Folley responded with a very interesting remark, how after Ivan Karamazov left his hometown he was sure nobody would miss him being there, but the one who would actually end up missing him, was himself. This observation wandered in my mind for quite some time; how big is the distance between a person and his beliefs, how big is the distance between a person and his very own actions?

In Crime and Punishment, again by Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov, partly with the same rational justifications as the Russian characters mentioned before, murders an old pawn broker. In his mind he did the right thing, he thought that he was sure he did the right thing, but no matter how refined or elegant the theory behind his justifications were and even if he could mathematically prove that Napoleon would have done the exact same as he did, he still couldn’t live with what he had done. No one, in the entire novel, has made him suffer as much as he did, no one was as horrified by the blood on his hands as he was himself.

I couldn’t help but imagine an ever present witness, an ever luring judge gazing through his eyes, the eyes of the defendant only to then persecute him for all the misery he caused. Whether he himself agreed with the sentence wasn’t of importance to the personal courthouse Raskolnikov seemed to host inside his mind. He did what he did and would be judged nevertheless.

Often we try to act more morally correct around others; we behave when people are present and as soon as we are alone with ourselves we can finally let go of the bonds of ethics. No one can judge you then right? The only person left to then judge you is yourself.

Don’t people painfully underestimate the influence their own bad actions, only witnessed by themselves, can have on their self-image? They think they’re lucky that they didn’t get caught with whatever sin they committed, when they already got caught by themselves.

In psychology, philosophy and literature often the central force or drive that moves people is desire. From Nietzsche to Freud to Lacan, the common denominator is that desire is the primary or even the only force that is at the root of all human action. Whether it’s a will for power, a desire for recognition by your parents or a longing to fill the emptiness, where it directs itself is debated, but they all agree that it is the foundation of human psychology.

Of course there is something which needs to move us in order for us to actually do something, but is that always desire? Is it really the foundation of why we do anything or are there other reasons for us to act, rather than just to fulfil a want?

First, I think it is crucial to categorise different forms of desire; the most familiar is of course the desire to have something: a brand new car, a nice house, love. Though there are other forms too, not every thing we do stems from a desire to have or possess a thing, the most important of which I think is the desire to do something. It sounds incredibly obvious, but there is a little more nuance to it; often when we do something it’s because we want to have something, so the actual reason of wanting to do a certain thing is to possess or get something, the act is merely a means to an end.

Wanting to study so you can have a good grade, wanting to cook so you can have a good meal. However, the longing to do something that I mean is where the act of doing that thing is the reward itself. Playing a tennis match, because you like playing tennis is giving into a longing which immediately fulfils itself. It doesn’t need to get you anything, the joy you get from it is rewarding enough to get you off your couch.

This is in my view a much more pure and also sustainable way of wanting. Where the things you do aren’t really supposed to get you anything and if it does then that’s a nice bonus. The last year I have experienced this with writing, all the support I get for my work is unbelievably great and wonderful, the opportunities I have received due to writing and the people who my work has inspired or helped and yet these aren’t the reasons I write; I write simply because I like it. For some it could be shocking to hear, perhaps they will say something like: “Don’t you write, because of all the opportunities it gives you then or for a future career?”. My answer to that question is simple: no. Not because I don’t appreciate the fact that I can write things other people like to read, but because I believe that writing for any other reason except for intrinsic motivations is disingenuous. It’s deceiving.

There is although one exception I would make here and that’s the act of service: baking a cake for someone you hold dear, going to a museum you actually dislike but you go to anyway because your friend really wants to go. Those are deeds, which have motivations that are as selfless as the ones I mentioned prior and strangely enough although they are very different drives in both situations the same mechanism is at play, which is doing something without expecting any merit, the cake they receive or the museum they get to see is the reward. It’s a motivation without there being a factor of trying to yield personal gain: just like you make the piece of art purely because you like it, you bake the cake purely because someone else likes it.

I feel the same way when reading books or watching movies where the author wants to ‘teach his audience a lesson’. The kind of movies where you see that the thoughts you are supposed to think went prior to the story that embodied them, the kind of painters whose paintings are made to show the audience what is the correct thing to believe.

Because it’s so normalised in our society, you and even I when I came up with this initially can’t see that much wrong with that approach, it is quite harmless right? The harm or the problem that I experience is that the examples I mentioned are all outwardly focused, the writer of the movie writes the film to make you think a certain way about something instead of writing it to express his own ideas, struggles or thoughts. It is artificial. The irresistible need to express oneself for its own sake is a longing in a far different category than wanting the new car or promotion.

Following this instinct of doing what you love, instead of doing something so you can get what you love will make us more happier and genuine in our lives. A clear example is when people are in love: when you really love someone, you don’t go to a movie or on that walk through the park with that special person so you can get something out of it, no going to the movie or the walk through the park was the reward. From that eventually develops a relationship, which is something people want to have, but as soon as you go on the date to have the relationship we all feel the intentions get grey and superficial and the mystic or special aspect it perhaps once had will inevitably fade.

You know it is true and genuine when the calculated decisions and the side ulterior motives all melt, the results they might generate become secondary, irrelevant even. This is not exclusively true for love but for almost all aspects of life. A life spent doing things, without them owing a profit to you is a happy life; a genuine life. Gazing at an artwork, drinking your favourite tea or having a conversation with a dear friend they are all the things that don’t have to pay a debt to you for you spending your precious time and energy on them and strangely enough those are the ones that fulfil you more than any possession ever could.

Of all the fears I have ever had, not one came as close as the fear of loneliness. Navigating isolation has been one of the biggest challenges I have went through, a mix of switching classes, a few jerks and some poor decisions led me to, in my own school at least, be a loner.

Being alone, having no group or tribe that you are a part of, it forces you to think for yourself, not because you want to be independent, but because you don’t have anyone or anything to base your thoughts on, aside from yourself. In the beginning this leads to uncertainty, you start following whatever seems most acceptable, often inspired by what the fictional ‘normal person’ would think or do. You are on your own, but you still try to follow some kind of herd, try to play by the rules of a system, even though you aren’t even a part of one.

It’s always a difficult dilemma when you have to weigh your own morals against acceptance of a group, ‘should I say something or should I just go along with it’, ‘is this normal’? Desperately trying to find some frame of reference, trying to find out what’s normal and what’s not, still playing by imaginary rules of imaginary people. This is what I did for quite a while of my, still ongoing, teenage years; obsessively parting my hair in certain ways, wearing certain clothes, even hyper-consciously changing the ways I move my hands all in a kind of quiet hope to be accepted or maybe one time get a party invite.

Yet, I have never conformed, every time I could gain status or a membership of a group in exchange for a hit to my conscience, I declined the offer, time and time again. Not because I don’t want to have a friend group, of course, but because I can’t, if I have to act in ways which are completely against my nature in exchange for friendship I just can’t go along with it, not only because I don’t want to, but because I simply can’t.

A few years ago, when I switched schools, I got in a class with very loud guys, guys who insulted each other constantly for fun, with a very clear hierarchy, the type of persons you can’t really have a conversation with. I just didn’t fit in with them, they are not demons, I acknowledge that, but I just couldn’t change myself enough in order to really be a part of that group.

With that mutual rejection went along lots of shame, if they are what’s normal, well then that means that I am not, was what was echoing through my head and bleeding through in my behaviour. Being left with just myself, I hid myself in all kinds of distractions, afraid to pursue my true passions, thinking it would just differentiate me even more from the groups that I already wasn’t a part of.

At school, when I was around 8, I remember liking history, philosophy and religion, they always ignited a little spark in me, spiking my enthusiasm. Despising school because I thought it wasn’t normal if I didn’t, I repressed those interests more and more during that school year after I switched schools. At the end of that year, when the summer break started, I found myself swallowed up by alienation and an all devouring feeling of being out of place. I was lost.

During that summer, I made the decision, to let go and accept myself. It sounds so simple ‘to accept yourself’, but to let down all the walls you keep up for yourself, to trust your own judgement and morals is so powerful and genuine. To see yourself for who you are, the good and the bad and radically embrace yourself nevertheless. From that moment on I was my moral compass, I decided what I deemed good and bad, valid and invalid, what I liked and what I disliked. I could finally enjoy myself, the countless social calculations and ruminations stopped and I started to pursue what I loved.

