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The easiest way, of course, is to burn it all down and start again.
We gather the entire world’s supply of bleach, hand it to the fire-starters, and let chemistry run its course. Like Super Mario, we start all over again at the beginning of this level, this time (we promise our future selves), we’ll really learn the lessons from history. No extra lives. No auto-save. Just back at Go, do not collect $2.
Isn’t it a relief to indulge in this fantasy of a reset button? No one to blame, no horrible farce of a trial that has no end, no need to get to the heart of the matter. We can say: it’s not me, it’s not you, it’s the system! It’s always been the system, and we can change any system we want!
The not-so-fun way is to stick your head into the sand, and wait it out.
If I don’t say anything, someone else will, and he’ll change. If I look the other way, someone else will step in and make them come to their senses. Someone (surely someone) who is smarter than me will stop this train wreck and by some great magical quantum formula, sweep me up in their wake. I don’t have to be the superhero of this lifetime. All I have to do is keep my head down and one day, I’ll wake up and someone else has fixed the problem. One could argue that this is also defined as insanity, but in a world whose prime predilection seems to be choosing the wrong adventure at every point in history, why bother going against the flow?
The hardest way to make the world suck less is to hope.
Nobody really wants this because, as the young ones say these days, it’s cringe. “Hope,” really? What next? Run as president?
Also, hope has a nasty habit of disappointing. And so we’d rather doom-scroll and cancel accounts and brands and personalities, we hide behind our screens and become keyboard warriors. Because hoping is not just disappointing, it is also dangerous.
When my daughter was born, I remember looking at her tiny face and feeling a kind of awe that can’t be translated into any of the languages I know. This is a brand new human. A true one. Heart. Lungs. Tiny little toes. Pink skin. She was born from me? I have messed up and done so much wrong, and this gorgeous human came out of me regardless?
Everything around her was brand new, too.
Look, I said, finally noticing how amazing this world is: this is grass. This is a bed. That’s the sky. No, don’t cry, that’s just a cat. This is mommy. Look, my love, these are clothes! This is a couch!
And no matter what I show her, it’s magical and new because it is.
When I looked into my newborn child’s face, I finally understood what the word “holy” meant and it’s not just religious or performative. She is sacred just by virtue of existing.
If we look it up in the dictionary, the opposite of hope is despair. But I don’t think that’s right. I think the real opposite of hope is ennui. That gray feeling of flatness. Nothing is interesting or exciting anymore. We live in an actual world of miracles: robots deliver food, double-sided tape exists, modern plumbing works so reliably that we only notice it when it doesn’t. We can buy single sachets of gin, wine in a bottle, food can last for months, and our clothing is so great that we can go out in sub-zero temperatures and take selfies.
The sum total of human knowledge sits quite literally at our fingertips, and yet we believe every ad we see that totes a new drug or product. We comment away, blithely, and make ourselves forget that the systems we’ve been led to believe are beneficial are actually not. Later, we think, as our thumb keeps scrolling up. Later, I’ll think about it.
Of course there’s hope, of course I hope. Just not right now, it’s too much to think about.
We outsource our hope to our social media feeds, to a vague concept of “better governance,” to podcasts, movements, and algorithms. We wait for hope to arrive fully formed, like a product launch.
Hope as a concept seems impossible these days and it’s because we keep misunderstanding it. We think that it’s optimism; things will work out fine… somehow. Or we think that it’s positive thinking: “Don’t say it out loud, don’t be negative, it might come true!” We think it’s blind faith: “magtiwala ka lang!”
Hope is beyond all that.
Hope is hunger.
It’s that feeling you get when you see something and you know it hasn’t reached its full potential. This is NOT as good as it gets. Hope is living in the dissatisfaction that the world isn’t going as we thought it should, and yet working towards a brighter future. Hope recognizes that there is a future despite the present circumstances. Hope is not comfortable; it aches.
And that is why we’d rather burn down the world than hope. Because hope is heartbreaking. Hope comes with a cost: our complacency, our comfort, our preconceived notions. Hope will tell us we are wrong, but shove us so that we move despite being wrong. Hope makes us wake up early in the morning, determined to be the change instead of waiting for a change. Hope makes revolutionaries out of all of us because suddenly the status quo is not cool.
My daughter can’t tell you what the definition of hope is, but I watch her live it. She makes plans for tomorrow. She reminds us that we don’t do that, we do this, mom. And she is constantly showing me things. Look, mom. That’s the grass. That’s the sky. That’s the ocean. Look, mom, look, the cat is being a cat. Look, mom. Mom.
So how do we make the world suck less?
Since global arson is generally frowned upon and being an ostrich is not biologically possible, it seems we have no choice but to hope. We show up and take notice. We treat things as if they are still brand new, sacred by virtue of existing. We let ourselves be moved by the small things — like a child learning what grass is, a stranger being unexpectedly kind, the crazy miracle of having clean water whenever we fancy it. And ice! Ice in everything! And oh my gosh, have you heard of music? All of music?!
And we let hope shove us until we show up.
We may not have all the answers, and we might choose the wrong adventures despite our good intentions, but we make plans for tomorrow. We fight for the future. There are no billionaires with special world-saving toys here, just us. We hope, and we choose to be the kind of people who’ll move to be the change instead of waiting for any change.
And as we wake up from the stupor of doom-scrolling to notice sky and grass and the magic of modern technology, maybe, we bring back the sacred into this world, and maybe then the world will remember how to not suck so much.
Art by TROY NONATO
