The Absurdity of Hope

There’s a strange kind of comedy in being alive right now. Like watching the world spiral into chaos while holding a green smoothie and a gratitude journal, trying desperately to remember how to breathe through your nose and think positive thoughts.

Every headline is a punchline, every outrage a rerun. The absurdity isn’t that the world is burning — it’s that we’ve learned to scroll through the flames while meal-prepping for the perfect balance of macros.

And yet… there’s hope. Somewhere between the anxiety and the new cottage cheese recipe, hope has become the most rebellious thing we can practice.

Complicit and Comfortable

Let’s start here: we’re all complicit. Every one of us.We’re sipping our water with electrolytes, posting about mental health, while the world runs on suffering, distraction, and lithium-ion batteries. We rage-tweet about injustice on devices made in factories we’d never want to visit.

To be alive in 2025 is to be both incredibly lucky and quietly guilty. Lucky because, by statistical miracle, we get to sit in warm houses, reading essays like this one. Guilty because we know — even faintly — that most don’t get that luxury.

I think about Gaza — not as a political headline, but as a human one. Kids drawing under the sound of drones. Parents who’d give anything for the kind of boredom we complain about. It’s a tragedy beyond adjectives, and yet it fades into the background noise of our feeds.

The least we can do — maybe the most — is not look away entirely. To remember. To feel it. Even for a second. That’s the currency of compassion.

Breaking News, Brought to You by Existential Dread

The world’s been busy this week.

The Blue Jays are in the World Series — proof that miracles still happen in Canada, eh?!

Meanwhile, Trump’s called off tariff talks with Canada, because apparently we can’t even have free trade without free drama. Ukraine’s back in the headlines, the coral reefs are bleaching faster than my mid-2000s hair dye, and the temperature outside feels like a bad science fiction plot.

We’re living through a mashup of history’s greatest hits: a little bit of the Cold War, a touch of climate apocalypse, a sprinkle of reality TV.And through it all, most of us are just trying to get our steps in.

Sora AI and the Cult of Internet Slop

Somewhere on the internet, a new AI model called Sora is creating entire worlds out of text prompts — cities, faces, dreams — all generated faster than you can say late-stage capitalism.

And it’s mesmerizing. Like staring into an infinite mirror of our own nonsense.The internet has become this carnival of recycled slop — content about content about content — and we keep lining up for another ride.

But here’s the irony: Sora’s fake worlds might start feeling more coherent than the real one. The algorithms are reflecting us back, and the view isn’t flattering. It’s us — distracted, overstimulated, desperate to mean something.

(Read next: AI’s Takeover — how we became the content.)

Health, Hope, and the Cringe Factor

I’ve been dealing with some health stuff lately — the kind that forces you to slow down, breathe, and reconsider everything. When your body demands attention, your priorities shift. Suddenly, the big, messy world out there becomes a mirror for the one inside you.

Hope feels ridiculous at first. Like forcing yourself to smile in the mirror when everything hurts. Like trying to meditate in a burning building. But sometimes cringe is just the early stage of healing.

Hope isn’t naive anymore. It’s rebellious. It’s saying, “Yes, everything is on fire — but I’m still going to show up. I’m still going to try.”

(See also: 70,000 Thoughts a Day — how we think ourselves into chaos.)

The Absurdity of It All

Every generation thinks theirs is the weirdest — but ours might actually be right. We’re living in the first era where the line between tragedy and meme is measured in seconds. A war, a scandal, a sports victory — all just content for the feed.

And yet, in this theatre of chaos, people still fall in love. They still raise kids, write poetry, take walks, start over. They plant gardens even when the forecast predicts drought.

Maybe hope isn’t about denying the mess — it’s about insisting on beauty anyway. It’s the audacity of optimism when cynicism feels safer.

6 Headlines, One Heartbeat

Let’s rewind those world headlines, because there’s something oddly poetic in their overlap — a mash-up of absurdity, tragedy, and the occasional miracle:

1. Blue Jays in the World Series — Proof that long shots sometimes pay off. A whole country collectively manifesting hope between innings.

2. Trump’s Tariff Tantrum — A reminder that ego is undefeated, and diplomacy is just reality TV in a suit.

3. Bleaching Coral Reefs — Nature’s alarm clock, still ringing. We keep hitting snooze like the planet’s not on fire.

4. Ukraine’s Struggle — The cost of freedom, written daily in human lives, while the rest of us argue about algorithms.

5. Gaza’s Grief — The unbearable reminder of how far empathy still has to go.

6. My favourite: 3I/ATLAS — The Mothership.

Have you seen it yet? 3I/ATLAS — the interstellar object everyone’s suddenly looking up at, half in awe, half in existential dread.

It’s only the third interstellar visitor ever recorded — a cosmic drifter slicing through our solar system on a one-way ticket from who-knows-where. Scientists say it’s just a comet: a frozen piece of space debris tossed out by another star system millions of years ago.

Others — the internet philosophers, the Reddit dreamers — call it a mothership.

Draco reptilians, the V reboot, intergalactic AirBnB — take your pick.

But even if it is just a rock, it’s the most poetic rock we’ve seen in ages.

Because while we’re glued to screens, arguing about tariffs and timelines, something truly alien just drifted through our sky — completely indifferent to all of it.

It doesn’t care about our politics or our panic. It just is.

The universe keeps moving, whether or not we get our steps in.

Maybe that’s the real message of 3I/ATLAS: perspective.While we spiral about the latest headline, the cosmos casually sends us a postcard from infinity — a gentle “hey, don’t forget how small you are.”

Each headline is its own tragedy or triumph — but together they form a strange kind of chorus. A song about survival, delusion, and the fragile miracle of still being here.

Finding Light in the Noise

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations — you’ve survived another scroll through reality.The world is a full-blown dumpster fire — messy, loud, unpredictable — but that’s also what makes it alive.

Every day we get to choose: numbness or awareness, cynicism or curiosity. And maybe that’s what hope really is — not a feeling, but a decision. A daily act of rebellion against despair.

Because when everything feels too big, the smallest acts matter most. Calling a friend. Watering a plant. Making someone laugh. Reminding yourself that being alive — still, somehow, beautifully alive — is a privilege worth honouring.

And while most of us are just trying to stay afloat, there are still people like Greta Thunberg, standing on the deck of a flotilla heading toward Gaza, daring to do what world leaders won’t. She’s not old enough to rent a car in some countries, but she’s willing to risk arrest to remind us what moral courage looks like.

That’s hope, too — not the filtered, Instagram-friendly kind, but the kind that rows into a storm anyway.

We are all walking contradictions: complicit and compassionate, tired and grateful, scared and stubbornly optimistic.The world might be bananas — asinine, chaotic, and sometimes heartbreaking — but maybe that’s what makes it worth loving.

So let’s keep laughing, learning, building, healing. Let’s keep choosing hope, even when it makes us look ridiculous. Because in a world this wild, hope — messy, inconvenient, human hope — might just be the most rational thing we have left.