A self-development podcast with philosophical, psychological and literary flair hosted by Victoria Hutchins, the creator of @thedailyvictorian and nationally bestselling author of MAKE BELIEVE. Episodes every other Sunday.
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Données mises à jour le 09/11/2026
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The Spiritual Girl's Guide to the Holidays
Saison 3 · Épisode 9
dimanche 8 novembre 2026 • Durée 37:20
You spend all year working on non-attachment, mindfulness, and conscious consumption. And then it’s the holidays, and suddenly you're fighting for your life at the family dinner table and contemplating buying a $70 candle as a stocking stuffer. Welcome to the spiritual girl's guide to the holidays: a three-part survival guide for enjoying the magic of the season without losing your mind, your money, or your sense of self. Along the way, we’ll talk about the history of Christmas consumerism, what bell hooks can teach us about our relationship with luxury and material things, and the strange psychological phenomenon of holiday regression. I also share a low-consumption holiday gift guide full of thoughtful, thriftable, and DIY ideas.
If you want the holiday magic without the interpersonal chaos, financial ruin, and return of your teenage coping mechanisms, I made this episode for you.
PS: If you want the PDF version of the gift guide, go to this link to give me your email and I’ll send it to you!!!
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00 Intro: the spiritual girl's guide to the holidays
05:52 1. Holiday regression: why going home makes you feel 16 again
07:25 How to make a plan for boundaries & weird conversations
12:12 2. The holiday spending spiral: the history of Christmas consumerism
15:20 How to give more thoughtful gifts
16:14 Low-consumption holiday gift guide: DIY, thrifted & meaningful gifts
21:27 bell hooks on beauty, luxury & conscious consumption
22:54 Extremely specific tips for mindful spending
25:49 Living the aesthetic you want to buy
27:00 3. How to stay grounded when your routines fall apart
31:39 10 journaling prompts for the holiday season
The best year of your life doesn't start on January 1. It starts with what you do before the year begins. Today, I come to you with three things you can do right now to prepare for 2027 to be the best year of your life.
I know it’s still October, but every year we lose our collective minds from November until January. And soon it will be New Year’s Eve and we’ll be trying to make our vision boards without having given any thought to the actual vision. SO: we’re getting a head start on preparing for 2027 before the holiday chaos hits with 3 audits that will help you get clear on what you want, what's holding you back, and how you actually want to live.
Along the way, we're talking about why we're so bad at estimating how much we can get done in a day, why being harder on yourself might actually be holding you back, what the Stoics (the original chads) can teach us about new year’s resolutions, and how to chase your biggest dreams without wishing away the life you're living.
PS: I made you a free worksheet to walk you through all three audits! It's got all the questions we talk about in this episode and space to work through them yourself. Find it here!!
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00 Intro + why we’re starting before January 1
06:40 Audit #1: the levels of energy audit
07:36 How to make an energy ledger
10:02 The energetic evolution of choices
12:32 Epictetus on how to handle temptation
14:02 Reflection questions to audit your energy
14:44 Audit #2: the promise audit
16:26 Why shaming yourself doesn’t work
How to Become Unbotherable
Saison 3 · Épisode 7
dimanche 11 octobre 2026 • Durée 39:48
We all have that one person who can ruin our day in less than 30 seconds. Why is it so hard to stay in our values around certain people? And how do we stop giving them so much power? In this episode, we're turning to the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche for five lessons on dealing with difficult people, navigating conflict, and becoming unbotherable. If you've ever let a five-minute interaction ruin your entire week, this episode is for you.
EPISODE OUTLINE - NIETZSCHEAN PRINCIPLES FOR BECOMING UNBOTHERED
00:00 Intro
9:13 1. Navigating other people’s opinions of you
14:50 2. Let them misunderstand
21:01 3. “They muddy the water to make it seem deep”
According to the existentialists, the core problem of being human is this: we are meaning-seeking creatures in a universe that is silent on meaning. But somehow, we're supposed to figure out what to major in, who to marry, and what to do with the approximately 30,000 days we get to be alive.