As Camus so beautifully said: ‘In the midst of winter I found, there was, within myself, an invincible summer’. The invincible summer where I picked up Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, started to dress the way I like to dress, started to indulge myself in all the things I loved without any shame. I could enjoy myself with a book and a cup of tea, that was enough. No big story, no award, just a sense of fulfilment whilst reading a book and looking at the leaves through the window. A few months later, I wrote my first essay on Substack, The Test of Mortality. And gradually, I found people who I didn’t have to pretend with, people with whom I actually felt happy, I found friends.

§1.1: The Tsarist Regime

The Tsar in Conflict with Democracy

Throughout the 19th century, Russia was ruled by the Tsar. The Tsar held absolute power; Russia was essentially an absolutist state governed by an ancien régime. Russia was Orthodox, and the Christian faith played a major role in the daily lives of Russians. In Russia, the church and the Tsar were inextricably linked. The Tsar governed the church; as state property, churches received their salaries from the Tsar. The church, in turn, proclaimed to the illiterate peasants that the Tsar was chosen by God, and that by honoring and obeying the Tsar, one honored and obeyed God. This granted the Tsar a sacred status in Russia as both an autocratic despot and a religious symbol. To be Christian was to serve the Tsar. Thus, a mutual dependence existed in which both parties derived power from each other.

To maintain the autocracy of the Romanov family, Tsar Nicholas I tried to mythologize the image of the Tsar as much as possible among the populace. In addition to the sacred status obtained through the church, they achieved this by building upon the rich history of the Romanovs and portraying past rulers as heroes. All of this was designed to affirm the permanence of the autocracy; throughout the 19th century, and particularly toward its end, the West had democratised.

Autocracy was no longer the norm, and the Tsar’s right to rule was increasingly challenged by emerging democratic movements in Russia. Their reaction was to restore the ancient glory of the Tsardom and reintroduce old, medieval principles. They did this by readopting the principles of the Muscovite Tsardom, the archaic system used until the second half of the 18th century, within their empire. One of those principles was ancient patrimonialism, which entailed that the Tsar owned the state as personal property, just as in the Middle Ages. The other was depicting the Tsar as the embodiment of God on earth. The Tsars clung to these principles until the end of their reign in 1917.

In the eyes of the ordinary Russian peasant, the Tsar was viewed not merely as a royal monarch, but as a father figure: one who knew all the peasants by name, understood all their struggles, and, were it not for the evil nobles surrounding him, would gladly fulfill all their wishes. Tsar Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 to 1855, even commissioned a biography of himself in which he was portrayed as “the father of the people,” who would “pay special attention to the welfare and moral development of the populace.” All this served the purpose of maintaining the Tsar’s mythical status and, with it, his right to rule as an autocrat.

The Tsars of the 19th Century

In the year 1801, during the era of Napoleon, Tsar Alexander I ascended the throne. Despite an initial good relationship with the French emperor, they eventually became embroiled in a war because Napoleon sought to claim the Russian Empire for himself, an endeavor doomed to failure. As victor of the Napoleonic Wars, the Tsar initiated the creation of the Holy Alliance: a pact between Russia, Prussia, and Austria aimed at curbing the secular and liberal ideas of the French Revolution.

When Alexander I died in 1825, his brother Nicholas I was designated as the new Tsar. Nicholas I was fiercely authoritarian and conservative; he was disgusted by revolutions and determined to guard the existing order. Consequently, he brutally suppressed an uprising in Poland. Although the public called for social reforms similar to those in neighboring Western countries, he refused to implement them and instead tightened censorship. Despite his conservatism, he did wish to introduce one social reform: the abolition of serfdom. Ultimately, his advisors restrained him, and the reform was not enacted. On his deathbed in 1855, he made his wife promise that Alexander, his successor, would be aided in abolishing serfdom.

His successor, Alexander II, was considerably more progressive in contrast to his conservative father. He modernised the army, relaxed censorship, and abolished serfdom. Despite his progressive policies, there were clear boundaries, such as when he crushed an insurrection after introducing military conscription for Poland in 1863. However, the young radicals of Russia were disappointed by what Alexander achieved through his reforms; discontent mounted, and the notion took hold that only terrorist attacks could bring about necessary change.

This led to several assassination attempts on the Tsar. The first occurred on April 4, 1866, carried out by a student named Dmitry Karakozov; the Tsar survived. However, this caused the Tsar to backtrack on all progressive reforms: he dismissed liberal officials and strengthened the Third Section, the Tsar’s secret police, appointing the aggressive Shuvalov as its chief.

Due to Shuvalov’s harsher measures, the radicals in turn grew more aggressive. During a visit to Paris in 1867, another attempt was made on the Tsar’s life, which he again survived. Terrorist nihilism emerged, groups of young people who rejected all moral principles and authority. One of these nihilist movements, Land and Liberty, attempted to assassinate the Tsar in April 1879 while he was walking in Palace Square; a bullet grazed his coat, and he survived. Another nihilist group, People’s Will, pronounced a death sentence upon the Tsar and blew up a royal train in November, one the Tsar was supposed to be riding, but was not, once again escaping unharmed. In April 1880, the group detonated a bomb inside the Tsar’s Winter Palace, which again left the Tsar unharmed.

All these attempts caused widespread panic for the Tsar, leading him to appoint Loris Melikov to execute whatever measures were necessary to protect him. Loris introduced reforms to pacify the revolutionaries: he liberalized the press and the universities, and abolished the salt tax.

Loris reported in August 1880 that tranquility had been restored. However, a few months later, in March 1881, as the Tsar attended a military parade, another bombing took place. His luck had run out; he was wounded and bled to death that same day.

§1.2: Russian Society

A Land of Peasants and Serfs

An average Russian city was Kishinev, located in the province of Bessarabia, a region situated between the Black Sea and Romania. The “upper town” appeared quite elegant, featuring neoclassical government buildings and churches, but not far from it lay an entirely different world: a realm of narrow, unpaved alleyways, open sewers, and wooden hovels, where pigs and cows grazed in the lanes, and where cholera broke out once every three years. Thus, every Russian city presented two faces: one of imperial grandeur and one of extreme poverty.

Compared to neighbouring Western nations, civic culture was still in the early stages of development, even at the close of the 19th century. Most Russian cities had evolved as administrative or military outposts for the Tsar rather than as commercial or cultural centers. They were typically composed of a small aristocratic elite alongside a vast population of street vendors, artisans, and labourers. There was no middle class comparable to those in Western countries. The professions were too weak and dependent on the state to assert autonomy until the final decades of the 19th century, while the merchant class remained deeply fragmented.

In a country as vast as Russia, it was impossible for the Tsar to govern every city alone. He therefore appointed city governors who, in exchange for their service, were permitted to “feed” themselves at the expense of the districts over which they ruled. These governors held immense power because the state failed to build an effective provincial administrative system capable of centralizing power. As a result, governors could disregard many directives from Saint Petersburg if those orders conflicted with their personal interests.

A crucial vulnerability of the Tsarist regime was the severe lack of local governance; the mythical image of an all powerful old regime was completely false. For every 1,000 inhabitants, Russia had merely 4 civil servants, compared to 12.6 in Germany and 17.6 in France. The police force was tiny by European standards; its police per capita was only half that of Italy and less than a quarter of Prussia’s. The average police officer was responsible for 50,000 citizens across dozens of villages spread over nearly 5,000 square kilometers.

Rural life in Russia was frequently romanticised by upper class students residing in the cities. They viewed peasant villages as harmonious communities, imagining the inhabitants to be more considerate of one another and chaster than those in the corrupted cities. Peasants were regarded as “noble savages.” Regrettably, this romanticised perception held by the Russian elite had no basis in reality. Peasants fed infants mouth to mouth, spat into one another’s eyes to cure styes, and used open air latrines.

Eighty percent of Russia’s population consisted of peasants, even as the 20th century dawned. Peasants were isolated from society on virtually every level: politically, economically, culturally, and geographically. They rarely traveled beyond their small villages, fields, local churches, and markets. Until 1861, the majority of peasants were bound as serfs. This remained the reality of Russian society through the end of the 19th century.

§1.3: The Russian Intelligentsia

The Intellectual Outsiders

The Russian intelligentsia was defined less as a distinct social class and more as a group sharing a specific mindset: one of radical opposition to the Tsarist regime and a readiness to participate in its overthrow. The history of Russian revolutionaries is the history of the intelligentsia. These revolutionaries were, first and foremost, intellectuals fascinated by European history and literature, particularly the French Revolution. Lydia Dan, a Menshevik and member of the intelligentsia, remarked of the movement: “I think that as people, we were far more from books than real life.”

