It Began as a Mistake: Living Between the Walls
Most people fake normal and call it discipline. I faked normal, got sick of it, and wrote this instead.
Have you ever felt like things are a bit strange?
It’s as if we’re living in the spaces between the walls and in the shadows of passing objects.
It’s as if we don’t fit into a system that seems to be functioning perfectly fine for everybody else.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Whether we find ourselves in the Underground or at lonely heights, if we become bitter and constantly critique normality, we risk losing our way. Those who participate in it have no hope of living authentically at any elevation. Yet, most of us are in precisely this position, faking average to keep up appearances, all the while feeling disconnected and angry toward the normality that most people are just faking anyway. It’s not your fault for feeling this way. It’s built into our culture.
We’re shot into awareness once we’re already going through the motions. Maybe we’re underground when we wake up, perhaps we’re high up a mountain. Most likely, we’re drunk on a small hill like Henry Chinaski at the beginning of Charles Bukowski’s Post Office. The book opens with the line It began as a mistake. Our situation probably began as a mistake, too. Then, just like Chinaski, we get drunk on cheap wine, numb ourselves to it, and say, I had become immune to the barbs. My real life existed when I was alone. This book will give you the frameworks and tools necessary to allow your real life to exist all the time, without compromise.
The Underground
I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
All of Dostoyevsky’s work becomes more relevant by the day, but none more so than his 1864 work Notes from the Underground. The titular “Underground” comes from the Russian подполья, but it’s only an approximate translation. Подполья, pronounced “podpolya”, doesn’t literally mean the “underground” like a cellar, it means something closer to rebellion, or even a “shadow society”. We are all living in an underground, a parallel society, intangibly “behind” the veneer of supposed reality. Dostoyevsky’s narrator, the “underground man,” bitterly critiques everyone and everything. He inhabits the liminal space between the walls, perhaps yearning for human connection while simultaneously cutting himself off from any. Whenever we agree with something our soul disagrees with, smile at someone we dislike, speak ill of someone behind their back, or anonymously leave a mean comment on someone’s YouTube video, we are acting as the underground man.
The Heights
I was what you might call a man of the heights.
— Albert Camus, The Fall
It’s possible to become bitter and disconnected at the top, too. If the underground man is bitterly looking up, Jean-Baptiste Clamence of Camus’s work The Fall bitterly looks down. Jean-Baptiste is a lawyer in Amsterdam. He prides himself on helping the poor and assisting strangers. He saw himself as living “above” others, socially and morally. Unsurprisingly, the book is written in a monologue style similar to that found in Notes from the Underground; each of these stratagems yields a solitary life. Metaphorically and physically, the main character sinks throughout The Fall, eventually winding up in Amsterdam, which is about seven feet below sea level, quite literally underground. Jean-Baptiste has contempt for those he deems “beneath” him.
How many of us, when given even a modicum of money or power, would turn on our fellow man in the same way, thinking of them to be “lesser than” us because of worldly circumstances?
When we humblebrag on LinkedIn or delight in getting the best of someone, we are acting as Jean-Baptiste.
Digital Alienation in The Modern Underground
Dostoyevsky and Camus couldn’t have imagined how perfectly their archetypal characters would translate to the age of smartphones and social media. The underground man would have loved X, a place where you can critique everyone from the safety of your digital cave while desperately hoping someone, anyone, will engage with your profound observations about the world’s stupidity. Jean-Baptiste would have been an Instagram influencer, posting carefully curated shots from his penthouse while looking down on the masses with pity and disgust. The bitter creator and bitter consumer are represented through these two works: the one who posts and the one who comments.
We’re all living in a new kind of подполье now, scrolling through feeds that make us feel simultaneously superior to and inferior to everyone else. You watch someone’s vacation highlights and feel both envious of their apparent happiness and smugly satisfied that you can see through the obvious performance. Look at these idiots pretending to be happy, you think, while double-tapping anyway. After all, it would look bad if you didn’t like their photo; that would mean you don’t want them to be happy. Social media has perfected the art of making everyone feel like they’re missing out on a party they wouldn’t even enjoy. It’s engineered to keep you in that sweet spot between the underground and the heights, never quite belonging, constantly comparing, perpetually dissatisfied, always in the liminal space between the walls.
