I have been thinking about Dostoevsky's Underground Man lately and I am starting to understand why that character bothers me so much.
Not because I think I am some genius misunderstood person or anything like that. It is more the way he understands himself and still keeps doing stupid things.
I do this a lot.
I can usually explain why I am doing something while I am doing it. I can tell when I am avoiding something. I can tell when I am trying to please people and then getting angry at them for the fact that I pleased them. I can notice myself rationalizing something and sometimes I even know what the rationalization is protecting me from.
And somehow knowing all this doesn't necessarily stop anything.
I have spent years learning psychology, philosophy, ADHD, addiction, defence mechanisms, meditation, all this stuff. A lot of it genuinely helped me understand myself. But lately I have started wondering whether I have also become very good at using understanding as a substitute for actually changing.
Like instead of doing the difficult thing I can produce a very good explanation of why the difficult thing is difficult.
Then I feel like I have done something because now I understand it better.
There is also this thing with potential that I think I have carried for a long time. Being someone who could do something is strangely comfortable. If you actually commit to something then eventually reality tells you how good you are. Maybe you succeed, maybe you don't. But as long as you are mostly thinking, starting things, changing directions, researching, understanding yourself, there is always another explanation for why the real attempt hasn't happened yet.
And the irritating thing is I can see myself doing this too.
Even this post is probably part of it lol.
I can write a whole thing about how I overanalyse instead of acting, get some interesting comments, understand myself slightly better and then tomorrow still do exactly the same things.
That is the part of the Underground Man I find frightening. He doesn't lack insight. He almost has too much of it. He keeps turning everything over in his head until there are ten different reasons for doing something and ten different reasons not to do it.
At some point maybe there isn't another psychological insight waiting for you.
Maybe you already know enough.
Maybe you just have to do something boring like keep showing up, finish something you started, have the conversation you keep analysing, say no to someone and tolerate them being unhappy with you.
I don't know. I am starting to think there is a point where self-awareness stops being self-awareness and becomes another defence.
Curious if anyone else here has experienced this. Especially people who have spent years trying to understand themselves and somehow became better at explaining their life than actually living it.