Why do I want someone to tell me what to do?
A decision has been waiting for weeks. Every option has been weighed. What remains is a wish that is almost embarrassing to say out loud: that someone else would simply decide.
In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Fyodor Dostoevsky gave this wish to a character who defends it. Ivan Karamazov tells his brother a story he calls a poem, "The Grand Inquisitor".
The deal
In sixteenth-century Seville an old cardinal speaks to a silent prisoner. The religious frame of the scene is Dostoevsky's own and does not need unpacking here. What matters is the Inquisitor's claim about people:
"man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find some one quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Constance Garnett, book V, ch. 5
The next sentence narrows it: only one who can appease their conscience can take over their freedom. The Inquisitor offers exactly that. Peace, in exchange for the choice.
The price
Read through the Inquisitor, the wish to be told what to do looks less like immaturity than like a refusal to pay what freedom costs. The cost is carrying the decision afterwards, with no one else to point to.
That is why the wish sounds so reasonable when it comes. Handing the choice over promises relief from the conscience, not only from the work.
The page on wish and will follows Irvin Yalom on how a person comes to want and to decide. This one is about the moment of handing that over to someone else.
What the poem leaves
Dostoevsky does not let the prisoner answer in words. He leaves a question: which decision am I waiting for someone else to make, and what would I get if they made it?
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.