Lift Up Your Hearts!

In August of 2018, my friend Eric Schultz posted an article that struck me to the heart, and I’ve been meaning ever since to write about the thoughts it inspired.

Warning to procrastinators: Don’t. Today I went to re-read the article and discovered that it was no longer available on Eric’s Occasional CEO site. Worse, though I thought I had saved copies of the article, it turns out they were merely copies of the link, which did me no good. Even the Wayback Machine failed me.

Eric found a draft version of the post and put it back up here. It’s not as polished as I remember the original being, but you’ll get the idea. In trying to fathom why it disappeared, he suggested that maybe he had decided it was too dark and took it down. Maybe he did—though having had one of my own posts removed from Facebook by the corporate censors, and heard similar stories from others, I no longer dismiss the notion that some disappearances might be less than innocent. In any case, dark as the post may have been, what I took away from it was hope.

For several years now I have been concerned by the number of people who look around and are overcome by despair. Despair deep enough that they have determined to have no children, because “how could I bring a child into such a terrible world?” If suicide is the extreme expression of individual hopelessness, surely this is the same attitude on a much larger scale.

The odd thing is, though they have this despondency in common, people are coming to this point from many different places, and with many different fears. Climate change, the election of President Trump, an asteroid hitting the earth, terrorism, pandemic, widespread civil unrest, and the takeover of our world by super-intelligent computers are only a few of the disasters on the brink of ending not only the world as we know it, but any world worth living in. How should we live in such times? How dare we bring children into such a world?

I’ve long wanted to write an answer to these questions—to these fears. Eric’s post gave me a place to start. The chief difference is that, back in 2018, when I started writing this post in my mind, it was from a position of strength. I saw these fears as understandable, but not really rational; I certainly didn’t feel them myself to any great extent. But this past year has dealt a hard blow to my easy optimism, and I sometimes fight with despair myself. I still believe in the hope I had back in 2018, and I think what I will write will not be substantially different from what I would have written then. The difference is that now I will also be preaching to myself.

This morning I realized that I have put this post off for so long not only because it's such an important subject that I don't feel worthy to take on, but even more because I was trying to make it into a single post, which it just cannot be. Therefore I’m going to be tackling it in smaller segments, and have created a new category for them: "Last Battle."  At least that takes the pressure off of making everything hang together as a single narrative.

Next up? The hope I found in Eric’s dark essay.