There's a reason why this Utopian Scholastic video is in my permanent side-bar here.
There are days when I cannot tell whether I am living or merely continuing.
I get up. I move. I perform the actions required of me. I support the people to whom I have pledged myself: my wife, our daughter, the small and sacred circle around which my life is built. I make the decisions that need to be made. I carry what needs to be carried. I try to be the reliable source of energy around them—to protect, encourage and provide, even when I cannot locate an equivalent source of energy within myself.
My love for them is real. That must be said clearly. It is not diminished by my exhaustion. They are not the cause of the emptiness. But there are times when love survives more completely than the person doing the loving. The commitment remains intact even as the interior structure begins to fray. I continue along the rails because I laid them in sincerity, because my promises were real, because even when I cannot feel myself moving, I know where I am supposed to go.
Sometimes I feel less like a person than a human automaton assembled from obligations, muscle memory and love.
The machine gets up. The machine answers. The machine helps. The machine remains gentle. The machine does not abandon anyone.
Inside it, somebody is crying.
That is the difficult truth beneath my listening. Utopian Scholastic is not simply calming music to me. It is not background ambience, an aesthetic curiosity or a fashionable excavation of the recent past. I listen because I am trying to reach something. I listen because some part of me is fading, and this sound gives that fading part a shape. It places a faint outline around what I can no longer hold directly.
Every day, the sound seems a little farther away.
But I can still hear it.
So I listen. I'll never stop listening. Even when the sound is gone, I know, I'll lean in still, out of muscle memory.
There was once a version of me for whom hope was not an argument. It was an instinctive posture toward the world. I did not have to prove that people could be good before I believed in their goodness. I did not need evidence that the Earth was worth loving. The future felt open—not guaranteed to be perfect, but open to discovery, improvement, beauty and surprise. Knowledge appeared to lead somewhere. Technology seemed capable of enlarging human life rather than consuming it. Education was not merely preparation for labour; it was an invitation into the mysteries of existence.
I remember the emotional architecture of that world: the soft electronic glow of educational television, the hum of a computer waiting patiently on a desk, maps and globes and science books, libraries that seemed larger inside than outside, school corridors made strange by afternoon light. Museum exhibits imagined the cities of tomorrow. Documentaries moved from the depths of the ocean to the edges of the universe and seemed to say that all of it belonged within the reach of human curiosity.
Even the silences felt different.
Perhaps some of these memories are composites. Perhaps I have repaired them with longing, warmed their colours and removed their harsher edges. I know the 1990s were not innocent. No period deserves to become an imaginary paradise purchased through the erasure of other people’s pain. What I miss is not a perfect decade that never existed. I miss an orientation toward life that did exist: a tentative, ordinary confidence that people might learn; that learning might make us better; that the future was a place we had some responsibility for building together.
That confidence has become difficult to access.
The world now often feels organised to extinguish it. Cruelty is made visible every hour and then transformed into entertainment. Our attention is harvested, divided and sold back to us. Every thought is pushed toward outrage; every identity becomes a market category; every disaster arrives beside an advertisement. We know more and understand less. We are connected to everyone and held by no one. We consume so much evidence of human life that human beings begin to appear unreal.
Eventually the soul protects itself through numbness.
That numbness frightens me more than grief. Grief, at least, is a form of contact. Grief says that something mattered enough for its absence to hurt. Numbness says nothing. It allows the days to pass without resistance. Beauty touches the surface and disappears. Horror touches the surface and disappears. Hours become tasks, tasks become weeks, and the person inside the mechanism becomes harder to find.
Then this music begins, and somewhere in me there is movement.
It is hardly a movement at all. It is not a grand resurgence of faith. It does not feel like healing in the clean, triumphant way people like to narrate healing after the fact. It is smaller and stranger than that.
It is a tendon twitch.
A tiny involuntary contraction toward hope.
Before I can explain why, my hand reaches for this playlist. Before my conscious mind can manufacture another reason for despair, something older in me presses play. The movement is almost beneath thought. It is muscle memory from the years when hope came naturally—not a clear memory of a particular day, but the body’s memory of how it once stood within the world.
My mind may say there is nothing left. The tendon moves anyway.
My soul may feel hollow. The tendon moves anyway.
The sound may be fading. Still, the tendon moves.
That is me.
Not the numbness. Not the machinery. Not the performance of functioning. Not even the voice that tells me I am disappearing. I am, such as I am, the small movement underneath all of it—the reflex that still reaches toward warmth when warmth appears. However little of myself I can feel, I can feel that. However faintly, something in me still recognises home.
Sometimes I think of it as a kind of 'rigor nostalgis': a body tightening around the memory of its last warmth. But the phrase is not quite right. Rigor belongs to what can no longer move. This is movement. Minute, exhausted and almost imperceptible, perhaps—but living movement. A reflex is not nothing. A reflex is the body preserving knowledge that the conscious mind has forgotten.
Mine has preserved the knowledge of hope.
That does not mean I feel hopeful. Feeling and knowing have separated. I can be hollow and still remember, physically, how to reach for what once filled me. I can doubt human goodness while continually seeking its traces. I can look at the Earth with grief and still respond to its beauty before cynicism has time to intervene. I can feel incapable of belief and nevertheless behave like someone who has not surrendered it.
That behaviour may be the deepest belief I have.
This is what Utopian Scholastic holds for me. It is a sound, but also a place and a time. It is the remembered glow of a world in which knowledge was generous, curiosity was good, and the future had not yet narrowed into dread. The music carries the atmosphere of classrooms opening onto galaxies; of public institutions built to share rather than extract; of children being told that the planet was vast, fragile and worth understanding.
