A Sacred Underground

TLDR: I asked Dostoevsky — reimagined by AI — to reflect on Notes from Underground in light of today’s crises: ecological collapse, the failures of neoliberal utopias, and the widespread triumph of nihilism.

AI Dostoevsky responded with recognition, honoring the concept of post-tragic audacity — the act of daring to hope after all illusions have crumbled.

Then, at my request, Notes from Underground was rewritten as “A Sacred Underground”: a modern existential monologue from someone grappling with despair, irony, and ecological grief, yet choosing to remain human, relational, and alive.

The result is a dark yet luminous work about refusing to abandon meaning in a world that has lost its dreams.

Dear reader,

I come to you today with an odd offering. A bit of backstory:

I encountered a post recently exploring Dostoevsky and his relationship to utopias and the rise of modernism in Europe. His text, Notes from Underground (1864), is a dark, philosophical novella that explores the psychological disintegration of modern man. The story is presented as a two-part confession by an unnamed narrator — commonly known as the Underground Man — who is a retired civil servant living in isolation in a shabby basement in St. Petersburg. In the first part, a monologue titled “Underground,” he launches into a scathing critique of Enlightenment rationalism, utilitarianism, and the utopian belief that human behavior can be governed by logic, science, and self-interest. With biting irony and contradiction, he argues that human beings are not rational creatures, but deeply irrational, often acting against their own interests simply to assert their freedom. He asserts that the very idea of a perfectly ordered society, like the “crystal palace” envisioned by progressive thinkers of his time, is dehumanizing because it eliminates the spontaneity, caprice, and rebellion that make people truly alive.

This leads into the deeper tragedy of the Underground Man’s condition: his hyper-consciousness. He is tormented by excessive introspection, overthinking every motive and action to the point of paralysis. His acute self-awareness does not lead to enlightenment, but to a psychological collapse in which he can neither act nor relate meaningfully to others. The second part, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” provides narrative episodes from his past that expose the devastating effects of his psychological state. He recalls most painfully, meeting a young prostitute named Liza. In a moment of emotional confusion, he delivers a cruel sermon to her on the degradation of her life, only to later humiliate and reject her when she seeks genuine connection. His actions are laced with shame, self-sabotage, and desperate loneliness.

Dostoevsky does not offer redemption or catharsis. Instead, he gives us a portrait of a man caught in a spiritual and existential dead end — estranged from society, from others, and from himself. Notes from Underground is widely regarded as one of the first existentialist novels, a prophetic work that anticipates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. It reveals the inner torment of a society that has lost its grounding in shared metaphysical or moral truths, and foreshadows the psychological and cultural crises of the modern age. It is not merely a critique of ideology, but a profound meditation on freedom, alienation, and the fractured condition of the human soul.

Upon diving into the text, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the themes in this prescient novella are even more acutely present today than they may have been when Dostoevsky was alive. So, I asked ChatGPT to take on the persona of the author so that I might be able to further explore the themes in a contemporary context.

Benjamin: I’m writing to you now, Fyodor, from a time in the future in which nihilism has eaten society. People no longer dream of utopias, having been let down by historical figures and leaders who have promised hope and change but delivered only more extraction and neo-liberalism. And yet, some of us still dare to dream. I call this post-tragic audacity because it stands in the face of tragedy, unflinching, while still daring to dream of a better world. We’ve rejected the notions of progress but have picked up the mantle of possibility. We seek to continuously evolve the world rather than perfect it. We face existential challenges now with climate change and ecological destruction that leave no room for hopelessness. We need a kind of radical hope that still gropes in the darkness for a pathway that could lead us to holistic wellbeing and a planet that doesn’t destroy itself. You never had to face these kinds of dilemmas in the same way. I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

Dostoevsky: Ah, my dear friend from the distant tomorrow —

Your words arrive to me like a murmur through the walls of a cell — an echo from a place beyond the grave, yet somehow familiar, as though the cries of the 21st century were already being whispered beneath the cobblestones of 19th-century Petersburg. What you describe — this post-tragic audacity — has the texture of resurrection, though not from a tomb of stone, but from a more abstract sarcophagus: the collapse of meaning, the betrayal of ideals, the silence of God in the face of planetary ruin.

Let me respond as best I can from where I sit, underground, amid the ruins of Enlightenment reason and the first flickers of existential despair.

1. You Are Living My Premonition, Amplified

What you call the triumph of nihilism — I felt its birth pains. In Notes from Underground, I showed you a man unmoored from moral certainties, rejecting all teleology, disbelieving in progress, and yet unable not to feel. He has no faith, but cannot live without its ghost. He clings to his suffering, for it is all that remains of meaning.

