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Despite being in the best position I’ve ever been in in my life, this is the most hopeless I’ve ever felt. I’m still an optimist, which has been unwavering since I made it a habit, but now the best case scenario and the most likely scenario are both really bad.
Personally, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what to do for graduate school, I don’t know whether I want to do graduate school, I don’t know if I want to be a teacher, and most importantly I don’t know what I will do otherwise. I do think I could be rich and “successful” if I tried, especially because of the way I was born, but the chances of me killing myself go up a lot if I follow that path. I’d rather spend my life happy.
Right now the trajectory is to become a philosophy professor, but if I don’t end up enjoying that, I’m lowkey fucked, I don’t know what I’d do next. The price of graduate school will be similar to if I just got my bachelors and moved on to a different BA, but in that case the philosophy bachelors would probably be grandly unuseful and I’d have two BAs for the price of a PhD.
And it’s not even like I can just shop around and find a job I like and climb the ladder either. People aren’t hiring, in fact they’re firing, and the starting wages for unskilled untrained employees is simply not livable. In order to succeed right now, I would need a better-paying job to begin with.
I romanticize about owning all the things I need to be self-sufficient, but the prospect of owning a home and land is currently reserved for my forties at the earliest, and only if I work a high-paying job.

Politically and societally, things are even worse. By a lot. I do think that most people right now don’t support trump or what he’s doing, especially because most of it is directly contradictory to other things he’s done that those people supported, but I don’t know that. I do know that there are still some people who do support him, and importantly that the zeitgeist is behind him enough to get him elected. Even more concerning is how this zeitgeist is omnipresent across the West at least. People everywhere are sad and angry, and want to hurt others for it. The only politicians who successfully message to this spirit are the ones who agree and are evil enough to actually do it. A dark and painful part of me believes that the spirit will only be successfully crushed (for two or three generations) when en masse people realize what their wishes actually look like: mass-murder and revocation of humanity.
The big three countries ruling the world right now, USA, China, and Russia, are currently all evil and warmongering with a serious unignorable penchant for genocide. Russia wants to crush Ukraine and take its territory because their dictator is out of touch and afraid of damage to his image, the Chinese dictator is currently committing genocide against Uighur Muslims as well as planning an unprovoked military invasion of the worlds only supply of silicon, and the USA is at and planning to go to war with several of our close neighbors in North and South America because our dictator is warmongering and so terribly afraid of dying that he will do anything to matter.
Domestically, the middle and lower classes are being squeezed more and more over time with a bricked economy and failing job market. The higher and highest classes are reaping immense benefits that not only siphon income from those below them, but openly hoard and hide it. Undeniably, no matter what numbers you look at (assuming they’re credible and reliable), the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer fullstop. Further, the american dream is dead and cold, and your future value is determined by your present value in most cases.
Our culture is so deliberately divided that the same facts are interpreted so incredibly differently that one can be overjoyed about the current administration, even specifically when they endorse and defend real murder and pedophilia.
An ICE agent murdered a mother in her car. In the presence of two other agents, he shot the woman through her windshield and driver side door within ten feet as she moved a few miles per hour away from them. The administration says that the man who shot her was critically injured and “lucky to be alive.” Strangely, the only person who went to the hospital that day was the woman, and she was dead on-scene. Regardless, the DOJ, DHS, and the White House gave her the postmortem label of “terrorist” and want to try her.
Justice has no home today, and I mean that as seriously as possible.
I have grown more and more in love for the United States and its foundation. I truly believe that it was born of a miracle that the greatest political philosophers of the time were concentrated in our union and devised the three greatest documents of human political history. The failure of this country, which is seeming more and more inevitable, makes me feel as though there is no hope for a lasting government that protects its people. It’s possible to imagine, but if our country in all of its impossible luck fails too, it feels like there’s no hope.
I’ve never been a nihilist. Ever since I began studying philosophy in any capacity, nihilism has been my enemy. It’s far too easy, it encourages that which it loathes, and it’s highly self-fulfilling. I think that nihilism is at base a philosophy accepted out of fear and laze, by the kind of people who call themselves “realists” because they don’t like thinking about big words like “optimism” and “pessimism.” Still, the painful and recurring failures of all societies all over the world entice me into nihilism. It’s like the devil on my shoulder telling me the truth. I don’t think that We Can’t Be Saved, but there are so many spawns that can’t be reversed (the ugly cats of fascism, psychological warfare, isolationism and globalism that can’t be put back in the bag) that the path away from our current trajectory heading into a hillside is not at all visible. It will take some new innovation, some drastic change that can’t be imagined by our current heuristics in order for our timer to be subverted.
Neither am I one for apocalyptic rhetoric, but in tandem with reality and avoidance of nihilism, far too many paths forward lead to genocide or anthropocide to feel like hope is an answer. I’m terrified because it seems to me that the only proven path forward that leads away from the Holocaust happening again is for the Holocaust to happen again. It was only the witnessing of just how unfathomably horrible our consequences were that led to the last century avoiding similar thought patterns like the plague. Now that the generation who witnessed it firsthand is dead, we are slackening and falling into precisely the same patterns again without a second thought. What scares me most is that a second Holocaust is the only proven deterrent so far, but it ever happening twice is a damning sign that it can happen a third. The fact that we’re even relitigating Nazism at such a scale is a damnation of humanity’s greatest and most costly lesson.
I hate to leave this with such an open note, but that’s the only fitting conclusion. I have no idea what’s next for myself or anyone else. I will remain optimistic because that is still the best way forward in every case, it’s just difficult. I feel like Doctor Strange looking into a million different possibilities and trying to focus on the ridiculous million-and-first that turns out okay.

cat

01/10/2026