Can We Escape from Ourselves?

Sometimes, we switch jobs, change partners, or move to a different city in search of something new, but once the initial excitement subsides, we realize that very little has changed on a deeper level: We are the same people. Our inner life has not been fundamentally altered. We are still prone – as much as we ever were – to negative thoughts, anxiety, or saying things we don’t mean in the midst of an angry outburst. And we know then that it was not so much a city or a job or a person we were running away from, but ourselves.

Can we escape from ourselves?

We can try to forget ourselves by becoming fully absorbed in an activity – an engrossing novel, a game, or a creative project. Some opt, alternatively, to take various drugs that can alter one’s states of consciousness.

Such techniques can provide a respite, but the effects are temporary. At some point, the absorption phase is over, and we are left to our own devices, alone with our thoughts, and we run into our old selves once again. It is as though there are parts of us that act as intruders occupying our own minds. We want to discard those parts, and we may succeed in temporarily silencing them, but while we can win an individual battle against them, we seem unable to win the war. The intruders invariably come back. One might say, pace Sartre, that hell is not other people: Other people we can choose to avoid. Hell is the place we can never get away from no matter where we go: our own minds. Or at any rate, our minds’ oppressive side.

The nameless protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s existentialist novel Notes from Underground suggests a different strategy: embracing yourself and taking solace in the realization that you cannot change. At one point the narrator goes so far as to say that after struggling for years to overcome his own darker side, he came to rejoice (yes!) in his own depravity because he saw it as inescapable:

I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home … acutely conscious that that day, I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last, the bitterness turned