Adequate Conceit

Benjamin John
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  • PHILOSOPHY
  • UPDATED SEMIWEEKLY

Adequate Conceit is a philosophy podcast told through long-form audio essays about modern life after certainty. Each season is a collection of reflective essays exploring what happens when the old structures of meaning — religion, identity, work, and cultural certainty — begin to fracture. The show began in the aftermath of religious deconstruction, asking what fills the space when faith no longer does. But it has grown into something wider. This season turns toward: • loneliness in an age of optimisation • identity politics and the exhaustion of being seen • artificial intelligence and synthetic intimacy • self-help culture and the discipline that leaves us alone • existence pain without quick fixes • the tension between being wild and being domesticated This isn’t a motivational podcast. It doesn’t offer life hacks or tidy conclusions. Instead, each episode sits in the messy middle — pulling apart cultural habits, philosophical assumptions, and the quiet contradictions of modern life. If you’re drawn to philosophy, psychology, meaning, culture, deconstruction, and the emotional landscape of being human right now, you’ll feel at home here. No shouting. No simple answers. Just careful thinking in public.

  1. FEB 27

    After the Abyss

    What happens after the abyss? After certainty fades. After the outrage cycle burns out. After faith, productivity, and the promise of progress start to feel thin. After you realise there might be no rescue arc, no final act waiting to resolve the tension. After the Abis sits in that space. This is an episode about existential meaning in a world that feels unstable. About uncertainty, burnout, attention fatigue, and the quiet grief that follows the loss of belief — whether that belief was religious, political, professional, or personal. It asks what love looks like without hope attached to it. What connection looks like when you lower the standard. What grace looks like when people are loud, messy, flawed — and still worth standing beside. There’s a story about a paddling pool. There’s a story about meaning collapsing. There’s a story about choosing connection in the middle of mental and cultural exhaustion. No toxic positivity. No motivational arc. No neat ending. Just a quiet defiance: If there’s no one coming, there’s us.

    9 min
  2. The Missing Conversation

    FEB 17

    The Missing Conversation

    As we choose our AI tools — not by features or performance, but by which one feels like it gets them. That isn’t really a story about technology. This episode traces that feeling back to a much older loss: the disappearance of thinking together. The loss of unfinished work, intellectual companionship, and the spaces where ideas could stay rough, debated, and alive. From early chatbots to modern work culture, this is a reflection on patience, kindness, TL;DR thinking, and what happens when the middle disappears.

    9 min
  3. After We Were Heard

    FEB 10

    After We Were Heard

    We fought to be heard. We fought for language. We fought for a seat at the table. And that mattered. But now that we’re here, something feels stalled. This episode looks at what happens when identity becomes the main thing we defend — and creation quietly falls away. When outrage replaces contribution, when expression stands in for making, and when being against something feels easier than building something new. A conversation about exhaustion, meaning, art, work, and the difference between declaring who we are and offering something that didn’t exist before.

    9 min
  4. The Loneliness After Discipline

    FEB 7

    The Loneliness After Discipline

    We did the work. We deleted the apps. We got more intentional, more self-aware, more disciplined. And then something unexpected happened. This episode explores the strange, quiet loneliness that can appear after self-help works — when coping mechanisms fall away and nothing rushes in to replace them. Not a crisis. Not a breakdown. Just a new kind of aloneness that no one really warned us about. A reflection on discipline, disconnection, and what we stopped building while we were busy fixing ourselves.

    8 min
  5. Season 4 Trailer

    SEASON 4 TRAILER

    Season 4 Trailer

    When we last spoke, we were trying to make sense of a world that had fractured. Since then, something quieter has happened. We became more disciplined. More self-aware. More intentional. And somehow, more alone. Season 4 of Adequate Conceit sits with what’s emerged in the gaps: after self-help works, after identity hardens, after our conversations get shorter and our certainty louder. It explores loneliness without collapse, meaning without grand narratives, and the strange comfort of being heard back by machines when we’ve lost the time and patience to do it for one another. This season isn’t about answers. It’s about the middle we lost — unfinished thoughts, thinking together, and the fragile spaces where something new might still be built. If you’ve felt calmer but flatter. Seen but stalled. Disciplined but disconnected. This season is for you.

    4 min

  6. 01/11/2022

    Existence pain

    Existence pain, sometimes it's hard to be here at all sometimes trying to work the whys and how's behind that doesn't do us any more Favors  a lot of the thinking here developed after reading Loves Executioner

    9 min

  7. 01/06/2022

    Love with a side of Pitty

    Do we have to understand before we love? We develop a particular type of care where we still pathologist the wants and behaviours of others who just like us might be doing the best they can. A caring pity. this time ask if there's anything a little better

    10 min

  8. 01/04/2022

    I am sorry your just 'too much'

    That time you burst out love all over someone a bit too early.

    11 min
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Trailers

About

Adequate Conceit is a philosophy podcast told through long-form audio essays about modern life after certainty. Each season is a collection of reflective essays exploring what happens when the old structures of meaning — religion, identity, work, and cultural certainty — begin to fracture. The show began in the aftermath of religious deconstruction, asking what fills the space when faith no longer does. But it has grown into something wider. This season turns toward: • loneliness in an age of optimisation • identity politics and the exhaustion of being seen • artificial intelligence and synthetic intimacy • self-help culture and the discipline that leaves us alone • existence pain without quick fixes • the tension between being wild and being domesticated This isn’t a motivational podcast. It doesn’t offer life hacks or tidy conclusions. Instead, each episode sits in the messy middle — pulling apart cultural habits, philosophical assumptions, and the quiet contradictions of modern life. If you’re drawn to philosophy, psychology, meaning, culture, deconstruction, and the emotional landscape of being human right now, you’ll feel at home here. No shouting. No simple answers. Just careful thinking in public.

Information

  • Creator
    Benjamin John
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    34
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Benjamin John
  • Show Website
    Adequate Conceit