To Let Go or Not To , That Is the Question: Between Dostoevsky, Kafka and Camus

Do you see the glass as half empty or half full?  The question followed me.

I had no answer. The question shook me. Am I an optimist or a pessimist? Do I cling to suffering or surrender to release?

In that uncertainty I remember Dostoevsky once said , “I held on because I believed pain meant it was real.”  According to him, pain proves something exists. And so, we cling to it. We hold on because it feels real. In Dostoevsky's world, agony becomes a path to the divine, to moral reckoning, and to truth. Pain, in his view, becomes the proof of existence; hence, the half-empty glass proves I exist. 

I believed him. And that is why I held on because it made me feel real.

But as I walked with this belief, thinking deeply about whether pain is truly real, Franz Kafka quietly knocked on the door , with his distance, his disillusionment , and said, “I let go because nothing real should hurt that long.”

Now I was confused. Does it mean If it hurts, the glass is an illusion?

Should I stay with Dostoevsky, where finding meaning comes through the endurance of pain? Or should I listen to Kafka, who sees, what pains cannot be truth?

These two ideas trapped me , caught me in an endless loop of thought. To seek relief in letting go or to search for truth in holding on? Both paths pulled me in different directions. And when the confusion became too heavy, when I felt I was on the edge of committing a philosophical suicide, I remembered Albert Camus. He reminds us that life is absurd. There is no point. And precisely because there is no point, we must live fully: The glass is a miracle precisely because it owes you no answers.This helped me understand something deeper. Dostoevsky was right. Kafka was right. And so was Camus.

To truly let go, one must walk through Dostoevsky, pass through Kafka, and arrive at Camus.

This journey found its reflection in the words of Sahir Ludhianvi , the great poet who wrote:

“Main zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya….

Jahan gham bhi na ho aur khushi bhi na ho,

Main us maqam pe khud ko lata chala gaya.”

I kept walking alongside life….

Where sorrow and joy feel the same,

I brought myself to that state of being.

This, to me, is the answer. You walk through Dostoevsky, you pass Kafka, and you finally understand Camus. You realize that life is not about choosing pain or release. It is about walking through both and arriving at acceptance.

And when I thought even more about this, I found the same idea reflected in science , in the words of Niels Bohr, the father of quantum theory. He said,“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”

This, too, aligns with Camus, and Sahir, with the chaos of emotion and thought. Particles are not always particles. Waves are not always waves. Sometimes they behave as both , sometimes neither. Reality is just a possibility. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle tells us we can never fully know both the position and speed of a particle at once. There is always an error. Always a gap. Always a doubt.

So if there is always uncertainty , if even the foundation of matter is based on probability , then how can we ever call anything completely real?

In the end, I stopped asking whether the glass is half full or half empty. 

I simply said, I am grateful to have a glass at all. 

To drink from it. 

To spill from it. 

To break it. 

To glue it back together.

To be here , in this brief flicker of time,

hurting, healing, wandering,

and somehow, still alive.