Living The Book of Disquiet

About Living The Book of Disquiet

This podcast began with me writing letters to my soulmate/literary doppelganger Fernando Pessoa. I then went off and got lost on YouTube making "content" for a couple of years but sucked at that. So I'm now back here podcasting! Some of the new pieces will be Pessoa/Book of Disquiet focused, but much of the new stuff, as the title of the show suggests, will be me living my own book of disquiet through texts/films/music which I feel FP would have vibed with. I hope you will stick around for these new episodes in 2026. Say hi if you like here: livingthebookofdisquiet@gmail.com Steve x

Publisher

Fernando Pessoa

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

5 Jun 2023

Latest episode

9 Jan 2026

Latest episodes

21 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Jan 2026

   Speaking to No One in the Age of Content

   Hey FP, You're a loner. I'm a loner. The writer Anneli Rufus is a loner. That shared condition is what pulled me back into her book Party of One: A Loner’s Manifesto (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Party-One-Manifesto-Anneli-Rufus/dp/1569245134), which has also sent me back to you. This episode is a letter to you about loneliness in the age of platforms, about why speaking now almost always means speaking into systems that do not want one soul addressing another, and about how art quietly degrades into content when expression is reorganised around optimisation, scale, and engagement. I talk about YouTube, therapy culture, ADHD and trauma narratives, self-pity as a moral crime, and the way our most basic primate needs for attention, recognition, and belonging are now mimed by screens. I also think about why I have spent two years talking into a platform (YouTube) that could never answer back, and why I am returning instead to the slower, if somewhat lonelier practice of speaking to you, friend.

2. 

   14 Nov 2025

   Pessoa, c'est nous?

   Good morning FP, I was lying in bed half an hour ago wondering if I should stop writing to you, stop trying to connect to another human being through the medium of writing. For this is a peculiar game I am playing here am I not? A man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. He gets a bit closer and recognises that the tree is a kind of proxy for the conversations this man maybe wishes to have with another. So he approaches the man and offers him an ear: talk to me and I will respond as another man might, or even as a tree, he says. Alternately, a man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. How peculiar, he thinks, and walks on, leaving the man and the tree to whatever understanding they might learn to glean from each other. Perhaps this is your response to my fable, a poem from 1933? The master without disciples had a flawed machine. Despite its levers and gears it never did anything. It served as a barrel organ when there was no one to hear it. When silent, it tried to look curious, but no one came near it. My soul, rather like that machine, is flawed, complicated, erratic, and serves no purpose at all.

3. 

   12 Nov 2025

   Do We Need Anybody? (We Need Somebody to Love)

   FP, in this missive I write to you about addiction and abstinence, about Bhavesh and me spending an evening without our respective substances, and the idea that therapy, like religion, depends on confronting what one cannot renounce. I describe the Beatles and their articulation of love as life’s central meaning, Freud’s belief that an analyst must face his own cravings to avoid moralising or colluding with a client, and Jung’s influence on Alcoholics Anonymous through the concept of spiritus contra spiritum. I examine psychotherapy as a secular religion with its own rituals, prohibitions, and codes of purity, and discuss the constraints of supervision, the fear of liability and exposure, and the rise of what I call the Church of Outrage. I consider the therapist’s position within capitalism, the tension between care and commerce, and the role of friendship in therapeutic work. I trace Freud’s intellectual inheritance from Judaism and Christianity, his inward turn toward the invisible, his resistance to redemption, and his fatalism made literal through his addiction to cigars. I contrast Freud’s stoic endurance with Father Teofan’s ascetic ideal and Hesse’s depiction of Narcissus and Goldmund as embodiments of transcendence and appetite. Finally, I return to you, Fernando, to the cafés, the wine, the solitude, and the way you refined all that corrosion into syntax, proving that style can outlast flesh.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

9 ratings

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.