I am a sick man I am a spiteful man I am an unattractive man so begins Doo's Notes From The Underground it is the story of a retired middle management civil servant who's just turned 40 and is completely utterly miserable he lives in squalet in a tiny underground flat and has not a friend to his name this book is dov's great warning to us all do not live like this man or you will end up like him here I will break down what I see as the key lessons we can take from the story of
The Man From The Underground and how he can avoid his painful footsteps or step right in them if you've got a masochistic streak one the man does nothing but thinks everything Notes From The Underground is full of the narrator saying that he will do something he says he will challenge an insulting acquaintance to a jewel but he never follows through he says he will start a brawl with a military officer but he never does he wishes all sorts of spiteful and hateful misfortunes upon the people around him but barely raises a finger to make this
happen his inner monologue is all bark but his outer action show no bite and this is one of the key components to his intense Misery the narrator divides the world into two types of people people who act and people who think and he shows intense Envy for the people who act they get things done they are virile active and will stop at nothing to get their way whereas the person who merely thinks May conceive of grand ideas but they're ultimately ineffectual what do their ideas matter if they cannot act on them or even speak of
them in public this inability to enact his desire slowly eats away at the narrator and erode to self-respect his inner monologue is full of thoughts cursing himself for not acting and promising to act next time fully in the knowledge that when the time comes he never will I think a lot of us can relate to this feeling on a smaller scale how many times have you promised to yourself or others that you would do something but then failed to keep your word societally we talk a lot about how this will make others trust you less
but the far greater consequence is that you will trust you less you will lose your own respect and start to see yourself as incapable of action and just like the man from the underground this will lead you into a form of learned helplessness there is one story from the book that's a particularly good example of this the narrator has felt insulted by an acquaintance zov and vows that he will slap him in the face to restore his self-respect he takes a carriage to where he believes zov to be but when he arrives zverkov is nowhere
to be found having encountered this small obstacle the narrator immediately gives up think about that for a second the narrator has explicitly said multiple times that this slap is the only thing that will restore his self-respect and yet he gives up at the slightest inconvenience I he holds himself in such low esteem that he no longer even cares if he respects himself so D's warning to us all here is to take at least some lessons from the people of action sitting and promising yourself that you will do something though you know you won't follow through
with it carries the risk of eventually causing you to hold yourself in contempt and that is a price no one should be willing to pay for more on philosophy and the art of learning subscribe to my email list the link is in the description two he is an nihilist The Man From The Underground is a little bit like an edgy teenage boy that is never grown out of his Bleak nihilistic phase one of the most telling passages from a monologue by the narrator reads I say let the world go to hell but I should always
have my tea he's essentially saying that he cares nothing for his fellow man but is happy to see them all burn as long as he himself remains okay this as far as Doki is concerned is the ethics of a demon and he displays perfectly well how this sort of attitude leads to misery since the narrator feels no commonality with other people he is always on the defensive he only sees them as potential threats or enemies but never as friends after all to consider someone a friend is to say that you care about their well-being that
they are close to your heart and the narrator has already ruled out anything of the sort he is convinced that to believe anything else is just superstitious and he considers this nihilism to be the educated position on ethics of course this inevitably leads him to conflicts the narrator perceives every action someone takes as a danger to him he interprets neutral actions as threatening and annoying actions as if they were mortal wounds in one lengthy section of the book he describes how he was so irritated at the hay demeanor of the military officer that he spent
months tracking him down just so he could bump into him on the street he did this because as far as he was concerned the officer had dealt him a grave insult by not paying him adequate courtesy the officer for his part did not even realize the narrator existed so deep did the narrator's hatred of others go that he would spend this amount of time attempting to correct some imagined wrong that didn't even exist he describes how he would wake up in the middle of the night in a fury at this total stranger who had done
nothing more than ignore him the man from the underground is tormented by imaginary demons born from his own lack of goodwi towards humanity and this stretches to how he treats people he doesn't even think have wronged him he describes at length how he was needlessly cruel in his Civil Service post inconveniencing and denying people whenever he could just so he could enjoy watching them suffer in his Twisted worldview it was every man for themselves and he did not owe anyone else in the world anything at all but this view distorted him made him full of
spite alienated him from everyone around him and ultimately ruined his life and again again I'm sure we can see small Tendencies of this in our own lives we all sometimes unjustly treat others with suspicion they have not earned perhaps they remind us of someone that has wronged Us in the past or they just caught us in a particularly paranoid mood in recent years some attention has been drawn to how unfair this is on the suspected but very little attention has been given to how much it harms the suspect treating other people with ill will Spite
and hatred will do more to hurt you than it will ever do to hurt them and this is a rare point on which n Jesus the Buddha and dovi all seem to agree three he evades challenge time and time again you see the narrator running from Challenge and as a result you see how he will never grow as a person one of the first things he says in the book is that he quit his job the first chance he had and he has not applied himself to anything since he has nothing that fills the void
left by this lack of challenge in his life and this leads to suffering in his avoidance of challenge he has given himself the greatest challenge of all a life with no point this is all in spite of the fact that he fully recognizes that struggle is an important component to a meaning meaningful and fulfilling life he describes people like chess players that would not want to give up the game if you offered them all the riches in the world the point is in the play The Man From The Underground is somebody who has given up
