A Solution To The Underground Mind

One of my favorite books of the past decade has been Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

I’ll try my best to make some of the ideas legible but I highly recommend reading the book before this article as only half or even less of this article will make sense.

The book is the best description of a cynical, spiteful and resentful mind.

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

The book is written in such a way that almost every person who reads it will feel like ‘This is so me’. That’s normal, that’s the point.

However, it’s more true for some people than others.

It’s a filter to some extent, if you read Notes from the Underground it’s probably not your first Dostroysky book, and the “negativity” and “not-feel-good” of crime and punishment didn’t scare you away.

So only someone who has an underground mind would end up reading NFTU.

While having an underground mind might be obvious from my writing, it’s not obvious if you just look at my life.

This article is trying to answer the question,

how do you thrive with a very deep underground mind? Not survive, not do okay, NO thrive! #BeTheBestYou

Harmless Untruths

To understand what I mean by “more” underground than others I have an idea I call harmless untruths.

Derek Sivers explains the non-underground version of this idea in his book Useful not True, Scott Adams ‘Reframe Your Brain’ is good too.

A year or so ago my friend got into martial arts after he tried to stop and failed to stop a crime. I remember he said the sentence “If I get good at fighting, it won’t happen again”

In the 10 seconds after he said that sentence, my mind went through the entire series of ideas below

1. Even if you become the best fighter someone 1 weight class above you will smack you down
2. Even if you become the strongest the other guy has a machete
3. Become a master swordsman? The other guy now has a gun
4. and even if you win the gunfight, the state has a monopoly on violence, frowns upon vigilante justice, and will lock you up. In a society where the state isn’t strong enough to do that, you have a mafia hit on you. In either case, you don’t win the fight.

Now marginally I agree that it’s better to be able to fight than not, just as it’s better to be strong than not.

So, my friend wants to try and tell me a harmless untruth but my underground mind immediately jumps and processes the state’s monopoly (or even the lack of it) on violence.

That’s an overthinking brain. It’s much easier to solve problems if you understand what you are dealing with.

Don’t call that rational or “smart”, it’s just overthinking EVEN if it’s true.

Now we can call the idea of “training to get better at fights” a harmless untruth.

It’s better to believe it. Your life would be better if you could believe it.

If you have friends who can believe it, let them be. But if you’re anything like me (and you are by the fact you’re reading this article) your brain can’t help but babble those 4 points in a normal conversation.

But now, how do you ‘person with an underground mind’ get into martial arts when you can’t fall for the harmless untruth?

I believe you have 3 options here.

1. Believe Your Overthinking Mind

& pick inaction/the easy choice/the weak perspective.

You take the negative ‘smart but not that smart’ perspective 100% seriously in its simplistic form and you use it as an excuse to avoid doing something that is usually hard.

“The entire universe isn’t going to exist in a couple billion years so what’s the point”

”Love is just neurons and chemicals in the brain”

”that girl probably thinks I’m weird, what’s the point of going to say hi”

You genuinely think the world you create in your mind is real.

You drink your own kool aid and forget that you need to test out your theories in the real world.

2. Force Yourself To Play Along

”why are you complaining, no one else has a problem with this”

The voice at the back of your mind is saying the things I said at the start of this section. You ignore it and instead, you try and play along.

You embrace Fake Positivity. (I’ll write about his in my next article)

This never lasts as you’ll see from this article.

Embracing this perspective is like doing something due to FOMO, you aren’t even in the game 6 months later.

This is the endless cycle of Fomo -> disillusionment -> Fomo -> disillusionment -> Fomo -> disillusionment …

That might be familiar to many of you.

And finally, a solution that worked for me

3. Embrace The Underground Mind

and come out the other side to the light/real positivity.

Most of the underground mind is often mistaken for nihilism because most people are living in a fake positivity world.

The “let’s end this podcast with something positive” fake California niceness is now a global phenomenon.

“Why are you always so -ve?”

Often this question isn’t about being negative, rather it’s about not reinforcing people’s fake positive worldviews.

Optimize for real positivity in your life, not in your ideas

Let’s use my favorite overused example, the gym

There are 100s of underground mind reasons to convince you not to lift

> Cancer and you lose everything

> Hit by a car and you lost your legs

> You’re just overcompensating for being short

> That’s not functional bro

Cool, I’ve heard it all. So why do I still go to the gym?

I enjoy lifting and so do most people I know. Once you go through the learning state, lifting weights isn’t ever dissociative, it’s the most present thing you can do. It’s meditative.

