It’s nearing the year’s end, and my mind is a blizzard of ideas and hopes for the new year. I flirted with the idea of dipping into Dostoevsky or Aspasia tonight—imagining I’d consume one neat, bite-sized philosophical insight and set it down here—but I don’t have the brain space for that kind of tidiness.
I did enjoy pushing past the familiar, male-only philosopher lineup to search for women thinkers—most of whom I’d never heard of. That alone felt worthwhile. Even if I don’t have the time tonight, I plan to return to them, to study and sit with their ideas later.
From Dostoevsky, one idea keeps tugging at me: the irrationality of being human. Our desire to design ourselves—to optimize, to behave logically, to live “correctly”—and our simultaneous, almost defiant insistence on freedom. Even when that freedom leads to suffering. Even when it costs us happiness.
It sounds absurd at first. Why would anyone choose depression or misery? Dostoevsky’s answer isn’t that we want pain, but that we resist being engineered into contentment. Any system—philosophical, political, or psychological—that promises guaranteed happiness feels, to him, like a quiet tyranny. To be always well-adjusted, always satisfied, always predictable would be unbearable. Boring. Inhuman.
So we rebel. Sometimes against logic. Sometimes against ourselves.
We crave stimulation and novelty, and then we crave safety and order. We want structure, and we want escape from it. Dostoevsky understood this contradiction not as a problem to solve, but as a condition of being alive. The tension between constraint and daring isn’t a flaw—it’s the line we pace back and forth across, even if only in our own minds.
What I take from him is this: the harder I pull the reins on myself, the more fiercely something in me will resist. The tighter I try to pin myself into improvement, the louder the underground voice becomes. There is no winning through domination.
Maybe the work isn’t controlled, but the relationship—allowing and constraining, holding and releasing. Letting the contradictions exist without trying to eradicate them. Not fixing myself into submission, but learning how to live inside the middle.
That, too, is freedom.
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 