 I mean, the thing about pain is that it is just quite insistent. It will not shut up. Anyway, my back hurts, Hank. Good morning, it's Tuesday. Can we talk for a little bit about the seductiveness of despair? Oh, God. It's easy for me to find despair compelling first because it's simple. Like, as a worldview, it has this reassuring, if horrifying, consistency. Like, you know, life sucks and justice is everywhere and worsening. Not only are we all going to die, in time, the sun will boil the oceans and every memory of what we ever said or did or loved will evaporate. There's no need, as Fitzgerald once put it, to hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort with the sense of the necessity to struggle because there is only the futility of effort. All right, let's go check on the weather. It's cold. It's been cold forever. And it will never not be cold. Back to you in the studio. Awesome. Well, that guy's bringing good energy to the party. Then there's the fact that if you look around seeking justification for despair, you will find it. Like, how are we supposed to respond except with despair to the fact that 1.6 million people are going to die of tuberculosis this year, not because we lack understanding of the disease or treatments to cure it, but because of inequitable access to health care and impoverishment and other forms of injustice. All right, I'm going to try standing. And that's not even to mention all of the, like, personal horrors, right? The feeling that I'm failing those I love or that I'm a burden on them, the fear, the grief. Despair addresses all of this in a straightforward, holistic way. I despair because despair is the correct response to all this awfulness. But as I see it, there are two big shortcomings to this dead soul, hopelessness. First, it's not helpful. And second, it's not true or at least it's not the whole truth. Despair is simple, whereas consciousness is multitudinous. Mere despair won't suffice in response to life because mere anything won't suffice, including mere optimism or mere outrage, right? Like the idea that the eventual boiling of oceans negates the work that we do together implies that the lives of others are meaningless just because they're temporary. And I just don't agree with that. The idea that I'm merely a burden implies that a person needing care makes them less valuable, which again, I just don't believe. And the idea that the world is hopeless because millions of kids are gonna die needlessly due to impoverishment this year ignores the fact that 30 years ago, kids were twice as likely to die before the age of five. And that change did not happen naturally or inevitably. It happened because many people collaborated across time and space. They collaborated in anger and frustration and disgust, but not in hopelessness. I'm hiding behind the plant. I don't know why, but this actually hurts less than regular setting. But the thing is regressive change also involves lots of organization and collaboration, right? Like the organized attempts to overturn free and fair elections or to take away the rights of the marginalized. I'm not saying that when we work together, we only change the world for the better. I'm saying that despair is the wrong response to consciousness because we are going to change the world together and we should be thoughtful about how we do it. Destruction is often fast, loud, and dramatic, whereas reparative work tends to be slow and quiet and unspectacular. But that's where the hope is for me. And I don't just mean in big projects like building a maternity hospital in Sierra Leone or working to expand voting rights in the US. I also mean in the quiet human moments that we can give each other. Last week, my friend Chris called me because he knew that I was in pain and he said, man, I'm so sorry, your back hurts, that sucks. And then he listened to me talk about it and he believed me. And that didn't really help with the pain, but it did help. I just keep coming back to that old Philip Larkin poem. We must be careful of each other. We must be kind while there is still time. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.