Nietzsche Killed God. We Murdered Hope While the Children Wore Their Best Clothes.

eaching for hope may be like a dead man's longing to smell summer one last time. Like an ant that wishes to soar like a bird of prey. Hope can seem impossible. There are violent storms that destroy it every morning. The powerful do not want us as individuals. They want compliance. They pull the strings of their money, and we dance. We have also been let down by hopes of the past. They grew weak. They suffocated. They brought nothing to our souls. They rotted with time and poisoned our ideas. When we look at the world, we sometimes see the darkest of nights. A better future presents itself to us as fiction.

In the midst of these assaults, we are castles. Besieged, seized, plundered, desecrated from within. But our walls still stand. It is our duty to drive out the intruders. Not to capitulate. Attacks on our goodness are feeble. They break against the human spirit. There is no force powerful enough to defeat the infinite future. Hope can prevail. But we must choose it.

Yet first, we must understand hope. Truthfully. Seriously. Deeply.

Hope is not passive. It is not a stone lying in a garden. To hope does not mean to wait idly and expect good outcomes. That is not hoping. That is wishing. That is expecting. Hope is no task for the indolent. It must carry the dimension of action. One must participate in the world. Act with the mind. Hope and action are inseparable. Only from hope can we act. In true hope, we find the resolve to build our own future. Hope is a path toward a better place. But we must choose to walk it. Hope is not a small sensation. It is an activity.

Hope is also not a fleeting feeling satisfied by trivial events. It is more enduring. More profound. It is an openness to the idea of the not-yet. A permanent receptivity to the pain and the glory of the future. To the fullness of the world. And to the fact that within that fullness, something good must exist.

Reason. Logic. These things have their place in our lives. But like everything that nourishes us, too much can corrupt. It is remarkable how inconsistently the world operates according to reason and logic. Every day we are struck by people and events that happen although they should not have happened. Logic cannot predict everything. It cannot predict the new. The new, which comes into being in every moment we breathe. In hope, we find ourselves ready when reason fails. Ready for a future that will certainly defy the mechanical realities of today. Hope is an openness to everything. It hears frequencies that reason cannot hear. It is the certainty that, despite all adversity, the events of today need not determine those of tomorrow.

We should not hope for a specific goal. That is not hoping. That is wishing. The world transforms around us, and our hope must be flexible. We should not contaminate our hopes with precision. Instead, we should marvel at the simplicity of the not-yet. A loving woman, good friends, a larger home — these specific desires are made of coarse material. They invite fear when fate seems to whisper that they are further away than we imagined. These things are only a mask for what we truly long for. Which is happiness. The hope for simple happiness is not merely sufficient. It is magnificent. This longing is unalloyed. It bends and yields when the winds of the world press against it. In hope, the vague and the abstract meet us with great utility.

Too often we approach hope from the wrong direction. We should not ask what we hope for. But from where we hope. A person does not lose hope because of external circumstances. But because of internal ones. We must seek a version of the not-yet that is strong. Unbreakable against the world around it. We must seek hope as a fundamental way of being. Not as a method of coping with what already is. We should understand the world, and ourselves, as places in which hope can exist. A future grounded in flexible and enduring hope forms solid ground beneath our feet. A path before our eyes. We can move forward as active participants in the world. Toward a magnificent future. A magnificent and abstract paradise, beautiful precisely because of its indeterminate form.

Every day I notice the individualism of our Western society. So much drive in this world. And it is directed so entirely inward. Naturally, it can only be this way. The individual must achieve, improve, succeed for themselves. But hope is not an individual act. It is the song of the collective. Inherent to hope is the expectation of events and circumstances that lie outside one's own control. Hope does not petition for one, but for all. And therein lies such beauty. It is an acknowledgment of what one must do. Of the possibility of seizing one's own future. While simultaneously understanding the multitude of forces that act upon that future. It welcomes everything that can be. Everyone who can be. To hope is to fully appreciate the texture of a society. Hope is not a burning match. It is a fire that all share.

And yet our plague of hopelessness does not arise from misunderstanding alone. No. Our despondency is born in many dark and separate winters. The world around us cries out every day: Why hope? What could you possibly hope for? And it assails us with vast images of suffering and despair. Of goblins feeding on our collective grief. These goblins have summoned every person, through violence and capital, to surrender life in favour of mere survival. We are told that only the present matters. That the future is a grim story already written for us. Work, toil, and worry about your today, so that we may cede tomorrow to our so-called elites. It is easier for the capitalist to function when we have only circular days. Lives that exist only to satisfy their own needs. When every person allows their days to be darkened by drudgery, monopolised by their own feeding, when we offer our days only as sustenance for ourselves — then the task of the great gods of capital becomes immeasurably simpler. What action can we give to our not-yet? What trouble might we cause in the grand designs of the elites, if our present consumes us entirely?

