"Everything sucks is an incredibly powerful story; it just happens to not be true."

Author John Green on despair and hope

Author John Green ("The Fault in Our Stars" and more) notes how much the world and our reactions can lead us to feel despair.

In a post about her Wild Card podcast interview on NPR, Rachel Martin writes, "everything he creates — books, essays, YouTube shows — they are all designed to make you engage with the broader world and to care about other people."

From Facebook reel, a clip of interview:

John Green: "I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition and I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life and something that I have to battle on a on an almost daily basis.

"So much of my brain tells me that there's no reason to get out of bed or do anything because nothing matters, because the oceans are going to boil in a billion years, because the world is going to end long before that for me and for everyone I love and probably for humanity itself.

"And people are so monstrous and capable of such horrific behavior toward each other and toward the world, and that despair is so powerful because it tells this complete holistic story; it explains everything.

"Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks. What an incredibly powerful way to look at the world. It just happens to not be true."

More from the interview post:

Question 1: Do you spend more time in your head or in the world?

John Green: It's not a particularly close competition there, Rachel.

Rachel Martin: Somehow I thought you were going to say that.

Green: I spend more time in my head by a very wide margin.

Martin: What's it like there?

Green: Pretty intense, to be honest with you. It's a little overwhelming sometimes. I almost can't say what it's like there. It's like trying to describe the ocean to somebody who's never seen it. What did Kafka say? That "a book can be the axe that breaks the frozen sea within?" I'm always trying to break that frozen sea within.

There's always rooms inside of my mind that I've never visited or I don't know how to get to. That's a lot of why I make creative work, because it's a chance to visit those rooms somehow. My understanding of my own self expands in some ways. But I spend a lot of time in my head and not all of it is healthy if I'm honest with you.

From interview John Green cherishes life by writing about death By Rachel Martin, NPR March 27, 2025.

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