Hang onto Hope

Happy New Year! Here's to 2024.

It’s that one time of the year where we’re allowed to be sentimental and philosophical and everyone is writing their end-of-the-year lists, taking stock of the past twelve months. It’s that still and quiet moment of the night, the serene and somber foyer before entering sleep. Where the phones are off, and distractions are distant, and you can’t hide from yourself.

On a micro scale, New Year’s Eve is a taste of our final twilight, and so our year flashes before our eyes. We want to confirm it was full and not wasted, that we are grown and better, and further along towards happiness or success or whichever destination we’ve set in our minds as culmination.

New Year’s is sobering, but it is honest. This is when we resolve to be better because that’s what we earnestly want for ourselves. As shitty as the world is, it always strikes me how hopeful we are at this bend. Every year, on the dot. We circle back together and embark courageously forward behind promises to each other and covenants to ourselves. We’re animated by inspiration, literally translated as the air in our lungs. Deep breaths, clear minds, open hearts.

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about tomorrow, I stopped trying to figure out the future a long time ago. I submit to entropy, that the world will only get more random and disordered with time, especially in the absence of structure and leadership (and nobody’s in charge anymore). But the one thing I do bank on is Hope. I don’t know where it comes from and why, especially given the circumstances, but there’s always an ember that illuminates the darkest caverns. You’ll find that light in other people – adventurous youth, ambitious dreamers, and brave wanderers (this is why I’m so drawn to streetwear and street culture). If you follow Hope, you will find your way out of the hole. Remember, there is more sky than earth.

I worry about us. The lonely us, the scared and anxious us, the desperate and spiritually starved us. Mired in identity crises and existential perils: climate change, social unrest, wealth disparity. Choosing suicide and mayhem, we are a hollow generation grasping for pitchforks over forks at the table. I hate the wars, the one overseas and the one online. I can’t stand how we talk to each other. How we look at each other. Like a haunted house, we are squinting hardest at the blackest recesses to make out the boogeymen. This only leads us deeper into the darkness and further apart from safety: each other.

As we survive the night and emerge into the new year, identify the Hope in your world and hang onto it. Although it may seem sparse in the headlines, it is abundant in the people amongst you: your children exploring the garden, your partner quitting their job to follow a dream, a friend beset by a breakup only to try dating again. There is Hope in strangers as well, the local florist who counts on Love, the trader who anticipates the line turning up (at any moment now!), the teenager who believes their brand will prevail.

You can find Hope even in the people you are oriented to dislike, the ones you have been taught to reject. The ones who are more threatened by you than you are of them. Dismissing them is to dim your world, your own Hope. And at the end of it all, you will be left alone, to reckon with a nothingness that craters all inside.

Happy New Year, friends. To a bold and bright 2024 that we celebrate in unison. Hang onto Hope. We can’t go another year without it.