the game entirely and then he wonders why he's not having any fun this attitude has consequences both in the short and the long term for the narrator in the short term it turns him into an utter coward every time he faces a challenge or feels fear or has to rise to an occasion he avoids it like the plague and as a result he never becomes any braver at various points he describes one to get into fights or challenge someone to a jewel or in some way put himself In Harm's Way but he never follows through
he is a victim of his own cowardice and that cowardice has only Arisen because of his continual Retreat from any meaningful struggle in his life one of the most interesting passages in the book is where the Narita briefly strikes up a connection with the prostitute Liza and gives her his address this could have formed a way out for the man underground it could have been the beginning of his reconnection with society and with his fellow human being but instead he is immediately seized with irrational Terror and embarrassment at his humble flat and when she visits
he insults her to such an extent that she leaves and he never sees her again he was so scared of human connection and so cowardly in character that he threw away his one shot at slowly reclaiming his life from despair dovi here hammers home the dire consequences of cowardice without some modicum of Bravery built from overcoming challenges in our lives we Doom ourselves to whatever circumstance fate happens to throw in our laps so think to your own life what challenges are you avoiding I'll start I'm a singer in my spare time and I've been avoiding
certain auditions for fear that I will be rejected and told that I'm not good enough but with this tough love from dooi I've booked two auditions in the next month I don't know what will come of them but I think in my own small way I've learned a lesson from Doo's cautionary tale four he avoids responsibility it has often been said that the Hallmark of an adult is someone who can take responsibility for their own actions there is a reason we don't throw toddlers in prison for hitting one another in the playground we don't consider
them responsible for those actions but as soon as one comes of age it is expected that we take full responsibility for our choices and deal with their consequences The Man From The Underground is the perfect example of why it is imperative that we do this he takes every opportunity to offload the responsibility for his life onto someone else he feels it is the fault of others that he's unhappy he blames his acquaintances for his lack of self resect he blames the world for his lack of friends instead of facing the fact that he's a fundamentally
unlikable person he blames the people around him for being too stupid to understand him instead of recognizing that he is unremarkable to most people he demands recognition for his mere existence he's a sort of incel but in every aspect of his life his refusal to take any responsibility for his actions means his situation is genuinely hopeless in a particularly poignant Moment In the book Liza The Prostitute he's befriended Embraces him out of pity and he says they won't let me I cannot be good again he interprets the world's reaction at his immensely hostile Behavior as
a dire Injustice rather than a reasonable response to his cruelty and his hate this for me is the moment where the fate of the narrator is sealed it is when he has hammered home the final nail in his own coffin not only has he ruined his life for no reason but he has rejected any hope of escaping his situation this piece of wisdom from dostoevski is echoed through the works of other existentialist philosophers like Jean Paul satra who recognizes that taking responsibility for your own life is psychologically incredibly difficult it is often far easier to
point the finger at the world or at other people anywhere but in our reflection in the mirror and the narrator secretly seems to know that he's being pathetic he constantly runs from his own reflection in the book a nice image capturing how he cannot stand to be in his own company after all he has rejected one of the only qualities that commands respect from most people he has made himself pitiable by his own values and there's no quicker way to become miserable than that if other people lose respect for you you might not always be
in their company but if you lose your own respect you'll be trapped forever in your own self-hating spiral five he is intellectually arrogant lastly The Man From The Underground Dooms himself by his own intellectual arrogance he could at any point turn back from the disastrous life he's carved out for himself but instead he forges onward and downward because he is so convinced of his own rightness during the book he's constantly presented with challenges to his worldview there are his old school friends who have all achieved greater success than him and seem more amiable towards others
in the world there is Liza who manages to show optimism and empathy in the bleakest of personal circumstances and he writes at length of approaches more successful and meaningful than his current attitude to life but he disregards all of them on one flimsy reason those approach Es are not as intelligent as his he regards his Bleak cowardly nihilism as the natural position of the intelligent and educated man and refuses to budge on this for any reason in his arrogance he thinks he knows more than anyone around him despite not demonstrating that knowledge at all in
any of the book he is someone who is reasonably well read and reasonably clever who has seemed to convince himself that he is a once in a generation genius his delusions of grandee prevent him from taking any advice from others even when it would clearly benefit and it gives him somewhere to retreat to when he's embarrassed by the material or spiritual success of others after all he is too intelligent for society so no wonder he's found little success in it I think dovi is warning us here about a particular kind of person that many of
us are at risk of becoming chances are if you've clicked on a video about dovi you're probably well read and clever but dooi warns people like your good self who love learning not to get carried away into the realm of intellectual arrogance where learning then becomes impossible this in my opinion is one of the overlooked components of the narrator character in the novel his arrogant assumption that his way is the most intelligent way ensures that he will continue on his doomed path forever it should set off alarm bells in us all anyone can be saved
from a path of self-destruction provided that they have an open mind and are willing to learn new things experiment with new outlooks and continue developing as a person The Man From The Underground has shut himself off from any such Evolution and has confined his character to be static and stagnant and all because he thinks he knows better than everyone else subscribe to both my Channel and my email list for more on thinking to improve your life
