Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 116 - K
Welcome to Issue 116 of Deep Life Reflections, where each week I share my thoughts on what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.
This week, we’re travelling from Ancient Greece to a dystopian future—questioning how well we know ourselves, and how important that actually is. We begin with Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, drawing out the work of Socrates as our guide. Then we examine Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049—an intelligent and visually luxurious sequel to the 1982 cult classic. There’s plenty of room for existential reflection here, especially given the film’s exploration of consciousness, identity, and memory. It leads us to ask: Do we really need to understand every corner of ourselves?
Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
The Story of Philosophy. By Will Durant.
The Story of Philosophy chronicles the lives and ideas of the great Western thinkers throughout the ages: Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Voltaire, Kant, Nietzsche, and many more. It was written a century ago by the historian and philosopher Will Durant.
It’s a book I’ve been working my way through over the past few months. Each philosopher is given their own extensive chapter, arranged chronologically, making it easy to dip in and out. Their ideas are shaped by the prevailing economic and intellectual environments of their time. The book is so dense with insight and wisdom that I couldn’t do it justice in just a few paragraphs.
So, I decided to focus on just one philosopher for this issue, perhaps returning to others in future editions. I’ve chosen Socrates, who, interestingly, doesn’t even get a full chapter to himself. Instead, he’s tucked under the work of Plato, whose monumental influence opens the book.
I chose Socrates for a reason.
This week, I read an interesting article in The Atlantic called You Don’t Know Yourself as Well as You Think You Do by Julie Beck. She observes how much of modern life seems to be pushing us to know and examine ourselves in ever greater detail—therapy, personality tests, tracking our steps, our sleep, our moods. Journaling. The idea that if you’re not actively working to understand yourself, you’re falling behind.
She quotes Socrates himself: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Yet Beck’s central argument is that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think—and that we don’t need to. In fact, letting go of the need to fully know ourselves might lead to a little more peace, flexibility, and even integrity in our lives.
Let’s return to Socrates. Would he agree?
I think he would.
Because the starting point of Socrates’ philosophy is humility. “One thing only I know, and that is I know nothing.”
For him, real understanding begins when we start to doubt our most cherished beliefs and dogmas. When we turn inwards.
Which leads us to the phrase most associated with him: “Know thyself.”
Socrates didn’t mean we should reach perfect self-understanding—only that we should never stop examining. To “know thyself” was, for him, an ongoing act of humility.
Socrates believed the worthiest subject for any philosopher wasn’t the stars or trees, but our minds, and what we might become. He wandered Athens asking difficult questions about the human soul, uncovering assumptions, and exposing certainties. Reflecting not lecturing.
In doing so, it led him to offer a definitive answer to one of life’s oldest and hardest questions: What is the meaning of virtue? For Socrates, it wasn’t obedience or status or strength. It was wisdom. The ability to know what is good. And the courage to live by it.
And that was his legacy.
Condemned by the Athenian state, Socrates refused to beg for mercy, despite his sentence of death by poisoning. Even when his friends bribed the prison guards and offered him an easy escape, he stood firm. To him, fleeing would betray the principles he had spent his life defending: the importance of reason, integrity, and dialogue—even in the face of injustice. His parting words were calm:
“Be of good cheer, and say that you are burying my body only.”
Perhaps the lesson from Socrates is this: the pursuit of self-knowledge should be tempered with humility, openness to change (recognising that we often underestimate how much we will change), and a willingness to let some parts of ourselves remain unknowable.
Not everything needs to be tracked, categorised, or defined. Being human often means being inconsistent, irrational, and unclear.
Some truths may only ever emerge in the living, not the knowing.
Three thousand years later, Socrates, I think, would agree.
2. What I’m Watching
Blade Runner 2049. (2017) Directed by Denis Villeneuve.
“Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic, and romantic.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Denis Villeneuve is one of my favourite directors working today. The Canadian filmmaker—who has spoken of his love of stillness and silence in the creative process—brings a precise aesthetic and deep emotional imprint to every film he touches. He respects his audience’s intelligence and isn’t afraid of ambiguity, silence, or unresolved questions.
