Adequate Conceit

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 

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

a new year's message from a forgotten friend and us we were

Some Christmas we didn't feel the things we were supposed to. Other times we felt things only naughty boys and girls did. what about those times we were ungrateful? antisocial or didn't feel like sharing? Maybe we learned not to tell anyone, it's okay, you can tell me. I will go first. 

Perfectionism and the kid in the corner, when our virtue turned out to be fear all along, How do we break through to hit publish just a little more often?

Those intoxicating souls already comfortable in their own skin, did they already do the work? did they learn how to be this way? most often advice on how to be confident, charasamtic, or even just present centers around the external habits we see, the questions the eye contact the standing tall and paraphrasing to show understanding.  When you look a little deeper theres a handful of perceptual shifts that comfortable relaxed people have from those of us still locked in the coulda, woulda, shoulda,. In this episode we look at those internal differences  

Do we ever really 'find' ourselves? And when we do how come we were somewhere else distant from our first culture? all the episoads of the first two seasons centre around self acceptance and self discovery. Now we're ready to hear some of your story's about what it took, what it takes, to be proud the the selves you were told to be ashamed of and the steps of the journey you're yet to take. Message the show 

We're doing so much better, how far would we like to get? this week is a conversation starter, leave us messages about how you let too much slip? or how you felt when your teammate did. Where do we put our dark souls at work? and did the grumpy old guy in the corner have it right all along?

Lies and liars the fibs and falsehoods and the hope we have that we know something clever that will help us find them. 

The tiny version of you that lives in my head didn't react the way you did. how we end up with inaccurate working models of the people in our lives and the practice arguments we have with them start to crumble. 

Keeping score? building a case? or just figuring out who we are dealing with? It's impossible not to keep a tally of our interactions with others. Is holding loosely a recipe for getting hurt?

How the rags to riches tale hurts us, how oversimplified journalism bypasses our empathy and why not being done and still being messy gets in the way of us sharing the moments we are still living in. 

The repeated tails and personal propaganda that that we lay out for the word. And the choice we can take to manage it

When we create our own propaganda there's a story of who we want to be seen as. Maybe looking at that person tells us something new. Or we're so full of crap we forgot who were until we wrote it in Ink. 

A little bit of not for me ness goes a long long way. 

While there are plenty of us who have no trouble with selfishness others of us struggle to even begin to open the door to wanting anything for ourselves. 

part 2 of a 3 episode cluster on losing faith, this episode explores the impact of not having the belief systems and models of thinking to rely on. and makes parallels to losing a relationship or simply trust in what we think we know. 

Protect yourself, don't trust, don't love too easily and keep your energy for those who deserve it. To be strong, we preach our vulnerability, share our truths, yet we also hold such bile for our counterparts that we hurt ourselves more than we need to, and we never get from the other the change we hope they can make.  When we seek to help people change, the effort to keep seeing them with 'unconditional positive regard' is more freeing and powerful than we realise.  This episode is also available as a blog post: https://bnjh.wordpress.com/2020/12/18/unconditional-positive-regard/

Whose opinion of our work matters? is the feedback of our work critical to development or a step in the process we have got lost in?

Much of the time the argument we hear is the second half. 

When we need a new language to understand which side of a line we stand on the lines not drawn all that well. Introversion as Trates is no were like as fixed as it are made out to be and they are not the most helpful boxes to put ourselves in.  is episode is also available as a blog post: https://bnjh.wordpress.com/2019/12/07/why-your-not-fixed-in-to-introversion-or-extroversion/

A generation and more of self-help teach us we need rags to riches story before we come out as the Victor. Many of us follow an easier path and the story isn't told because it risks being boring not much to tell if we just did the things we were taught and it all turned out okay.  Can we forgive ourselves for the lack of struggle and seek out just enough challenge continue to grow? This episode is also available as a blog post: https://bnjh.wordpress.com/2019/12/03/the-school-of-mild-knocks/

Intentionality in our questions, what response are we hoping for?  This episode is also available as a blog post: https://bnjh.wordpress.com/2019/08/01/bad-questions/

Does who we think of ourselves as affect what we are capable of.  This episode is also available as a blog post: https://bnjh.wordpress.com/2020/01/23/how-identity-affects-caperbility/

Before we jump in and say not all Men before we leap to our counter-argument let's sit with the discomfort of asking if I am part of the problem what do I do next?

A little riff I am often drawn into on personality testing. the MBTI, DiSC profile and Strengths.  This episode is also available as a blog post: https://bnjh.wordpress.com/2019/12/18/which-is-the-best-personality-test-for-work/

Maybe we don't have to deny our desires and needs all the time.  This episode is also available as a blog post: https://bnjh.wordpress.com/2020/12/09/the-one-about-the-wolves/