The Seekers Among Us: Marking a Hundred Episodes of Asking Why

Based on a Podcast with Svetlana Ćopić and host Philipp Kobald

When Curiosity Refuses To Sit Still

Some people are born with a quiet engine inside them — a hum that won’t shut up until they understand why the world looks the way it does. Others stumble into their inner life only after the world knocks them flat. And then there are those moments when an entire society starts wrapping everything in soft padding, helmets, disclaimers, and emotional safety rails, hoping no one will scrape a knee. That’s usually when the seekers get restless.

This conversation with creative director and lifelong explorer of ideas Svetlana Ćopić unfolded exactly at that crossroads: the point where curiosity meets a culture trying very hard not to feel anything too deeply.

Why This Conversation Mattered More Than the Others

This episode wasn’t just another recording. It marked the one-hundredth conversation of the year — a milestone that turned a simple idea into a global archive of human searching. For a moment like that, the guest choice had to mean something. After speaking with philosophers, mystics, neuroscientists, priests, and wanderers from Nairobi to Japan, the celebration returned intentionally to someone close to home.

Svetlana was the first guest Philipp ever met in person, the one who shared not only geographical proximity but the same relentless interior questioning. Inviting her wasn’t nostalgia; it was a statement. After a hundred episodes looking outward, this moment was about turning inward — toward the seekers themselves, toward the people who carry questions long before they have language for them.

This episode marked the circle closing, and the reason the podcast exists becoming visible again.

The People Who Can’t Help Asking Why

Curiosity is not a lifestyle choice; it’s a biological inconvenience. Svetlana puts it plainly: “I was tormented with these questions since I was born.” Those questions — Who are we? Why are we here? What does any of this mean? — aren’t decorations on the spiritual path. They are the path.

Some people meet these questions early, as children who cannot accept the script handed to them. Others try to outrun life until it corners them with a crisis: the wall, the breakdown, the moment the old self collapses. But the striking thing we discovered is that the questions themselves don’t change. Only the timing does. The inner work eventually calls everyone; it just doesn’t knock on every door at the same hour.

Standing in the Middle of the Spiritual Marketplace

We also ended up in a thorny territory: the booming spiritual industry. A place where sincerity, illusion, longing, and opportunism share the same table.

Svetlana is blunt about the danger. The problem is not only the manipulators. It’s the deeply vulnerable people walking into spiritual spaces hoping to be seen, helped, or told something meaningful. “You can literally start tomorrow and claim you talk to aliens,” she says, “and in six months you’ll have followers.”

It’s a reminder many seekers privately know but rarely say aloud: the modern spiritual landscape needs more discernment, not more incense.

And yet, neither of us sees this as cynicism. Discernment isn’t the opposite of spirituality. It may be its most honest expression.

Evidence, Intuition, and the Places Science Hasn’t Reached Yet

One of the most surprising points of contact between us came from opposite instincts. I often look at clairvoyance and the invisible layers of human experience with openness, even hope. Svetlana stands firm on the other side: she trusts her intuition but refuses blind belief.

Her line is simple: Show me the evidence.

And here lies the tension that defines our age. Some truths can be measured. Some can only be lived. Inside the gaps between them is where most seekers quietly sit — half skeptic, half mystic, fully human.

Where Evidence Ends and Faith Begins

This is where our positions diverge gently. Svetlana refuses to leave the ground of what the mind can verify or experience directly. Philipp, however, has spent a year submerged in conversations where the world stretches far beyond what science currently measures.

He is not abandoning logic — only noticing its edges.
At some point, when evidence runs out and experience falters, there remains a human question older than science itself:
Do you dare believe in something before it can be proven?

For Philipp, faith is not surrender but a possibility. Not faith in dogma, but in the idea that reality might be wider than our current vocabulary. Svetlana stays anchored in reason; Philipp wonders whether holding both — earth and sky — may be the truest stance of all.

Together they form a bridge most seekers already walk: skeptical enough to stay honest, open enough to stay awake.

Where Spirituality Shows Up Without Asking Permission

Svetlana dropped what may be the most powerful sentence of the entire conversation: for her, spirituality manifests best through creativity.

The idea arrives fully formed, she says, almost as if gifted. It becomes a film, a project, a message, a piece of culture that ripples outward. “It starts as a vision,” she explains, “and ends up being something that changes people.”

This flips the usual script. Instead of spirituality leading to transcendence, it leads to creation. Instead of escaping the world, it builds something inside it.

And it’s impossible not to notice that this mirrors what many seekers feel privately: transformation isn’t proven by how you meditate but by what you make, how you show up, and the traces you leave on the people around you.

The Rituals We Don’t Realize We Need

A surprising tenderness emerged when we spoke about death. Modern life tries hard to sterilize it — hide it, tidy it, outsource it. But when Svetlana lost her parents, the old rituals she once dismissed suddenly revealed their true function: they carried her.

Community, rhythm, shared meaning — none of these require belief in doctrine. They require being human. The same is true in birth, where entire new professions like doulas and “death companions” are exploding because people have no one left to guide them through life’s most ancient transitions.

For a culture obsessed with progress, we’ve forgotten that some things were never meant to be optimized. They were meant to be witnessed.

Are We Too Safe for Our Own Good?

If you want to understand our current crisis, look at a Belgrade playground where children walk a rope twenty centimeters above the ground — wearing helmets and safety harnesses. That image stayed with both of us.

When a society sandpapers every rough edge of existence, seekers feel it first. Life becomes too edited, too disinfected, too distant from reality. And when that happens, curiosity isn’t a philosophical luxury. It becomes survival.

Svetlana reminds us: people haven’t changed across centuries. Our technologies shift; our essence does not. We still break, rebuild, search, and reinvent — just like the city she grew up in, a place destroyed and resurrected more times than memory can hold.

The Optimism You Don’t Expect

Despite the darkness that threads through modern life — AI uncertainty, fragmented communities, bewildering amounts of information — Svetlana stands on solid ground. “Things are always being destroyed and created again,” she says. “Life just goes on, in spite of all of us.”

It’s an optimism born not from naivety but from history. Civilizations collapse and rise. People lose themselves and find themselves again. Meaning goes underground and resurfaces when the soil is ready.

Maybe the real spiritual path is not escaping the world but learning how to remain in it without losing the edge of our humanity.

Guest Bio

Svetlana Ćopić is a Belgrade-based creative director with over two decades of experience in branding and advertising, and the founder of an agency focused on socially positive creative projects.
Guest link: https://noagency.club/

Watch the Full Episode on YouTube

The complete conversation is available on the @HolisticCircle channel.

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By Philipp Kobald in cooperation with AI
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