2026 / Cabinet of Thoughts

December 39, 2025:

It’s well into 2026 at the moment, but it feels like we’re in retrograde so I’m having a hard time advancing the year counter. I think the saddest thing of all is that we completely lack hope. From 1848 until the 21st millennium, humanity had some form of viable alternative to the world order, even as the latter continuously dismantled dignity and happiness around the globe. Children were born into a world where hope was still alive, even if just barely, and young adults, eyes yet full of starlight and not dulled by the immiseration of life, could still imagine a better future as they blinked through an overlay of dream, or they could pick up a pen, pamphlet or rifle in the name of something better. The option was there, and as anyone in a situation of hopelessness knows, Hope is the foundation of all happiness and every positive emotion in the world. She is sinister yet all-powerful, since her mere existence, however distant, is enough to elate millions upon billions. She’s like the sun – you do not need to look at her to see her. When alive, she cannot not be seen. You know she’s there and you can breathe again. Nothing else has this power. Hope is Tinúviel dancing in Morgoth’s court, surrounded by absolute darkness, deep in the caverns of Angband. You’d think hope should be immortal. But she wasn’t. She’s gone now. She left this world for somewhere nicer. We have nothing now. The demon is omnipresent and politics is dead. It died a few decades back, but its funeral was truly held these past few years.

Nowadays what are children or emerging minds supposed to aspire to? Initially, as humans first developed cognition and formed civilizations, Hope was bright in the sky, white and luminous. Her heart brimmed with possibilities, all good avenues that could be taken – so many opportunities, so many beautiful futures. But by the nineteenth century, watching us, she got severely disillusioned and turned bright red in protest, mirroring our blood. She became the crimson star, fluttering in the night sky, barely visible at times, yet always there, reminding mankind that something better is possible. But we murdered and grave-stomped her. She’s gone now – gone far away. Now there is only darkness where her star once pulsed. Red rotted into black and an enormous void has now emerged where once she shone with all her glory, where billions of children, workers, farmers gazed up for solace, for hope, and for their next breath. That void now continuously siphons the hopes and futures of those still born in this abandoned world, tangled up in the dark bowels of evil, suffering, and inequality from birth to death. What sort of rescue operation is even possible for the rigged idiocy that we call the modern world ‘order’ without any hope for a better alternative? Dünyanın neresine bakarsan, orada yitik bir çocuk ağlıyor. Ağlarken kimse duymasın diye tuttuğu nefeste boğuluyor.