Those who joined this movement and regarded themselves as intelligenty, primarily students and writers, maintained a distinct set of values and norms, a shared style of dress, and a unique vocabulary. They gathered in salons and coffeehouses and read the same journals and newspapers. This rendered them a subculture within the upper classes from which they predominantly originated. They often shared a distinct physical appearance: unkempt, long hair and a beard.

The intelligentsia rejected any compromise with the regime; liberalism was dismissed as weakness. The law was held in contempt and deemed secondary to traditional peasant customs. Within the intelligentsia, sympathizing with terrorists was regarded as a virtue, and substantial financial donations were funneled to them.

The Russian intelligentsia was profoundly isolated, separated from Tsarist officials by their political views and from the peasantry by their education. Yet perhaps most decisive was their isolation from the Western intellectuals who inspired them. According to Isaiah Berlin, when Western ideas reached the Russian intelligentsia, they were adopted as dogma. A fundamental difference between Russian and Western intellectuals was that Western ideas were continuously challenged by competing doctrines and put to the test, whereas the Russian intelligentsia was far quicker to embrace imported Western theories as absolute truth. This was partly the result of Tsarist censorship, which banned the open expression of political ideas. Consequently, the volume of ideas entering Russia was relatively small, leaving imported theories largely unchallenged and allowing them to rapidly acquire the status of sacred dogma. The philosophical movements popular within the intelligentsia shifted over time: Hegelianism dominated the 1840s, Darwinism the 1860s, and Marxism the 1890s, each sequentially embraced as ultimate truth.

This pursuit of absolute truth characterised much of 19th century Russia’s celebrated literature. Convinced that their ideas held the key to the future, the intelligentsia divided the world strictly into supporters and opponents, friends and foes. This laid the groundwork for the totalitarian thinking that developed later among intellectuals. Guilt was frequently a driving motivation behind their revolutionary stance; hyper aware of their wealth and privilege, they sought to redeem their guilt by dedicating themselves to the revolution for “the people.” However, this “love for the people” was often abstract, a romanticised ideal. While the peasantry was viewed as sacred, intellectuals preferred to avoid interaction with individual peasants. This love in abstraction aligns closely with the thoughts of the tormented intellectual Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov: “One can love one’s neighbour in the abstract, perhaps, and even at a distance, but almost never at close quarters.”

For many believing in a shaky argument or going along with an idea that lacks logical reasoning and evidence is much more preferable than to risk offending their group by critiquing it. Anything that differs from what the group thinks needs to be silenced and if you see an inconsistency then they probably have an answer to that. The fear of questioning certain beliefs is an indirect fear of being socially ostracized.

This leads to groups where everybody conforms to the same morality without any question or doubt. And while the saying is often that people with similar ideas form groups, perhaps it’s the other way around and the social power of the groups themselves are the real power behind those dogmatically similar ideas. Not the like-mindedness of the people.

This part of human nature is exceptionally hard to tackle, we want to be part of a group, but with that comes the cost of handing in a part of our individuality and also a piece of our critical thinking skills. Instead of forming their own opinions people will learn how to defend the views of the tribe they subscribe to.

It leads people to adopting ideology package deals: a phenomenon where a person’s opinion about one topic is enough information to predict almost all of their views on society and politics, whether the issues are related or not.

Yet, we all have a choice. Just because it’s tempting and easy shouldn’t mean we shouldn’t be held accountable for throwing our critical thinking skills out of the window. Believing in or supporting certain claims, whether it’s about people, politics or religion that aren’t grounded in logical reasoning and/or a holistic or nuanced view of the matter is a morally weak action. As standing for something has influence on those matters, whether micro or not, the causes you actively support will grow stronger if you do so.

Having now established that the beliefs and value judgements people make carry a certain weight, we can see how unjust it is when that certain opinion was not constructed by evidence, but just adopted by someone because he picked it up from his group and wanted to ‘go with the flow’.

It shows us a darker side of all our political and cultural quarrels, that the actual substance of the debate maybe isn’t even central at all, but that perhaps most of the people on both teams just follow certain ideas, just because their friends or co-workers follow them and they still want to get invited to the monthly dinner party.

Another phenomenon that isn’t all too uncommon is people using their views on societal conflicts or politics for social gain. They do this through virtue signaling for example. Instead of seeing political differences as differences in people’s values, there is a morally superior opinion and a ‘bad’ opinion, one that supposedly should reveal someone’s lack of character. Whether that correct opinion leads to the best outcome for society isn’t really important, it matters that that belief is morally superior and what the other thinks isn’t.

And again the question is raised, how much of public debate is actually used to get to truth, to the best outcome possible and how much of it gets used for social gain and status.

Our thinking faculties, logic and the data we get from studies don’t get used to find the truth or come up with the best possible solution, but instead to serve as proof to confirm pre-held beliefs. When the data gets used to fit inside a framework instead of as a tool to create one, it’s a sign that truth isn’t the highest on the priority list of the person committing that action.

People are more divided than ever and we really need to question ourselves and our standpoints. We should question our beliefs, critically examine counter arguments to the positions we hold most dear.

To be more self-conscious about blindly agreeing with points that we don’t really understand. To dare to think, to dare to think for oneself. Not to immediately conform your biases or the most popular belief in town, but to look actively for their strengths and weaknesses and then make a decision.

And no, that isn’t someone who goes with the flow. But in my opinion it offers a much better alternative to be someone who isn’t easily fooled and above all: somebody who knows what he stands for.

The main character of the book, Bazarov, was the embodiment of the nihilistic younger generation. Bazarov’s nihilism is best characterized by radical materialism, devotion to the natural sciences, and a complete rejection of any authority or principle. According to him, everything that does not tell us something about the material world is useless; as far as he is concerned, the church, institutions, the emotional life, art, and romance are all worthless. His character is blunt and snappy, and he dismisses every emotion as “romantic nonsense.”

In the story, he travels through agrarian Russia together with Arkady, a young man who looks up to Bazarov. Bazarov conducts scientific research in which he dissects frogs and spends the rest of his time arguing with Arkady’s father, Nikolai Kirsanov, and his uncle, Pavel Kirsanov, about their romantic, more traditional values and principles.

Bazarov pointed out to the elders that their belief in liberal, aristocratic values or their appreciation for the poems of Pushkin were completely useless, and that they would be better off spending their time reading a scientific book or studying the innards of a frog. This caused a great deal of tension and conflict between the older Kirsanovs and the younger Bazarov and Arkady.

Subscribe now

Eventually, because Bazarov had had enough of the Kirsanovs, he left with Arkady for another estate, that of the Sergeyevnas.

Here, the young gentlemen made the acquaintance of Anna and her younger sister Katya Sergeyevna; Anna and Bazarov got along well, as both were quite orderly and practical and shared the same down-to-earth outlook on many matters. Ultimately, their connection and Anna’s beauty led to feelings of love in Bazarov. He desperately wanted to suppress these, as they were merely a romantic distraction. Yet he failed to do so and could not help expressing his feelings anyway. Unfortunately for him, his feelings remained unrequited. The cold materialist scientist who wanted nothing to do with sentimental matters could not help getting swept away by them after all.

Bazarov’s situation grew worse and worse. He fell out with Arkady; the young man sensed that Arkady no longer saw him as his mentor as he had before. He saw that Arkady had gradually built up fear and resentment toward him and his ideals. The two former partners parted ways, with Bazarov returning to his parents’ estate while Arkady left for his father and uncle.

Bazarov became melancholic; he worked hard and gave himself little rest, shutting himself off and not wanting to be disturbed by his parents. His parents, who cared so much about him and were worried for him, began to fear him as well, not daring to address him when they saw him and doing everything they could to keep him satisfied.

Subscribe now

During an autopsy of a peasant who had died of typhus, Bazarov makes a crucial mistake: he cuts himself with the knife he had previously used to operate on the deceased peasant, which had the tragic consequence of infecting him.

Bazarov became very ill; he knew immediately what was wrong with him and what his fate was. He tried to be pragmatic about it, but he failed to smoothly rationalize away his own approaching death. He was merely a sick organism, one that was now on the verge of dying. No matter how well he knew that, he could not comprehend its infinity. Even then, he tried with all his might not to fall into “romantic nonsense,” but unfortunately and understandably, this failed, as it was too much for him. A few days after the autopsy, he passed away.

When Turgenev wrote the novel, his intention was to portray Bazarov as a danger; he was disgusted by his aversion to the arts, the emotional life, and his rejection of tradition. However, the younger generation that Turgenev was attempting to describe did not see Bazarov as a villain at all, but as a hero. The man whom Turgenev wrote as a warning was praised as an example. This marked the beginning of the nihilist movement in Russia.