In this episode, we walk through six levels of living a meaningful life as described by Simone de Beauvoir in her 1947 work The Ethics of Ambiguity, moving from brainrotten aimlesness to a life driven by purpose. If you want to live a life that feels meaningful but have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing with it, this episode is for you.
EPISODE OUTLINE: THE 6 LEVELS OF LIVING A MEANINGFUL LIFE (according to 20th century existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir)
The manosphere wants you to think charisma is all about dominance and control. But what if it’s actually about deep presence and social courage?
I don’t want to be like the guy who uses scarce communication to hide his lack of depth and fear of commitment. I want to be like the people who make you feel cool just by talking to them, while radiating charisma themselves.
If you’ve ever wondered why some people can have fun talking to literally anyone, struggled to know what to say when someone asks you a question, or wished you were more comfortable saying what you actually think, this episode is for you.
In today’s episode, we unpack 5 habits of highly charismatic people, from what they say when they’re getting to know someone to how they navigate disagreements. Along the way, we’ll talk about what we can learn from Socrates about swag, dive into the science of answering any question well, and use Byung-Chul Han’s concept of “the smooth” to investigate how we can stay raw and real in a world that tries to sand our edges.
EPISODE OUTLINE: HABITS OF HIGHLY CHARISMATIC PEOPLE
00:00 Intro
07:14 1. How to ask better questions
08:18 The science of how asking questions makes people like you
10:18 The power of follow-up questions
13:41 2. How to answer any question without freezing
14:37 The scary thing no one tells you about writing a book
17:11 Why your mind goes blank when someone asks you a question
18:03 The secret to answering questions with ease
20:21 The link between storytelling and charisma
22:40 3. Stop performing agreement in conversations
23:18 What is backchanneling?
23:59 Upspeak, confidence, gender, and the way we talk
How to Plan Your Fall to Change Your Life
Saison 3 · Épisode 4
lundi 31 août 2026 • Durée 41:11
Pumpkin spice apologists wya? It’s the great lock in Charlie Brown!!!!! In this episode, I’m walking you through the exact five-step seasonal planning system that dramatically changed my life a few years back. Along the way, we’ll dive into the philosophy and psychology behind why it works. We’ll talk through Nietzsche’s philosophy on habits, Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas on how to reconcile your past and future selves, the planning fallacy, and more. Whether you want to change the trajectory of your life this fall or just set up some systems to make life a little less chaotic, this episode is for you.
EPISODE OUTLINE: HOW TO PLAN YOUR FALL TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
00:00 Intro
06:21 I made you a worksheet ◡̈
09:30 STEP 1: THE AUDIT
10:36 Facticity vs. transcendence (de Beauvoir)
11:11 The importance of considering both your past and your potential
12:55 Using self-distancing to self-reflect more effectively
13:31 How to audit your goals
14:56 How to audit your execution
18:24 STEP 2: THE PURGE
19:07 The paradox of choice
Cleaning out digital and physical worlds
22:15 Choice architecture
25:15 STEP 3: THE CHOICE
25:55 The planning fallacy
27:54 Optimism bias & why overplanning feels good
29:00 STEP 4. THE TRADE OFF
31:25 Nietzsche’s on the power of “brief habits”
33:10 STEP 5. THE TIME
34:33 Temporal landmarks and why they make you more likely to achieve goals
The Possibility Crisis of Your Late 20s
Saison 3 · Épisode 3
dimanche 16 août 2026 • Durée 27:59
If your early twenties are for your Sylvia Plath fig tree allegory crisis, then your late twenties are for your Joan Didion Goodbye to All That crisis. In her famous 1967 essay, Didion writes, “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
This episode explores a strain of existential dread that often shows up in your late twenties: the possibility crisis. Sometimes it hits you after capital-S Something happens. A bad break up, a wounding professional failure, or a friendship ending that felt like betrayal. Other times, there is no one defining moment or incident. You just realize one day that you are no longer as bright eyed, bushy tailed, or hopeful as you used to be, and can’t put your finger on why.
