I just finished reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights, but my mind could not remain in mid-nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg.
When I turned the last page on the unnamed narrator, a self-proclaimed “Dreamer” who spends four ethereal nights falling in love with a woman who eventually leaves him for another, I could not stop my mind from wandering to the quiet crisis that runs through our modern age.
Dostoevsky’s novella is subtitled “A Sentimental Novel from the Diary of a Dreamer.” At the outset, it is a sweet tragedy of love that has gone unrequited. Beneath it lies a staggering psychological prophecy.
In my opinion, Dostoevsky was not just describing a lonely young man along the banks of the Neva River; he was painting the soul of an isolated generation brought about by technology.
The Dreamer is a guy who lives inside his head. He is isolated from the raw and unpredictable friction of actual social life, and constructs magnificent, pristine worlds in his imagination. He observes humans from a distance, yet remains completely unobserved. When he meets Nastenka, he can’t help but fall for a young woman who is also hiding from the unyielding, overbearing gaze of her grandmother.
Their attraction is instant, intense, and delicate. They are two lonely creatures who are desperately trying to find some evidence of their own existence by looking in a mirror. Today, look around and see how much infrastructure we have put in place to produce millions more of these Dreamers.
Today we are a hyper-connected being, living at an unprecedented level of existential loneliness. We stumble through the terrains of busy urban life and digital feeds, always on the scene, nowhere to be seen.
Consider the viral story of Australian influencer Essena Oneill. She famously deleted her social media after exposing the haunting emptiness behind her millions of followers. She unveiled the true meaning of her “picture perfect” posts and re-captioned images with the reality: “Staged. Paid for. I felt completely alone.” O’Neill was the modern Nastenka, yearning for attention from a gilded cage which is surrounded by virtual phantoms who adored her images but had no care for her being.
Dostoevsky’s Dreamer turned to inner fantasies to escape his isolation. In the same way, modern youth turn to algorithms.
The rise of “AI Girlfriends” marks the absolute culmination of the Dreamer’s dilemma. Such platforms offer absolute, frictionless compliance. Which human relations could never. An AI partner never argues, never judges, never leaves and never demands self-improvement. It simply mirrors your desires and validates your ego.
Yet this type of intimacy is a deadly snare. Human connection comes with complexity and uncertainty. They are vulnerable, risky, and often conflicting. Modern youth pick a choice of someone who is predictable and convenient in the form of a machine rather than a human, and hence are doomed to all the same tragedy that befell Dostoevsky’s protagonist. They tend to choose a comfortable illusion over a painful truth.
At the end of White Nights, Nastenka’s former lover reappears, and she runs off with him without hesitation. Dreamer stands alone in the cold morning light, facing the wallpaper that’s beginning to peel on the walls of his small, dark room.
Now his illusion is broken, he finds himself with no self-esteem except for that momentary high that comes from being briefly accepted.
This is the ultimate danger facing our youth.
If we replace real-life communities with curated profiles and compliant algorithms, then we do not cure loneliness; we commodify it! In building elaborate mental sanctuaries, we become completely vulnerable when some crisis or even demand arises in actual life.
Dostoevsky did not write White Nights as a celebration of romantic idealism, as what movies made of the novella showcased; he wrote it as a warning.
Living life in a hollow fantasy is actually a life unlived. No moment of idealisation, no matter how sweet it is, can ever replace this messy, exquisite and beautiful reality of being truly known by another human being.
