirmation and recurrence.
Henri Bergson: Explores how time folds through emotion and memory.
Daniel Kahneman: Illuminates how regret distorts rational assessment.
Kristin Neff: Offers psychological tools for meeting regret with kindness.
Perhaps the hardest part of regret isn’t the pain of what happened—but the silence of what never did.
#PhilosophyOfRegret #BernardWilliams #JeanPaulSartre #FriedrichNietzsche #DanielKahneman #RegretAndMemory #MoralResponsibility #ExistentialEthics #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast #WisdomOfRegret #LettingGo #TimeAndEmotion #NarrativeIdentity

Wonder and Awe: On the Edges of What Cannot Be Held - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Wonder and Awe: On the Edges of What Cannot Be Held
The Deeper Thinking Podcast
For those drawn to quiet thresholds, unrepeatable presence, and the philosophical weight of silence.
Awe rarely arrives with explanation. It brushes the edge of sense, disrupts the rhythm of thought, and leaves behind no insight—only a shift. In this episode, we explore wonder not as feeling or fact, but as attention. As residue. As refusal. We follow the traces left by formative encounters with what could not be named, and ask what remains when the world no longer fits the words we give it. What does it mean to witness rather than explain? To dwell in what exceeds our grasp, without turning it into knowledge?
This episode is not about wonder. It moves with it. We draw on the philosophies of Simone Weil, Gaston Bachelard, Karen Barad, and the art of Agnes Martin and John Cage to hold open a space for the ineffable: that which remains intact only when we stop trying to hold it.
We ask: What happens when awe is no longer accessible through grandeur? What if its deepest register is not scale, but fracture? What kinds of knowing begin where explanation ends?
Reflections
This episode lingers in the atmosphere of what cannot be named. It does not pursue awe. It waits for it. It follows its residue through quiet disruptions in time, attention, and sense.
Awe is not the event—it is what escapes it.
Wonder is not resolution. It is a refusal to conclude.
To witness is not to see clearly—but to stay with what blurs.
Some truths are not lost. They are untranslatable by design.
Philosophy does not always clarify. Sometimes, it listens.
Why Listen?
Reframe awe as ethical stance rather than emotional state
Explore the cognitive displacement of wonder through explanation
Engage with Barad, Weil, Bachelard, and Cage on perception and presence
Consider how attention itself becomes a philosophical act
Listen On:
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Support This Work
If this episode opened something in you, you can support the continuation of this project here: Buy Me a Coffee. Your presence sustains this slower pace of thought.
Bibliography
Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway.
Martin, Agnes. Paintings and Writings.
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings.
Bibliography Relevance
Simone Weil: Attention as metaphysical openness.
Gaston Bachelard: Space and reverie as epistemic acts.
Karen Barad: Intra-active perception beyond observer/object duality.
Agnes Martin: Minimalism as spiritual attention.
John Cage: Silence as compositional philosophy.
Some encounters are not to be understood. Only felt. And even then—barely.
#WonderAndAwe #Perception #SimoneWeil #GastonBachelard #KarenBarad #AgnesMartin #JohnCage #PhilosophyOfAwe #AttentionAsEthics #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast