There is a particular sort of exhaustion that comes from trying to be a decent person in a world that doesn’t always appear to reward it. Especially when you have to acknowledge that you haven’t always been a decent person yourself.

Not a good person. That’s a different thing, and an altogether more complicated claim to make about yourself. But a decent one. Someone who tries to mean what they say, do what they promise, and leave the people they encounter a little better off for having known them.

It’s not an especially glamorous ambition. There are no medals for behaving with integrity when nobody is looking. No certificate for telling the truth when a lie would have been considerably more convenient. No great cosmic scoreboard keeping track of the times you could have been cruel and chose not to be. In fact, the only person who could keep a total score is yourself. And sometimes, frankly, that’s fucking annoying.

Because other people don’t always play by the same rules. They make promises they don’t intend to keep. They take what they need and call it love, friendship, opportunity, whatever word makes the theft easier to swallow. They mistake kindness for an unlimited resource, honesty for a negotiating position, and forgiveness for permission. And you’re left wondering whether being decent is just another way of volunteering to be disappointed.

I don’t think it is. Or perhaps more accurately, I refuse to believe it is.

There’s a difference.

Yes, this is more breakup content. And yes, there’s something to be said for “not all men, but always a man”. But if you spend your life expecting people to disappoint you, eventually they become the only thing you’re looking for. And that will grind you down. I can’t get with that. There are too many good people and interesting things in the world to let the bastards become the whole story.

Hope isn’t necessarily the conviction that everything will turn out well. Sometimes it’s the considerably more stubborn decision that the possibility of things going badly isn’t sufficient reason to stop trying. It’s choosing to remain open to people when experience has provided a fairly comprehensive argument for becoming a suspicious old bastard.

It’s making plans. Buying tickets. Starting projects. Agreeing to coffee. Telling someone you love their work. Saying what you mean without first calculating whether the other person deserves to hear it… It’s also knowing when to leave. Which I still haven’t mastered.

Because honesty isn’t the same as endless tolerance, and kindness doesn’t require you to keep offering yourself to people who treat your trust as something disposable. You can wish someone well from a considerable distance. You can understand why someone behaved badly without volunteering to experience it again. You can forgive, or not forgive, and still get on with the business of living. None of these things require a dramatic declaration.

Sometimes you just go home, put the kettle on, and carry on.

And perhaps that’s the part I’m increasingly interested in. Not the grand transformations. Not the dramatic before-and-after photographs, or the insistence that every unpleasant experience must eventually reveal itself as a valuable lesson.

Sometimes something awful happens and it remains awful.

Sometimes people disappoint you and you can never trust their explanation.

Sometimes the lesson is simply that you would prefer not to do that again.

But the world remains full of things worth participating in. There are people making ridiculous, beautiful things for no particular reason. People who will remember how you take your coffee. People who will tell you about something they’ve been reading with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for announcing a major scientific discovery.

There are conversations that last longer than expected. Games that become stories people tell for years. Music that catches you completely unprepared. Little moments of generosity that nobody thought to photograph. There are people who do what they say they’ll do, just simply because they do. And I think those people deserve our attention rather more than the ones who don’t.

Because the richness of a life isn’t necessarily measured by what you’ve accumulated, achieved, or managed to keep for yourself. Some of it is in what you can share.

Your time. Your enthusiasm. Your terrible jokes. Your obscure knowledge of something nobody else in the room particularly cares about. The things you’ve made. The things you’ve learned. The willingness to sit with somebody when they don’t have anything entertaining to say. And the ability to let other people bring those things to you in return.

That last bit matters.

You cannot build a rich life entirely out of giving. There has to be room for receiving, for being surprised, for letting somebody else make the effort. Otherwise you’re not sharing a life. You’re providing a service.

Which brings me back to honesty. I don’t mean brutal honesty, that rather convenient excuse people use when they want to be unpleasant without accepting responsibility for it.

I mean making your actions recognisable alongside your words. If you say someone matters, behave as though they matter. If you promise something, meet your commitments. If you change your mind, say so.

If you can’t give someone what they’re asking for, don’t keep them waiting in the hope that they’ll eventually stop asking.

And if you want a life filled with interesting, generous, complicated people, perhaps the most sensible place to begin is by being someone with whom those people can safely share theirs.

Not because the universe will reward you. It might not.

Not because good behaviour guarantees good outcomes. It demonstrably doesn’t.

But because every dishonest action introduces another small distance between the life you say you want and the life you’re actually making. And I don’t particularly want to live in that gap.

I want the coffee, the conversations, the art, the music, the absurdly complicated games and the people who turn up when they say they will. I want to remain capable of enthusiasm without feeling foolish for it. I want to be able to look at the things I’ve done and recognise myself in them, even when the outcome wasn’t what I hoped for. Especially when the outcome wasn’t what I hoped for.

I want a simple life, but not a small one.

And I want to share it with people who understand that being invited into somebody else’s life is a privilege, not an entitlement. So yes, nolite bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. It’s famously not proper Latin, which feels appropriate. A slightly pretentious piece of nonsense that has nevertheless become a perfectly serviceable declaration of resistance.

But I don’t want to spend my life resisting bastards. That would give them rather too much influence over the plot. I’d much rather spend it making things, learning things, loving people, being loved, and occasionally being an insufferable know-it-all about the wider Weyland Yutani mythos.

Hope, I think, is allowing yourself to continue doing those things without demanding a guarantee. And honesty is how you make sure the life you’re building is actually one you want to inhabit.

Don’t abandon hope, Lads. We’ve got better things to do.