Claire Berlinski.Verified account

Of course the headline is clickbait. "Feeling hopeless?" Why yes, I am! Indeed, I believe--from survey data and conversation with others--that many of us are experiencing this emotion.

It's not comprehensive, in my case; I understand that there are also many reasonable grounds for hope. But this is a bleak, unusual moment, and the editor who put that headline on the piece--and put it on the front page--understood full well that this would get a lot of clicks.

And at some level, understood why. And the essay contains some points I expected to see: It points out what many younger Americans probably don't and can't really understand: how optimistic and hopeful Americans once were.

We *all* thought the world was getting more democratic, just and free. And it notes the peculiar despair that has clearly settled in over the US--and the world, I note--because of the pandemic and US dysfunction. But apart from that, the essay makes no sense to me.

The climate hysteria, the anti-humanism, the hostility to technology, the urge to revert to primitivism--when I read that, I become *more* hopeless. Irrationality, extremism, and hostility to "geoengineering or some other techno-fix" are the last thing we need.

The enforced happiness--"I've concluded the world is ending, but it's a kind of liberation!"--is a direct parallel with the Power-of-Positive-Thinking cult in which Trump was supposedly raised. The full range of human emotions are not allowed, ultimately.

Tragedy, gravity, solemnity, mournfulness, gravitas--not allowed. Anyway, the essay is self-indulgent--*we* may die, but the human race will adapt to climate change. There will be wars and famines in the future:

Just as there have been in the past. But humanity has endured. We're born, we live, we suffer, we die. La vie est brève: Un peu d’espoir, Un peu de rève Et puis—Bon soir!