I’m walking down a rural road near my house at dusk, cresting a hill to see a beautiful sunset. The sky is bleeding—reds and purples melting into one another, the heavens lit like some impressionist painting. In the presence of so much fiery color, of a once-passively-blue sky turned to crimson spectacle, I melt away from myself. I suddenly feel intensely small.

The fear of embarrassment is a powerful disincentive. We’re social creatures with a deep-seated fear of feeling out-of-place or being made fun of—and in the awkward and anxious years of high school, facing the dual urges to somehow fit in and ‘find ourselves’ all at once, that fear runs deeper. We want to put ourselves ‘out there’, but that fear holds us back. Revealing something personal, something deeply tied to our identity, is an intensely vulnerable experience—and therefore a profoundly scary one.

Among the most popular idioms in English is the phrase, “every cloud has a silver lining.” It’s often true—clouds with the sun behind them can have a silver glow around the edges, surrounded by the sun’s light despite obscuring it. Bad things, as the saying then implies, will be accompanied by good, made bittersweet by some accompanying blessing. It’s an unmistakably powerful metaphor, and its simple eloquence seems to imply the truth of the phrase’s figurative sense. We often repeat it as those around us go through difficulty—we want to help, we want to reassure, and we’ll resort to clichés if we need to. However reassuring it may be, though, just like a cloud, the phrase’s initial sweeping elegance obscures something that, deep down, doesn’t have much weight at all.

I’m lying in bed in the late spring of 2020, my head clouded with scribbling thoughts. My life feels hollow—stripped of its charm, school reduced to screens and friendships reduced to FaceTime. A familiar question rears its head: Why? Why am I doing any of this? Why make and keep friends, why go to meetings and involve myself, Zoom after Zoom after Zoom, why care—when it all ends, inevitably, soon, the same way. Like a child, I asked, and asked, and asked—and always came up empty. It seemed that life itself was hollow—everything around me, everything I was, everyone I loved. Questions rang out like chiming bells–Why? Why? Why?

In the summer of 2019, I went backpacking down the Virginian Appalachian Trail—and it was painful. Day after day after day, after swatting away bugs through the night, after an ungenerous breakfast and the promise of a 16-mile day ahead, I sweated and ached and endured more than I ever had before. And yet, an inexplicable feeling of joy washed over me as I crested a hill far steeper than I thought, seeing the Blue Ridge Mountains laid out before me like a painting. I remember 1AM conversations under the stars fueled by intense mutual earnestness, laughing more deeply than I ever had at stupid jokes.

We love to put things in boxes, and usually in a way that glosses over the complexity of the things we’re trying to categorize. Admittedly, categorizing someone as a Democrat or Republican is much easier than keeping track of a more complicated individual ideology, and a checkbox for ‘race’ on a form is easier to deal with than the deeper details of someone’s heritage. But although these shortcuts are helpful, they can easily start to seem real if we forget that they’re fundamentally simplifications. We start seeing political beliefs, race, and even identity as a series of checkboxes, and we lose nuance.

Humanity’s natural curiosity is fascinating. We’ve mastered all we need to survive, we’ve beaten the evolutionary game, and yet we want more. We venture to the moon and to Mars, we search for mathematical and philosophical truth, we conduct studies, do research and look for answers (even when there’s no immediate reason to do so). 

Humans have long predicted the end of the world. There have been catastrophic prophecies as long as there have been people—with some large-scale prediction of the end occurring at least every few years. A famous recent example is in 2012—the end of the 5,000-year-old Mayan calendar led many to believe that disaster was imminent.