Leo Tolstoy
Whose Life Is Empty
Everyone told him not to think about it, so he went and looked at different people
Tolstoy, A Confession
He refused all four ways out. This asks where to look once you have noticed the emptiness.
What actually happened?
In the years he could not find an answer, Tolstoy looked around at people of his own kind and saw four ways of dealing with the question: not knowing it; enjoying whatever could still be enjoyed; ending one's life; or seeing that life was senseless and dragging on anyway. He admitted he was in the fourth group. Then he looked away from his circle, to the working people who lived off the land, and they did not find their lives meaningless. Perhaps, he concluded, the verdict of emptiness was true only of the way he lived.
Every way out avoids looking
Not knowing, enjoying, ending it, dragging on: what the four share is that nobody looks at the question any longer. Most of the educated and wealthy people around him took the first two, and their advice was mostly not to think so much.
A friend says stop overthinking and take a weekend away. You come back and the question is where you left it.
Look at different people
Among the learned, rich and leisured he found no answer, so he looked at people unlike himself: peasants who fed their families with their hands. Their lives were hard, but they did not have his kind of emptiness.
Instead of discussing meaning over dinner with colleagues, watch the craftsman who still enjoys the job after thirty years.
You can leave his answer
In the end he found his answer in faith, and in old age built a religious teaching of his own. This page leaves that answer aside and keeps the direction of his search: when you feel empty, ask whether it is your way of living that is empty.
You need not take up farming. You can ask whose life all this busyness is being lived for.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you feel hollow, and everyone around you says don't think so much, or go and enjoy yourself.
Ask first: the people who don't feel this, how is their day different from mine?
Where it goes wrong: reading it as 'go and experience a simpler life for a while'. He looked at those people to see what his own life lacked, not to treat their lives as scenery.
Lines to keep
Being told not to think never made a question leave.
Maybe it isn't life that's empty, only your way of living it.
When you can't answer, go and watch people who can.
Same situation, other people are asking
Every day is the same and I don't know what it's for.I'm good at all of it and I don't know what I want.Do I have to leave this life to find the real one?What I do all day is the opposite of what I care about.None of it means anything · all 8 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.