There are books that age and books that wait. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which Tolstoy completed in 1886, belongs to the second category. It was not waiting for a more educated reader. It was waiting for an infrastructure. It found one. Ivan Ilyich Golovin was a judge, a civil servant, a man of standing. He lived without scandal, died without having chosen anything. What the text does, with the coldness of an autopsy report, is show that this absence of choice was neither accident nor individual cowardice, but the predictable result of a system designed to prevent the fundamental question from ever being asked. The system has improved since then. So have the results.
The Man Who Lived Correctly
Ivan Ilyich is an examining magistrate in the Russian Empire, a man of career, of manners, of position. His life is what his contemporaries call a successful life, with promotions, a suitable marriage, a tastefully decorated apartment, useful connections. There is nothing monstrous in him, nothing sublime. There is, above all, a constant will to conform to an external model, to be legible to others, to occupy without disturbance the place the system has assigned him. Tolstoy does not condemn him. He observes him. And that clinical gaze is the most devastating literary operation in the text, because by the end of the reading the reader understands that what he has seen in Ilyich is not an exceptional case but a statistical portrait. Ilyich’s conformity is not individual cowardice ; it is the product of a social engineering that rewards adhesion and penalises singularity.
What the text establishes in its opening pages is the contract. Ilyich receives social approval in exchange for social legibility. Every detail of his existence, from the furniture to the friendships, is selected according to what others consider appropriate. The result is a life without apparent friction, without visible conflict, without the discomfort of choosing against the consensus. It is also, and this is what Tolstoy will demonstrate with the implacability of a forensic doctor, a life emptied of its own content. What remains when the varnish of approval is stripped away is an empty space where an individual should be.
The Machine That Manufactures Normals
Every society produces models of conformity. It is one of its most elementary and most effective mechanisms of cohesion. The model changes its name according to the era and the context, but its function remains intact, which is to offer individuals a ready-to-use form of existence, with clearly defined success criteria, verifiable progress indicators, and an integrated system of rewards. The model is comfortable precisely because it eliminates the need to choose in depth. Whoever adopts it can concentrate their energy on execution, not on the fundamental question of what they want to be or how they want to live. The question has been resolved in advance, by others, and that is exactly what gets sold as freedom.
What has changed over the past two decades is the scale and the speed of the mechanism. Digital platforms did not invent conformity, but they industrialised it. They gave it a real-time feedback infrastructure, a permanent audience, and a system of metrics that converts social judgement into quantifiable data. Where the control of the model was once exercised by the immediate environment, by family, neighbourhood, and colleagues, that control now operates at a global scale, in milliseconds, with the precision of an algorithm designed to maximise adhesion. The result is not a more sophisticated version of the same phenomenon. It is a qualitative leap in the intensity of pressure towards the norm.
The Screen as Approving Mirror
The algorithms of the major platforms are not neutral tools for content distribution. They are selection systems that amplify what generates measurable interaction, what the industry calls engagement, and in particular what confirms pre-existing expectations and models. A filtered face, a carefully framed life, a body presented in the terms the system has already established as desirable. None of this is expression. It is production. The individual does not reveal themselves on these platforms ; they are manufactured there according to the specifications of the attention market.
What makes the mechanism difficult to detect is that it presents itself under the opposite vocabulary. Authenticity, self-expression, community. The platforms do not say “conform to the model”. They say “show yourself as you are”. The result is the same as what Tolstoy describes in Ilyich, but executed with an efficiency that the nineteenth century lacked the technology to achieve, and applied to subjects who have been trained to confuse adhesion with freedom.
According to DataReportal’s Digital 2024 report, the average global user spends 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on social media. Multiple studies published between 2019 and 2023 in specialist journals including JAMA Psychiatry and Computers in Human Behavior establish a consistent correlation between intensive use of social platforms and increased symptoms of depression and anxiety, particularly among young women, though the causal mechanisms remain a subject of scientific debate.
Gerasim Does Not Have an Instagram Account
In Ilyich’s world, there is a figure who functions as an absolute anomaly. Gerasim, the peasant servant who tends to him in his agony. Gerasim does not lie, does not perform, does not look away. He carries out physical tasks that others consider degrading, and he does so without affectation, without drama, without the slightest trace of performance. His presence is the only thing that genuinely relieves Ilyich, not because Gerasim is extraordinary, but because he is real. Tolstoy presents him as someone who has not learnt to separate what he does from what he is. He has, in that sense, no image to protect. He is exactly the opposite of the man who lived correctly.
The figure of Gerasim is more unsettling today than in 1886, because the system that has produced the approved life not only penalises those who refuse to participate in it, but makes that refusal increasingly difficult to sustain without material consequences. The authenticity that Gerasim embodies is not a posture available to someone who depends on digital visibility to exist professionally, socially, or economically. The system does not only manufacture models ; it also manufactures dependence on those models. Leaving is not simply a personal decision. It is a cost. And it is precisely at that point that Tolstoy proves most uncomfortable. He does not describe a trap from which one might escape with good intentions, but an architecture that turns the exit into a luxury.
The Question That Defers an Entire Life
What Tolstoy activates in the final section of the text is the question that the system of the approved life exists precisely to keep silent. Did he really live? Not in the sense of having had experiences, travelled, consumed, accumulated. But in the sense of having inhabited his own existence with some degree of authenticity, of having chosen at some point against the consensus, of having been something more than the product of a series of adjustments to the model. Ilyich confronts that question in his agony because his entire previous life was designed to prevent it from arising. Physical pain destroys the mechanisms of evasion. The screen never stops broadcasting.
The contemporary digital system functions as a permanent mechanism for deferring that question. The saturation of stimuli, the speed of information, the constant pressure to produce and consume content. All of this generates a state of permanent occupation that makes difficult the kind of silence in which the question might be formulated. It is not a conspiracy. It is simply the structural effect of a business model based on the capture of attention. The individual who does not ask whether they are living the life they wish to live is an individual who will continue to generate interaction. The absence of reflection is not collateral damage to the system. It is one of its products.
The World Health Organisation estimates that depression affects more than 280 million people worldwide, making it the leading cause of disability globally. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, in a study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, demonstrated that limiting social media use to 30 minutes per day produces a significant and measurable reduction in levels of loneliness and depression among young adults.
The Correct Life Has No Happy Ending
Tolstoy offers no way out. There is in the text no prescription, no alternative model, no promise of redemption available to those who might decide to abandon the approved life. What it offers is a diagnosis, and that diagnosis has the coldness of a forensic document. Ilyich understands, at the threshold of death, that he has lived badly, not in the moral sense but in the existential sense, according to criteria that were not his, for an audience that did not know him, in a form that was foreign to him. That understanding arrives too late to be useful. Tolstoy does not apologise for this.
What the text does in 2026 is to point out that the mechanism that destroyed Ilyich now operates at an unprecedented scale, with precision tools that the nineteenth century could not have imagined, on populations trained from childhood to understand visibility as synonymous with existence. This is not an individual problem of insufficient authenticity or weakness of character. It is the logical consequence of a system that has turned social approval into a currency and has built a technical infrastructure to administer it at an industrial scale. The system does not produce conformists because it is malicious. It produces them because it is profitable. Nobody needs to say it in those words. The numbers say it themselves…
G.S.
Sources
- DataReportal. Digital 2024 Global Overview Report
- Coyne, S. et al. Social media and depression in adolescents, JAMA Psychiatry, 2023
- Hunt, M. et al. No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2018
- World Health Organisation. Depression fact sheet, 2023
- Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
Actualizado el 28 de April de 2026