It’s one of the best things for my ADHD: if you read any of my articles or talk to me for more than 5 minutes, it’s obvious that I have some version of ADHD. The gym is one of the best tools I have for channeling my ADHD into a single thought stream.

Infinite energy -> the same way I don’t want $ to be a reason I can’t do something I genuinely want. Infinite energy is amazing. Never being physically tired (within reason) is a choice every one of us can make.

So my solution is some version of doing a thing for it’s own sake and not “just” for the goal

What are you doing when you’re doing the dishes?

You’re doing the dishes.

I love the above perspective but I don’t think it’s the same.

The Zen Buddhist perspective of the dishes tells you that you will enjoy things you don’t like if you’re in the moment as you experience them. It’s true but that’s not necessarily the solution I’m trying to share here.

What I’m saying is a much easier perspective, that more people can do.

I’m saying that by 100 Jiu-Jitsu sessions, you already enjoy it, you just need to make it to the 100 sessions and all your bullshit excuses don’t exist.

Your opinion of what the girl across you from the bar thinks doesn’t survive the 5 minute conversation, it only exists if you run away.

If you can add the zen perspective on top of that? Go ahead but you wouldn’t need this article in the first place.

So don’t try to deny the negative thoughts your mind has, but you need to also be smart to know that those thoughts don’t survive a touch of reality.

But doesn’t that mean that there’s value in solution 2?

In wearing the mask cause it gets you moving?

I think it works for normal people, which is why every influencer lives in the “just do it” world, but I think option 2 does worse over the longer term for people with an underground mind.

In the short term of maybe 6 months, FOMO works better but the disillusionment means you take a break for longer than if you never got FOMO in the first place.

Johnathan Bi covers this well under his Mimetic lectures where he talks about:

When you are highly mimetic, your goals and desires are not your own  But you tie your beliefs of happiness to the achievement of the goal.

Once your beliefs of happiness are tied to a goal you get fomo and a massive hunger to achieve it, and then you get it, you succeed and you feel…nothing.

This is the day after disillusionment a guy often experiences with a girl after he sleeps with her in situations where it wasn’t actually his own desire.

Hence, fomo -> hunger drive -> success -> disillusionment.

It’s not failure you need to be worried about, it’s success in things you never wanted to begin with.

This is what you’re going to put yourself through if you settle for option 2.

Understand your mind so you can work with it and not against it. Or deny it ever existed.

> I can play a role, I was able to put on a mask, go to so many events, just play a role, life was great

Me: did that ever last? or was it just like a ball pushed underwater? Did you suddenly lash out randomly like a person with tourettes? Do you notice you can’t help but self-sabotage yourself even when everything is going great?

… *silence*.… fuck

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

So if you have a mind-like me, stop fighting against yourself.

I had a quote from a year ago

Advice from terminally online people doesn’t apply to people who are not terminally online

Similarly, the advice most of you have gotten most of your life is “Hey don’t think so much” “Just stop thinking” “Why do you always overthink” blah blah blah

That’s not useful, because in almost all cases, the person saying that never had a thought that burst their harmless untruth to begin with.

They are not pulled into the undergound.

You are, so you can’t just rise to the light.

You need to go into the depths of the darkness where you are currently avoiding it and come out on the other side.

Embrace it.

Underground Ubermensch

Please, Please, Please listen to this episode of the Martyrmade podcast twice before reading this section.

I’m going to try my best to make it legible for people that don’t but I think you miss out on the majority.

This is my favorite podcast episode of recent years, hands down.

It’s a podcast about the lives of 2 very interesting philosophers, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.

An interesting aspect is why Nietzsche wrote the philosophy that he did.

One of his biggest ideas is of the Superman, the Ubermensch.

But Nietzsche was never an ubermensch, in fact, quite the opposite. His relationships are an illustration but his fame, and social standing when he was living followed the same pattern.

The first woman he loved was married, and on top of that was having an affair with Wagner (the societal ubermensch of Germany at that time).

He was the third wheel in their relationship.

Nietzsche wrote about being an ubermensch because he was always in their shadows, always the bridesmaid.

When he left that city and went to another town, he was too shy to ask the next girl he liked. So he asked his friend to do it. The girl ran away with his friend.

That’s the real Nietzsche.

—- Credit where credit is due —-

South Park has an episode called “The Simpsons Already Did It” that has a good lesson on why it’s okay and not a big deal if you imitate something else (even unknowingly).

The Girardian in me would highlight how imitation leads to all innovations… (but this article is way too long so here you go long /short)

But to give Nietzsche’s work his due you have to say “Nietzsche already wrote it” to most of modern philosophy.

Do you think that there’s a revolutionary idea that a philosopher wrote in the past 150 years?

