Dostoevsky and the Doomer: Dissecting The Modern Underground Man
The modern world has left many people — namely young men — feeling alienated from the systems around them, but this phenomenon is anything but new. There is no better exemplar of this feeling than the infamous “Doomer” meme, represented by a young male donning a black sweatshirt and beanie, oftentimes with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, and who possesses a bleak and hopeless outlook on life. The Doomer has no particular political persuasion, although he is often concerned with issues of catastrophic climate change, global stagnation, and demographic crisis. He has taken the so-called “black pill”, a metaphor for embracing the inevitability of suffering and an inability to do anything about it. He longs for a better system, a better existence, that he’s not even sure exists.
Although the Doomer meme is a relatively recent invention, this highly-relatable state of being is certainly not. Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky personified this widespread feeling in his character the “Underground Man”, first introduced to readers in his 1864 novella Notes from Underground. This nameless character espoused the same feelings of hopelessness and alienation that the modern Doomer does, even finding a sort of pleasure in his suffering, for feeling something is better than feeling nothing at all.
In his long rant, the Underground Man introduces himself as a sick man, a mean man, an unattractive man of forty years who brings pain to himself out of sheer spite for the world around him. He wrote that, “[I]f you ask me now why I tortured and tormented myself like that, I’ll tell you: I was bored just sitting with my arms folded… Once, or rather twice, I tried to make myself fall in love. And, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, I certainly suffered! Deep down, of course, I couldn’t quite believe in my suffering and felt like laughing. But it was suffering nonetheless — the real stuff, with jealousy, violence, and all the trimmings. And all that out of sheer boredom.” Like many in the modern world, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man felt such a strong sense of aimlessness and meaningless that he would seek out suffering simply to affirm his humanity amidst the consequences of his social disconnection.
In a state of alienation, one can’t help but try and prove to themselves that they still possess some sort of agency, some sort of free will and control over their conscious self, because at the end of the day, that is the last semblance of power that one has in a world over which they possess no influence. By choosing to be a conscious sufferer over a blissfully ignorant participant, one asserts their humanity to a world that seems to have forgotten it. If one feels doomed, the least they can do is reaffirm that they are not simply a cog in a machine, but a being with very real emotions, even if those emotions are negative. In a world that is largely focused on material, scientific, utilitarian, rational-egoist concerns, it is all too easy to drop out, to become disenfranchised. While the Underground Man was rebelling against the dawn of Modernity, the Doomer is revolting against its twilight.
Through his Underground Man, Dostoevsky rejected the themes of utopianism and the perfectibility of man that dominate modern thought, writing: “You say, moreover, that science itself will teach man… that he has neither will nor whim — never had, as a matter of fact — that he is something like a piano key or an organ stop… Now suppose one day they really find a formula at the root of all our wishes and whims that will tell us what they depend on, what laws they are subject to, how they develop, what they are aiming at in such and such a case, and so on and so forth… Well chances are that man will then cease to feel desire. Almost surely. What joy will he get out of functioning according to a timetable? Furthermore, he’ll change from a man into an organ stop or something like that, for what is a man without will, wishes, and desires, if not an organ stop?” What the Underground Man and the Doomer fear the most, that which they fight against, is becoming an organ stop.
Although the philosophy of the Doomer and the Underground Man seems pessimistic, or even nihilistic, by rejecting happiness as the primary aim of existence, it is also liberating. Indeed, by taking ownership of one’s feelings, one can lean into a sort of stoic self-improvement that focuses on what can be controlled — oneself — over that which can’t. At the end of the day, according to Dostoevsky, man does not want a system to make him content, but to become content through his own choices, even if many of those choices are active, irrational attempts at making oneself unhappy.
He wrote that, “You can shower upon [man] all earthly blessings, drown him in happiness so that there’ll be nothing seen but the bubbles rising to the surface of his bliss, give him such economic security that he won’t have anything to do but sleep, nibble at cakes, and worry about keeping world history flowing — and even then, out of sheer spite and ingratitude, man will play a dirty trick on you. He’ll even risk his cake for the sake of the most glaring stupidity, for the most economically unsound nonsense, just to inject into all the soundness and sense surrounding him some of his own disastrous, lethal fancies… if only to assure himself that men are still men (as if that were so important) and not piano keys simply responding to the laws of nature.” In other words, we desire the freedom to be imperfect more than we actually desire perfection. We’d rather eat the Forbidden Fruit than live in paradise, just to prove that we can, even if that means suffering.
Moreover, the Russian roots of the Doomer philosophy is evident in the musical community that has formed around it. Many of the so-called “Doomer music” playlists consist of late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russian rock, including bands like Kino, Molchat Doma, and Chernikovskaya Hata. The aesthetic of gray, dilapidated Soviet apartment blocks, particularly at night, has become a favorite among Doomer art.
Alas, the Russian language might have the most fitting word for that which the Doomer feels, a word which doesn’t even have an English equivalent: toska. According to famous Russian author Vladimir Nabokov, “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning… At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” If toska does not describe the Doomer and the Underground Man alike, than nothing does. They are the personification of the toska endemic to Modernity.
I have no prescription for the woes of all the Doomers out there, because it seems to me that it’s not necessarily a problem in need of fixing, if a problem at all. Without the Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, we would not have seen the existentialism that challenged the values of the modern world through books like Ellison’s Invisible Man or movies like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. It is my hope and my belief that the younger generations that are so particularly plagued by the phenomena of the Doomer will produce the art, the literature, the political, economic, and philosophical ideas needed to combat the alienation of Modernity. Suffering and pain and emotion are powerful sources of creativity and innovation, and by channeling those feelings, Doomers can follow in the footsteps of their predecessor, the Underground Man, and create the foundations for new ways of thinking and acting in response to the conditions of our modern world.
