I am many things, but an optimist is not one of them. To label myself an outright pessimist would be an overstatement, but as anyone who knows me can attest, I tend to dwell on the morbid.
Perhaps that wouldn’t be the case if there wasn’t so much morbid to dwell on. But there is. Every morning, I wake up in a comfortable bed in a cozy house to a family I love, pick up my phone to get my morning New York Times fix, and am immediately depressed. Headline: the election is a mess. Another headline: global warming is, impossibly, even worse than we thought. People won’t stop killing other people, and A.I. is single-handedly destroying our ability to rely on visual and audio media for verification.
Sometimes I swear that, back when I was younger, things weren’t this dire. Surely, there was a time when more people got along and we weren’t a planet spiraling towards doom: a halcyon era to which we will one day return. But, looking back, I realize that the world wasn’t any different. I was just a child frolicking on a playground, less aware of its cruelties and shortcomings. Sometimes, I’d give anything to be back in that bliss, free of weltschmerz.
Weltschmerz, directly translated from German, means “world-pain.” It’s the fatigued ache of the soul when one believes that the world will never live up to the idealized version of it they hold in their mind. Symptoms of weltschmerz include an acute awareness of the pain and suffering occurring around the world and a weary, resigned, melancholia. It comes and goes in waves, abated by temporary distractions only to surge forth at the slightest reminder of the bigger, grimmer picture.
Weltschmerz hits me the hardest sometimes in my happiest moments. Just last week, a handful of my fellow Westview Ambassadors and I visited Deer Canyon for a playground playdate, where we spent an hour acting just like every other kid enjoying their lunch playtime. Children swarmed us, asking us to read to them, play with them, and, in one case, rate a drawing out of 10.
The playground was a near-utopia. Nothing but collaboration, laughter, and children with bright futures. They talked about the world like it was perfect, just waiting for them to grow up and take it on.
Briefly, alone in the middle of the blacktop, I twinged with weltschmerz. This was how the world should be: an elementary school playground, not the mess that I read about every morning. That too complicated, too angry, too loud in all the wrong ways mess.
My agonizing was interrupted by a chipper invitation to play basketball from a young girl. She had a pastel shirt and an unbridled, joyful gleam in her eyes that told me she’d never had to use the word weltschmerz, or that it had any reason to exist. I took her up on it and a few minutes later, we were having so much fun that my weltschmerz, for a moment, melted away. I’m not an optimist. In my battle with weltschmerz, I can’t say I think I’ll win the war. But, back on the playground, winning a battle was enough.