Odds are Nietzsche already wrote it, inspired it and probably even intellectually destroyed the strongest counterarguments.

“Nietzsche already wrote it!”

——

Now let’s go back to calling him a cuck 😊

Nietzsche got beginner’s fame, the young rising writer fame, where his initial ideas pushed him to the top of society.

But Nietzsche was always wearing a mask in those communities, and every time the mask fell off (like his rants against nationalism while everyone else drank the Kool-Aid) he lost all the fake status he gained.

A good description would be that Nietzsche would talk shit about Wagner and his posse, but he picked Wagner’s fans as his audience.

Instead of just saying “Wagner is stupid and so are his fans, fuck them I’ll find my own people”. He could’ve left the hierarchy but he chose to stay and compete within it.

In Internet lingo, Nietzsche wasn’t ‘jacked and unbothered’

He was living in a world where his friends went to the club without inviting him and he had to act like it didn’t happen the next time he met them to be a part of the group.

It’s safe to assume that Nietzsche had an underground mind, especially considering the later part of his life.

How he found a Dostoevsky book in a library, how every part of his life matched the character in that book down to the fact that he was searching for an apartment.

He fell in love with Dostoevsky’s work and probably went crazy due to the fake reality that the book shattered.

Nietzsche’s early taste of fame made him believe that he was an ubermensch but he wore a mask to play that role and his underground spirit would act out and sabotage him.

He died crazy and out of his mind sucked into the underground world. He spent so much time avoiding.

Now answer me, sincerely, honestly, who lives past forty? I’ll tell you who does: fools and scoundrels.
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

Now let’s get to my man, Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky had a very similar life to the initial fame that Nietzsche had, but his “more” underground mind made him a radical immediately. He didn’t last a year in a pleasant society.

At a very young age, he was sent to Siberia and was set to be executed, but was only saved at the last moment after he was blindfolded and at the shooting range.

He was changed after that experience on 2 fronts

1. His work before the execution has been described as someone who wrote amazingly but in the last second compromised and held himself back. He held back punches because he optimized for critics, culture, and society. He didn’t after.
2. He chilled. He didn’t believe he needed to burn the system down. He got married had a family and a normal life. The more ‘negative’ his books got, the more ‘positive’ his life became.

Sidenote: I do wonder about the direction of causation here and believe 1->2. In my own life the more I had to (by my own fears, choices or circumstances) hold my tongue and in turn my thoughts the more I talked about systematic change. But the less I held my opinions and in turn my actions the more chill my life became.

Dostoevsky’s life can be summed up as him resisting the underground but having a much stronger underground mind than Nietzsche so it never allowed him to resist it for too long. So he sank and lucky for us, he didn’t die and came out on the other side.

Once he embraced his underground mind he wrote his best work. The order of books after Siberia are Crime and Punishment, The Brother’s Karamazov, and Notes from the Underground.

When he died his funeral was the most attended until that moment in Russian history.

A pre-embrace of the underground mind would’ve believed “I can’t write a story like the Grand Inquisitor cause someone who is highly religious and not very smart will get too emotional about it, so I’ll hold myself back. What if people get the wrong idea”

A post-underground mind would say “I HAVE TO write it, I CAN’T NOT say it, my hands hurt if I hold them back. Holding back is harder than writing it”

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

I hope you understand this blog after you get the second perspective 😉

So now we get a very interesting contrast of their lives. 2 different people who both had underground minds.

There is one question on my mind.

If you have an underground mind, the one that doesn’t stop its whispers, the one that doesn’t ever stay quiet, is it possible for you to ever become an ubermensch without first sinking into the underground?

I don’t know, I just know that the mask never survives.

This is an N=2, but a very relevant n=2

Nietzsche: mini ubermensch -> fake ubermensch -> keep the fake charade going -> and now SINK… you’re in the sunken place Mr. Underground

Dostoevsky: Mini ubermensch -> 50% underground -> near death experience -> 100% underground -> dafaq how am I an ubermensch?

In one of the chapters of the Fountain Head you have the following interactions between Howard Roark and Steven Mallory.

This is why only someone with Nietzsche’s life could write what Nietzsche wrote.

The FountainHead written from the point of view of Howard is only 10% in size because Howard is unaware.

A real life Howard Roark has no idea who Howard Roark is.

If your only example of an Ubermensch is Howard Roark, you’ll screw yourself cause I don’t think you can choose to be unaware.

You are like Steven Mallory, you can’t help but notice the crowd so what do you do?

You dive into the underground, cause it is much easier to navigate when you choose to go in yourself.

See you on the other side!