Opinion: The Cure for Despair is Wonder, Awe, and Humility
Photo: c/o Caitlin Johnstone
by Caitlin Johnstone
The following column appeared originally in Caitlin Johnstone’s blog, “Daily Writings on the End of Illusions,” on July 8, 2026. It is reposted here under Creative Commons license.
The cure for despair is awe, wonder, and humility.
It is true that there is unfathomable cruelty in this world that will bring you crashing to your knees. And it is true that we are ruled by monsters with deeply entrenched power.
But it is also true that we live in a mysterious universe whose ways are almost entirely unknown to us. And it is also true that we don’t really have any idea where humanity’s adventure is headed.
We are made of particles too small for our minds to imagine, spinning through an expanse of blackness too vast for our minds to comprehend, because we are naked apes whose fleshy brains were evolved for the purpose of obtaining fruit and meat, not for understanding absolute reality and cracking the enigmas of the cosmos.
Our best scientists have produced no answers to any of life’s most significant questions, having to content themselves with a humble shrug over the most basic inquiries like why anything exists, what matter is, and what is the nature of consciousness. The greatest minds of the last two hundred years were baby monkeys poking at a supercomputer and yelping at the beeps.
We come into this world dazzled and clueless, we stumble around making our best guesses for a few years, and then we take our exit with more or less the same amount of knowledge we had when we showed up. An insignificant rounding error’s worth of understanding, in the grand scheme of things.
All I’m saying is we don’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s helpful to hold some humility about this while taking action and trying to effect positive change in the world. We’re all just children trying to figure this thing out together based on a very, very limited understanding of what’s happening and how things work.
We’re going to fail a lot. We’re going to lose a lot. We’re going to make a ton of mistakes. We’re going to get confused. Of course we are. We’re a bunch of cute little idiots.
So what do we do? We keep trucking along. We stumble through life trying to make the world a better place as effectively as we can, making our best guesses about the next step to take along the journey using these dopey little monkey brains that our species evolved a blink of an eye ago.
We study. We organize. We take action. We talk to people. We go to meetings and have patience with how stupid and frustrating they can be. We share our tiny little cups of information with those who don’t have it and open people’s minds to the possibility that a better world is possible.
And in the meantime, there’s awe and wonder. No matter what happens or how badly things go, for a few short years we get to be on this astonishingly beautiful planet together. We get to look at its beauty with our eyes, listen to its beauty with our ears, let its beauty sing its glory in the physical sensations in the body, as we meander around through a fascinating world that we will never, ever understand.
How great is that?
You have access to this always, in each moment. Start from where you are. The emotions you’re feeling in your body. The thoughts dancing around in your head. The visual field right in front of you. The sounds in the room. The feeling of the air moving through your respiratory system. The feeling on your flesh of whatever surface our planet’s gravity is holding you to right now.
It’s an explosion of miracles, and it is radiantly beautiful. If you can’t find the beauty right now, keep looking. It’s there. I swear to you it is.
If you can let the beauty and wonder in while doing what you can to improve the world, there is no reason despair should ever touch you. Just put in your best effort while relishing each moment of this delicious terrestrial existence, and despair will find no purchase within you.
Caitlin Johnstone is a reader-funded journalist, essayist, painter and poet based in Melbourne, Australia. She writes with her American husband, Tim Foley. She has published her writing in many outlets. She writes about politics, economics, media, feminism and the nature of consciousness. She is the author of the illustrated poetry book Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers.