Life can be (a) dream

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November 11, 2025 - Confession

Confession is a short book by Leo Tolstoy explaining his search of meaning, God, and faith (in that exact order). It was written ten years after finishing War and Peace, and two years after finishing Anna Karenina. I will be quoting from David Patterson's translation. I would recommend his translation if you would like to read this as well. The first section will explain the whole plot of the book, but I will leave out the most important metaphors and dreams. This is an attempt to bully you into reading the book. If, at any point, this looks interesting to you, stop reading my summary and go read the book instead! The second section will explain my personal takeaways. You can skip to it if you've read the book before.

Tolstoy was raised Orthodox Christian, but this didn't stick into adulthood. He lost faith and floated through life for a full decade. "Lying, stealing, promiscuity of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder - there was not a crime I did not commit; yet in spite of it all I was praised, and my colleagues considered me and still do consider me a relatively moral man." It is exactly during this time period that he started writing. He sought power and importance, and wrote to achieve it. For another six years, he gained new "faith" in writing, in teaching a message that he didn't yet understand to the population, and wrote on. Really, his only true faith was money and praise.

It wasn't until Tolstoy saw a beheading that he realized that there is no way to rationalize murder. But, unfortunately, this was just a seed that wouldn't fully bloom for another fifteen years. For fifteen more years, Tolstoy wrote and wrote. He wrote War and Peace while "regard[ing] writing as a trivial endeavor". Tolstoy tried to teach one core principle: "We must live for whatever is best for ourselves and our family".

Then, suddenly, Tolstoy started having periods of doubt. Whenever he had a pause in life, he would ask himself why. Not anything specific, but just... why? And what's next? He fell into depressive states, calling the questions irrelevant over and over, but the questions came over and over, more and more urgently, fighting him and beating him into the ground, until he realized he had to answer them. That these were the most fundamental questions that he could ever ask himself. And without them being answered, truly nothing mattered, good or bad. "If a fairy had come and offered to fulfill my every wish, I would not have known what to wish for."

Tolstoy finally understood that life is meaningless. He had a wife he loved, he had children he loved, he had a wonderful home, he was well respected by friends and strangers, and yet he had to trick himself into not killing himself. He carried ropes out of his room at night so he could change alone, and he never hunted with a gun to avoid the temptation to shoot himself. He searched and searched, looking for any sort of meaning, and came to the conclusion that not only was life meaningless, but that everyone else acknowledged that life is meaningless and couldn't find anything more.

How could you ever leave this mindset? Philosophy gave him no answer, and science gave him no answer. It didn't matter. "I could not be deceived. All is Vanity. Happy is he who has never been born; death is better than life; we must rid ourselves of life." Tolstoy looked at what the people around him had found out, and found no answers yet again. One group of people that had similar circumstances were the most logically consistent of all simply because they killed themselves after realizing the joke being played on them. But Tolstoy didn't kill himself in spite of calling them consistent! Despite it all, he still had some doubt. "If there is nothing higher than reason, then reason is the creator of life for me. If there were no reason, then for me there would be no life. So how can this reason deny life when it is itself the creator of life?" He knew he made a mistake, but he didn't see what.

Tolstoy finally saw that he chose to disregard anyone who wasn't educated and wealthy, regarding them instead as animals. But these "animals" had figured out how to live some time ago, and were living quite successfully. Tolstoy's life wasn't the true and normal life! His life was a life of luck! He found that the common people already answered this question very simply with one thing: faith.

This was still not ideal. Rational knowledge demanded a denial of life, but faith demanded a denial of reason. Tolstoy suffered with how irrational faith is, but simultaneously recognized that it was the only thing that offered a meaning to life and a possibility of life. Every type of faith "gives infinite meaning to the finite existence of men, meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation, and death".

So Tolstoy started to study faith. First, he started with Orthodox Christianity, but he found that they mixed Christian truths with superfluous and irrational nonsense. Love your neighbor, but fight wars against Catholics! Tolstoy went closer to the uneducated peasants, and finally saw that for them, the superstitions and nonsense mixed with Christianity simply did not matter to them. Their faith was the true faith. They worked and toiled and labored, and were happier than the rich. They suffered, but peacefully and almost joyfully accepted death. He came to love them all. Tolstoy's class was now repulsive and meaningless. The "simple people" had already truly understood how to live.

Tolstoy's initial error was not misunderstanding life. His error was instead extrapolating the evil nothingness that was his life onto the whole population. His life was evil and meaningless. Life overall was anything but. He tried to see God and believe in God, and started swinging on a horrible pendulum. He could never rationally believe in God, and God never seemed to hear him. But when he briefly believed that God is real, that he was born from someone who loved him and understood him, he became full of life and joy. But God was an irrational thought! And so it went for hundreds of times over.

But, really, the whole time it was simple as this: "As long as I know God, I live; when I forget, when I do not believe in him, I die. Live, seeking God, for there can be no life without God". Never again did Tolstoy think of suicide.

Forgive me, Tolstoy, but you did such a wonderful job writing about your own experiences that it made me want to share some of mine.

Tolstoy's biggest claim, at least to me, is not that God is real. Instead, he claims that without his belief in God, he will rot. Perhaps you are strong, and perhaps you don't need a belief in God to function, but I am weak the same way Tolstoy is. I see the irrationality of faith. I cannot fully get myself to believe in a God, or in the continuity of soul after death, or even in true free will. I am on the horrible pendulum ride that Tolstoy was on for so long. When I briefly get myself to believe that I will persist in some way after death, and that someone made me with full faith in my potential, I really do feel happy. This lasts about two minutes, sometimes three if I'm drunk, and turns into despair all over again afterwards.

My focus was on free will first, though. In senior year of high school, we were asked to write a paper on our beliefs of free will. When I started writing about determinism, I felt something gnawing at my heart. I swapped my paper to argue for free will and let it go. Later, when I was finally free from home and adjusting to college life, I saw more clearly than ever that there was nothing could be true except for determinism. I saw that I was weak for choosing to believe in free will so blindly and without reason. Somehow, I told myself I'd try believing in it anyway and see how it goes.

About two years into this, I read Confession. I was more obsessed with how Tolstoy came to believe that he'd done nothing with his life after he wrote Anna Karenina, especially since I had read it just a few months prior. All of my reason for existing at the time was work output. I recognized that, at the very least, that reason of existence was wrong, but everything related to the search of faith and God left me with a strange feeling. I moved on and ignored it for another year. Then, somehow, I realized that believing in the existence of free will implied the existence of the soul. The soul is what lets you escape your biology and your circumstances. So, should I lie to myself about the existence of the soul too?

I don't know how to stop swinging besides lying to myself. I tell myself that the soul is real, and that I have free will, and that someone knew what they were creating when mankind came to be. Really, I don't think it matters what I believe deep down anymore, because it never does anything good for me. The second I believe that I will continue to exist in some way after death, I don't feel the urge for recognition or praise as strongly. Existence is enough. When I believe that I have full control of my actions, I don't feel limited by my past or that I'm doomed to act in certain ways forever. And when I believe that someone knew what they were doing with us all, I feel calm.

I don't need to worry about the logistics of this because I've already admitted that it's not real at heart. So, I have no motivation to figure out the potential omnipotence of a God, or how a soul might work, or how chemistry controls us down to the atom and neuron fire. As long as this is what I think from the time I get up until I go to bed, then I will act better.