RSS · https://api.nonarkara.org/podcast/nonism/feed.xml
On Simulation, and Why You Can Relax
One-month special. Why the simulation argument is probably right, three theories of why we might be in here, and why that is a reason to hold your life more lightly. Built from days 95 and 27 of 100 Days of Non.
The Post I Kept Not Writing
Coffee in hand. I owed this blog six more rules and I simply did not write them. I forgot. Freud had a word for the kind of forgetting that is quietly doing a job for you, and I think he was right about mine.
The Limit of a Thing
Coffee in hand. I once walked twenty-eight kilometres across Tokyo in a single day — Tsukiji, Ginza, the Imperial Palace, Roppongi, and finally Shibuya, just before the metro closed. I arrived with almost nothing in my hands. That walk taught me more about what I own than any amount of tidying ever has.
What I Actually Inherited
Coffee in hand — and today that is not a throwaway line. My father carried a tea flask to work every day of his working life and came home with it empty. I grew up watching a man run himself on one hot drink and a fixed routine. I did not inherit the tea. I inherited the ritual.
Non-Philosophy — Thailand Soccer Podcast Teaser: Philippe Coutinho and the grammar of peak talent
Philippe Coutinho: same left foot, different team grammar. Peak talent is not a portable file. Thailand Soccer Podcast teaser — Non-Philosophy. Made with ElevenLabs.
The Non-Philosophy Podcast · Thailand Soccer Podcast Teaser · The Movement
Thailand Soccer Podcast teaser. First touch as ethics at speed. Voice: ElevenLabs accent-tuned.
The Non-Philosophy Podcast · Thailand Soccer Podcast Teaser · After the Whistle
Thailand Soccer Podcast teaser. After the whistle: reset, centre circle, finite courage. Voice: ElevenLabs accent-tuned.
Ageing Beautifully
Coffee in hand. The architect Louis Kahn said that good architecture ages beautifully. I read that line years ago and stopped. That is it. That is exactly how I would like to get old — not preserved, not fighting it, just aged the way a good building ages.
The Non-Philosophy Podcast · Nostalgia
Nostalgia as memory versus policy. Keep the parts list; refuse the throne. Voice: ElevenLabs multilingual v2, accent-tuned.
The Non-Philosophy Podcast · Special · Why This Show
Pitch special. Why The Non-Philosophy Podcast exists — confession that becomes a tool, no affirmations, help yourself first. Voice: ElevenLabs multilingual v2 clone.
Six Things You Are Actually Chasing
Coffee in hand. Think of a decision you made this year that you justified with a practical reason — the job, the move, the purchase. Now ask which need it was really serving. The practical reason is almost never the whole answer.
Stability Is What Dead Things Have
Coffee in hand. Ask yourself honestly whether you want your life to be more stable — and then ask what a perfectly stable week would actually contain. Same pattern, no surprise, nothing undetectable. That is the thing you said you wanted.
The Seat Belt Argument
Coffee in hand. You fasten your seat belt without thinking about it. Somebody made you do that, and you almost certainly agree with them. So where exactly is the line where being made to do something stops being an insult to your freedom?
You Cannot Own a Person
Coffee in hand. Think about the last time you felt a flash of something ugly when someone you love made a plan that did not include you. Not the argument that followed — just that first half-second. What exactly was it defending?
Alone Is Not the Same as Lonely
Coffee in hand. Tonight, turn off every light except one screen and sit with it. Somewhere in the first ten minutes you will find out which one you are actually in — loneliness, or solitude. They feel identical for about a minute and then they stop.
The Question I Nearly Answered Too Fast
Coffee in hand. A graduate school sent me a questionnaire, and one question asked whether I would do my PhD again. Of course I would, I thought. What a stupid question. And then my hand stopped on the way to the submit button. That pause is the whole episode.
Is That So?
Coffee in hand. Think about the last piece of bad news that landed on you — the accusation, the cancelled plan, the thing that was not your fault. How long did it take you to start explaining yourself? And what would have happened if you had said nothing at all?
On Sex, Unapologetically
Coffee in hand. A warning before we start: this one is for adults, and I am not going to talk around it. Here is the question I want to put to you. You have been taught your whole life that love and sex belong together. Where did you learn that, and have you ever once checked whether it is true?