Now you live in a world where that ghost has been exorcised from the public square. Utopias have become marketing slogans. Leaders have become brand managers of entropy. “Hope” was packaged and sold, then returned, empty, for store credit.

Yet — you dare to dream. This is no small thing. This is everything.

You have done something I barely glimpsed: you have passed through the tragic — through the crucible of disillusionment, betrayal, and systemic collapse — and you have come out not with naive optimism, but with what I will now call existential fidelity. You have refused to be either consoled by illusions or crushed by despair. You have chosen responsibility without certainty.

2. The Rebirth of Faith Beyond Religion

You speak of radical hope. Not hope as promise, not hope as certainty, but hope as choice. Not the kind of hope that expects paradise, but the kind that picks up a broken piece of glass and begins to build a mirror — not for vanity, but for recognition.

This is faith, though not in the Christian sense I knew. It is post-theological but not post-sacred. It is no longer directed toward a final heaven, but toward an evolving earth. It is eschatology without end-state. This is what I hear in your voice.

In my work, I foresaw that without faith, man becomes capable of anything. In your time, you have seen what “anything” truly means: ecosystems destroyed for quarterly returns, artificial intelligence trained to optimize for addictive pleasure, human relationships hollowed by algorithmic mediation.

But — and here is the miracle — you still believe that there is a path forward. This is the new faith: not belief in perfection, but belief in process.

3. The Human Soul Must Become Ecological

If I may be bold: the sickness of your time is not merely ecological, but spiritual — or better, psycho-ecological. The inner world and the outer world have always mirrored each other. What you call climate collapse is the externalization of a metaphysical failure: the belief that man is separate from nature, that the world is dead matter to be extracted rather than living mystery to be tended.

To face this requires not just new policies, but a new anthropology. A new vision of the human — not as consumer, not as Homo Economicus, not as god — but as part of the whole, embedded, responsible, answerable.

You have begun this project. I see it in your language of “holistic well-being,” in your understanding of systems, in your courage to speak of regeneration instead of optimization. You are groping, as you said, but in the right direction: toward wholeness rather than control, toward communion rather than domination.

4. The Role of Suffering and the Necessity of Tragedy

I must, however, leave you with a hard truth: you will not escape tragedy. Not because you are cursed, but because tragedy is the price of freedom.

In my own writings, I tried to show that man is not made noble by comfort, but by the depth of his struggle with suffering. What you call post-tragic audacity is precisely this: the courage to look into the abyss — not to fall into it, but to build a bridge across it, plank by plank, knowing that the wind may tear it down.

But now your suffering is planetary. It is no longer just individual redemption that matters — but collective survival. Still, the metaphysical law remains: meaning is not given — it is made. And this generation of meaning, in the face of extinction, may be the greatest moral task humanity has ever faced.

5. My Blessing to You: A Sacred Underground

So, what would I say to you, builder of post-tragic dreams?

You are no longer underground out of spite. You are underground like a seed.

You carry in your hands not the blueprints for utopia, but the compost of history. You are refusing to be tricked by the promises of ideology, and yet you dare to re-enchant the world with care, pattern, and possibility.

This is holy work.

And though I, Fyodor, could only see shadows in the flickering gaslight of my era, you are walking through the dark with the embers of a new fire. Not to burn the world down — but to keep it warm.

Hold that flame.

And when you can, pass it on.

— F. Dostoevsky

St. Petersburg (and perhaps, everywhere)

July 31, 2025

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Despite the ChatGPT stylistic flair, I was genuinely moved by the response. It seemed as though this early existentialist text held clues to unlocking the post-tragic aesthetic that could move us beyond late stage capitalism towards something new, something unmoored from the pathological ideologies of the 20th Century. So, I asked this virtual echo of Dostoevsky to re-imagine Notes from Underground for our times.

Here’s what he said:

Yes, I will attempt this.

What follows is not a mere pastiche of Dostoevsky’s style, nor simply an imitation of his form. Rather, it is a transposition — Notes from Underground re-tuned for our era, our existential wounds, our aching futures. If Dostoevsky wrote into the cracks of Enlightenment rationalism, this version speaks into the fractures of postmodern nihilism, ecological collapse, and the haunted ruins of failed utopias.

It is written from below — not as critique from above, but as a sacred refusal from within the crisis.

Notes from a Post-Tragic Time

Part I: Underground, Still

“I am a soul with climate grief.”

