This week I read Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky. It took me a while to get into, but it was brilliant on the way out. Every time I read a novel like this, I'm struck that my experience is similar to the (albeit exaggerated) experiences enjoyed by the characters.Â
That said, I am not a lunatic like Dostoyevsky's protagonist (I think). Nor am I angry and unhappy (The narrator: "The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful."), nor am I an unnamed forty-year-old man living in St. Petersburg. But I am a person. And people live—like the narrator—in a kind of unreality.Â
Our reality is as differentiated as our appearance. Perhaps more so. It's an interpretation of the world around us that barely resembles (and does not align with) what is actually happening. We look at the world from our perspective, each of us seeing the same event, book, or conversation differently. Consequently, our view is as unreliable as the next.
The narrator in Notes from the Underground sees the upsetting side of life. (He is sad and sees sadness). But, while he is overwhelmingly negative, what struck me most in the narrator's experience is his ability to imagine a world that doesn’t have much to do with what's really going on. He wonders, as if fantasising, of arguments that don't happen, friendships that don't form, love interests that never materialise, and fictional fights. He lives in the hope that he will have the opportunity to express his frustration and becomes incensed when he can't. Like a child, he moves from one obsession to another, taking his fears and insecurities out, as anger, on those around him.Â
This all resonates! Do we not live in a kind of parallel reality? The unreality of our lives gets in the way of us living it. And, so far as I see it, this unreality comes from two sources.
The first unreality comes from our own distortions, such as our inability to accept things as they are. An example from my own life is that I often fail to train sufficiently for my running endeavours. Intrinsically, I know that I should be jogging to get fit in the months before. Yet, discipline fails me; I return to unreality, assuming I'll be fine. I'll arrive at the starting line unfit and already fatigued. Similarly, at work, my number one thing to do is sales. Intrinsically, I know that many problems get solved if I succeed in more sales to local authorities and the like. But—oh!—I find pitching dry, and how, frankly, I'd rather spend that time reading, writing to you, and scrolling Goodreads. Again, I return to my unreality and fail to act on the facts. Seneca says, "Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life's books each day." Living in unreality is postponing things that one shouldn't.Â
The second unreality is dealt on us by society. The propaganda machines we are victims of, and the social echo chambers we reverberate within. Relevantly (and tragically), the unreality that many Russians are living in at the moment, as subjects of propaganda, is laid bare in a recent Economist article:
Russia is not conducting a war, Mr Putin's flacks insist [in their propaganda], but a nearly bloodless military operation to free its Ukrainian brothers from the vile West and its Nazi proxies in Ukraine. These "Nazis" are invisible and all the scarier for it. The audience does not see their faces, for they are a faceless, torch-bearing mass, but only their victims, who tell of atrocities: "torturing people, breaking ribs, burning, stabbing and stabbing, pulling out teeth with tongs and branding people with red-hot iron, with fiery iron, crushed skulls, mutilating", as Mr Kiselev explains. Repetition, pumping music, kaleidoscopic montages; Russian tv is using the full range of tools to whip up nationalistic hatred.
It's saddening, and unbelievable to us, but feasible to the intended audience. Disinformation like this is an unreality many can't avoid. We don't opt-in or out of it. We can't always call bullshit because (by definition) it's hard to know if it's happening to us. Indeed, some in Russia will see through the lies, but many others believe their tv. Similarly, we can opt-out of social media, which is heinously corrupted by bad actors. (great thread btw), and protect ourselves, but we miss out on some of the signals hidden in the noise. If we do exile ourselves, we then live in a silo of one!—surely this is worse.
So, we live in unreality, perhaps from evolutionary necessity, laziness, or propaganda. Or all three. While it's tough to get a steer on what is real, it's worth asking what if the opposite were true? What if what I'm reading, feeling, or thinking, is wrong. It's hard to do, but can be illuminating.
My week in books
Notes from the Underground by Fydor Dostoyevsky: It's excellent and worth getting through the first 40-pages (during which I was often confused and hardly entertained). From then on: Magical. Here's a quote: "It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone."Â LINK.
Live well,Â
Hector