Last week I was reading a paper written by my godson, Arlo, on Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. Now, let’s pause for a moment to appreciate that Arlo reads Dostoevsky for fun. While other teens are busy perfecting the “camera flip” trend or arguing over whether a TikTok influencer's pet duck really deserves its own line of merchandise, Arlo is deep-diving into existential despair and penning essays about humanity’s penchant for suffering. Naturally, this makes me both incredibly proud and slightly worried he’s an 80-year-old Russian man trapped in a teenager’s body.

Arlo’s paper got me thinking about the strange ways we humans cling to our misery. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man isn’t just someone who tolerates suffering—he revels in it, hoards it like a kid with his Halloween candy haul. As Arlo wrote, "Dostoevsky argues that humanity needs to embrace the good and the bad of life to be truly free." And let’s be honest: We all have a little Underground Man in us, don’t we? Choosing to wallow, refusing to solve problems, embracing the chaos of it all—it’s maddeningly human.

I co-host a podcast called "Fifty Words for Snow" with Emily John Garcés, in which we explore words that lack direct English equivalents. This exploration often touches on how we, as humans, navigate suffering and contradiction. In a recent episode, we interviewed........

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