You can persecute a person as evil due to the fact that he has eaten killed animals his entire life or cherish him because that same person saved a child during a house fire and then again persecute him, because he saved the kid not out of pity for the kid, but merely to impress his wife.

This example makes us clear that the individual is infinitely complex and also unbearably paradoxical. Yet, given that human beings aren’t the only thing complex in the world, we try to reduce that complexity to categories, this way we can get some order, clarity and above all certainty. People do this, not only to others, but also to themselves.

Subscribe now

Whether they do it through astrology or personality types or whether they’re red or blue, black or white and for some just healthy or sick. This way of categorising the self leaves lots of sides of people’s character in the dark, they only let themselves get defined through one narrow category.

Of course I admit, people aren’t always busy with their own identity, however it is interesting to think about people their self-perception and how they establish a sense of self.

With these binary ways of defining oneself people often neglect how broad they actually are and on how many fronts of reality they operate which I think is a great loss, somebody’s personal life could be much richer if they embrace the paradoxes that exist within them, embrace the unmappable person they really are. On a deeper level, this means letting the chaos within them exist without having to make order from it.

Letting the chaos flow can obviously lead to uncertainty and anxiety, not being able to sum up who you are in a catchy one-liner, it isn’t stable enough for most people to hold onto. Here’s how I do it: I really like reading classical literature and philosophy, it’s a central pillar of my identity, the thing contrasting those ‘high culture’ interests are of course ‘low culture’ ones, such as ‘shallow’ comedy shows without any deeper layer. So it would be normal for people who like to occupy themselves with ‘high culture’ to have a disdain for ‘low culture’ and vice-versa. So naturally given my interests you would think I would be on ‘the high culture team’(or just the snob team), well then here is a surprise for you, after I finished reading Dostoevsky’s masterpiece Demons I flushed it down spending 2 hours watching Family Guy clips.

People are afraid of chaos, as it implies uncertainty and danger. This makes people yearn and long for totality, a solution or answer that leaves no possible room for doubt. The more uncertain and chaotic the times are, the bigger the craving for totality gets. It manifests itself through religion, which satisfied the hunger for the complete answer and certainty of the entire world for millennia, which it still for many does, however when religion fails, we fill the empty gap God once occupied with the State. Just look at the totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. Entire societies where the state, government was treated as sacred and absolute as God was the centuries before.

But, because safety, certainty and overall well-being of humanity have only gotten better and better we managed to keep this desire in check, however it still manifests itself on other fronts. The most primary example of which being the identity of the individual.

Just like the complexity of reality which could be made understandable by the state in the 20th century or religion in the ones prior, labels and absolute identities can do the same thing in order for the individual to navigate themselves. Being oneself without them, falling in the abyss of oneself without them, the complexities of oneself seem to be unbearable for most to carry.

This eventually leads to people coming together and forging some kind of group identity, letting their personality be dictated by the footballclub or the political party they support. It provides a sense of order, however it can bring a halt to change, development or new ideas, as the group identity brings a sense of tribal comfort, they wouldn’t risk letting a contradictory part of themselves slip through.

They want to completely fit the package of their assigned group or ideologue, silencing the unique or contradictory parts of a person making their personality more shallow and in turn by adopting a more absolute sense of self they get more polarised, estranged and alienated from other people. But when people just try to conform to a group identity in what sense are they left remaining an individual?

This, being able to accept that you’re larger than these categories or ideologies takes courage, it requires a person to break free from comforting chains, to face the unknown within themselves, to not be so sure who is the enemy anymore. It takes a lot, it’s a long road, but that is when a hero is forged, when you’re left with a person actually becoming oneself, a human in process of becoming an individual.

Subscribe now

To me, beauty is a value that doesn’t only apply to one category of art or life, the most common category in which we look for beauty is visual art, within this fall paintings, architecture, drawings and also nature. I find beauty something to be broader than just the visual, ironically when you look close enough you can find it in other parts of life too from classical literature all the way to how people treat each other.

Subscribe now

When making judgement, beauty as quality gets easily pushed away, often because it ‘doesn’t make it anything more valuable’. From a pure utilitarian standpoint this is a valid argument, however judging something as beautiful tells you it’s valuable, without having any proof of usefulness, without it even having to be useful. This tells us that beauty isn’t simply a means, it’s an end in its own right. Where other creations like a screwdriver are tools, just a means to a certain end, the painting is its own end, there is no higher purpose it has to carry in order to justify its existence.

This makes the appreciation for art and beauty an unconditional purely driven by an intrinsic love for the thing, purely for its own sake. Like a small child, the painting doesn’t have to fulfill a function in order to be adored, loved and cared for.

The fact that beauty has this strange place in our value system, reveals to me something about human nature: Humans have an unconscious internal drive for beauty. When people talk about success, they don’t see the number on their bank account or the actual lists of business innovations, they see a stunning yacht, a beautiful car and a gorgeous partner.

That longing for success, The American Dream, is so attractive to us, because of the rich beauty we associate with it. Working seventy hours a week, always with the image of the car and the palmtrees in the back of people’s mind. That image running in the back of people’s mind is what keeps them locked in in what they’re doing, they think they’re after success, when they’re actually just chasing beauty.

By recognising this desire as a need, it’s almost funny to see how easy it can be to fulfil it. In my case, I hung my favourite paintings up in my room, I read my favourite books and try to be aware of beautiful architecture or views when I see them so I can reap as most soil from them when I encounter them. All this has led me to becoming increasingly more fulfilled and happy in my life.

Earlier I mentioned the unconditional appreciation of a painting, how it has value despite its relative uselessness. For me, the fact that there are things in life which are of no practical use to us and yet deem worthwhile proves to me how deeply human this species actually is, it shows to me the intrinsic, deep love humans have for the world. That we don’t live in a race, that there are moments which are ends in and of itself.

Last autumn when I was drinking tea from my teapot, looking outside seeing the sunset and a leaf falling down, whilst reading a chapter from The Brothers Karamazov. If you ask me the memory I endear the most it’s that one, it wasn’t grand, no other people were involved and it wasn’t expensive and it still is the one which gave me such a deep sense of joy and happiness that it’s still engrained in my memory.

Another example of these moments was last week, during my trip to Vienna and I went to the Belvedere museum where I was deeply moved when I walked past Egon Schiele’s painting Die Umarmung. The desire for closeness portrayed in it, the seeming unconditional longing for one another and the unique expressionistic style made me unable to look away.

If you ask me how to make life more meaningful, more joyful, I would answer you to make a bigger effort in seeing and appreciating the beauty in life, more intensely, rigorously and passionately than you ever did before.

Subscribe now

These words have a quite heavy load, as they often indicate something permanent, something within a person’s nature which is and always will be a part of them. Take for example the use of ADHD; when someone isn’t quite able to concentrate on a certain task or is extremely enthusiastic about something all the time we will be more quick than ever to label it, with in this case ADHD.

This of course, doesn’t mean that ADHD doesn’t exist. However, the usage of it by people with absolutely no expertise on it can be very destructive for someone’s self-image.

Besides it being potentially harmful for anyone(and in some cases beneficial), there is one group who are most susceptible to this kind of use of language and who can also be most damaged by it. I am talking about teenagers.

Teenagers, naturally, are in a difficult stage in their life; their body changes, they get confronted with ‘adult’ problems and all this happens at a rapid pace. Feelings of insecurity about their bodies, thinking they’re not enough or maybe even feeling a little bit depressed is all very normal given their circumstances.

Teenagers also don’t know who they really are yet, as a result they experiment: one day they’re the skater and the other they go to school dressing preppy, while the third they decide to take themselves extremely seriously on Substack.

As I mentioned before, therapy speak is increasingly more common, especially online. When a teenagers feels insecure or anxious, they more and more frequently instead of going to their parents or discussing it with their friends go on platforms like Reddit, only to find out about that there actually exists something called an anxiety disorder.

These teenagers who are in desperate need to feel certain about themselves, who crave to belong somewhere, who want to know who they are can easily become really attracted to the idea of having a disorder or rather the identity of having one.

It can lead to them starting to emulate more and more of the symptoms to fit the diagnosis they found on the discord servers, as a result their anxiety worsens and worsens.

This is called(funnily enough using therapy speak myself here) the Looping Effect. The unconscious change of behavior to fit a diagnosis better, leading to disorder to become more ‘real’ for them.

If they then go to their parents who are fond of therapy-speak, who (in some cases not all) confirm the teenager’s anxiety as something pathological, confirming that they actually do have something unchangeable inside them.