Both Positions Are Inauthentic
Dostoyevsky’s underground and Camus’s heights are the same viewpoint with different worldly trappings.
The characters in each predicament are separated from those they view as “normal people.” We start there as bitter voyeurs, aroused and then disgusted by the tiny social media videos playing on our phones.
Embrace this disgust and blossoming anger; it is the activation energy required to reset and then redefine your life.
Once you come to grips with the situation and your anger cools, through the techniques outlined in this book, you will not sink into shame over your inertia. You’ll see it for what it is, then choose which parts to keep and which parts to jettison. You’ll avoid developing a superiority complex because you’ll be acting out of authenticity, even if it’s not pretty by other people’s standards. The social, financial, and other trappings of the world will come and go; you can only be snared by them if you worship them.
This book will teach you how to allow yourself to become naive when it’s fitting and clever when it’s required, never making the grave mistake of associating those temporary states with your true, authentic self.
Why Other Solutions Fail
Every other approach to this problem is like putting a Band-Aid on a severed artery. The self-help industrial complex is like AI slop that gets worse and more generic with each iteration - it has no personality or opinion to it.
So-called “positive thinking” is particularly insidious because it asks you to lie to yourself about your reality. The underground man and Jean-Baptiste wouldn’t be able to lie themselves to anything more than a very superficial happiness. Actual change would involve a deep acceptance of their previous operating methods, even if they were ugly.
Authenticity is strength, not positivity.
I once met a man who said that the reason he goes to church every Sunday is to “feel happy”. It’s a fine motivation during sunny days, but what about when it doesn’t work anymore? When your wife gets cancer or you lose your business? Will the church still make him “feel happy”? Living and acting out of authenticity won’t always make you happy, but it will always allow you to transcend the storms that will inevitably come your way in life.
Positive thinking or trying to “feel happy” is only as powerful as one’s ability to lie to themselves in bad situations.
Traditional therapy sometimes falls into the same trap. Many therapeutic approaches focus on adjusting your behavior to fit into society’s expectations rather than helping you figure out what you want. What if some of your “distorted” thoughts are authentic responses to an inauthentic world? If you feel humiliated when your under-qualified manager (who happens to be the CEO’s son) barks inane orders at you with priorities that seem to change by the hour, maybe you should feel humiliated instead of making yourself okay with it.
Then there’s the self-optimization nut jobs.
The Andrew Hubermans, Grand Cardones, and Steven Bartletts. They sell you morning routines, supplement stacks, and time blocking systems to make you more of someone you never wanted to be in the first place. They operate under the presupposition that you should like what we like: longevity, endless riches, rigorously efficient productivity.
They’re not inherently evil pursuits, but they’d do better to ask the more essential question, which is, “Why do you want the years/money/productivity?”
Take longevity guru Bryan Johnson, who has claimed to dramatically slow his body’s aging process. Every time I see him speak, I can’t help but wonder, for what purpose and at what cost? In a culture where “more is better” is embedded in us since birth, that may seem like a dumb question, but I love asking dumb questions because they’re usually the ones other people are too scared to ask. Maybe Bryan has a good answer, but is it worth not having some dicey tacos from a street vendor in Puerto Vallarta, or overindulging in the champagne at your daughter’s wedding? I don’t mind ponying up a year or two of lifespan to have such experiences. Many people listen to these gurus without ever asking the fundamental question. It’s like becoming good at playing a song you hate.
These approaches fail because they’re trying to manage the symptoms of inauthenticity rather than addressing the root cause. They’re teaching you how to be a better actor in a role you never auditioned for. Maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll stumble on the proper role, but would you want to leave something so precious to chance?