In Praise of Incrementalism
Coffee in hand. The thing that has shaped me the most was never one decision. It was years of small, boring repetition, most of it with nothing to show for it at the time. I want to make the case for that unglamorous kind of change, because it works better than almost anything else I have tried.
Confidence Is Built by Failing, Full Stop
Coffee in hand. Years ago I walked off a stage feeling like a dead man, in front of a real audience, after a talk that genuinely fell apart. I want to tell you exactly what I did in the days after that — because that failure, not any talk that went well, is where the actual confidence came from.
Why Reading the News Isn't Good for You
Coffee in hand. I found out about a story the entire world had been watching for days, weeks after everyone else already knew how it ended. I felt no shame once I noticed something: I had lost nothing by being late. That is not a throwaway line. It is the whole argument.
Would I Be Okay If This Were the Last Thing I Ever Posted
Coffee in hand. Before I post anything, I ask myself one blunt question: would I be okay if this were the last thing I ever wrote? Not because I am feeling morbid. Because it is the fastest filter I know for whether something is actually worth saying, or whether I just want to be seen saying it.
Gossip Is a Crime Against Humanity
Coffee in hand. My father was a kind man. I barely remember a time he was harsh with me. There is one I remember precisely: I had brought him gossip about a classmate, and he asked whether I knew it for sure, whether I had seen it, and whether I had reported it. Those three questions are the whole episode.
The Step Everyone Skips
Coffee in hand. Design thinking became a workshop format with coloured sticky notes on a wall. Underneath the sticky notes there is a real method — and the one step almost everyone quietly skips happens to be the only step that was ever actually difficult.
Doing the Work, or Occupying the Position
Coffee in hand. From the outside, on an ordinary week, someone who is actually doing the work and someone who is merely occupying the position look completely identical. The difference only ever shows up on the one week that goes wrong.
The Work Nobody Assigned You
Coffee in hand. Look at your real to-do list, not the polite version. I would bet at least half of what is on it was never assigned to you by anyone. It simply accumulated, and it will keep sitting there, uninspected, until somebody finally says its name out loud.
Why Modesty Is Bad for Society
Coffee in hand. Hiding what you are genuinely good at feels, from the inside, like humility. I want to make the case that it is closer to theft — that you are quietly taking something other people actually needed and putting it back in your own pocket.
Every Extra Sentence Is a Cost
Coffee in hand. Every extra sentence you write is a tax you charge someone else, without ever asking their permission first. Most writing advice is just decoration sitting on top of that one fact. I want to show you the fact underneath the decoration.
The Half-Second After Someone Criticises Your Work
Coffee in hand. There is a very specific half-second, right after someone criticises something you made, where every part of you goes straight to defending it. I want to talk about that half-second precisely — because whatever was said inside it is usually the only thing in the whole conversation actually worth hearing.
The Four Noble Truths as a Design Brief
Coffee in hand. The Four Noble Truths are, structurally, a design brief: name the suffering, find what causes it, define what its ending looks like, build the path there. It is two and a half thousand years old, and it is better organised than most briefs I have been handed this year.
Twelve Hours at an Airport
Twelve hours stuck in an airport taught me something years of trying harder never did. Effort spent on the part of a system you do not control looks exactly like effort — and produces exactly nothing. I learned that the hard way, in a plastic chair, at three in the morning.
Design, Fast and Slow
Coffee in hand. Somewhere in the last week you made a fast, confident, gut-level call, and you were almost certainly right. Somewhere else that same week, that exact same instinct was confidently, disastrously wrong — and in the moment, you had no way of knowing which one you were in.
A Nonism Dictionary
Coffee in hand. A city is a physical place where strangers try to live together without killing each other. That is a real definition, not a joke, and it costs nothing to write. This episode is a handful of sentences exactly like it.
You Built the Expectation Yourself (ElevenLabs voice)
Coffee in hand. The last time something disappointed you, look again at where the disappointment actually came from. Not from what happened. You built something in your own head first, quietly, in advance — and then completely forgot that you had built it.
