Why do people who have everything still wake at three in the morning certain that none of it means anything?
This is a long, unhurried history of the moment the floor of ordinary life gives way. It begins with a celebrated novelist who, at the height of his fame and fortune, quietly hid a rope from himself, and from that single human crisis it opens outward across the centuries.
We follow the confrontation with meaninglessness through the oldest scriptures and the calm arguments of antiquity, through a believer terrified by an infinite and silent cosmos, through the philosopher of endless striving, and into the thinkers who made this dread the very center of their work. We sit with the death of God, with radical freedom, with the absurd, with a survivor who found a reason to endure the unendurable, and with a tradition that meets the void by loosening its grip on the self. The episode closes not with a tidy answer but with the quiet question of how a person comes back to life.
Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
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00:00:00 When the Floor Gives Way
00:13:20 Everything Under the Sun
00:20:22 The Ancient Art of Facing Death
00:28:47 The Silence of Infinite Spaces
00:34:56 The Will That Never Rests
00:45:07 The Dizziness of Freedom
00:58:20 The Underground and the Inquisitor
01:07:37 The Death of God
01:21:39 When the Abyss Looks Back
01:30:13 The Sick Soul
01:36:59 Anxiety and the Nothing
01:48:56 At the Limits
01:55:06 Condemned to Be Free
02:07:02 The Absurd and the Refusal
02:17:15 The Weight of Ambiguity
02:23:55 The Courage to Be
02:32:09 A Reason to Endure
02:44:24 The Denial of Death
02:53:08 The Noonday Listlessness
02:59:24 The Self That Lets Go
03:08:18 The Return of the Ordinary
03:15:14 Why the Abyss Remains
Sleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest.
All research and writing is done personally. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.
