In the 19th-century book A Hero Of Our Time, Russian author Mikhail Lermontov describes the life of a selfish, nihilistic Casanova who can’t seem to satisfy his itch for adventure and women. The protagonist lived not like a child of God but a beast, and allowed his fallen human nature to hurt others for fun and games. This book is the diary of every modern man who aims to live his life according to his passions, and sadly I recognized a lot of the behaviors and sentiments in my own past.

The world can never satisfy your boredom

As a young man, as soon as I got my freedom I threw myself wildly into all the pleasures that money can buy, and soon got tired of them, needless to say. Then I went in for society high-life and before long I was tired of that too. I fell in love with women of fashion and was loved in return. But their love merely stirred my imagination and vanity, my heart remained empty. I took to reading and study, but grew tired of that too. I saw I had no need of learning to win fame of happiness, for the happiest people are the ignoramuses, and fame is a matter of luck and you only need to be smart to get it. I got bored after that.

[…]

If you like, I’m still in love with her. I’m grateful to her for a few moments of relative bliss. I’d give my life for her. But she bores me. I don’t know whether I’m a fool or a scoundrel, but one thing I am sure of is that I’m just as much to be pitied as she is, perhaps even more. My soul’s been corrupted by society. My imagination knows no peace, my heart no satisfaction. I’m never satisfied. I grow used to sorrow as easily as I do to pleasure, and my life gets emptier every day. The only thing left for me is to travel. As soon as I can I’ll leave. Not for Europe, though, not on your life. I’ll go to America, Arabia, India. With luck I’ll die somewhere on the way. At least I can be sure that with storms and bad roads to help this final solace will last me a while.

Seducing a woman through suffering

I met her in Chelakhov’s shop yesterday. She was haggling over the price of a Persian rug and pleading with mama not to begrudge her it, as it would look so nice in her study. I offered forty roubles more and bought it from under her nose. I was rewarded with a superb look of fury. Near dinner time I had my horse walked specially past her windows with the rug draped over him. Werner was visiting them at the time and told me that the effect of this scene was most dramatic.

[…]

‘Tell me, does it amuse you very much to torture me? I ought to hate you. Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve brought me nothing but suffering…’

Her voice trembled, she leaned towards me and lowered her head upon my breast. Perhaps that’s why you loved me, I thought. Moments of happiness one forgets, but sorrow never.

Women who don’t serve the good fall in love with evil men

I really can’t think why she is so fond of me, especially since she’s the only woman who’s ever properly understood me and all my petty weaknesses and unhealthy passions. Can evil be so attractive?

[…]

I remember one woman who loved me simply because I was in love with someone else. There’s nothing more paradoxical than the female mind, and you can never convince a woman of anything—you have to arrange matters so that they convince themselves. The chain of reasoning they employ to overcome their own prejudices is extremely original, and if you want to master their dialectic you have to turn all the textbook rules of logic upside-down. For example, a normal approach would be: ‘This man loves me, but I’m married, so I mustn’t love him’. But a woman’s approach would be: ‘I mustn’t love him, because I’m married, but he loves me, so…’I have to use dots here, for now the voice of reason is silent, and it’s mainly the tongue, eyes and heart (if there is one) which do all the talking.

The narcissistic man runs away from commitment

However much I loved a woman, the first hint that she expected me to marry her would banish my love for good. My heart would turn to stone, its warmth gone for ever. I’ll make any sacrifice except this one. I’ll hazard my life, even my honour, twenty times, but I will not sell my freedom.

Why do I value it so much? What use is it to me? What am I preparing myself for? What do I expect from the future? Absolutely nothing.

I have this innate fear, this uncanny premonition. After all, some people are unaccountably afraid of spiders, cockroaches and mice.

The inner hell of a godless existence

I’ve been going over my past, and I can’t help wondering why I’ve lived, for what purpose I was born. There must have been some purpose, I must have had some high object in life, for I feel unbounded strength within me. But I never discovered it and was carried away by the allurements of empty, unrewarding passions. I was tempered in their flames and came out cold and hard as steel, but I’d lost for ever the fire of noble endeavor, that finest flower of life. How many times since then have I been the axe in the hands of fate? Like an engine of execution, I’ve descended on the heads of the condemned, often without malice, but always without pity. My love has brought no one happiness, for I’ve never sacrificed a thing for those I’ve loved. I’ve loved for myself, for my own pleasure, I’ve only tried to satisfy a strange inner need. I’ve fed on their feelings, love, joys and sufferings, and always wanted more. I’m like a starving man who falls asleep exhausted and sees rich food and sparking wines before him. He rapturously falls on these phantom gifts of the imagination and feels better, but the moment he wakes up his dream disappear and he’s left more hungry and desperate than before.

