There's a word for wanting to fix a broken world and quietly suspecting it's beyond saving, at the same time. It's not in any dictionary. A documentary made it up this year: apocaloptimism.

Eric ran into the feeling twice in one week: once watching a man methodically pick up trash from a roadside ditch that would fill right back up within days, and once catching himself in it, admitting his own uneasy mix of hope and dread while wading into work on artificial intelligence.

Both moments point back to something older than the word, something Jesus's own followers felt watching a man who "went about doing good" end up dead like a failure. The answer isn't optimism. It isn't pessimism either. It's something else.

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
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