The Commingling of Privacy: A Texted Conversation on Time and Desire with Joshua Segun-Lean

In this unique asynchronous exchange, thinkers Joshua Segun-Lean, Uzoma Orji, and Sheila Chukwulozie engage in a week-long conversation conducted entirely via text. What begins as a simple question about intriguing sounds quickly unfolds into a profound philosophical exploration.

The dialogue opens with Joshua’s meditation on the “incredible commingling of privacy” found in the ambient sounds of city life, a stray piano melody becomes a window into a stranger’s practice, mood, and ambitions. Uzoma affirms this perspective, sharing how a shift in awareness transformed urban noise from an irritation into the central music of life.

This sparks a deep dive into the human condition. Sheila challenges reductionist narratives that favor statistics over individual complexity, arguing that true understanding requires moving from the big picture to nuanced, personal reality. Joshua responds with a powerful reflection inspired by theorist Lauren Berlant, focusing on the paradoxes of survival: why people cling to lives that don’t work, act against their own interests, and are shaped by “conflicting and opposing desires” that defy easy categorization.

Sheila, profoundly struck, expands the thread by drawing a parallel to St. Paul’s internal conflict in the Bible (Romans 7:15-20), examining the concept of a divided self and the nature of mercy. She introduces a critical distinction from Sadghuru: the difference between what is merely “good” and what is truly “necessary,” warning against the potential harm of over-giving.

The conversation concludes with Joshua pondering whether the aspiration for purity leads to self-resentment and how we can learn to love others by attending to their actual needs rather than our own expectations. In a time of great insecurity, he posits that a necessary, though fearful, stillness is required to plan and face coming challenges.

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Uzoma Orji: Hey Joshua, what was the last thing you listened to that intrigued you? How long did it last?

Sheila Chukwulozie: Hi Joshua, I’d like to jump in and just set the tone a little bit before we jump right into it. Thank you for offering to speak with us. We are quite stoked to try this new way of “texting” ourselves into and through a conversation. It’s funny that texting is a verb that seems to only work for informalities when all that is word is text.

We are thinking of setting this conversation to last over a period of a week so that it’s something you can see, leave, come back, see, leave, come back, and eventually attempt to address. I am a huge fan of your mind and your way in the world, so my fingers are itching to go H.A.M.

Here is to the beginning of an interesting experiment of time. Does everything sound like your alignment and agreement?

Also, I propose that we make new sign offs that mean something for us in this time.

Joshua Segun-Lean: Sheila and Uzoma, such a great please to be brought into conversation with you two. I think you're both very cool and I've followed your work with great interest.

I believe a week should be just fine. I'm eager to see where this goes.

Let’s see if I can answer your question. The last thing I listened to that intrigued me. Haha. This is an interesting and difficult place to start because I'm a very passionate listener. Music mostly, but I'm also quite keen on sounds that arrive in my hearing by accident. It's one of the few indulgences of city life. The sounds other people make constantly flow through our lives. We hear people walking & running, starting and turning off their cars, opening doors and closing them, standing and sitting; we hear people begin and end conversations whose content or purpose we can only guess at, etc. We don't often pay attention, of course, but what's happening is this incredible commingling of privacy entirely on an acoustic level. For example, on days like today, I catch stray tunes of a piano from a house nearby. I don't know which one and I don’t know who plays it but I always pause to listen. I suspect it might be a child practicing for school or church. The tempo is often tentative, unmarked by the fluency of long experience. It's usually the same popular hymn or contemporary gospel song for weeks until, for some reason, they take up a new one. Sometimes, there is new confidence in the playing that suggests they may be playing elsewhere, perhaps taking extra lessons. Just like that, I am a witness to the moods and ambitions of this stranger simply because they happen to play the piano within my hearing. I think it's fascinating.

Uzoma Orji: Good morning, Joshua and Sheila.

Joshua, thank you for this incredibly beautiful response.

Sounds like one of the few indulgences of city life. The perspective, wow. Two days ago, I was meditating but finding it difficult to stay present because of all the sounds in my neighbourhood. I found myself getting irritated until I realized that I could actually lean into these sounds and meditate with them, that they are indeed a central part of the music of my life and that I couldn't and shouldn't dismiss or ignore or wish them away. I think that perspective shift has opened something for how I navigate my surroundings, and I feel happy to hear you affirm it.

The journey of this project has been full of affirmations and synchronicities that I consider to be spiritual evidence that we are doing the right work. I've been thinking a lot about how the things that resonate the most with us are things that we already know and feel intuitively. What has been resonating with you lately and what do you think that says about where your intuition/soul/inner self is at this time?

Sheila Chukwulozie: Beautiful words moving on this email stream...thinking about a "thread" versus a "stream".

Joshua, "this incredible commingling of privacy", is such a fascinating phrase. This incredible commingling of privacy...isn't that the world as we know it?

