Hope is often lauded as a miracle emotion which can help us see through the longest of nights towards the dawn. Each to their own, but I've never been one for hope, particularly over the past five years of doing this work. To me, feeling hopeful about the world seems like a form of ignorance, a deliberate ignoring the cold and ugly truths about the state we're in. Hope seems like a passive salve for an imaginary wound because nothing about this is superficial nor limited to our own individual experiences; the very matter of our world is changing before our eyes and we, our societies, our lives and our futures with it.

I do not want to feel hopeful. I want to feel angry, deeply angry about the injustice and cruelty and horror and callousness and even idiocy which marks the waves of history. I am angry at how impossible it seems to imagine such cruelty and horror on an interpersonal level and yet it seems to be the one thing humanity can scale up in short periods of time. Goodness—goodness is what I feel us when we are flesh and blood standing opposite one another and sharing a pocket of quietude; where does that goodness go when those who gather in secured rooms make decisions about our lives?

I have been deeply angry these past five years. It has kept me afloat, kept me sharp. It has helped me keep working despite the mountain of terrors to climb becoming taller every day. But yesterday, when I read that one of the victims of the mass shooting at Bondi beach was a Holocaust survivor, I didn't feel angry anymore. Instead, I wept.

If you've ever been in therapy, you may have been told that anger is a "secondary" emotion, meaning that it is often used to mask a more vulnerable, uncomfortable emotion like shame, guilt or sadness. Anger is an empowering response to situations that make us feel like we've been punched in the gut. It feels like a form of action against the unacceptable. But, often, that which is unacceptable is also utterly outwith our control, like the death of someone we love. Anger in the face of death is an attempt to ride above the waves of sadness that need to wash over us so they can carry us towards new shores.

I feel those waves rising now, after years of anger, and I am not sure how these two feelings relate. Anger is what propels us to change what we can, and sadness is what moves us to see things as they are. But, sometimes, the way things are feels too unconquerably awful to imagine that change is possible. Alex Kleytman was just a child when he survived the Holocaust. To have been killed by anti-semitic hatred 80 years after the end of WWII is like being crushed under the wheel of time. It should take the breath out of all of us.

The extreme violence experienced all over the world at this very moment—so acutely aflame at this very moment—is both unimaginable and, seemingly, inevitable. It is both alien and intimate, repulsive and recognisable. And therein lie the two emotions whose relationship I cannot make sense of: I am angry because such violence is terrible and wrong and senseless; I am sad because this violence has long been known to us. It is only when we know the shape of a thing that we know how to grieve it.

Last year, around this time, I wrote a piece titled An Uncanny End detailing the many atrocities that were taking place then, atrocities which I believed signalled the beginning of the end for our particular era. I wrote that the world we were waking up to was unprecedented. But now I fear I was wrong. Now I fear this era will not end, it will merely restart, the wheel of time turning into a well-dug groove and picking up where it once left off. And so I am left with the question: How do I feel angry about that which I know the shape of, that which I grew up learning how to grieve?

How do we feel like we can begin to change the world when nothing, we learn over time, by watching, ever really changes at all?