Your life is being optimized into a coffin. Every app on your phone, every metric at your job, and every "wellness" routine you follow is designed to turn you into a predictable, manageable, frictionless unit of production. They want you to live in a Crystal Palac. A world of glass and iron where everything is calculated, every need is met, and every "correct" choice is incentivized. They want to convince you that two times two always equals four, and that if you’re still miserable, it’s just because you haven't updated your software yet.

Fyodor Dostoevsky saw this coming a hundred and fifty years ago, and he hated it. He hated it enough to spend his life documenting the exact moment the human soul decides to stick its tongue out at perfection and burn the whole palace to the ground. In this episode, we’re not doing a literature lesson; we’re pulling apart the modern ego like meat from the ribs.

We’re tracing Dostoevsky’s descent from a mock execution in a frozen St. Petersburg square, where he had five minutes to live, to the Siberian labour camps where he realised that humans don't actually want happiness. We want intensity. We want friction. We want the right to be a disaster.

We go deep into the Siberian Laboratory to understand why a ten-pound shackle is a better teacher than a self-help book, and we confront the Grand Inquisitor’s Deal to see why we’ve traded our terrible freedom for the digital bread of the Feed. This is the story of the Roulette of Grace, exploring why your life only starts making sense when the math fails and the Extraordinary Man you’ve been playing finally hits the floor.

Stop trying to fix yourself. Stop trying to be rational. The firing squad is already leveling their rifles, and the only question is what you’re going to do with the five minutes you have left. Get out of the palace. Go find some friction.

Much love, David x

Welcome to 2026. The calendar flipped, but the gears didn’t stop grinding.

Most people think Franz Kafka wrote fantasy. They think he dreamed up giant bugs and invisible judges because he had a colourful imagination. They’re wrong. He wrote the user manual for the meat-grinder of modern life.

He spent his daylight hours at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, putting a dollar sign on human misery. He was the guy who decided exactly how much a crushed pelvis was worth in the eyes of the law. He was a suit. A corporate drone. A high-performing variable in a bureaucratic equation that never quite balanced.

At night, he performed the surgery. He took the sterile, bloodless prose of the office and used it to describe the smell of the machine that eats us alive.

In our first episode of the new year, we’re tearing the skin off the machinery of modern dread. Consider it a survival guide for the cubicle. We’re diving into the logic of the eternal Trial, where you’re guilty by default and the charges are redacted for your own protection. We’re looking at the Metamorphosis, where the horror isn’t turning into a vermin, but worrying about missing the 5:00 AM train while you’re doing it.

We’re talking about the Castle, that god of Middle Managers, where authority is everywhere and nowhere, and “help” is always one more form away. We’re witnessing the Penal Colony, where the company handbook is carved directly into your nervous system with glass needles until you finally “understand” the policy.

You’ve been standing at the gate for long enough. You’ve been waiting for an acquittal that isn’t coming and a permission slip that was never printed. The machine only has power as long as you believe it has a purpose.

If you’ve ever felt like a glitch in someone else’s software, this episode is for you.

The court is in session. Don’t bother bringing a lawyer.

Much love, David x

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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