Beauty Is Not in the Thing Itself
Coffee in hand. Hume said beauty is no quality in things themselves — it lives only in the eye that looks at them. Fine. Then explain why some decisions are still, unmistakably, wrong. That contradiction is where this episode lives.
I Was Just Lucky (ElevenLabs voice)
Coffee in hand. Think of the best thing that has ever happened in your career. Now sit with the uncomfortable second question: how much of that was actually you, and how much was just where you happened to be standing when the door opened? Most people never honestly answer that. I think you owe it to yourself to.
Subtract Before You Add
Coffee in hand. Look at whatever is open in front of you right now — a plan, a room, a draft. Now ask the question almost nobody asks first: not what is missing from it, but what could be taken away. That one flipped question is the entire episode.
The Anti-Fragile Manifesto
Coffee in hand. Somewhere in your life there is a system that has never once failed — a process, a relationship, the way you have always done a particular job. You probably file that under good news. I want you to spend the next ten minutes considering it might mean the opposite: that the real test simply has not happened yet.
Three Beliefs That Should Cancel Each Other Out
Coffee in hand. Three beliefs that ought to cancel each other out, and don't. People are not born broken. Almost nothing that happens to you is yours to control. And you are still, completely, responsible for what you make of it. Try holding all three at once for the next ten minutes and see what it does to the next setback you have.
The One Critic I Never Doubt
Coffee in hand. It is Mother's Day here in Thailand today. Think of the last piece of honest feedback that actually changed how you did something — not a compliment, the real kind, the kind that stung a little. Who said it to you? And why did you listen to that sentence from them, when you would have waved it off from almost anyone else?
To Philosophise Is to Learn How to Die
Montaigne and Cicero on the one appointment nobody reschedules, and what it does to the question of what today was for.
The Bad Faith Bicycle Technician
Sartre's bad faith, met in a repair shop: a man performing the role of the man who fixes bicycles so completely that there is nobody left inside it to actually fix the bicycle.
Writing Is the Thinking, Not Its Record
You do not write down a thought you already had. The writing is where the thought happens, which is why it can only be done alone.
The Most Expensive Shrug in Any Organisation
A claim that cannot survive being asked why is not a claim, it is a habit wearing a claim's clothes.
The Post I Kept Not Writing
Coffee in hand. I owed this blog six more rules and I simply did not write them. I forgot. Freud had a word for the kind of forgetting that is quietly doing a job for you, and I think he was right about mine.
The Limit of a Thing
Coffee in hand. I once walked twenty-eight kilometres across Tokyo in a single day — Tsukiji, Ginza, the Imperial Palace, Roppongi, and finally Shibuya, just before the metro closed. I arrived with almost nothing in my hands. That walk taught me more about what I own than any amount of tidying ever has.
What I Actually Inherited
Coffee in hand — and today that is not a throwaway line. My father carried a tea flask to work every day of his working life and came home with it empty. I grew up watching a man run himself on one hot drink and a fixed routine. I did not inherit the tea. I inherited the ritual.
Ageing Beautifully
Coffee in hand. The architect Louis Kahn said that good architecture ages beautifully. I read that line years ago and stopped. That is it. That is exactly how I would like to get old — not preserved, not fighting it, just aged the way a good building ages.
Six Things You Are Actually Chasing
Coffee in hand. Think of a decision you made this year that you justified with a practical reason — the job, the move, the purchase. Now ask which need it was really serving. The practical reason is almost never the whole answer.
Stability Is What Dead Things Have
Coffee in hand. Ask yourself honestly whether you want your life to be more stable — and then ask what a perfectly stable week would actually contain. Same pattern, no surprise, nothing undetectable. That is the thing you said you wanted.
The Seat Belt Argument
Coffee in hand. You fasten your seat belt without thinking about it. Somebody made you do that, and you almost certainly agree with them. So where exactly is the line where being made to do something stops being an insult to your freedom?
You Cannot Own a Person
Coffee in hand. Think about the last time you felt a flash of something ugly when someone you love made a plan that did not include you. Not the argument that followed — just that first half-second. What exactly was it defending?
Alone Is Not the Same as Lonely
Coffee in hand. Tonight, turn off every light except one screen and sit with it. Somewhere in the first ten minutes you will find out which one you are actually in — loneliness, or solitude. They feel identical for about a minute and then they stop.