The goblin of fear is another enemy of hope. In a climate of fear, we are obedient. Without the courage to speak for progress. Fear infects us to our core. It infects even our capacity to think. It destroys the imagination, and suddenly our what-ifs become entangled in ruin. It is a suffocation that mutilates the infinite expanse of our futures into a single narrow road. Action born of fear may provide us with a sustainable future. But one without a horizon. Without openness to the new. And without openness, there can be no hope.

Hope is also an assault on our sensibilities. Because it is a fundamentally creative act. It is the invitation and openness to the new. It is the glory that something is to be built that in no way resembles what already exists. But our world, with all its traps, discourages this radical form of creativity. It insists that the new is only a permutation of the old. Our world begs for the new, but only insofar as it is an acceptable substitute or iteration of what came before. The mutilation of our hope is a side effect of this idea. We fear hope because it compels us not to iterate, but to truly create. The hopeful future is not a future that corresponds to our impressions of the present. It is something new.

Our spirit of hope has been further distracted by the blunt prescriptions of optimism and pessimism. Both relieve the individual of the responsibility to act. These modes of thinking are the province of the idle. To be optimistic or pessimistic is to accept the future as already written. Things will either be good or bad. What reason, then, does anyone have to act? What will be done is already done. The optimist sees the world as a place of happiness and ignores misfortune. Hope acknowledges that we do not know what the world will bring. But that there is a vast expanse we can use to bring forth good. Despite everything else our days may hold. Pessimism, like optimism, is built on the rejection of possibility. For the pessimist, the world is a prison of despair. These thinkers assume that all hopes end in disappointment. And in doing so, they confuse shallow expectation with the truly infinite and ever-bending spirit of hope. These two schools of thought are brothers. Each offers us only an enclosed room for our world. It is a simple place. Perhaps even a comfortable one. But it refuses fluidity — the chaos of time that forms the very foundation of hope.

Even as well-armoured as possible against such despondency, every person will experience moments and periods of hopelessness. Goals slip into the distance. Perceived realities seem to dissolve like mist on a pond. Such is our life. The great tragedy of our days comes not from the loss of hope. But from the loss of the capacity to hope. From the loss of anything, in this wide world, to hope for. In the darkest hours, a future paradise seems so distant and unattainable that we forget paradise can be an option at all. We look at the future and see no possibilities. There, we have lost not only our destination. We have also lost our map.

It is precisely on such days that we must understand hope. Not as a tool of life. But as an existing part of the world. Within us and outside of us. The world, whatever chaos it contains, will always hold space for hope. The future contains everything. And the churning of days can never be strong enough to make this untrue. Our world is like a great forest. Even through the darkest winters, trees shed seeds and new life creates itself. The darkest and densest forest, its canopy blocking all light — such a place still creates new life. In the deepest part of that forest, a person might look down at the ground. And they will find it, inevitably, endlessly strewn with acorns. There will always be room for the new.

Next I ask: which of us would enjoy the feeling of fear? No one, of course. But of course, fear comes as a package with hope. To hope is to embrace the unknown. And in the unknown, fear always lurks. We must take fear with hope, as we take all other fear. Summer brings warmth and ecstasy. And it brings wasps and spiders. To stand beneath the night sky and stare at the stars is to marvel at the beauty of our universe. It is also to stand among the most nocturnal and predatory creatures. I can barely imagine a more flawless time than a day in the sun and a night beneath the stars. I can imagine nothing more flawless than hope.

There is, in fact, an inherent darkness in hope. It springs from pain, suffering, and misery. These things must exist for hope to exist. The society of utopia has no use for hope. Why should hope exist when everything is perfect? But it is a fact that such a place does not exist. Our world has texture. So much beautiful and painful texture, if only we can see it. Just as hope requires us to be open to what is not yet, hope requires openness to what is. We must insist on hope. Despite what surrounds us. And because of what surrounds us. To invite hope is to invite darkness. To have hope, we must be courageous.

When hope becomes action and we begin to start something new, we have no idea of the outcomes or consequences. The spectre of guilt may emerge from the shadows of courageous action. And that is the heavy burden the person must carry when they walk with hope. Oh, what a heavy burden it is to know that we can act well and yet create pain. But it fades beside the weight of a rancid life of existence that refuses possibility. Without possibility, we can jump into our own graves. And I would far rather wrestle with guilt than with a living death. Guilt we can manage. How magnificently we can manage guilt is a wonder of humanity. We are powerful against guilt. Human beings have been granted the incredible and often ignored gift of forgiveness. In forgiving ourselves, we acknowledge that the world creates unpredictable events and consequences. And we revive our openness to the new. We restore our capacity to hope. Forgiveness is not merely a human talent, but a necessity. One can imagine the infinite paralysis that would set in should we refuse our right to forgive. To ignore forgiveness is to saw the branches of our tree off at the stump. It is to reject possibility and welcome inaction. Forgiveness is the domain of the past, and hope the domain of the future. And together, we have eternity. We hope. We act. We forgive. And we hope again.

