Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher who shouldn’t exist. Dishevelled, incoherent, constantly coughing and stumbling, he looks less like a thinker and more like a man who accidentally wandered onto a stage. And yet, out of this chaos comes one of the sharpest diagnoses of our world: why we laugh at ideology, why we fantasize about the end of the world, why capitalism feels eternal even as it devours us.

In this episode of The Observing I, we dive deep into the contradictions that make Žižek both clown and prophet. From his childhood in socialist Yugoslavia to his obsession with toilets, jokes, and Hollywood blockbusters, Žižek turns philosophy into performance art, and performance into philosophy. We’ll explore his Lacanian core, his insistence that ideology survives through cynicism, and his terrifying reminder that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Žižek doesn’t give us comfort. He doesn’t give us solutions. He gives us catastrophe wrapped in laughter. He forces us to face the Real, the trauma beneath our fantasies, and to realize the joke has always been on us.

This is the gospel according to Žižek: if we’re going to burn, we might as well laugh while the ashes fall.

Much love, David

After a month away in Indonesia, the temples, incense, and heavy heat of Bali still linger in my mind. The summer break has ended, and The Observing I returns with something both spiritual and deeply psychological. This episode asks a simple but unsettling question: what happens when ancient Buddhist philosophy meets modern psychology?

It begins with a moment in Ubud, sitting cross-legged in a temple courtyard as a monk tells me, “Everything is impermanent.” A week later, back home, my therapist says, “Your feelings won’t last forever.” Same truth, different accents. That contrast became the seed for this conversation. One that travels between the Four Noble Truths and cognitive therapy, between impermanence and neuroplasticity, between the Buddhist teaching of no-self and the psychological understanding of identity, and finally to compassion, not as sentiment, but as a rewiring of the brain.

Buddhism hands these truths to us through rituals and parables; psychology delivers them in treatment plans and scan results. Both are attempts to loosen the grip of craving and fear. Whether you meditate on a cushion or reflect in a therapist’s chair, you’re in the same laboratory, the mind itself, running the same experiment: to watch, to loosen, to respond to life with curiousity rather than clinging.

This isn’t about becoming a better Buddhist or a better patient. It’s about learning to recognise the constant movement beneath our thoughts, our identities, and our relationships. It’s about seeing change not as a threat, but as the space where transformation becomes possible.

Much love, David

Antonin Artaud didn’t want to entertain you. He wanted to infect you. He wanted to burn down the theatre, then climb into the ashes and scream until the gods woke up. His Theatre of Cruelty was never a metaphor. It was a ritual, a possession, a violent reminder that behind every mask of civilization there is a jaw, and behind every jaw, a scream waiting to be released.

In this episode of The Observing I, we do not study Artaud. We survive him. We walk with him through the electric corridors of his mind, through the plague-ridden rituals he called theatre, through his years locked in institutions where his bones were fried with shock and his language dissolved into raw sound. We listen as he curses God. We watch him tear apart language, theatre, art, sanity, and finally himself.

This is not a biography. It’s a descent. A séance. A reckoning with the parts of ourselves we’ve exiled in the name of comfort and coherence. Artaud offers no answers. He offers a scream. A body without organs. A theatre that bites back. His madness is not illness. It is method. Sacred. Violent. Necessary.

Enter only if you’re ready to confront the performance that lives under your skin. The one with no script. No exit. No applause.

You have been warned.