And perhaps tomorrow I’ll die, and then there’ll be no one who could ever really understand me. Some will think me worse, others better than in fact I am. Some will say I was a good fellow, others that I was a swine. Neither will be right. So why bother to live? One just goes on living out of curiosity, waiting for something new. It’s absurd and annoying.

I’m afraid to ask if A Hero Of Our Time is autobiographical because Mikhail Lermontov was known to be a passionate man who caused scandal during his sprees. One time, he went too far needling a man who challenged him to a duel. He was shot in the heart at age 26. May we learn how not to live from his engaging novel.

Learn More: A Hero Of Our Time on Amazon

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Good article. Thanks Roosh.

I was thinking of something related to this earlier today. The concept of settling down. It seems as though secular people are never settled. There is this idea that you find a person, get married, and have a family. But these days people are not settled in this state either. There is always a seeking for something else going on. People break up their families because they feel like they need something else that family life isn't giving them.

A lot of it is due to the idea that this life is all you get. Therefore whatever you do in a lifetime there is always something else you could be doing and this creates tension and anxiety in people. The Godlessness also makes the person aimless. Meaning their focus will likely shift to different things at different times of their life.

Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly. The counsel of the ungodly is things like: you do you, you deserve the best, you only live once, put yourself first... etc etc... Secular life is never going to lead to being at peace, to being settled, as you say it is pointless. If there is no point, nothing to aim at, it will never be settled. There's always going to be something else that tempts the secular person. "Maybe I'm wasting my life... maybe I should be doing this... or maybe I should be doing that..."

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Have you ever read "Oblomov"?

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My father is the man in that photo. When he's not working he sits in a chair drinking wine all day watching sportsball. Anything that disturbs this worship ceremony is responded to with anger. By following God I won't end up that way.

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Even with the best life. All the moments he had. Gone in death in a Godless universe:

Illustrated here.

Even with his best life. With great meaning. Gone. Atheists will say the limitations of lifespan makes life all the more meaningful than immortality. With all said experiences in his brief consciousness. But in the end. Nonexistence.

His genes carry on in an indifferent universe that will eventually cease to exist or eventually will come back in an endless cycle:

Even if we recapitulate consciousnesses in new bodies. How do we know that said consciousnesses will be "us"?

That is the Atheist worldview.

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In the 19th-century book A Hero Of Our Time, Russian author Mikhail Lermontov describes the life of a selfish, nihilistic Casanova who can’t seem to satisfy his itch for adventure and women. The protagonist lived not like a child of God but a beast, and allowed his fallen human nature to hurt others for fun and games. This book is the diary of every modern <p class="more"><a class="more-link" href="">Read More</a></p>...

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That guy is me.

In secular life indeed nothing makes sense. You want to travel and then you're bored. You want sex and then you want her to leave. You want happiness and then it feels hollow. You want to feel and then you want to be numb.

I just spend a few days in a monastery again and life then makes sense. The blocks fit together.

And then after a few days and I want to get in the world again. Then after 2 hours I realize what am I doing here? What's to be found? What treasure is hidden? There is nothing.

I notice though I interact better in the world recharged. But also easily depleted. We need to stay very close to God if we want to function well.

Anyhow good article thanks.

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Wow all of that and he was only 26? I’d expect all that bitterness from someone much older and this was almost 200 years ago. There’s nothing new under the sun.

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If a man denies that they have a soul, then they truly have nothing.

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Maybe the title should be "The Life of a Hedonist Is Pointless."

Was Aristotle's life pointless?

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Wow all of that and he was only 26?

Agree. I was shocked at his insights, as young as he was. Smart dude who did something dumb and got more than he bargained for.

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Agree. I was shocked at his insights, as young as he was. Smart dude who did something dumb and got more than he bargained for.

Adolescence is a recent concept.