I find it hard to really be engaged with conversations where I’ve always been asked to look at the statistics over and over again as if I’ve never looked at them before. It's always when a conversation starts from a wide lens, and I think some nuance on an individual level might reveal some complexity...but I think that complexity really fucks up some people's theories. Whether liberal or conservative...I think if one's feet are cemented on a hypothesis that cannot flow from big to small, one to many, here to there, now to then, then there's some of that mobius strip paradox irony glory that gets missing.

Do you find?

Joshua Segun-Lean: There’s this great interview between Lauren Berlant, who passed recently, and Dorothea Lasky, the poet, in which Berlant writes:

‘I am interested in the ways people find sustenance and make survival happen in worlds that are not organized for them. I am interested in why people stay attached to lives that don’t work, as though people would not survive the wholesale transformation of those attachments and the lives built around them, as though they would rather be miserable, stuck, or numb than tipped over in the middle of invention.’

Generalizations work because they're easy to hold in the mind. Within sets or subsets, our lives can be reduced to patterns of behavior, trends, variables. But looking closer, as Berlant suggests here, will reveal ambivalence, inconsistencies, omissions. Realities no arithmetic can account for. One person acts against their self-interest for reasons they cannot explain. Another chooses to suffer even when it seems they could choose otherwise. We rush madly for things we already have. We risk years and months for one moment. We submit to conditions we rescue others from. We are ensnared and entangled by various conflicting and opposing desires. Survival shapes and misshapes us in ways that defy any totalizing narratives. There are no neat rows. No one remains pure. Every person’s story is poorly told.

Sheila Chukwulozie: Hi Joshua,

Your last message struck a chord and a half. I've been thinking and talking about it. It's one of those things I carry wholly and silently through my days...just thinking about how much the practice of my life aligns with not just what you wrote, but how you wrote it. I realize Uzoma wasn't copied in that email, so I've made sure it's below in this thread.

I had been thinking about when I'd reply and what I'd say succinctly, in response, And randomly. as I was watching this show on Netflix called Good Girls, they reference Romans Chapter 7 verse 15. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the will is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me (Romans 7:15-20).

Now there are a lot of captivating things to say about what St Paul said to the Romans there. First off, it's hard to ignore that it's the ever-adamant Paul once again fighting with the magnetism of his body, which he calls sin. Paul is an interesting character throughout the Bible. His intensity makes it look like he was a Christian for the longest. So, to me, it reveals how intensity can feel like a measure of time. Like an intense love that burns a hole through the rest of one's life, even if just in the memory of how intense it was. The memory is inscribed in our minds like it was ironed on and even burnt through. And even if the time we spend on it is soothing the burn, it’s still time spent.

But secondly, I'm captivated by how Paul chooses to separate himself from this "self" that does what he doesn't intend to do. This part of him is which he calls SIN. The part which the Cartesian tradition calls "flesh"- always weak, never spiritually willing. It reminded me of your words here: "One person acts against their self-interest for reasons they cannot explain. Another chooses to suffer even when it seems they could choose otherwise. We rush madly for things we already have. We risk years and months for one moment. We submit to conditions we rescue others from. We are ensnared and entangled by various conflicting and opposing desires"

We are ensnared and entangled by various conflicting and opposing desires. So, when we are sorry, what do we want? Mercy or consequence? And if we know the universe will always restore its balance and therefore consequence is unavoidable, what really is mercy? Do humans give mercy to hope on a value that the universe does not know?

I spent my Sunday listening to the Sadghuru give a sermon on over-compassion and over-giving. He was warning against it. He said if you give an ant a ton of gold, the weight will only crush the ant. He warned that if you give something to someone that is based on a rigid understanding of mercy or compassion, you do more harm than good to the universe and you leave the universe to clean up what never needed to be done. He said instead of thinking of what's "good", why don't we think of what is necessary?

What is necessary for you right now? And how does it make you feel confirming that it is necessary, regardless of whether it's good or bad?

Joshua Segun-Lean: Friends, your observations about Paul are interesting, Sheila. I’ve been thinking about them. I wonder if it is possible to hold aspirations of absolute purity without learning quite seriously to resent yourself. And I wonder if it’s possible to know yourself as a body or as belonging to a body if you believe that body to be inherently damned/damning.

And the difference between what is good and what is necessary might be crucial when we think about how we love the people we want to love. Often, I think we fall into the habit of loving people according to our own expectations and standards rather than listening and attending to what they actually need, what they tell us they need.

These days, unable to turn away from the increasing insecurities of our times, I think some kind of stillness is necessary. Stillness to recover and plan and accept whatever challenges we must face. It can be fearful to consider because stillness has a way of forcing us into unfamiliar confrontations and often extends our reliance on hope, which Amiri Baraka calls a 'delicate suffering'.

I'll be thinking more about these questions.

I hope the new week is kind to you both.