The view of them being ‘the person with an anxiety disorder’ only gets reinforced and reinforced, even though if they never knew what it was in the first place, they would perhaps even already have moved on from that feeling. The reinforcement of this label, leads them to feel more certain about who they are, but they do have to pay the price of believing or in their case knowing that there is something intrinsically wrong with them, which is permanent.

As you see in this example, there’s a teenager who deals with something relatively normal for their age: anxiety. You see how that normal experience can evolve into a permanent identity, with a major contribution of that being the use of therapy-speak.

Instead of being given the freedom to experiment with different identities like they can when they dress more preppy at school which they can immediately change, it gets confirmed by the outside world as something pathological and permanent.

This is in my opinion incredibly dangerous for the development of teenagers and adolescents. During the time that they’re most fluid, they can get a diagnosis by their environment or Reddit server, because of symptoms they show that easily could have disappeared with age.

The same can be true for gender dysphoria. In my opinion teenagers should be able to doubt about their gender identity, without something permanent being attached to it and especially at a time where they get most confronted with their gender, because of puberty. So if you give a 15 year old for example medication which will permanently alter their body, it can be incredibly harmful for them in the long run. They never got the chance to outgrow their doubts.

They lose the freedom to change their mind, to change altogether. But instead their insecurities or uncertainties get an official label which can haunt them for the rest of their life.

Coming to a conclusion I think that parents should try to put things into perspective for their children. Most of the stuff they think or feel today is different the next day and forgotten a week later. So when they get confronted with these online groups or terms used in psychopathology it’s best to put their worries or uncertainties into perspective and communicate with them.

Let them know that they’re at an extremely vulnerable age and that most people, if not all go through such feelings and insecurities. How their aunt or uncle did things too which were questionable at their age, but that that is still no reason to think that they were abnormal. It grounds them in knowing that they’re okay.

Perhaps if that now grown-up aunt worries about something regarding her mental life, people should try to do the same thing as I just described they should do with their children. I hope that if we as a society would put this more into practice we can feel more acceptance about our sometimes painful and weird, but still paradoxically normal behavior.

We all know these values: truth, freedom, loyalty, love, equality, safety, justice and beauty. These are all values we try to honor during our lives, although it seems to me that we’re rather uncertain about what they actually mean and how important they actually are for our lives.

When reading different philosophers for example; they all seem to argue mostly from a different angle: some view everything through a lens of freedom and others through one of equality, while there are certain people viewing everything humans do as a manifestation of the will to power.

Subscribe

I think It’s fair to say that most of us can agree with most of the statements made about these values, ‘freedom should be prioritized’ for example, though at the same time we can agree with another statement ‘equality before all’. They seem not to go hand in hand and due to that the values run into a conflict. We try to solve a problem approaching it from different angles, from different values.

We can partly blame this on the fact that our brains are advanced, but not (yet) supercomputers. We have difficulty with having a complete holistic view of a situation such as politics, leading us to narrowing certain problems down to one value that we use to make sense of the question at hand.

But are these values all equal? Is freedom worth as much as loyalty? Would I rather live in a beautiful, but fake world? All these values seem to be quite unweighted, they’re weight seem to be asserted by your mood and the context in which they’re used.

Truth as a value has a significant lower value when you’re playing with a child, although that completely changes when you’re in a court case for example. Leading from this, we can’t assign a fixed importance towards a certain value. But how can we manage to assess all of them holistically when they can be so hard to keep good account with all of them?

A tool that can help with this is the pen: writing. Writing allows you to hold a thought for a long time, forcing you to think critically and evaluate it from all angles available. You can evaluate it a day later and are more able to touch the struggle of these sometimes messy concepts of right and wrong or beautiful and ugly.

As we just asserted it seems that most values are highly context sensitive, though I wonder: Is there one that ascends the power of context?

Context seems to be so important, because it shows the object in relation to the world. It helps us to evaluate the actual worth of the thing at hand.

I think that this power of context, shows us how variable our sense of worth and value actually is. It reveals to us some side of a certain worth that pure abstraction never can, that’s partly why the analogy is so important.

An analogy, certainly in philosophy, often tells us the morality of a certain act in a certain situation. The certain situation seems secondary at first, however it’s the make or break for the value being promoted by the thinker. It shows us when and where something is and isn’t appropriate, providing us with nuance, with more skills helping us to give the right place to the right value at the right time.

To come to an conclusion, I think that this is what moral philosophy should try to focus more on: is not what is the most important, but when something is more important.

Living a life where our values aren’t fixed, but instead one where we learn to deal with the variability of them. Helping us to give them their deserved place given the situation, so that from there we can act in that situation in the most moral way possible. We shouldn’t learn about the good choice, but how to make the good choice.

This has led to many people seeing the humanities as ‘lesser’ sciences, they aren’t of as much utility, an in depth reading of Don Quixote isn’t going to help you build a bridge right?

However, this view, in my opinion, is a great tragedy for civilization, our society. Just because these subjects aren’t directly or measurably useful doesn’t mean that they’re of less worth than the exact sciences, they’re in a different category.

A good education in the humanities: literature, history, philosophy. It teaches you how to think, broadens your perspective, challenges and shapes your beliefs.

They help you to answer questions without a fixed solution, questions you can’t possibly solve with a calculator: What should the ideal state look like? What is good and what is bad? What is beauty? These questions don’t have a fixed answer, however people for over thousands of years have thought about them. Examining those thoughts and from those refining your own, that is what a humanities education is supposed to do, to build your norms and values, a Bildung.

Bildung is a German word, it means a life-long holistic education and self-cultivation. Its origins lie in 18th century Prussia during the enlightenment. The goal of Bildung was to create freethinking individuals who can contribute something to society.

When someone wanted to pursue a Bildung it was crucial to read literature, philosophy and study history, because they were viewed as a crucial part of how a freethinking individual is created, how a good member of society is created.

These disciplines go beyond regular academic subjects. They have huge societal influence, a culture raised having to reflect on ethics or politics will show more thoughtful decisions, different voting patterns and will drastically change the way citizens treat and view each other.

Silently they shape how society organizes and views itself, they shape not only personal, but also societal identity. A good education in the humanities, a Bildung, is where the masses get a shot at becoming individuals.

When approaching the humanities, I think it’s crucial to critically evaluate what is and isn’t part of this Bildung. We often see classical literature as a main pillar in the arts, they have deep thematic, intellectual and emotional value. Containing characters and dynamics that make you think. However a good tv show can do the exact same thing, albeit through a different medium.

It’s important to note that a lot of classical literature was written to educate or ‘raise’ the population, Tolstoy mentioned this for example. So we should ask ourselves: why can’t the same be true for a high-grade show like the Sopranos or a movie like Good Will Hunting?

These are all creations made for the same project: The Bildung of humanity. Therefore I think it’s crucial to actually think what is and what isn’t under this flag. If the material: the new Michael Jackson movie, a Radiohead song or the Attack on Titan anime really challenged you and made you see the world in a different light or at least challenged you to some extent, then I am sure we shouldn’t hesitate but to count it as a part of this education project. The project which the Prussians during the enlightenment started.

Bildung is still not able to help us build a bridge, but it is the most effective tool to prevent the construction of tanks.

But yet, when it comes to showing yourself to others, it suddenly needs to be perfect, like we don’t know that the outside person looking at the picture isn’t as imperfect as we are.

Perhaps we can ask ourselves, why, why do we do this? Is it just for aesthetic reasons? Do we just want our hair to sit in that exact right spot or to wear our tie in that perfect knot, a knot not too showy, but one that still communicates that you mean business.

What is it exactly what we try to communicate? What do people actually hope to achieve when posting their healthy daily routine and vibrant social life on Instagram? What’s the purpose?

Me personally, I often find that there’s a lack of honesty when people do this, they often try to impress people that they don’t even like or even know. Paradoxically with the people they do like they will play it down. They share the filter they used to make the picture look better or even the brand new AI tool to make their teeth look better. This is just because you would never share a ‘perfect’ photo of yourself with somebody you actually like, somebody who actually knows you I mean.

They know who you really are, they know that the picture was posed in a certain manner and the smile was practiced with a ‘10 tips for a perfect smile’ Youtube video, posing for them as some perfect person on a perfect holiday with perfect friends would be embarrassing.

The reason why it would be embarrassing, in my view, is because it is disingenuous. You’re showing to every person on the internet a perfectly edited version of yourself, sharing the perfect parts of your vacation, the perfect parts of your job, of your family and so on. Like it’s normal that everything is perfect, to a real person you would never have to show yourself in such a manner. Often in real life people emphasis a certain modesty when sharing about their lives, but on these platforms it’s the complete opposite. Farewell holistic view of other people.