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I feel many if not all of the fashionable "normies" that adopt, for whatever reason, this ethos or worldview don't bother to contemplate the full implications and meaning behind it all. Death isn't as easily dismissed with nihilism as its made out to be, especially when someone dives deep and ruminates about it. Of course, most people never dive any deeper on this than just the surface. The honest and appropriate response to an impending nothingness, which is what the secular world actually believes is utter hopelessness and madness. It doesn't matter how long we may be living today versus before, it's all the same. Nothingness is inevitable (at least in the secular worldview). But it goes on. So is the reunification with the dead. This is where our fashionable automatons tend to break down and reveal their inner spirituality. Outside of the small cohort of atheistic true believers, in my experience, I've noticed that people retain many of the baseline articles of faith. Most people, even those that are outwardly atheistic, will admit when their guard is down or none of their fashionable friends are around, that they believe there is something beyond this life. Similarly, you see this when a loved one has recently passed. It's a peculiar phenomenon, that speaks more to how intolerable living within a "reality" that insists there is no God and no afterlife is to humanity. Grieving is soothed and eventually subdued by the faith that at some point we'll be together again. Without such hope, even if its remote or, perhaps, instinctive vs. cognitively believed, the process of dealing with death is unbearable. And unbearable in a crippling way. Only the most insensitive and psychotic of us can endure such a thing. And, certainly, such people exist. But if they "deal" with loss and their own mortality it is because they're utterly indifferent to any other person and/or hostile a la sociopaths or psychopaths. For the rest of us, our mortal condition requires more than just a flippant dismissal of the eternal as something unsophisticated. What's grating is there are a lot of people who proclaim their modern worldview, but have clearly not read the fine print.

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Maybe the title should be "The Life of a Hedonist Is Pointless."

Was Aristotle's life pointless?

In an atheist worldview. Aristotle won't ever exist again.

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In an atheist worldview. Aristotle won't ever exist again.

Not saying he didn't but...

My question is...

Prove to me Aristotle was even real. Prove it.

Tell me, secular people. Where is your proof? Where? Why do you accept it?

And what of the King? A myth? What is a myth? A liar? A con? A lunatic? Why? How?

Prove it to me.

I'm confident that your process will lead you to Christ. The Savior. The Everlasting Lord. The Man God that makes sense of everything in your life.

Go ahead. Try it. I beg you. I pray that you do.

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My father is the man in that photo. When he's not working he sits in a chair drinking wine all day watching sportsball. Anything that disturbs this worship ceremony is responded to with anger. By following God I won't end up that way.

That's a powerful observation. At the end of the day we all serve someone, whether it's the LORD or celebrities, our stomachs, our flesh, entertainment. When people seek to remove the knowledge of God from their minds they replace the worship that should be for God with something else. "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting;" Romans 1:28.

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"The life of the godless man is pointless" is a very interesting idea to contemplate. Pointless to the man himself yes I think we all agree on that. Certainly in the moment.Pointless in total? In the end, well that depends. Even the potter makes vessels of dishonor that still serve their purpose.

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Wow all of that and he was only 26? I’d expect all that bitterness from someone much older and this was almost 200 years ago. There’s nothing new under the sun.

Didn't Roosh write his first book at that age? Lermontov wrote more poems, but Roosh wrote more web pages. :-)

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Even with the best life. All the moments he had. Gone in death in a Godless universe:

Illustrated here.

Even with his best life. With great meaning. Gone. Atheists will say the limitations of lifespan makes life all the more meaningful than immortality. With all said experiences in his brief consciousness. But in the end. Nonexistence.

His genes carry on in an indifferent universe that will eventually cease to exist or eventually will come back in an endless cycle:

Even if we recapitulate consciousnesses in new bodies. How do we know that said consciousnesses will be "us"?

That is the Atheist worldview.

Jay Dyer wasn't joking when he referred to evolutionism as being a rip-off of Hindu mythology. Atheism inevitably collapses into a religion itself when evolutionists have to confront an ultimate, transcendental foundation for their cosmology. It'll be just easier for them to reply with, "I don't know what was before the Big Bang," rather than to take a leap of faith and formulate a dogma (no longer a theory at this point) of a universe that has existed from eternity past through an endless cycle. This is nihilist madness.

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"The life of the godless man is pointless" is a very interesting idea to contemplate. Pointless to the man himself yes I think we all agree on that. Certainly in the moment.Pointless in total? In the end, well that depends. Even the potter makes vessels of dishonor that still serve their purpose.

Paul is citing the passages of Jeremiah. But in context those vessels of dishonor exist because the clay resisted the potters attempts to shape it into a beautiful fine vessel.

So the potter remade it into a cruder object of dishonor:

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Paul is citing the passages of Jeremiah. But in context those vessels of dishonor exist because the clay resisted the potters attempts to shape it into a beautiful fine vessel.

So the potter remade it into a cruder object of dishonor:

That seams reasonable, but not necessarily complete. I think it can be understood in more ways. Thank you for that, I had not noticed it before

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