The Question I Nearly Answered Too Fast
Coffee in hand. A graduate school sent me a questionnaire, and one question asked whether I would do my PhD again. Of course I would, I thought. What a stupid question. And then my hand stopped on the way to the submit button. That pause is the whole episode.
Is That So?
Coffee in hand. Think about the last piece of bad news that landed on you — the accusation, the cancelled plan, the thing that was not your fault. How long did it take you to start explaining yourself? And what would have happened if you had said nothing at all?
In Praise of Incrementalism
Coffee in hand. The thing that has shaped me the most was never one decision. It was years of small, boring repetition, most of it with nothing to show for it at the time. I want to make the case for that unglamorous kind of change, because it works better than almost anything else I have tried.
Confidence Is Built by Failing, Full Stop
Coffee in hand. Years ago I walked off a stage feeling like a dead man, in front of a real audience, after a talk that genuinely fell apart. I want to tell you exactly what I did in the days after that — because that failure, not any talk that went well, is where the actual confidence came from.
Why Reading the News Isn't Good for You
Coffee in hand. I found out about a story the entire world had been watching for days, weeks after everyone else already knew how it ended. I felt no shame once I noticed something: I had lost nothing by being late. That is not a throwaway line. It is the whole argument.
Would I Be Okay If This Were the Last Thing I Ever Posted
Coffee in hand. Before I post anything, I ask myself one blunt question: would I be okay if this were the last thing I ever wrote? Not because I am feeling morbid. Because it is the fastest filter I know for whether something is actually worth saying, or whether I just want to be seen saying it.
Gossip Is a Crime Against Humanity
Coffee in hand. My father was a kind man. I barely remember a time he was harsh with me. There is one I remember precisely: I had brought him gossip about a classmate, and he asked whether I knew it for sure, whether I had seen it, and whether I had reported it. Those three questions are the whole episode.
The Step Everyone Skips
Coffee in hand. Design thinking became a workshop format with coloured sticky notes on a wall. Underneath the sticky notes there is a real method — and the one step almost everyone quietly skips happens to be the only step that was ever actually difficult.
Doing the Work, or Occupying the Position
Coffee in hand. From the outside, on an ordinary week, someone who is actually doing the work and someone who is merely occupying the position look completely identical. The difference only ever shows up on the one week that goes wrong.
The Work Nobody Assigned You
Coffee in hand. Look at your real to-do list, not the polite version. I would bet at least half of what is on it was never assigned to you by anyone. It simply accumulated, and it will keep sitting there, uninspected, until somebody finally says its name out loud.
Why Modesty Is Bad for Society
Coffee in hand. Hiding what you are genuinely good at feels, from the inside, like humility. I want to make the case that it is closer to theft — that you are quietly taking something other people actually needed and putting it back in your own pocket.
Every Extra Sentence Is a Cost
Coffee in hand. Every extra sentence you write is a tax you charge someone else, without ever asking their permission first. Most writing advice is just decoration sitting on top of that one fact. I want to show you the fact underneath the decoration.
The Half-Second After Someone Criticises Your Work
Coffee in hand. There is a very specific half-second, right after someone criticises something you made, where every part of you goes straight to defending it. I want to talk about that half-second precisely — because whatever was said inside it is usually the only thing in the whole conversation actually worth hearing.
The Four Noble Truths as a Design Brief
Coffee in hand. The Four Noble Truths are, structurally, a design brief: name the suffering, find what causes it, define what its ending looks like, build the path there. It is two and a half thousand years old, and it is better organised than most briefs I have been handed this year.
Twelve Hours at an Airport
Twelve hours stuck in an airport taught me something years of trying harder never did. Effort spent on the part of a system you do not control looks exactly like effort — and produces exactly nothing. I learned that the hard way, in a plastic chair, at three in the morning.
Design, Fast and Slow
Coffee in hand. Somewhere in the last week you made a fast, confident, gut-level call, and you were almost certainly right. Somewhere else that same week, that exact same instinct was confidently, disastrously wrong — and in the moment, you had no way of knowing which one you were in.