I like these types of filmmakers. I don’t want to be spoon-fed.
In 2017, Villeneuve directed the follow-up to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner. Unlike so many modern sequels and reboots, he didn’t just remix familiar themes or characters to deliver nostalgic fan service. Instead, he built on the philosophical questions raised by the original, crafting a slow-burning, deeply contemplative sci-fi film that investigates nothing less than what it means to be human.
Set thirty years after the original, Blade Runner 2049 takes us back to Los Angeles and a future where bioengineered humans —known as replicants—are designed to serve real humans. In Scott’s original, the replicants were rebellious and short-lived, hunted down by blade runners like Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). By 2049, a new generation of obedient replicants has emerged. More sophisticated. More controlled.
Officer K (Ryan Gosling) is one of these newer models. Designed to comply, to obey, and to track down and ‘retire’ older rogue replicants who have lived long beyond their lifespan. But when K tracks down a replicant just trying to live a peaceful life as a farmer, he uncovers a long-buried secret—a replicant who may have given birth—that could challenge the entire societal order. This pulls him into a mystery about his own past, the power of memory, identity, and the possibility that he might be more than what he was designed to be.
True to Villeneuve’s sensibility, there are no easy answers.
In mathematics and physics, K often represents a constant—something fixed, known, dependable. But in Blade Runner 2049, K is anything but fixed. He’s searching and uncertain. Not unlike Josef K from Kafka’s The Trial, a man lost in a dehumanising system he can’t understand.
Blade Runner 2049 looks incredible. Villeneuve reunites with his long-time collaborator Roger Deakins, whose cinematography is astonishing. He creates a pulsating, fragile world of crashing waves, falling snow, vast, empty spaces and torrential, bleak rain. The film retains its cyberpunk roots and strong Asian cityscape fusion. When K travels to a long-abandoned Las Vegas, the visuals shift into an apocalyptic, dust-filled yellow haze. The film is more expansive than the original.
The film’s run-time is close to three hours and long stretches demand patience and attention. But the reward is there for those willing to go the distance.
Audiences weren’t. The film underperformed at the box-office; its length and slow pacing cited as key reasons. Reflecting later, Villeneuve said that while still proud of the film, he realised he’d made “the most expensive art house movie in cinema history.”
He may be right. It’s not a film for everyone. But it’s a deep, rich, intelligent film that asks important questions. Questions that are even more urgent in 2025 than in 2017, especially around artificial intelligence, consciousness, and what defines a human being.
As one critic wrote, “Blade Runner 2049 isn’t about what happens; it’s about what this terrifying and beautiful world tells us about life and perception and reality.”
The film offers at least one answer to the question of what it means to be human: the capacity for free thought. Because to ask that very question—to wonder who you are—you must first be free to think for yourself.
The alternative is a world that tells you who you are.
Or worse, what you are.
3. What I’m Contemplating
I listened to a podcast this week from Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO. It was framed as an ‘Emergency Debate’ on AI, with three informed thinkers representing different ends of the AI spectrum. It was an interesting debate, and for me, a worrying one. I agreed most with the panellist who voiced grave concerns about the power of this technology and where it might take us. Because we don’t really know what we’re dealing with. It’s too complex, too powerful.
With this week’s featured works spanning millennia, from the inward-focused teachings of Socrates to the tech-drenched dystopia of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, there’s plenty of terrain for existential reflection.
We know there’s pressure today to “know yourself”—to define who you are with crisp certainty. AI is becoming an enabler of that. We can ask it to give us therapy, analyse our behaviour, process our journals. We can throw all our data, all our thoughts and desires into the machine and say, “Tell me who I am.”
And it will. Perhaps scarily accurately.
But even before we consider the risk of surrendering all this deeply personal information to tech companies, many operating more from profit than from any desire to further human understanding, there is a deeper question: What if self-knowledge isn’t about mastery at all?
What if it’s about learning to be comfortable with the contradictions, the mess, and the parts we don’t fully understand and never will?
That might just be what keeps us human.
4. A Quote to note
“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”
- B.F. Skinner
5. A Question for you
When do you feel most human—and what does that feeling involve?
Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.
James
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