Our souls have been poisoned
The world is not alright. Perhaps it never was.
I never considered myself naive. I always knew that injustice and strife are parts of the world we live in. And I always thought they will remain so. But I was always an optimist. A real optimist. My heart and my mind were always certain that things will turn out alright in the long term, for myself and for humanity.
Maybe it's because I was born privileged. I had two genuinely good parents, I was born in what most people would call an upper-middle class family, I was never truly deprived of anything, I was never discriminated against, and I was loved so much by my wife, my friends, and my family.
Maybe it's because of Carl Sagan who shaped my very being when I was just 15 years old. He who made me awe at the wonders of the Cosmos, he who showed me that science is poetry, he who explained that being free means to have shed the chains of superstition and prejudice.
Maybe it was J.R.R. Tolkien who, when I was just 12 years old, taught me how to escape from this banal and mundane world.
I don't really know whose fault is it, but throughout my life my "hope pool" was always overflowing. I would gladly engage in conversations that lasted hours with friends and strangers to help them not despair. I felt as if history, and art, and science were with me in every debate, guiding my words, my beacons of light.
But one can be beaten down only so much before they succumb to their wounds.
Slowly, but steadily, the past 10 years have dried out my hope pool. My mind cannot process the world we live in. No matter what I do, I cannot fathom that this is it. I desperately try to evoke my inner Sagan, my inner Tolkien, my inner Jean-Luc Picard, but they're not there for me.
The world has poisoned my soul, and has done so for so long that it managed to kill a part of me. My favourite part of me.
And I despair.
— A.