A Nonism Dictionary
Coffee in hand. A city is a physical place where strangers try to live together without killing each other. That is a real definition, not a joke, and it costs nothing to write. This episode is a handful of sentences exactly like it.
You Built the Expectation Yourself (ElevenLabs voice)
Coffee in hand. The last time something disappointed you, look again at where the disappointment actually came from. Not from what happened. You built something in your own head first, quietly, in advance — and then completely forgot that you had built it.
Beauty Is Not in the Thing Itself
Coffee in hand. Hume said beauty is no quality in things themselves — it lives only in the eye that looks at them. Fine. Then explain why some decisions are still, unmistakably, wrong. That contradiction is where this episode lives.
I Was Just Lucky (ElevenLabs voice)
Coffee in hand. Think of the best thing that has ever happened in your career. Now sit with the uncomfortable second question: how much of that was actually you, and how much was just where you happened to be standing when the door opened? Most people never honestly answer that. I think you owe it to yourself to.
Subtract Before You Add
Coffee in hand. Look at whatever is open in front of you right now — a plan, a room, a draft. Now ask the question almost nobody asks first: not what is missing from it, but what could be taken away. That one flipped question is the entire episode.
The Anti-Fragile Manifesto
Coffee in hand. Somewhere in your life there is a system that has never once failed — a process, a relationship, the way you have always done a particular job. You probably file that under good news. I want you to spend the next ten minutes considering it might mean the opposite: that the real test simply has not happened yet.
Three Beliefs That Should Cancel Each Other Out
Coffee in hand. Three beliefs that ought to cancel each other out, and don't. People are not born broken. Almost nothing that happens to you is yours to control. And you are still, completely, responsible for what you make of it. Try holding all three at once for the next ten minutes and see what it does to the next setback you have.
To Philosophise Is to Learn How to Die
Montaigne and Cicero on the one appointment nobody reschedules, and what it does to the question of what today was for.
The Bad Faith Bicycle Technician
Sartre's bad faith, met in a repair shop: a man performing the role of the man who fixes bicycles so completely that there is nobody left inside it to actually fix the bicycle.
Writing Is the Thinking, Not Its Record
You do not write down a thought you already had. The writing is where the thought happens, which is why it can only be done alone.
The Most Expensive Shrug in Any Organisation
A claim that cannot survive being asked why is not a claim, it is a habit wearing a claim's clothes.
On Simulation, and Why You Can Relax
One-month special. Why the simulation argument is probably right, three theories of why we might be in here, and why that is a reason to hold your life more lightly. Built from days 95 and 27 of 100 Days of Non.
Non-Philosophy — Thailand Soccer Podcast Teaser: Philippe Coutinho and the grammar of peak talent
Philippe Coutinho: same left foot, different team grammar. Peak talent is not a portable file. Thailand Soccer Podcast teaser — Non-Philosophy. Made with ElevenLabs.
The Non-Philosophy Podcast · Thailand Soccer Podcast Teaser · The Movement
Thailand Soccer Podcast teaser. First touch as ethics at speed. Voice: ElevenLabs accent-tuned.
The Non-Philosophy Podcast · Thailand Soccer Podcast Teaser · After the Whistle
Thailand Soccer Podcast teaser. After the whistle: reset, centre circle, finite courage. Voice: ElevenLabs accent-tuned.
The Non-Philosophy Podcast · Nostalgia
Nostalgia as memory versus policy. Keep the parts list; refuse the throne. Voice: ElevenLabs multilingual v2, accent-tuned.
The Non-Philosophy Podcast · Special · Why This Show
Pitch special. Why The Non-Philosophy Podcast exists — confession that becomes a tool, no affirmations, help yourself first. Voice: ElevenLabs multilingual v2 clone.
On Sex, Unapologetically
Coffee in hand. A warning before we start: this one is for adults, and I am not going to talk around it. Here is the question I want to put to you. You have been taught your whole life that love and sex belong together. Where did you learn that, and have you ever once checked whether it is true?
The One Critic I Never Doubt
Coffee in hand. It is Mother's Day here in Thailand today. Think of the last piece of honest feedback that actually changed how you did something — not a compliment, the real kind, the kind that stung a little. Who said it to you? And why did you listen to that sentence from them, when you would have waved it off from almost anyone else?