There is an ideal that has burned in the human heart for more than a hundred years. It is not some profound and inscrutable theory, nor some unreachable myth, but the plainest wish: that one day, no one will have to bow and scrape for a mouthful of food or a place to call home; no one’s fate will be worlds apart simply because of where they were born; no one will need to gain happiness by exploiting another.

Its logic is as simple as something said at the dinner table: when the world can produce enough for everyone, when we no longer have to fight over staying alive, hatred will naturally disappear, oppression will disappear, and so will all those schemes and betrayals that leave us exhausted.

Yet as we kept walking, we gradually found that this road was far harder than we had imagined.

We have to admit that there are always certain things in human nature that material abundance alone can hardly change. People compare. People envy. People want to live better than others. Even with food and shelter secured, we still care about whose house is larger, whose position is higher, who receives more respect from others. These things will never be “enough.” One person’s radiance will always set off another person’s plainness.

We also have to admit that history has taken many detours. Those attempts once full of hope: some succeeded, some failed. We have seen how ideals can be twisted by reality, how power can breed corruption, how kindness can be used. It has made us turn from the fervor we had at the beginning into something more sober, and more silent.

Today, we stand at a historical threshold unlike any before. Technology is changing the world at a speed we have never seen. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, new energy, and future technologies we cannot yet imagine are entering our lives step by step. They may free humanity from heavy labor and give us more time to do what we want to do; they may also be monopolized by a few, making the gap between rich and poor wider than at any time before.

We seem to have fallen into a dead loop. Technology runs too fast, while the pace of social change is always too slow. Those who hold capital and power are seizing the high ground of the future at the fastest possible speed. If things continue according to the logic of the present, the future seems only likely to become more unequal. This is the deepest helplessness of our age, and the pessimism that lingers in many people’s hearts.

But history has never been a script already written. Many things that seem unbreakably inevitable will, at some unintended moment, be completely rewritten by a sudden accident.

A thousand years ago, no one could have imagined that the Black Death would end a millennium of feudal theocratic order in Europe; eighty years ago, no one could have imagined that a world war would destroy the old colonial system and give rise to the modern welfare state; fifty years ago, no one could have imagined that a military communication network would become the Internet and break the monopoly of information; thirty years ago, no one could have imagined that that superpower would peacefully dissolve overnight and bring the Cold War era to an end.

History always buries seeds of hope in the darkest times. Those ideas mocked by everyone at the time, those people who quietly held on in corners, those insignificant acts of kindness often, many years later, converge into a torrent that changes the world.

We do not know what the world will look like fifty years from now. We do not know which road humanity will ultimately take. Perhaps technology will bring us unexpected surprises. Perhaps a shared crisis will teach us unity. Perhaps new ideas and new forces will lead us out of our present predicament.

But unfortunately, nothing is given. The light that keeps civilization from going out may never have been more than a stroke of chance.

It is not written in the epics of heroes, nor carved on the tombstones of emperors. It is hidden only in the spine of every ordinary person who refuses to bow.

The hand you reach out, the no you say, that little light you refuse to put out—none of these is a sacrifice to some remote utopia. They only prove that on this earth, there are still people holding on to something.

We hold ideals in our hearts, but we do not worship the future. We see the darkness clearly, but we do not join it. We light the fire not to illuminate the whole world, but only to let those who come after know that someone once walked this road.

As long as someone still walks, the road will not be cut off.