There is a very specific kind of person who loves the book Notes From Underground. Many people like it, and everyone should read it, but some people keep coming back to it again and again.
They are those who look down at humanity— from beneath them.
I noticed these people because I, too, am one of them. Before learning this, I felt somewhat alone; after learning this, I feel just as alone, but now I know that other people feel alone as well.
There is a good chance you are one of these people.
From an early age, you were alone. Isolated. Alienated. Not necessarily very isolated, or in an obvious way— but you were. Maybe you didn’t make a lot of friends. Maybe you did have friends, but never really cracked the code concerning how to actually socialize. Maybe you could socialize, but never really figured out how to connect. Not really.
It probably wasn’t your fault when it started. It might have been weirdness, or shyness, or a lack of friends your own age when you started school that was never really fixed, or health problems, or just regular introversion.
And maybe you overcame it, and maybe you didn’t, but either way it left a mark on you. You grew to like it— no, you never really liked it, but it beat actually being around people. And that isolation made you who you are today; someone who knows that other people are awful, and knows that they are worse.
Are you a bitter and spiteful person? No, I phrased that wrong: do you wish to be a bitter and spiteful person? Because that, at least, would mean fulfillment. That would mean a real emotion, a break from the apathy, a way to FEEL, at least for a while. To be a real, flesh-and-blood human being.
You wish you could be spiteful for more than an hour at a time. Because then, after the bitterness fades away, you are left to stew in your own pathetic feelings. You know yourself to be, at heart, a loathsome person. The most damning criticism you can make of humanity is that you are a part of it.
And in your loathing, in your contempt of yourself and others, in your loneliness that beat hanging out with people, you did something dangerous: you started to think. You thought, and you escaped into fictional worlds, and you brooded, and you thought some more. And such thoughts they were! A shame they came from such a bitter brain.
The strange thing is that you are smart. Not necessarily very smart, but smarter than most people— though that doesn’t take a lot. And even if you aren’t, you use what you have, and you think a lot, and you think deeply.
And something has been revealed to you. Some philosophy, some worldview, some idiosyncratic truth that sets you apart from other people. And you know very well that you believe it because you’re bitter and sad and sick and weird. And you know that it’s just because you’re pathetic, because you’re alienated, because you’re a loner that hasn’t been talking to anyone. That no healthy person would believe this. That believing it is just another symptom of your sickness.
But you know that it’s true, despite that. You sometimes wonder why it had to be revealed to you, this loathsome you, a creature of sickness and resentment who can never possibly convince other people of its validity.
But it is the truth.
And it is a vicious cycle. And it is a sickness. And it doesn’t make anything better. It is a wedge between you and others. The more you think, the weirder your thoughts get; the weirder your thoughts get, the sicker and weirder you become; and when you are sick, you draw away from others, to be alone; and when you are alone, you think, and the sickness grows.
And the truth grows with it, and the awareness that other people do not see the world in the same way you do.
Well, what can you do about it?
I don’t know.
I can tell you that there are other people, who are also sick and lonely in this way, and who have also seen some truth that the masses of humanity have not.
And I can tell you that they disagree with you over what that truth is.
And you can read Notes From Underground. Get a good translation, a recent one. It’s not very long; it’s a classic; and it is one of the most understanding portrayals of people like me.
And maybe like you, too.
You’ll get an idea of what you look like.