The Harder You Try, The Worse It Gets - The Philosophy of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s core warning is that the harder humanity tries to engineer perfect happiness—through reason, technology, and utopian social plans—the more likely it is to manufacture new suffering, because human beings can’t be reduced to rational machines. In Notes from Underground, an “underground man” insists suffering is unavoidable: no social or material arrangement can eliminate unhappiness, it can only shift what people suffer from. That premise turns modern progress into a trap. Even when societies chase prosperity and “perfect well-being,” people may still sabotage their own comfort, driven by irrational impulses, pride, spite, and a stubborn need for self-agency rather than bliss.

The transcript links this psychological realism to Dostoevsky’s life and its shocks. Born in 1821 in Moscow to a well-off Orthodox Christian family, he lost his mother to tuberculosis while he was away, and his father died under murky circumstances—reported as possible murder by serfs after abusive behavior. After studying military engineering and working as an engineer, he pivoted toward literature, publishing Poor Folk in 1846, which brought early success. Follow-on attempts struggled, and financial pressure pushed him toward a radical circle of utopian socialists. Arrest followed; in 1849 he was sentenced to death by firing squad, only to be pardoned at the last moment when a message arrived. The execution was later revealed as a mock-execution designed to terrify prisoners, and he was sent to Siberia for four years of brutal labor.

That experience helps explain the tonal shift after his return in 1860: less faith in utopian ideals, more focus on spiritual and psychological conflict. The transcript argues that Dostoevsky’s novels repeatedly dismantle the idea that morality and identity can be solved by rational calculation or self-interest. In Crime and Punishment (1866), Rodion Raskolnikov commits murder after adopting a nihilistic, atheistic worldview and a utilitarian logic: he believes extraordinary people can break rules if it produces the greatest good. Yet the rational justification collapses inside him. Guilt, horror, and a sense of being “not who he thought he was” torment him until he turns himself in, suggesting that reason cannot fully govern the self—and that doing “good” through violence can still destroy the person who tries to do it.

The same tension—between suffering’s inevitability and the possibility of redemption—threads through later works. The Idiot (1869) includes an anecdote mirroring Dostoevsky’s own mock-execution: the condemned man experiences time as both endless and unbearable, fixated on what might be lost forever. The transcript uses this to underline a paradox Dostoevsky returns to: purity and perfect goodness may be impossible, yet awareness, faith, compassion, repentance, and suffering can still open a path toward redemption. Even when the stories end in darkness, they leave room for transformation—an insistence that human beings are more than the systems built to manage them, and that chasing perfection without accounting for the irrational depths of the soul tends to worsen the very problems it aims to solve.