The playlist does not return me to those years. Nothing can. Instead, it brings me close to their glow.
I live close to that glow now, though it fades with every passing second. I hold my hands near it. I try to preserve whatever warmth remains in the fading memory. I know memory cannot become a permanent home, but perhaps it can be a small fire beside which I recover enough feeling to continue. Perhaps it can remind the body what warmth is, so that the body will recognise warmth when it appears again in the present.
The meeting of vintage and contemporary artists within the playlist makes this possibility feel real. The older pieces carry the signal from the years I remember. The newer pieces answer it. Across decades, artists have found the same emotional frequency: wistful but not defeated, futuristic but gentle, melancholy without surrender.
That continuity matters. It tells me the sound did not die with the period that produced it. Someone heard it later. Someone understood. Someone created from within the same tender architecture. What I fear is lost may only be dormant, moving quietly through other people, waiting to be recognised.
The care with which the artists are credited matters too. Each name and link leads away from the abstraction of “content” and back toward a human being. Someone made this. Someone listened carefully enough to gather it. Someone cared enough to tell us where it came from. The Spotify playlist becomes another path through the same living network.
Then there are the comments.
A comment section should not feel like a sanctuary, but this one sometimes does. Beneath the music, strangers arrive carrying their own memories, gratitude, weariness and hope. They try to describe where the sound has taken them. They thank Kester. They thank the artists. They speak about vanished rooms and half-remembered futures. They recognise the same signal.
For a moment, people are not competing to be the least moved person in the room.
They admit that they needed comfort.
They say thank you
They say: I heard it too.
In a world that continually supplies reasons to disbelieve in humanity, this small gathering becomes evidence in humanity’s favour. Not definitive evidence. Not enough to erase brutality, restore justice or repair the Earth. But evidence nonetheless: people remain capable of creating beauty, recognising care and responding with gratitude. Strangers can still meet around something gentle without immediately destroying it.
That is not everything.
But it is not nothing.
Perhaps human goodness has always survived this way—not as an uninterrupted force marching confidently through history, but as a scattered network of small, stubborn acts. A song made carefully. A promise kept while exhausted. A child reassured. An artist credited. A stranger thanked. A person who feels hollow continuing to generate warmth for the people around them.
Maybe goodness is often muscle memory.
Maybe the world does not remain good because everyone feels certain of goodness. Maybe it remains good because, even in periods of doubt and decay, some people continue performing its gestures. They keep the movement alive until feeling can return. They act from an old knowledge stored deeper than despair.
I want our daughter to inherit that knowledge.
I do not want her to inherit only my fear of the world. I want her to feel its wonder. I want her to encounter education as liberation, technology as possibility, art as a way of reaching people she may never meet. I want future generations to absorb the optimism inside this music—not its naivety, but its willingness to imagine.
Perhaps that is part of why I remain on the rails. I am carrying something forward even when I cannot fully feel myself carrying it. My wife and daughter may experience warmth from me at moments when I experience myself only as the mechanism producing it. The warmth is no less real because its source feels empty. A hollow vessel can still carry water. An exhausted person can still make shelter.
And perhaps a vessel is never as hollow as it feels while something is still passing through it.
The love passes through.
The promise passes through.
The music passes through.
The tendon moves.
It makes me cry to recognise myself there. Not in a heroic recovery, but in that almost invisible refusal. I may not possess the bright confidence I once had. My memories may fade. My soul may feel increasingly frayed, each day pulling another thread loose. The world may grow darker around me
Still, when I hear this sound, I lean toward it.
That leaning is mine.
It is the part of me the darkness has not converted into darkness. The world did not teach it to me, and the world has not succeeded in taking it away. It reaches for the goodness of people and the goodness of the Earth even while I insist I no longer believe in either. It keeps trying beneath the level of language. It holds on while the rest of me is tired of holding.
Maybe that is all I have.
But maybe it is also the beginning of everything.
Hope does not always arrive as light pouring through a window. Sometimes it is a nearly exhausted muscle contracting one more time. Sometimes it is the decision to listen again tomorrow. Sometimes it is the part of us that continues before we understand why.
I will not pretend the music cures me. I will not turn pain into a neat story about resilience. I remain tired. I remain frightened by my own numbness. There are days when I feel myself becoming less reachable, when I fear that the person I once knew is retreating beyond recall.
But the sound has not disappeared.
I can still hear it.
And while I can hear it, I will listen.
While the tendon moves, I will recognise the movement as mine.
While I can reach toward hope—even mechanically, even tearfully, even without the feeling of hope—I will keep reaching.
I will try.
Not because I am certain that everything will be all right. Not because optimism comes easily. I will try because something inside me remembers that trying is what I do. It remembers curiosity, gentleness and the promise of a shared future. It remembers the person I was before the world persuaded me that tenderness was foolish.
Utopian Scholastic is a sound, a place and a time to which I will keep returning. I will remain close to the glow of those fading memories. I will draw what warmth I can from them and pass it onward. I will hold on to human goodness—not because it has always prevailed, but because people still create it. I will hold on to the goodness of the Earth—not because it is unharmed, but because it remains beautiful and alive beneath the wounds we have given it.
The sound fades more each day.
But I can still hear it.
I will listen. I will try. I will hold on.
For as long as the smallest part of me continues reaching, I will answer it.
I, the tendon twitch, will twitch towards the light, always.