Of course, you can’t really blame the individual people in this, if all your friends, colleagues and their dogs do it, why wouldn’t you do it too? You go on nice vacations too right? Often when seeing these posts of your close friends, you kinda know what happens behind the scenes, you take it with a grain of salt, at the end of the day it’s just a snapshot of their lives right? But with people you don’t know personally, that’s all you have, pictures of perfect holidays with perfect girlfriends, for all you know that is their actual life, even though you would never be so stupid to think that about your best friend’s pictures.

The point I’m trying to make here is that somebody else’s pictures give you an unrealistically high view of other’s life, which inevitably worsens the way you think about your life and as a result you want to show yourself too in this manner, which leads others to get a delusional view about your life too and so the cycle reinforces itself. A positive feedback loop.

How can we break free from this? From these performative life-sucking apps? Isn’t it much more freeing to go on vacation without being able to put it on your Instagram, your social CV?

There is another hidden pain from publicly sharing how happy you are: you need to keep it up. Unconsciously although many people consciously plan activities just to show it, post it, etcetera, they become a slave to their own perfect persona. Keeping up with the Joneses is not only tiring, but it’s also extremely inauthentic and shallow. It makes you a product of your Instagram feed.

This is why I believe we would all be better off by just quitting Instagram as a whole, the platform, together with Tiktok is a disease of our time. Only when giving it up, when you aren’t force feeding yourself other people’s highlights, only then you can truly start living for yourself again, without living in an algorithmic prison.

So let’s hope that people listen, that people let go and that their internal forces will start to speak louder again: curiosity, passion, wonder. Let’s hope that with time the fragile, anxiety and misery inducing, external drives resulting from these apps can gradually be replaced by the more personal and human ones, the ones which make you actually want to get out of bed in the morning.

A mind that goes beyond space and time crumbles, the only thing it's able to focus on being the wound. All consciousness and being completely shifts from a diverted chaotic mess, looking into multiple scenarios and discovering different thoughts, to blood pouring out of an arm.

I couldn’t worry, the music playing in my head had stopped and all I could was feel and focus on this terrible raw sensation, as if I was a child. The pain leads you to feeling feeble, fragile, the independent thinker begins to realise he lives in a dependent body. He built a beautiful life but if the blood doesn’t stop pouring out it will all be gone.

How could it be? An inner life so complex and multi-layered, a personality that even one of the best psychoanalysts wouldn’t be able to dissect and yet, if you keep lying there, bleeding on the stairs, your body will crumble as well as this higher mind you think yourself to be and perhaps even are.

Your god given soulmate her only purpose has become just to get you a bandaid, a bandaid as soon as possible. A person who God himself has intentionally crafted to be by your side has turned into a mere means to an end in order to stop the bleeding. Aren’t you too important, too conscious, wouldn’t this individual be invincible to the simple consequences from a knife?

Camus writes about this in his novel La Peste. An epidemic spreads around the city, a primal disease like the plague which used to kill peasants in the dark ages and certainly not the people of higher Algerian society. Against all expectations it did. The privileged died as quick and with as much pain as the peasants, the plague didn’t seem to differentiate between the body of a simple farmer and that of the intellectual.

What Camus in this novel tried to get across, in my interpretation at least, is the absurd circumstances in which we live. We live with all these ideas of ourselves and others, assigning values to everything around us, values which the universe doesn’t seem to respond to. The people invent gods and whether they pray zero, ten or a thousand times, their bodies will all rot the same. The people look for meaning and the universe gives no answer.

There is none, you can find what works for you, though you should be aware that it working for you is the highest purpose receivable, as, given our circumstances, purpose is and inevitably always will be entirely subjective.

A human sensation which perfectly resembles this absurd condition is that of physical pain. While La Peste very elegantly managed to show the absurdness of physicality and death on a macro scale, Tokyo Ghoul, a manga published by Sui Ishida, has in an extremely precise and visual way shown me the impact the sensation I described in the first paragraph has on the individual. Pain. This sensation reaches its maximum both in pain and absurdity during one of the most cruel acts that we humans are capable of: torture.

The story is about an adolescent, Kaneki, a human who through a surgery becomes half human half ghoul. Ghouls are essentially the same as people in their appearance, however they’re only able to eat humans and also have certain powers like being very resistant(this will become important later on).

Kaneki’s body changed and as a result his entire internal life changed. The whole mental identity transformed because of a physical change. Me personally, I think this alone already shows us how much our body is connected with our picture of who we are and most importantly how this influences our picture of our non-material identity, commonly being referred to as the soul.

Now the second part I wanted to address, the part which made the most impact on me personally, the torture. The boy still struggling to adjust to the person he became, got kidnapped and tortured. His toes and fingers kept being cut off, again and again, his new ghoul body kept growing them back, reminding him every time of the monster he has become.

I just couldn’t imagine it, the sharp feeling, again and again and again. Your rational mind can convince you of anything and still it wouldn’t change anything about the situation you’re in, about the clipping tools in front of you. This torture, something which went on for days, broke him. Kaneki’s entire personality, soft and gentle, radically transformed into a cruel, overprotective and merciless killer. The way to destroying his soul began by torturing his body.

Here again, the thing affecting your body seems to affect your soul just as much. His soul seemed as damaged has his body and his soul died together with his body, in the snow. His personality after the act was so completely out of control that he wasn’t able to live anymore, he got defeated, lost his memory and lost his identity. Just like the scars weren’t erased from his body, the deed hadn’t been wept from his memory.

But, eventually, slowly he started to reconcile what happened to him, slowly letting himself be the person he is, slowly letting his body move the way it used to. Integrating the torture into his soul, without it completely destroying who he was, just like his body had been knitting his wounds together without falling apart.

A soul touched through its body. The object which always seemed to be the barrier turned out to be the gateway. A bloody gateway.

Me personally, I often notice this phenomenon with beautiful architecture, in Vienna for example, my favorite city. When I was there, there were numerous beautiful baroque buildings, with many very well precisely detailed stone figures on them. In Vienna beauty was taken seriously. On the first day I was intensely struck by this, the effort, the almost divine feeling it gave to me. Whatever we humans were meant to do, this was a part of it.

A week later, I sometimes still noticed it: the statues, the colourful wall paintings, but I started to neglect the city its imperial grandeur. I had already seen it now, I already ‘got it’, what is there left to appreciate anyway? Don’t I deserve to live in such a place?

Tracing back to the part about happiness, don’t I deserve to be this happy?

Only after I came back to my town in the Netherlands, I truly began to remember how gorgeous Vienna actually was. Only when I was deprived of witnessing such beauty, I began to understand that the stunning elegance which the city radiated wasn’t given.

The conclusion I drew from this is the following, only when accepting that nothing is given or you have no right to anything, only then you can fully appreciate every bit of that thing that is given to you.

You have no inherent right to be happy, grasping this truth makes this state feel like a gift, rather than it feeling like something which has to be true no matter what, because you deserve it.

Instead of expecting some baseline of fulfillment, which would inevitably lead you to neglecting every bit of happiness under that baseline, you grasp each and every bit of it.

An act which makes this appreciation of joyful and beautiful things easier, is starting to practice active gratitude. In our day and age we tend to feel like the thing which makes us happy has to be big enough in order to be worthy of making us, great conquerers of the universe, grateful. This perhaps pleases our fragile egos but it also takes lots of joy from us, instead of finding big fish to be happy about, we should try to even find beauty in the smallest fish of them all.

After all, isn’t it more beneficial to reap the most fruit from the smallest bit of soil?

I sat in my garden the other day and the entire year the tree leaves had been brown or weren’t even on the tree at all. I saw the leaves shining with beautiful colours, I often force myself to have big worries, a worry worth worrying about, but somehow I felt like this was the answer. A beautiful leaf, from a tree, the fact that I could recognise its significance meant I already had won.

At that specific afternoon, at my specific age, I witnessed a leaf, a leaf illuminated by rays of lights which had already passed. A moment which will never return, but yet, a moment I fully appreciated, a moment fully lived.

Dostoevsky wrote about this in his book, The Idiot, a book where he, through the fictional character, gave an autobiographical description of his near-death experience. He was scheduled to be executed and as the policemen held their guns towards him, he looked at the rays of light the suns emitted. He saw how they hit the church and how beautifully the church reflected this light.

