Giving up as Hope

Just a few months before his matriculation from a master’s program in the humanities at a university in Beirut, which was expected to take place in the summer of 2025, my patient, a highly intelligent and sensitive young Lebanese student, dropped out. What’s the use of the university in a world that’s falling apart, he said, and when the humanities are rendered useless? He also felt outraged about the university’s decision to continue classes amid the brutal Israeli war on Lebanon that terrorized the country and decimated many neighborhoods and turned them into rubble. His decision to drop out panicked his family. The master’s degree was supposed to be his ticket out of the rubble, the corruption, the economic collapse, and endless political disasters and wars. Personally, I know this educational exit plan very well, as I grew up during the Lebanese civil war and lived through two Israeli invasions and a postwar corrupt government run by warlords. I joined many young educated Lebanese who thought that leaving was their only hope. And yet, the level of destruction that I lived through dwarfs compared to what this younger generation has experienced – worse corruption, political deadness, intensified Israeli military aggression, and the largest nonnuclear explosion in modern history (the port explosion of 2020). We might expect such amplified destructiveness to entice more exodus, and to a large extent it has, and yet this exodus is taking place into a world stage that has become much more fragmented and unwelcoming to immigrants and refugees. As such, although I too felt concerned for my patient, I totally understood his decision. How can our youths feel hopeful launching into a world that has been rendered so unwelcoming? Throughout the world, our youths’ future homes have been made physically uninhabitable, increasingly unaffordable, and even when affordable, turned into lonesome, scary places.

In this unwelcoming landscape, I have observed over the past several year