I feel like I'm wasting my life
The feeling rarely comes with a clear reason. The job is fine, the days are full, nobody complains. And still, some evening, the thought arrives: this isn't it.
Most answers to that thought offer a plan: set goals, find a passion, stop scrolling. They assume the person already knows what a life well spent would look like. Often that is exactly what's in doubt.
In 1886 Leo Tolstoy published a novella about a man who had done everything properly. It is called The Death of Ivan Ilych.
A life that went well
Ivan Ilych is a judge. He married reasonably well, built a career, furnished a good flat. Tolstoy keeps returning to the same two words for his life: pleasant and decorous. Society approved of it, and so did he.
The story turns when he falls ill. Lying awake one night, he can no longer push away a thought he has been avoiding for weeks:
"What if my whole life has been wrong?"
— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, tr. Louise and Aylmer Maude, chapter XI
Wrong by whose measure
What comes next is the sharpest passage in the book. Ivan Ilych recalls faint impulses he once had to struggle against what the most highly placed people considered good. He had suppressed each one at once. Now it occurs to him that those impulses may have been the real thing, and all the rest false.
Two chapters earlier, alone with his thoughts, he had put it differently. He had imagined he was going up in the world, and in other people's eyes he was. All the while, life was slipping away from him.
The line Tolstoy draws, then, is not between a full life and an empty one. It runs between a life measured by other people and a life that was hardly ever given a hearing. By the first measure Ivan Ilych did well. The second he noticed only at the end.
Asking sooner
Ivan Ilych asks his question when there is almost no time left to answer it. That is what makes the story hard to read, and what makes the question worth something to anyone who asks it earlier.
The sense of wasting one's life is usually treated as a mood to get over. In Tolstoy it reads more like evidence: some part of the person has been keeping its own account, and that account doesn't match the official one.
Existential therapy is built largely around moments like this. The page on the four givens describes how facing the limits of a life can bring it into view.
What the story leaves
Tolstoy never says what the right life would have been. He leaves a smaller question: when I say I'm wasting my life, whose measure am I using?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.