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The Observing I Podcast

The Observing I Podcast

De : David Johnson
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 Award winning podcast about philosophy, psychology, and the human experience. New episode every Tuesday.

theobservingi.comDavid Johnson Développement personnel Philosophie Réussite personnelle Sciences sociales
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    • Jan Patočka and the Philosophy of Living in Truth

      Jan Patočka and the Philosophy of Living in Truth
      Feb 17 2026

      Jan Patočka was a Czech philosopher who spent thirty years banned from teaching, running illegal philosophy seminars in private apartments, passing hand-typed manuscripts through networks of people who understood that ideas could get you arrested. In 1977, at sixty-nine years old, he co-signed Charter 77. A document simply asking the Czechoslovak government to honor the human rights commitments it had already made on paper. The secret police interrogated him for eleven hours. He suffered a brain hemorrhage and died ten days later.

      In today's episode, we go deep into Patočka's three movements of existence, his concept of living in truth, his influence on Václav Havel and the Velvet Revolution, and his most quietly explosive idea - the solidarity of the shaken. The bond that forms not between people who agree, but between people who have all had their certainties destroyed and refused to rebuild the comfortable lie over the rubble.

      The shaking is not the enemy. That is what he knew. This episode is about what that costs, what it makes possible, and what it is asking you right now.

      Much love, David x



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      53 min
    • Mikhail Bakhtin and the Unfinished Self

      Mikhail Bakhtin and the Unfinished Self
      Feb 10 2026
      You are not one person. You never were.This is not a metaphor about complexity or depth. This is not inspirational content about containing multitudes. This is a structural diagnosis of how consciousness actually works, and the moment you understand it, the monologue you call your identity starts to crack.Mikhail Bakhtin understood something so fundamentally destabilizing about human consciousness that Stalin’s regime tried to bury it. He understood that the self is not a singular, coherent narrative. The self is a dialogue. A conversation with no final word. A collision of voices that never resolves into one clean answer. And every day you spend performing coherence, curating a finished identity, optimizing yourself into a brand, you are committing a small act of violence against the most alive thing about you.We live in a culture obsessed with the finished self. The optimized self. The self that has figured it out, that posts the proof, that performs completion like a product launch. LinkedIn is a graveyard of finished selves. Instagram is a museum of people who have already arrived. And every single one of those selves is a lie. Not because people are dishonest. Because the self was never meant to be finished.The Dialogue That Makes You RealBakhtin called it polyphony. Multiple voices. Not the inspiring kind where everyone gets heard and we all feel validated. The uncomfortable kind where voices contradict, compete, refuse to resolve. You think you have one voice, one coherent position, one true self. But you contain multitudes. You are the person who wants to be good and the person tired of being good. The person who loves your life and the person who wants to burn it down and start over. These are not phases. These are not glitches. These are voices. And the more you silence them, the louder they scream from the basement.You did not build your self alone. Every opinion you hold, every value you defend, every fear that keeps you awake at night was given to you by someone else first. Your mother’s voice. Your teacher’s expectation. Your friend’s judgment. The stranger who looked at you a certain way when you were seventeen and something inside you shifted forever. You are not a monologue. You are the echo chamber of a thousand voices that spoke to you before you even knew you were listening.This is what Bakhtin called addressivity. Every thought you have is addressed to someone. Even when you are alone. Especially when you are alone. You are always speaking to an imagined listener. You are always performing for an invisible audience. And that audience shapes what you say before you say it. Your internal monologue is not a monologue at all. It is a dialogue where you play both parts and pretend you are in control.The Authoritative Word vs. The Internally Persuasive WordThere are two kinds of voices living inside you. The authoritative word arrives with credentials, with institutional backing, with the collected wisdom of everyone who came before you and decided how things should be. It does not negotiate. It announces itself and waits for you to comply. Your parents spoke it. Your religion spoke it. Your culture spoke it. And you absorbed it so completely that by the time you were old enough to question it, you could not tell where the voice ended and you began.The internally persuasive word is different. It emerges from dialogue. From the messy, uncertain process of testing ideas against experience. It is the thought that keeps coming back even when you try to ignore it. The question that will not let you sleep. The feeling that something is wrong even though you cannot articulate what or why. The internally persuasive word does not give you answers. It gives you better questions.You change through dialogue. Through conversation where neither person walks away the same. Where words move between you and transform in transit and come back different than they left. But most people never make it past the authoritative word. Because the internally persuasive word is uncomfortable. It says maybe everything you were told was wrong. Maybe the life you built is not the life you want. Maybe the person you have been performing is not the person you are.The Threshold: Where You Actually ExistBakhtin had a word for the place where you are actually alive. He called it the threshold. Not the self you perform or the identity you curate. The threshold is the space between. The edge of one thing becoming another. The moment before the decision. The second after the mask cracks. The threshold is where you stand when you do not know who you are anymore and you have not yet figured out who you are going to become.Dostoevsky’s characters live on thresholds. In doorways. In stairwells. In prison cells and streets at midnight. They exist in spaces where the normal rules of social performance collapse and something raw breaks through. Raskolnikov does not confess in a church. He confesses in a crowded square ...
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      44 min
    • Lev Shestov and the Violence of Reason

      Lev Shestov and the Violence of Reason
      Feb 3 2026

      Lev Shestov spent his entire life at war with the most dangerous idea in human history. Not God. Not death. Not the void. Reason itself. The belief that things must be as they are. That necessity is real. That if something can be explained, it’s been understood.

      He was wrong about a lot of things. But he was right about this: every system that makes your suffering make sense is also making your suffering permanent.

      We live in Athens now. The algorithm predicts your behaviour. The data explains your choices. The metrics measure your worth. And somewhere underneath all that optimisation, all that rational efficiency, all that smooth frictionless life, something is dying. Something that can’t be quantified. Something that refuses to be predicted.

      Shestov called it faith. Not the kind you find in churches. The kind that says no to necessity. The kind that refuses explanation when explanation is the cage. The kind that insists the impossible is possible even when every system designed to run your life says otherwise.

      This week we go deep into the war between Athens and Jerusalem. Between reason and faith. Between the world as it must be and the world as it could be if you’re brave enough to refuse the first one.

      The algorithm already knows what you’re going to do next. The question is whether you’re going to let it.

      Much love, David x



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      56 min
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