Despair is the prevailing sense of the impossibility of change, future-less-ness, the absence of an undo button, the sensation of the floor of the elevator shaft falling out from under your feet, the Second You that is watching yourself laugh and not laughing along.

It is the nagging sensation that even in heaven everything looks unbelievably cheap.

Despair can be inherited through the body and via the soul, and can be inflicted on others through chance, circumstance, or deliberate violent action. It is a lack of agency at scale against injustice anywhere, the theft of vitality and diversity for capital gain.

Despair affects the human and the more-than-human and it commandeers the ‘inanimate’ in service of destruction and division.

It is The Way the World Is.

We, who have inherited the memory of freedom, reject this.

We, who were raised in the institution of dreaming, have the conscious duty of hope.

We know that the cycles of history will continue to draw themselves, and that our interests lie outside of them.

We believe that reality is still filled with the fragments of evidence of the promise of freedom and the materials to build the world right.

To assemble a life thickened with dignity, meaning, and intention.

We will lay these fragments of the secret end to end, a secret with a beautiful name, a secret called happiness.

—

Stray phrasing borrowed from Terry Pratchett, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Chris the Magic Marker, Alain Resnais, and my mother.

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