One Quiet Weekend, One Disorienting Book, and the Thoughts I Can’t Shake Off

There are books that make you think. Then there are books that pick apart the way you think. 'Notes from Underground' by Fyodor Dostoevsky did the latter.

I read it over a weekend I had set aside for quiet. No emails. No calls. Just me, the book, and the kind of silence that allows things to sink in deeper than you expect. And I wasn't ready for what this slim, strange novel had to say.

The unnamed narrator, often referred to as the Underground Man, doesn’t want to be liked. He’s bitter, contradictory, wildly intelligent, and completely committed to showing you just how broken he is. But what makes him terrifying isn’t his anger or cynicism. It’s how uncomfortably familiar his voice can feel.

I wasn’t reading about him. I was, at times, reading as him.

This wasn’t a character sketch. It was a mirror held up at the ugliest angle. One that shows you the parts of yourself you usually rationalise away. The self-doubt. The impulse to sabotage. The way we spin our insecurities into elaborate narratives so we never have to confront them head-on.

What shook me wasn’t just the narrator’s misery. It was how articulate he was about it. How he knew what made him miserable and still chose to keep digging deeper into it. There’s a moment when he says, “I swear to you that to think too much is a disease.” And it lands like a punch in the gut.

Because anyone who has spent long enough alone with their thoughts knows that the mind can be both a home and a trap. We’re told thinking deeply is good. But what if it’s also the thing that makes peace impossible?

The book doesn’t offer a resolution. It doesn’t try to redeem the narrator or make him lovable. That’s part of what makes it unforgettable. It’s unflinching. And it forces you to sit with that discomfort. To ask yourself, how much of what I do is just performance? How much of my suffering is chosen? And what would it mean to actually change?

Dostoevsky wrote 'Notes from Underground' in 1864, but it feels like it was meant for the modern mind. The kind of mind that scrolls endlessly, overthinks texts, performs curated versions of itself online, and calls that connection. The Underground Man might have hated Instagram, but he would’ve been on it—doomscrolling, lurking, criticising, aching to be seen and furious when he was.

That weekend, I didn’t finish the book with a sense of completion. I finished it with a headache, a heavy chest, and a hundred questions I wasn’t sure I wanted answers to.

And maybe that’s the power of a book like this.

It doesn’t entertain. It interrogates.

It doesn’t guide. It provokes.

It doesn’t hand you a takeaway. It leaves you with the echo of your own thoughts, now sounding just a bit more suspicious than before.

It’s been days since I read the last page. But that voice - acidic, brilliant, and deeply human still hums somewhere in the background.

Not every book should be comfortable. Some should crack something open. 'Notes from Underground' did that. Quietly, disturbingly, completely.