By the second half of last year, an impending sense of doom had filled my daily life. On a personal level, I was perfectly happy. There was no aspect of my daily life I did not enjoy. Yet, there was a white noise in the background of my mind: it does not really matter that I am happy because everything else sucks and the world is ending.

As much as I love my academic quests in social sciences, I feel they often train you to see the ugliness of the world, thoroughly, through a magnifying glass, until you are aware of every single way in which the system malfunctions. After four back-to-back classes in the day, each dissecting and examining a specific aspect of the world's ugliness, my mind was left hyper-aware of so many problems yet had no solutions.

I have never been the biggest fan of the half-full glass crowd, because some things bear no greater purpose to me. Overcoming them does not represent a character arc or a heroic act of resilience, but a demonstration of primordial survival instinct. Sometimes things just suck.

I thought, on some level, that being so aware of the world’s ugliness would protect me from it. Instead, I have to feel it, experience it, and think about it leaving no room for beauty.

It is difficult to imagine practicing empathy while creating space for this beauty. I could try to enjoy my morning coffee, or I could be the perfect critical thinker and analyze the exploitative chains of production that led to me having this coffee. I could enjoy a sunny day in the middle of winter, but I’ve been taught to not for a minute forget climate change. I can be happy when I am flying home to see my family, but I cannot be too happy because, for a variety of ugly reasons, a lot of people do not have the privilege to go see their families often.

The infiltration of moral perfectionism has thickened the doom fog of my existence. Whether in class discussions, social media discourse, or conversations with friends, I feel as if I have to be a martyr to prove that I care.

The martyrdom narrative that often accompanies activism and social progress has connected happiness with ignorance: if you dare be too happy, you are ignorant; if you dare be too sad, you are victimizing yourself. So how do we exist in this moral absolutism, where it seems practically impossible to be deeply empathetic while acknowledging that there is some beauty in it too?

I have come to realize that focusing on the world’s ugliness as a definitive and permanent state contributes in no way to the process of beautification. If you let the doom take up the entire view, you do not see anything worth saving. But, if you squint a little bit through the fog, you can take a peek at all the things that may still exemplify what you fight for.

The world in its entirety, is not so different from a singular person. It is deeply flawed but it evolves. And when you come to think about it, you probably always have a bit of faith left for people who have hit rock bottom.

You do not need to be okay with everything that happens in the world. But it is not an act of apathy to acknowledge that sometimes, there may also be good things that bring joy and laughter. Allowing yourself to experience that joy is not a moral crime and it does not dismiss the downsides, it allows you to accumulate strength and remember why the bad ones are worth fighting.

When despair is the status quo, the true act of rebellion is radical hope, rooted in the empathy and love that make life a living rather than a surviving experience. Frankly, it takes much more bravery to learn to love the beauty of life with its darkest faces, than to drown it into a pool of academic jargon and theories in the name of awareness.