There is a Climate Clock looming over Union Square.  It is supposed to remind us of the time we have left to limit global warming to 1.5ºC, although it looks like we are pretty much there already.  The monument has been ticking away for the seven years I have lived in Manhattan.  I imagine most people ignore it as they go about their lives, too preoccupied by our own dramas and dreams to take in the magnitude of the situation.  It says we have about four years.  Fitting, given this election cycle and the clowns lined up to destroy the planet faster than ever. 

If there is any comfort to be had in climate despair is that there is plenty of company.  This particular brand of blues has colored most of my life, and while a Harris win would have been more akin to a run-of-the-mill log boat ride towards environmental destruction than the current megalodon rollercoaster we are currently boarding, neither outcome would have been much of a comfort given everything we know.

The election came and went in unseasonably warm weather during a drought, further exasperating personal and collective existential dread.  Depression is a demanding mistress, but she has been very supportive of ever more frequent waves of nihilism that come over me.  The first NYC white Christmas in 15 years gave some foolish feeling of normalcy, that is until the first week of 2025 brought human bird flu deaths and literal hell fires, amongst a growing list of terrible news.  It probably doesn’t help that I have been indulging in TikTok under the justification that it will be gone soon, so I might as well enjoy it.  If people are allowed to binge watch TV shows, why can’t I gorge on that oh so sweet algorithm?

Given everything I have said so far, I am probably not the best person to write about hope, although I have been thinking about it in light of there being not a lot of reasons to have it now.  It’s not that I have a problem with hope, it seems quite necessary for life to go on, etc. My only critique is that it can be used to lull people into inaction, or put their power and faith in institutions and people who promise to take care of problems but instead make them worse, see: late stage capitalism. 

I have been under this impression that inspiration remains separate from and somehow superior to hope, but they definitely fall under the same genus, at least.  I am finding in these incredibly dark times that I seek out inspiration as the fuel needed to keep going.  To come across a poem or an exhibition or book that can spark an idea, that can drive me to materialize it into something new, that is everything.  Put it up there with food, water, shelter, sleep.  If hope is what keeps people from giving up, to have faith that there will be good things ahead, then inspiration is the fuel to actualize them.

New Year’s gets a bad rep, people complain that it’s a bunch of running around and a big letdown.  I, however, am a sucker for this final hurrah of the holiday season.  I don’t really care about being where the people are, as long as I am with good company, and what I like the most is the resolutions of it all.  And what are resolutions if not big ol’ earnest proclamations of hope?  To think there is a holiday that celebrates our agency and the belief that we can change, that we aren’t doomed to some stagnate version of ourselves.  What does such aspiration look like in the end times?  What do we want to become in an already finite life made ever more precarious?

It seems that despite the despair, or even because of it, I want to create more, that it feels like a race against time.  But I also want to mobilize, scream, fuck shit up, and the like.  But really, it’s all one in of the same, no?  May you make many things out of what is bound to be another unprecedented year!