In this episode I speak with Olga Penskaya, who is both Ukrainian and Russian.
The conversation opens through the lived experience of sanctions, restricted access, unstable belonging, and identities reduced to documents. From my own position as an Iranian who has spent years inside similar structures of limitation, the dialogue quickly becomes a shared field rather than a personal narrative.
Gradually the discussion moves toward a deeper philosophical terrain: what it means to live inside a reality that one did not choose, and how the self is formed under such conditions. Not only how systems shape lives, but how human beings internalize, normalize, and sometimes reproduce the very forms of suffering they are trying to escape.
The conversation also questions the way we construct cultures, nations, and conflicts as coherent narratives. Through movement, encounter, and lived experience, these narratives begin to dissolve, revealing singular lives that cannot be reduced to collective identities.
What begins as a dialogue about war, sanctions, and belonging turns into an inquiry into the nature of the self under pressure, the conditions of understanding, and the fragile possibility of not reacting to pain with further pain.
This episode is not about geopolitics, and not only about experience.
It is about how a human being lives inside structures that cannot be immediately changed —
and how, within those structures, different forms of consciousness, responsibility, and relation to reality become possible.
A philosophical conversation on imposed realities, adaptive selves, acceptance, and the interruption of inherited cycles of suffering.
