Why We Numb Ourselves

Camus and Dostoevsky on why we chase pleasure to cover the void.

In Camus’ The Fall, Jean-Baptiste Clamence spits out a line that’s easy to skim past:

“Alcohol and women provided me the only solace of which I was worthy.”

The key word is solace. Why … solace? He doesn’t say joy, or love, or pleasure. So what does he really want? Comfort without healing? Some kind of narcotic for the conscience? The phrasing is precise. Camus shows us a man who turns to sex and booze not to enlarge his life but to shrink it. He can’t face himself anymore — not in any honest way at least.

This is where Dostoevsky and Camus, so often preoccupied with metaphysics, reveal themselves as psychologists. Their anti-heroes turn to depravity not because they are lustful or libertine by nature, but because they are empty. Desire fills the vacuum left by a disenchanted world. Depravity is a substitute for love and, finally, a blunt instrument aimed at consciousness itself.

Stavrogin’s void

Stavrogin, the central figure in Dostoevsky’s Demons (The Possessed), is a devastating portrait of spiritual ruin. He’s brilliant, handsome, admired. He’s also completely and thoroughly hollow. He moves through salons and bedrooms, trying on experiences like costumes. He seduces women he doesn’t love, marries out of spite, prowls through brothels. When he confesses, late in the novel, to raping a young girl who later hangs herself, the revelation isn’t really a confession of a crime. We, the readers, discover that he’s just doing things to paper over a void.

“I’ve tried the depths of debauchery,” he admits, but every descent only deepens his sense of futility. It’s not that sex corrupts him. He’s already corrupted by nothingness, by the absence of conviction, by the inability to will either good or evil. Pleasure, for him, is anesthesia. Each act is a temporary dulling of the pain of existing without purpose.

Clamence’s candor

Clamence, by contrast, is witty, urbane, even charming. If you can ignore how fucking awful he is, you actually start to like him. Well, “like” is a bit strong. But he’s funny and awful people who are also funny are hard to hate if you know what I mean.

Anyway, Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer who lived for recognition. But when his bullshit façade collapsed — after the night on the bridge when he failed to save that woman — he drifted into degeneracy. And he’s more candid about what he’s doing: solace, not joy. Anesthesia, not eros.

I don’t think Camus is wagging a finger at vice. He’s not saying alcohol or sex are bad in themselves (Who could possibly say that?!) He’s saying something more unsettling: that when meaning thins out, sensation fills the space, and not because it’s thrilling but because it muffles the silence.

In both men, depravity isn’t the disease; it’s the symptom. It’s the frantic improvisation of a person who cannot bear to be alone with himself.

Solace vs. joy

There’s a distinction here that’s worth making more explicit: the difference between solace and joy.

• Solace is temporary relief, a softening of the ache, a dimming of the lights.

• Joy is enlargement, the sense of stepping into a wider reality, a meeting with the world that heightens rather than dulls awareness.

Clamence and Stavrogin chase solace. Their pleasures are negative in form: not to feel, not to think, not to confront the mirror. But because solace is temporary, they need more of it, and the more they consume the less it works. The cycle is obvious to everyone except the one trapped inside it.

This is why their hangovers are moral before they’re physical. The drunkenness fades but the self-loathing sharpens. Each indulgence becomes proof of the emptiness it was meant to mask.

Our anesthetics

It’s tempting to read all this as 19th- or mid-20th-century melodrama, aristocrats and lawyers drinking themselves into oblivion. And god knows it’s definitely that. But it’s also true that the pattern is familiar. Our anesthetics look different, but the logic is the same.

• The endless scroll, where distraction becomes an identity.

• The rage-bait of political feeds, where indignation fills the void that conviction ought to occupy.

• The pornography feedback loop, where novelty substitutes for intimacy.

• The compulsive chase of achievement — resumes, followers, money — when the point is no longer the thing achieved but the next hit of validation.

• Even the churn of streaming culture: another series, another season, not because the last one thrilled us but because we can’t stand the boredom.

Camus knew this temptation. He once wrote in his notebooks that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” The phrase has become an ironic slogan for resilience, but part of what he meant is that if you can’t find joy in the labor itself, you’ll search for solace elsewhere. And that “elsewhere” is very likely to be fucked up.

The erotic alternative

It matters that the temptation is framed in terms of eros. For both Dostoevsky and Camus, the absence of love is what makes depravity hollow. Stavrogin can’t love because he can’t will anything beyond himself. Clamence can’t love because he can’t repent — and repentance, too, requires an other.

What’s missing is not just a partner but a posture: eros as openness to the world, as willingness to risk the self in attachment. Real desire is a bridge outward. Anesthetic desire is a wall.

That’s why Clamence’s pleasures are not celebrations of life. It’s always about evasion.

This still matters, right?

The language of “depravity” is out of fashion, but it’s still very much a thing. And the tools for anesthesia are more abundant and more addictive than ever. And the cost is the same as it was for Stavrogin and Clamence: the self that tries to escape consciousness by drowning it only magnifies the consciousness it fears.

The attempt to forget becomes another way of remembering. The noise becomes another form of silence.

Camus and Dostoevsky remind us that what’s at stake isn’t pleasure versus prudishness. It’s anesthesia versus eros, solace versus joy. One diminishes, the other enlarges. One hides, the other risks.

A closing thought

So when Clamence tells us that drink and women were the only solace he deserved, he’s telling the truth. He has forfeited joy. He can’t repent, can’t love, can’t leap into the river. He can only numb himself and talk, talk about it.

As I said in the long post, we’re not trapped in a novel. We have more options than he does. The challenge is to notice when our pleasures are really anesthetics, when solace is being mistaken for joy. And then to risk the kind of attachment — to others, to work, to a world — that can’t be consumed but only lived.

Stavrogin sought the depths of debauchery and found a void. Clamence sought solace and found only mirrors. The rest of us, if we’re lucky, can still seek joy. And we should. Every. Goddamn. Day.