Seeing this, brought him into an ecstatic state, he realized he was as transitory, as those rays. Despite(or perhaps because) of this he was convinced to have lived for an eternity in that moment. All moments pass, but in that moment he truly was.

The execution turned out to be just a threat, the guards shot blanks, after which Dostoevsky developed epilepsy. This experience fundamentally changed him, an experience which taught him to live in the moment, I’m unable to think of a better or more terrifying way to truly embody this lesson than his.

After having written this(also a reminder to myself), I hope you, the reader, are more able to find joy and beauty in the everyday world, instead of waiting for some grand event which is actually worth being celebrated.

I thought I would finish this essay with a painting by Vermeer(Dutch just like me), as he masterfully manages to show the beauty of this everyday life. He paints the most ordinary occurrences in our daily procedures as if they’re something of unignorable importance, which is something we as people who live in a world which mostly made up of ordinary occurrences should strive to do as well.

Instead of being left in the dark about a person and gradually getting to know them we start making a profile about them right away: engineer, 110 followers, 8/10 looks. It is so easy, it can be so comforting and relieving to place a person in these categories. You never have to bother dealing with any of the contradictory or paradoxical parts of them, at the end of the day they’re just a doctor, right?

This, to me, is kind of sad. It doesn’t look that harmful at first glance, but when compared to how dating was approached before, the damage can truly be seen.

Imagine 2002, you just saw someone in the hallway of your university and had a little chat. The girl you were talking to had a weird black jacket on which intrigued you and a hairstyle you haven’t really seen ever. You talk with her about life at uni, but are mostly intrigued by the way she acts: her sudden moves and interesting comments. After you start wondering who she is, not what her job title on LinkedIn is, but who she actually is, what her internal life looks like.

Because we now have instant access to a person’s life, there is no or very little room left for this wonder. We can start to think we know them, but we just know the labels they identify themselves with and because that’s all we see of them, that can be all we start to focus on. Making dating not a journey in which you find your soulmate, but rather a search for an ideal LinkedIn match, hoping to find someone with whom you share conveniently enough a similar following on Instagram as well!

Instead of finding out their passions we see that they play in the second highest hockey league of their school, again these superficial rankings. All these measurable facts: career, followers and college ranking give us an almost measurable way of finding our ideal partner. There is only one catch, love isn’t measurable. We may know who this person poses as or what they wrote in their bio on insta, but we don’t actually know anything about who they are; the manner in which they speak, the way they listen, the type of questions we ask.

Another thing which makes this all the more crushing is the fact that this information makes us focus on our image even more as well. This starts to reinforce itself, until we only pay attention to the labels. We only see the way people show up to the world and for all we know that’s just who they are.

But this misses a crucial point of being interested in someone, which is not only being interested in the way they show up, but being interested in their internal life.

Let’s go back to the example from earlier, the girl with the weird black jacket. After the conversation is over, that’s all you know, a girl who talked in an interesting manner about her life at this university you both go to. This will probably leave you interested in her internal life, what goes on inside her? Why does she act this way? These questions. You’re being left in the dark with the only thing you’ll be able to do is just to wonder.

There are millions of people with whom you would be statistically compatible with, but none who awakened this curiosity within you, a curiosity which transcends practical matters like their career or social status. Perhaps you start daydreaming about the way she might act or what her dreams might be. I think this is a much more human way of getting to know a human. This is how you gradually build up an accurate image of a human, by concerning yourself with them and their daily and internal life.

This is, I think, the tragedy of the algorithmic age. We tend to operationalize, monetize and analyse everything measurable, which of course has its upside in technological development. However, it leads to complete neglect of our non-measurable but often much more beautiful qualities.

We don’t only do this with other people, we do this to ourselves too. We identify ourselves with labels regarding our career or professional endeavour and completely forget who we are holistically. You miss the beautiful parts about yourself, like the way we behave around your pets or the manner in which you greet the old lady who lives next to you. Like these things are not a crucial part of who you are.

The reason this matters is because you’re not going to fall in love purely because of someone’s looks or professional qualifications, those pieces which can possibly explain your craze about them lie in the small things: the way she plays with her dog or the interesting vocabulary she has. I think when you have this unexplainable feeling, the explanation lives in hundreds of these small observations, in these small pieces of the puzzle of the person you have fallen for.

Perhaps we can look at self love from this light too. Not to judge ourselves by these superficial standards, but by the way we treat our friends or made a funny comment in that conversation.

This is a way too unrecognized problem for people who concern themselves about the death of modern dating: The death of wonder about the other, the mystery.

This explains how dating shifted from a slow process of falling in love to a market running on supply and demand. A deep bonding becomes impossible when you look at the labels instead of the actual person behind them. But we still do, they give us a sense of control. Making us forget that the parts which are most beautiful about them and inconveniently for us, the most unmeasurable.

So perhaps this death of dating didn’t start purely because one gender is worse than the other. It all started with the death of wonder about the mysterious other.

The issue I have with the outspoken ‘look this is who I am’ identity is that it’s too external. When your identity is based around external things e.g. your vintage leather jacket, then your self-image starts to revolve around the way others view you, instead of the manner in which you view yourself.

You see this often on social media, for example: ‘Medical Doctor aesthetic’, a collection of pictures where you see cute doctor jackets and a nicely photographed hospital room. Again the same problem arises, people not wanting to become a doctor because of the actual substance, but because it looks cute(which in reality it doesn’t, trust me). After watching this you can easily see yourself now as the guy or girl in this doctors suit saving people’s life with a surgery, a surgery which you manage to perform in almost artistic fashion, a surgery so aesthetically sensitive that you didn’t even see blood.

However, there are also people who are intrinsically motivated, people who actually want to know how the nervous system works. These people become doctors too and for them the doctors jacket is just a byproduct of them pursuing their interests and passion.

It seems that (some) people, especially in a formative are obsessed with being perceived in a certain way instead of being a certain way. They place who they are outside of themselves and as a result their identity has no internal substance, when you look behind the flashy jacket, it’s hollow.

This to me looks very unstable, as it’s not natural nor sustainable. This desire to be perceived a certain way, is, eventually, just an attempt at being respected, acknowledged or loved. This is a valid desire, but it should be fulfilled another way, by starting to love yourself unconditionally or by being openly worthless to others and see what happens.

You need to have this sense that you are okay, that you are fine, you need to accept yourself. Funny enough it is then, when you start to change.

When your energy no longer goes to how people see you, you can finally pay more attention to what’s happening within you. It is as simple as finding out what you want to do with your time, maybe this time, you start to actually wonder about the nervous system. You start asking yourself how it actually works and as a result you buy some books regarding the subject.

As time goes on and your hunger to knowledge begins to grow you decide to go to medical school, perhaps you could become a neurologist after. A few years later you’ve become a doctor, though there is not much use in calling yourself that, you just followed your passion, the title is just a byproduct.

This is what I want to drive home, a life build around following yourself can be so rich, it can be full of substance, where every aspect is embedded with meaning! In contrast to the artificial identity we’ve just discussed where you’re not really embodying yourself, but rather holding up an act of who you are.

It is only when you let go of what others think of you(and not in a loud way) when you can start to become the person you are; someone who is a product of themselves instead of their environment, an individual.

When we do this the specific word seems very important. Even if the feelings are close to each other they still need differentiation. When you’re feeling resentful you don’t say you feel angry, it isn’t exactly right, even though anger has many similarities with resentment, it is still different.

Putting an emotion in the negative category isn’t enough, we need to be very specific of the sensation going through our body and mind. However, some languages don’t have words for certain feelings or felt experiences. But what does this do to us, when we aren’t directly able to label our emotion?

Тоска, a Russian word, famously described by Nabokov for being untranslatable. Toска means feeling unfulfilled without knowing why. A longing for something that never even existed. A deep spiritual and existential anguish.

The English language doesn’t have such a word, perhaps dreadful, but the difference between feeling dreadful and тоска, is as big as the earlier described difference between anger and resentment. It doesn’t quite hit the spot. But does that mean that the English speaking population doesn’t or almost can’t feel тоска?

To answer this question I will draw on a personal experience of mine. My native language is Dutch and in the Dutch language there isn’t a word like anxiety. You have the word “paniek” but paniek is more of an intense and sudden anxiety and not exactly the gradual increasing tense feeling that is anxiety.

When I learned this word of anxiety I recognized it, I had felt it quite a lot but I was never able to pinpoint what it exactly was. The feeling came and went away and that was that. However when I learned about the word, something changed. Whenever I felt anxiety I knew what it was, I was able to categorize the feeling and as a result was able to deal with it more easily. I managed to give this mental and bodily sensation a place.

