Grand Designs & Dostoevsky

Have you ever watched Grand Designs? It's a gently deranged programme documenting people with enormous amounts of money they feel compelled to set on fire converting old barns, churches, and crumbling historic structures into, usually, modernist glass squares.

What's fascinating about the show isn't necessarily the renovation itself. It's the belief nearly every couple brings to the project: that once it's finished, once they can finally move in, all the background niggles of life will dissolve. As soon as they get sign-off and the builders leave, they can start fresh on the blank slate of their iconic new home.

Psychologists call this the fresh start effect. The idea is that certain temporal landmarks feel like natural "chapter breaks", moments that let us draw a hard line between who we were and who we're about to become. Birthdays. Mondays. The first of the month. And most powerfully, New Year's Day. At these points we tell ourselves: that was old me. This is new me. All the failures, the bad habits, the times we didn't live up to our intentions, that was the previous version. The new version starts now, clean slate, no mess.

And to be fair, it works, at least at first. Research suggests people really are more likely to start new projects, sign up for gyms, begin diets, quit smoking, or attempt some kind of personal reinvention right after one of these landmarks. The fresh start effect is real. The problem is what we do with it, because there's a difference between I feel motivated to start and I can become a completely different person through sheer force of will.

Now think of the lovely people on Grand Designs who've bitten off far more than they can chew, transforming a dilapidated pile of sixteenth-century bricks into a family home that looks like a Scandinavian art gallery. At some point they always say something like: "When we move into this house, our dream house, everything will be different. We'll live more simply. We'll be more intentional. The space will transform how we exist."

Then they finish the house. They move in. It's beautiful.

But it's not only them who move into the palace.

All of their stuff comes with them. All the literal baggage. The same art. The same furniture. The same arguments about where to put the toaster. The same kids leaving smudges all over the glass and crayon on a pristine wall. Pretty soon the modernist cube fills up with the debris of their actual lives, because it turns out they're still the same people. The building changed. The people didn't. Or at least, not automatically.

And when we put these arbitrary markers on a calendar, we do the exact same thing. We say "new year, new me", and imagine we're moving into our own glass cube, expecting it to magically transform us, while our patterns and preferences and avoidances come shuffling right in with us like they've got a key.

But it's not all bad. Sometimes, after a few months in the concrete box, you start missing the old house. You remember there were things you loved about it. Sure, the kitchen window was drafty, and the hot water followed its own spiritual logic, but there was also a kind of lived-in wisdom there. A knowledge of how you actually are when no one's watching. The routines you built. The coping mechanisms, some healthy, some not. The ways you learned to get through the winter.

This is something Dostoevsky grapples with at throughout his writing. He's deeply sceptical of the Enlightenment fantasy that humans can rationally reinvent themselves on demand, like we're software waiting for an update.

In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov tries to become a completely new kind of person: a Napoleon figure, exempt from ordinary morality. But even after the crime, he discovers he's still himself. Still carrying a conscience. Still capable of guilt. Still bound to other people. Whatever he thought he could leave behind doesn't stay behind. It comes with him.

And the novel doesn't end with him reborn as a shiny new man. It ends with him, famously, on the verge of something. Not the Hollywood "before and after" montage, but the beginning of a slow, humiliating, difficult process. Dostoevsky's point isn't that transformation is impossible. It's that it's gradual. It's integration, not escape. It's learning to live with the moral weight of what you've done and letting it change you over time, rather than pretending you can amputate your past and walk off clean.

If we want to grow, we have to integrate our histories. We have to recognise that even suffering and failure contain accumulated information about who we are and how we tend to live. Redemption doesn't come from becoming someone new. It comes from becoming more fully ourselves.

The drafty windows weren't just problems to be fixed. They taught you something about resilience. About improvisation. About what matters when the fantasy collapses and you're left with Tuesday. And you can't pack that kind of hard-won knowledge into boxes and deliberately leave it behind. It comes with you into the glass cube whether you intend it to or not.