The Architecture of Debt Is Not Broken — It Is Working - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Architecture of Debt Is Not Broken — It Is Working

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

For many young people, debt is not a temporary problem. It is the condition of adulthood itself. In this episode, we explore how debt has supplanted ownership as the foundation of civic identity, economic structure, and personal possibility. Debt does not merely delay the future—it redesigns it. And it does so not as a glitch in the system, but as its intended logic.

This is not a financial advice podcast. It is a philosophical investigation of how David Graeber reframed debt as a moral architecture, how Byung-Chul Han diagnosed fatigue as the affect of freedom, and how Nancy Fraser demands we understand care and extraction as twin forces. We follow the thread of unpaid bills, missed rent, and survival budgets—not as isolated problems, but as the material vocabulary of a deeper social contract.

This episode is about design: of systems, of silence, of what becomes normal. It asks what happens when economic survival becomes the only form of participation. And it listens carefully to those moments—at kitchen tables, in late-night spreadsheets, in involuntary quiet—where something like refusal begins. Not resistance as spectacle, but as a structural reimagining of who we are allowed to be, and what we are allowed to owe.

Why Listen?

• How debt became the new architecture of adulthood
• Why shame is not a personal flaw but a systemic function
• The civic and emotional costs of assetlessness
• How care, refusal, and silence become design strategies

Further Reading

As an affiliate, we may earn from qualifying purchases through these links.

• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber — A sweeping anthropological history of debt, morality, and power. Amazon link
• The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han — A diagnosis of the neoliberal psyche through fatigue, performance, and control. Amazon link
• Cannibal Capitalism by Nancy Fraser — On the extraction of life, care, and environment by capital’s hidden infrastructures. Amazon link

Listen On:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Bibliography

• Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011.
• Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
• Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It. London: Verso Books, 2022.
• The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso Books, 2020.
• Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
• Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
• O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2016.
• Butler, Judith. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London: Verso Books, 2020.
• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso Books, 2020.
• Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
• Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Morduch, Jonathan, and Rachel Schneider. The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
• Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.