I think the same is true for тоска, it is there whether you name the emotional state or not. However, when naming it instead of it being a fleeing experience it becomes easier to recognize. Instead of being left in the dark with your feeling, you get a linguistic map which makes it easier to deal with your emotions.

Without this map you could feel that there is something wrong, but it becomes difficult to pinpoint.

Just like the government in 1984 tried to remove words in order to prevent people from critiquing the government, when you don’t have the words to critique something you can maybe feel that there’s something wrong but you can’t operationalize it. Which leads you to suffering from something you can’t quite pinpoint.

This is an exercise that can come in handy: the next time that you feel a difficult or specific feeling that is hard to pinpoint; write an in depth description of it and then give that description a name. The next time it shows up you recognize it and are able to navigate through it easily.

The fact that we need this shows us how complex we actually are. We need something to navigate a world that doesn’t explain itself. Just like we needed to invent mathematics in order to make sense of the structure of reality, we invented language in order to make sense of ourselves.

From the intense and overwhelming reality we abstract certain elements, label them systemize them and live with them. Dangers arises when we start to confuse the map for the landscape and sadly I think we already have.

When learning mathematics the common phrasing is this: “Nature follows these mathematical rules”. But that isn’t true. With these mathematical rules we can follow nature, not vice versa.

To come to an conclusion, I think that we need just like Husserl said, to go back to the things themselves and change our relationship with language(including mathematics). Not as something that is real like a tree is real. But as an abstract system which helps us makes sense of this incredible universe, from the weird sensations we feel all the way to how stars collapse.

Humans evolved to want control, control about our food, threats and life. This was of course in order to ensure our survival. This desire has stretched out over millennia and is now the most dominant reason responsible for our need to control our lives and behaviour such as tracking every calorie going in and outside our body.

When trying to put life in a theoretical framework or create a worldview there are 2 desires, one is conscious and the other one mostly unconscious. The rational desire: attempting to find out the truth about life and the evolutionary desire: trying to get a sense of control about life. These two can easily conflict and can result into a theory of life that mostly produces a feeling of safety, without being necessarily true.

In my opinion, life is too much to put into one single theory. Every sensory experience, every mental experience and every social interaction has so much depth and context needed in order to understand what it is and even then its description will inevitably miss nuances. These experiences are so rich and by trying to fit them into a framework it can lead to us neglecting the complexity of that experience.

Subscribe

Language plays a big part in this too I believe. For instance, you listen to Bach and a stream full of emotions overwhelm you, you forget about all your worries and for a small moment your soul is one with the music. The song ends and you get asked what you were doing, “just listening music” you answer.

By using the word “music” you gain control over what you just experienced, it results in a more comfortable feeling, however it also reduces its beauty and mystery. We use words in order to communicate to others, which is fine, it is a perfect way in order to convey the experience of certain phenomena. However, we don’t have to use words in order to understand what we feel or see, as individuals we have the pleasure of letting the experience itself speak to us.

We don’t need our experience to go through a filter of words in order to get it, words can water down the richness of phenomenons and by refusing to make sense of life by using words you get more of the pleasure and richness out of the experience. I’m not saying we should completely neglect language of course, it is a very functional tool in order to structure certain abstract concepts. However, language is inevitably descriptive and we shouldn’t confuse the map of the world for the actual world.

People often complain about the lack of mystic or beautiful experiences in life. We often act like we already understand everything and like our physical world can’t offer anything interesting experiences. However, we don’t understand the world, we can explain certain things, but the world in its entirety is completely incomprehensible to us. The most accurate indication we have of what it is, lies not in our linguistic theories, but in our direct experience.

This is why trying to fit life into a linguistic theory can be so reductive of its richness. My advice would be that the next time you encounter something beautiful: a flower, the sea, a work of art not to think of the word associated with what you say, but to just let the experience itself captivate you.

Perhaps then, by letting go of our intellectual defense mechanisms, then we can truly appreciate its truly mystical beauty and richness.

For thousands of years humans had the belief that all their efforts, labour and suffering served a divine eternal purpose. And suddenly during the enlightenment a rumour started to spread: “There is no God.” This atheistic rumour spread and spread and eventually Nietzsche made the final verdict: “God is dead.”

With the death of God a new philosophical problem arose. A problem which not only affected philosophy professors, but society as a whole. The nihilism problem. People who lost their faith began to adopt the belief that life was meaningless, the god who filled their life with hope left the stage leaving nothing behind but an empty space, a space too big for anything or anyone to fill. How could this gap possibly be filled?

A car can help you to quickly travel distances, it is made and bought for that utilitarian goal. In contrast art serves no purpose and yet we humans have created museums filled with it, investing billions of dollars in art. Apparently it doesn’t need to be of any utility for it to be worthwhile, its beauty alone justifies its existence.

Subscribe now

It seems that art proves meaning isn’t a necessary condition for something to be worthwhile. In this way it shows us that just like art life doesn’t need to have meaning in order to be worthwhile too, its beauty alone justifies its existence.

We humans tend to crave a divine grand purpose, only then in the eyes of many can life truly be meaningful. However, can’t we reverse that principle? Isn’t a life that is completely meaningless and still lived passionately paradoxically the most meaningful? One where its worth isn’t dependent on some external divine being.

But what would be a life that justifies itself? Life contains suffering, that is a non-negotiable. The common intuition would then be to find something which makes suffering worth it. Should life be good enough to cover the costs of suffering, in order to get to some kind of break-even point?

I believe we should abandon this transactional view altogether.

Instead we should try to embrace life like an artist making a piece of art. More often than not the amount of joy the piece provided the artist with was smaller than the suffering it caused him. And still knowing that if he could choose to do it again, he would.

Perhaps there lies the answer. Signing up for it no matter the costs. No matter how much life may throws at you and how disproportionately it is out of balance with the pleasure it brings you, you still choose it. You still attempt to love it, to embrace it, to find beauty in everything it has to offer. Making life itself a form of art and even its highest expression.

When I grew up people all wanted to teach me all kinds of lessons, those were often quite useful and practical. “Be patient” or “Live in the present” they got thrown at me a lot, so much so I could almost dream these sayings of conventional wisdom.

When keeping a few of these in mind it can really help to improve your life. However when your entire feed is filled with hundreds of these quotes full of wisdom not only do they gradually lose their power, but also a weird paradox starts to arise: The sayings start to conflict with each other.

As a result people can just select the profound doctrine they are gonna today follow purely based on their mood. For instance, you read a stoic quote about waking up early and how important it is because you start your day at the same time that the sun rises and the world wakes up, allowing you to live exactly in accordance with nature. But then it gets late and waking up at sunrise doesn’t seem so easy as it did 5 hours ago. But suddenly you read another quote, one by Aristotle this time talking about the golden mean and how extremes are never good and you should just aim to be in the middle. You agree, what a profound thought that is, so you change your alarm clock to a more comfortable time.

Ofcourse this example is rather innocent, but it does illustrate where the abundance of different wisdoms leads to: The justification of instinctive and amoral decisions by making it out to be some profound universal truth. A universal truth depending largely on your mood that is.

Subscribe now

The strange thing is is that most of these quotes can have some truth to them, even if they’re polar opposites. For example: “Success is only possible if you keep going everyday, even through the hardest moments” and “You are not machine, don’t rush yourself and take rest when you need it, only a well rested human can achieve true success.”

These quotes both tell us something opposite and still they both contain pieces of truth. Taking it slowly can sometimes be very beneficial and the ability to keep going through hard times also can come in handy. So how can two contradictory sayings be true at the same time?

In my opinion their truth depends on the context. There is not one one-liner in the world that can help you make the right decision, because the right decision can’t be made without being sensitive to context.

And actually this is why a lot of these so called profound sayings are almost always useless. They are good for usage at a young age for children still developing a moral compass. But in my opinion an individual should be able to make their own decision, without following any doctrine or dogma. Judgement should be based on getting moral values in dialogue with the context. Although the question that remains now is: How can wisdom/philosophy actually help us with our judgement?

The trick is that it shouldn’t teach us the what or the how, as the what is fluid, it should teach us the why. The why doesn’t change based on context, it is rock solid compared to what and how which are continuously changed by the tides of context. It is hard to change your reason for doing something all the time, making it less likely to change it based on your mood.

And from this foundation we can gradually move to how we do things and eventually to what we actually do. Making what we do grounded in a deeper rooted philosophy, without it leading to any contextual shortcomings. Philosophy shouldn’t tell us what to do, it should us help to discover why we do what we do.