Using Didion’s Goodbye to All That as our guide, we break down three key signs you might be experiencing a possibility crisis and what it might be trying to teach you. Along the way, we talk about how to cope with the realization that certain doors really do close, what to do when new people stop feeling full of promise, and how to let go of the fantasy that someday you’ll magically know what you’re doing. Consider this episode a field guide on the strange grief of growing up.
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00 Intro
04:23 What made Joan Didion great?
05:13 Signs of a Goodbye to All That crisis
05:46 1. You realize future you is just you
07:41 Weird girl money
08:22 The 90s’ overly adult depiction of your 30s
10:41 2. You stop believing in new faces
11:32 Hope springs eternal on Love Island
Rituals for De-Internalizing the Male Gaze
Saison 3 · Épisode 2
dimanche 2 août 2026 • Durée 30:41
Be honest: do you ever perform for no one? Do you spectate your own life instead of living it? Have you ever caught yourself changing pieces of you, from your clothes to your voice to your hobbies, in order to impress someone you don’t even like?
This episode is for you if you’ve ever sucked in your stomach in a completely empty room. Or scrolled through your own social media posts, imagining someone else looking at them. It’s for you if you've ever looked at yourself through someone else's eyes for so long that you've forgotten what you look like through your own.
In it, we’ll unpack how we get trapped under the male gaze through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, and more. Then, I'll walk you through 7 rituals that have actually helped me climb out from under it.
This is not an episode about giving up on love. It is a field guide on how to stop twisting yourself into inauthentic shapes to earn validation to fill the void of love. If you want to become the subject of your own life again, I think you'll like this one.
RITUALS FOR DE-INTERNALIZING THE MALE GAZE: EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00 Intro
07:28 1. The gaze audit (Sartre)
08:40 Subject self versus object self
10:01 Foucault’s panopticon & self-surveillence
10:54 How to do a gaze audit
14:11 2. Photo and mirror detox (Sontag)
15:42 3. Interrogate “I do it for myself” (de Beauvoir)
16:50 de Beauvoir v. Sartre: existence precedes essence?
17:21 Do we have to stop shaving to be good feminists?
Secret Portals to Your Next Self
Saison 3 · Épisode 1
dimanche 19 juillet 2026 • Durée 36:18
In stories, the narrator tells you which ordinary things are portals to magic and adventure. In real life, you have to find them yourself.
This episode reveals 5 secret portals to the next version of yourself: seemingly ordinary choices, traits, and habits that are thresholds to the future version of you who lives with more courage, clarity, and freedom. It’s for you if an old version of you has died but the new one hasn’t been born yet. You might have recently experienced a big life change: a move, or a relationship ending, or a career change. Or maybe you know one is coming. It’s for you if you have an unshakeable feeling that there is a more alive version of you out there, if only you could figure out how to get to them.
We’ll examine the work of philosophy’s greatest minds, like Nietzsche, Kant, Kafka, and the Ancient Greeks, to uncover the hidden thresholds between who you are and who you're becoming, and point out clues for how to spot them when they appear in your own life.
EPISODE OUTLINE
00:00 Intro
04:54 I missed you
06:05 Help me keep Soul Gum ad-free
07:35 Talk to me!!!
08:18 1. Intuition is a portal
08:49 Nietzsche’s beef with Socrates
10:44 The neuroscience of intuition (Gary Klein)
12:31 I exist because of a woman’s intuition
13:03 The tension between ambition & intuition
14:13 Mary Oliver on reacquianting with your intuition
15:05 Small ways to reconnect with your intuition
15:42 2. Solitude is a portal (Pascal)
16:39 The fear of being alone with your thoughts
Season 3 Coming Soon
Saison 2
dimanche 7 septembre 2025 • Durée 06:30
See you soon - I'll miss you! Make sure you're subscribed so you know when Soul Gum is back.