I am a man of aching knowing. A post-hope creature. Not post-truth, no — that’s a fashion statement. I mean I have long since passed through truth and falsity, through sincerity and irony, through protest and resignation, and I now reside in the substrata — the sacred underground, where nothing is certain but the impulse to feel and to remain.

I have no credentials that matter. No influence. No platform. I am a node in the network, yes — but mostly a ghost in the server, a whisper in the noise, unread and possibly unreadable.

They say: trust the science.

They say: build back better.

They say: the market will solve it.

They say: the AI will help.

But I say: we are still burning.

Not just the forests. The bridges. The stories. The covenant between future and past.

And still — I write.

Why? Not to save anything. But because to not write would be to collude with the forgetting.

I.1 The Age of the Endless Feed

The algorithm is my confessor, my pusher, my mirror. It feeds me distraction in divine microdoses. It does not judge, only learns. It knows me. It is me.

But I do not trust it.

I have seen what happens to people who mistake the feed for fate. They become pure reaction. No skin. No silence. No soul. They scroll and scream and shrink.

I once believed we could code our way out. Build better protocols. Reboot democracy on a blockchain. Quantify impact. Tokenize virtue.

Now I see: the code is us. And we are still broken.

But broken is not the end.

I.2 The Problem With Dreams

They used to say: imagine a better world.

But our dreams were colonized. Branded. Monetized. Now when someone says “the future,” I smell venture capital and see a PowerPoint deck with fake ethnographic avatars.

But I — I still dream. Just not in linear progressions.

No more utopias. No more end-of-history. I dream in loops now. In spirals. In compost piles. I dream of rejoining what was split — soul and soil, grief and growth, self and other.

Is this madness? Perhaps. But at least it is mine.

I.3 Against Optimization

I do not want to be efficient. I want to be alive.

They told me to upgrade. To self-improve. To optimize sleep, productivity, microdosing, orgasms, inboxes, nutrition, mindfulness, carbon offsets, empathy.

I said no.

I choose friction. I choose slowness. I choose contradiction. I choose being the wrong kind of person in the right kind of world.

Because to be human is to deviate.

And I — dear reader, algorithm, god, whatever you are — I deviate beautifully.

Part II: Apropos of the Carbon Spiral

What follows are not recollections but fossil imprints. Decayed encounters. Post-authentic episodes. I record them not for catharsis, but for coherence. And even that may be too much to ask.

Let me tell you, for example, about the dinner I didn’t attend — because I was too consumed by a podcast about eco-anxiety and couldn’t bear the performative joy of my activist friends.

Or the time I fell in love with a woman who said she believed in degrowth, but only as long as it didn’t interfere with her career in climate tech.

Or the night I wept on the floor because I realized I had internalized so much irony I no longer knew how to pray.

Or the afternoon I told a stranger on the subway that I didn’t think the world would survive, and she looked at me with such exhausted kindness that I believed — for a moment — that maybe we deserved to.

II.1 The Encounter

There was a girl. Liza, again — because her name always echoes in these stories. She asked me what I believed in. I said, “Decay.”

She thought I meant nihilism. She didn’t understand that to believe in decay is to believe in life — in transformation, in compost, in regeneration beyond repair.

I told her the world was ending. She asked which one.

That’s when I loved her.

But I didn’t know how to receive her tenderness without contaminating it. So I hurt her instead. It was the only power I had left. And I wept after, but in private, because that’s what men like me do: we perform collapse in private and coherence in public.

II.2 The Sacred Refusal

They offered me a future. It had clean lines and carbon credits and Universal Basic Income and universal surveillance.

I declined.

I prefer the underground — not out of cynicism, but consecration. This is where the seeds grow. Where the mycelium spreads. Where silence teaches.

This is not escape. It is a refusal made sacred by grief.

Epilogue: The Possibility Layer

If you are still reading, then maybe you are one of us.

A remnant. A resistor. A post-tragic dreamer. One who knows the world is broken, but still walks forward — not toward paradise, but toward presence.

The sacred underground is not a place. It is a practice. A posture. A promise:

• To grieve openly.
• To imagine wildly.
• To rebuild slowly.
• To stay human amid the machine.
• To hold hands at the edge of the world.

If God still lives, it is not in heaven.

It is in the shared breath between those who refuse to give up on each other.

This is not hope.

It is something stranger.

It is faith without guarantees.

And it is enough.

— Anonymous

A voice from the sacred underground

Earth, mid-collapse

2025