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.
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.
17 Feb 2026
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.
10 Feb 2026
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.
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