We carry so much fear. Let hope be its opposite. Its antidote. Fear is a dread of things that have not yet come to pass. But why must we dread them? Why must we insist on the wretchedness of the future? Let us instead rejoice when we welcome a spring from our darkest winters. Let us look at the future as something we can build. Not as something that builds itself around our indifference. The past can inform our future. But again we fall into the trap of the bad. We regret that things did not go as we wished, and we assume they will continue to fall in the same direction. We are imprisoned by the past. Ignoring that all of history is a history of change. What once was need not be again. What exists, exists only in order to change. Rain brings blossoms. The bad can be the seed of the good.

We can say that the world is a lonely place. And that it does as it pleases. What a simple way to live. Simple, and destructive. The hopeless person is the inactive person, who fulfils their own convictions about the world. They allow the world to do violence to them. And they welcome their own crushing — only to then observe all of life from beneath the stone of oppression. But of course the world is cruel and agonising when one has lain down to welcome its violence. Instead, let us work. Let us lift and labour into the world, so that we may find hope and strike down simple pessimism. The whole world is a force. And we must meet it with strength. Strength that springs from hope.

To have hope is to be free. Which of us is omniscient and all-seeing? What arrogance and foolishness it takes to say that one's future is a locked door. The world is not so obedient as to honour our expectation that everything will remain as it has always been. We live in an infinite sea of possibilities. Even our own selves remain, forever, a mystery. Who knows what we will do as the seasons and years revolve again and again? Who can say what butterflies our cocoons will produce? How we respond to events tomorrow may be entirely unfathomable to who we are today. When we recognise this, we suddenly know that we are not on a predetermined course. We are not objects waiting for their next collision. It is through profound hope that we know: today is not tomorrow. This year is not the next. Suddenly we become free beings. Unbound by arrogance and prophecy.

How beautiful it would be if discovering hope were a simple thing. What paradise that could bring us. How proud I could be if I discovered the algorithm for hope. If only, if only hope could be plucked like a ripe apple from the trees of our days. There is so much fear in this world. So much pain. There is suffering so immense that the search for hope where there is none requires a fundamental reorientation of the soul. No person can say that hope is easy. Hope is great and difficult work. But it is a great foolishness to declare struggle as reason for inaction.

So let us hope forever. And in the most grotesque of our days, when none can be found, let us hope still for hope itself.

Afterword: On Children, Hope, and My Letters

Everything I have written about hope condenses into a single image: the child.

Children are the embodiment of the not-yet. They are living proof that the future exists. That it is open. That it has not been written in advance. Every child that is born is an argument against nihilism. Every child that laughs refutes the claim that everything is meaningless.

And yet — who suffers most from our collective hopelessness? The children.

A man named Janusz Korczak understood this. As he wrote of himself: "By profession a doctor, by accident an educator, by passion a writer, and by necessity a psychologist." He ran an orphanage in Warsaw. He also once wrote:

"War is an abomination. Especially because no one reports how many children are hungry, mistreated, left without protection. Before a people goes to war, it should pause and think of the innocent children who will be injured, killed, or made into orphans. No cause, no war is worth taking from children their natural right to happiness. One must think of the child first, before beginning revolutions."

These words were written nearly a century ago. They are just as true today. They will be just as true in ten years. In a hundred. Above all when we think of the wars of today — Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Yemen — and the many others known by no name at all.

Korczak also understood that children are not unfinished adults. He wrote:

"Children are not the people of tomorrow. They are people of today. They have the right to be taken seriously, to be treated with tenderness and respect. They should be allowed to become whoever it is they are meant to be — the unknown person in each of them is our hope for the future."

Hope for the future. That is what children are. Not because they will one day be useful. But because they already carry the future within them, right now.

On the 6th of August 1942, Korczak marched with 192 children from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. He could have fled. He was offered rescue more than once. He refused. He did not want to leave the children alone.

The children wore their best clothes. They carried their green flag with its golden four-leaf clover. They sang. Korczak told them they were going to the countryside. An outing. An adventure.

This is not a story about death. This is a story about hope. About the refusal to surrender dignity even when everything seems lost. About the decision that how we live — and how we die — matters more than the mere fact that we die.

Every year, I write letters to children in orphanages. By hand. With a few small gifts.

When I was a child, I experienced things I could not properly explain to anyone. I write these letters in the hope that I might prevent something of what I went through. I do not know if it works. I do not know if a letter can change anything.

But I know that hope is not a passive feeling. It is an activity. It must carry the dimension of action. One must participate in the world.

These letters are my hope. My acorns, thrown into the darkest part of the forest. I do not know which of them will take root. I do not know what trees will grow from them. But I throw them anyway.

Because hope asks for no guarantee. It only asks that we act.

Korczak once wrote:

"Children deserve a large share of humanity, a considerable portion of the population, the nation, the inhabitants, the citizens — they are our faithful companions. They were, they are, and they will be."

They were. They are. They will be.

And as long as there are children, there is hope.

And as long as there is hope, there is a reason to write letters.

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