The Freedom to Ruin Your Life

I’ve been reading Notes from Underground, and Dostoevsky makes an argument about human nature that I find quite compelling.

“Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick.”

There is something in us that values our agency so deeply that we will occasionally exercise it against our own interests. Sometimes it seems we would rather make the wrong choice freely than feel that the right choice has been made for us.

Maybe this is why knowing what is good for us has never been enough.

You know you should go to bed, and you stay up another hour.

You spend money you promised yourself you would save.

You avoid the workout while paying someone to convince you to exercise.

You pick up your phone almost immediately after putting it down.

We call this self-sabotage, but I wonder whether that description is incomplete. Sometimes these behaviors seem to contain a tiny declaration of independence:

“You cannot tell me what to do!”

The strange part is that the person doing the telling is often you.

We are somehow capable of becoming both the authority and the rebel, creating rules for ourselves in the morning and breaking them by nightfall simply because we can.

This may also be why attempts at self-improvement that rely entirely on control eventually backfire. You can optimize your environment, hire a trainer, download the app, buy the meal plan, and yet there is another personality in there saying, “To hell with it!”

Why does some part of us keep choosing against what another part of us claims to want?

Dostoevsky poses the idea that it is because being free includes the freedom to be unreasonable.

Maybe the goal, then, is not to eliminate this rebellious part of ourselves, but to understand what it is rebelling against.

One thing I have found useful is to pay attention whenever I hear the word “should” in my own head. I should work out. I should go to bed. I should stop scrolling. That language immediately creates an authority, and wherever there is an authority, there is usually some part of us tempted to rebel against it.

Try replacing the command with a choice.

“I should go to bed” becomes, “I can stay up if I want to. I’m choosing to go to bed because I care about how I feel tomorrow.”

It sounds like semantics, but it restores something important: ownership.

And when you find yourself doing something you know works against you, pause before immediately trying to overpower yourself. Ask:

What am I rebelling against right now?

Maybe the answer is pressure. Maybe it is perfectionism. Maybe your entire life has become so optimized that staying up until 2 a.m. eating cereal feels like the only decision nobody else gets to make for you.

The behavior may still need to change, but understanding the function it serves gives you a better chance of changing it.

Because every time you betray yourself in some small way, there may be a part of you trying to prove that it still has a choice.

The challenge is to stop proving your freedom by destroying things you care about and start exercising it by deliberately choosing them.