Looking into the abyss, and doing what Tolstoy did

Sunday, 12 July 2026

Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective.

OPINION: “Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come to those I love, or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms… my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? How can man fail to see this? And how to go on living.”

Leo Tolstoy wrote this in 1880. He was in his 50s. His loyal wife, 16 years his junior, had born him 13 children; eight of which survived. His books, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, would not be rendered onto the big screen for a century but they had made him ridiculously wealthy.

And yet the Russian writer found himself spiritually adrift. If there is no God, and only an eternity of oblivion awaits, why proceed with the pointlessness of existence? He concluded there were four options; ignorance, epicureanism (hedonism), suicide or living with the absurdity which, in the absence of God, is intolerable.

Tolstoy finds his way back to Jesus; or his own curated version of his teachings. Forgive me for compressing his 1882 book, My Confession, into two paragraphs but, well, it is a very small book. I did it justice.

Which brings me to Wellington lawyer and author Daniel Kalderimis, KC. He squirmed when I made the Tolstoy comparison, but I stand by it. He is a popular and successful lawyer with a happy personal life, and the respect of his peers and betters.

And yet; Kalderimis did what the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzche warned us not to do; he looked into the abyss. And the abyss reached out and tore him from domestic tranquility into the maw of depression. We are all, ultimately cut from the same biological cloth and when facing the same crisis, Kalderimis did what Tolstoy did; he went looking for answers.

His search covered vast tracks of western and some eastern intellectual, spiritual and metaphysical thinkers. Psychology, he observed from his studies, told him how to live, but not why to live; and philosophy the reverse.

Neither were sufficient, on their own, for the journey he needed to travel.

“My sense of self was closely entwined with my identity as a lawyer” he writes, but when that ceased to have value; what is left? He was busy but lost touch with why he was busy.

Depression, he found, removed a filter that allowed him to perceive himself and others as elevated beings. Once removed, he saw his fellow man driven by base motives chasing needs and wants.

Depression exposed himself as a player in The Matrix. Except, unlike Neo, there was no escape. He needed a foothold onto reality. Like Tolstoy, he wrote a book. Zest: Climbing from Depression to Philosophy. Unlike Tolstoy; he did not reach to God for help. He would have to travel a harder, but parallel, path.

“For a secular person, what is the point in living?” I asked. He answered: “Some of the concepts that religion has taken into its own, things that are sacred, that were valuable in and of themselves, were concepts that a secular person could also aspire to.”

Kalderimis’ search can be boiled down to a search for “…what kind of meaning could I find in my life that wasn’t just all of the things that I was doing and all of the things I would get.”

Along the way he discovered Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia; crudely explained as virtue is its own reward and the genesis of a branch of thinking called Virtue Ethics. This was insufficient.

“In my view, self-improvement without an ethical framework to match is a dubious life…I need to have meaning in my life.”

We all have to find our own purpose. This is my understanding of Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. For Kalderimis he finds this, in part, by a desire to connect with those important to him. But to do this comes at a huge cost.

The risk of loss. Of grief. If your purpose is the connection with others this comes at a price.

Buddhism responds to this by eliminating attachments. Kalderimis rejects this completely; in a passage that I think comes closest to a summary of my understanding of his work; “To me, the deepest level of acceptance is to acknowledge and embrace our attachments to people we love, knowing that it will hurt when the inevitable partings come; rather than to defend ourselves by pretending that it won’t.”

My own approach has been to follow Tolstoy’s first strategy; wilful ignorance as to the pointless of life while chasing fleeting moments of Aristotle’s eudaimonia by living as virtuous a life as the constraints of my character and base motives will allow.

Reading Zest has challenged my thinking. It will challenge yours.

It is Matariki. A time to remember those who have passed, celebrate the current harvest and plan for tomorrow. May you find your own path and, dear reader, the courage to follow it.