One of the problems with the world is that people carry the impression that they have been promised many things—a whole cluster of things, in fact—and those promises seem to come from different kinds of sources. Some of those sources can perhaps be grouped into categories. But one category is especially difficult to pin down, because it is foggy. People do not really know where those promises came from. Take a simple example. I recently saw an author say in a reel that people had been promised flying cars. Now people look around and say, “All right, we were promised flying cars. Where are they? We do not see them.” But then the obvious question arises: who exactly promised them? Was it Back to the Future? Was it science fiction writers? Movie directors? Futurists in popular culture? And if so, did any of these people actually have the authority to make such a promise? Not really. Yet the impression remains. If you ask someone who says, “We were promised flying cars,” and then press them on who made that promise, they may begin naming writers, films, or cultural visions. But if you push a little further and ask whether those things truly constituted a promise, they may begin to see that the basis is weak. Still, the feeling persists. That is the foggy part. People do not usually examine these things closely. But there are other sources of promises too, and some are less foggy. A nation, for example, can give people the expectation that there will be fairness, justice, equal opportunity, and some moral coherence in public life. The state does that, at least implicitly. Religion can do something similar. It can give people the expectation that wrongs will ultimately be punished, that good deeds will be rewarded, that there is some deeper balance to existence—whether in this life or in an afterlife. In that sense, religion too can function as a source of promises about justice and fairness. Then there is society itself, which transmits promises not through formal declarations but through sayings, assumptions, and repeated cultural habits. From early in life we hear things like, “If there is a problem, there is a solution.” Gradually that begins to sound less like an observation and more like a promise: if you are in difficulty, then somewhere there must be an answer. But who made that promise? Did my father say it? Did a teacher say it? Did I read it in a book? I may not even know. I just know that I have heard it. And the more such ideas circulate, the more solid they begin to feel. If you ask enough people, many of them will repeat the same thing back to you. Their agreement reinforces the impression, even though none of them is truly accountable for the consequences of that belief in someone else’s life. The same thing happens with other sayings: “If you have talent, it will find its way out.” “Hard work always pays off.” “Things happen for a reason.” “Good people are eventually rewarded.” We absorb such statements from all over the place—from parents, relatives, schools, books, films, religion, national mythology, motivational speech, and the general social atmosphere. And then, without ever formally deciding it, we begin to feel that these were promises given to us. We live as though something has been assured. But if we seriously begin to ask, “Who exactly promised this to me?” and keep following that question, we may eventually reach an uncomfortable point: perhaps no one can truly be held responsible. Or at least, no single source can be. The promise is everywhere and nowhere at once. There are, of course, exceptions. Sometimes a parent says directly, “If you study hard, you will do well in life.” In that case one might reasonably go back later and say, “You told me that, and it did not turn out to be true.” But even here the matter is not so simple. That parent likely repeated what they themselves had been taught to believe. They were not necessarily trying to deceive. They too had inherited a promise. They believed it, and then passed it on. And most likely we do the same thing, often without realizing it. We repeat things that feel true, or that we need to be true, especially until life forces us to examine them more seriously. So this is why I think of it as a fog—a fog of promises. We live in it. We share it. It surrounds us like a thick social atmosphere, almost like a soup. We do not clearly know who is making these promises, but we carry the sense that promises have indeed been made. And when we begin to feel that life has betrayed us, we also begin to feel that someone must be answerable for the broken promise. If someone sat down and tried to make a list of the promises that human beings feel were made to them—and then tried to trace each one back to its source—they might discover that in many cases there is no specific agent, no concrete person, no single accountable authority behind them. Yet the feeling of violation remains. The sense that something has not been delivered remains. This creates a problem. People complain, protest, resent, and inwardly accuse. But often they do not know exactly at whom the complaint is directed. They have the feeling that someone, somewhere, must be responsible, and so their resentment seeks a target. Sometimes they assign that target to the state, sometimes to society, sometimes to religion, sometimes to the previous generation, sometimes to vague elites, sometimes to fate, sometimes even to God. But if they keep digging deeper, they may find layer after layer behind the supposed culprit, until the whole thing becomes strangely empty. The anger remains, but the object of blame becomes less and less stable. And yet this fog is not entirely useless. In fact, it may have a certain function. Without these promises, life might become unbearably bleak, tedious, and spiritless. A person might ask: if there is no promise of anything good, no promise of fairness, no promise that effort means something, no promise that pain leads anywhere, then why should I do anything at all? Why should I persist? Why should I build, strive, endure, hope, or even continue? In that sense, human beings seem to need some promises in order to move forward. Perhaps that is why societies evolve such collective illusions, or collective sustaining beliefs. They keep people going. They provide motion, direction, endurance. But of course, the very thing that sustains us can also become the source of disillusionment. So what is the answer? I do not know. I do not have a neat solution. But perhaps one useful thing we can do is examine our complaints more carefully. Whenever we feel wronged by life in this deeper, more existential way, perhaps we can ask: what exactly do I feel was promised to me? And who, precisely, made that promise? Is my anger attached to something real, or to an inherited atmosphere of expectations that I never consciously inspected? Maybe these promises function like the push that gets an engine started. If a car engine stalls, sometimes you push the vehicle so that the mechanism can complete a cycle and begin running on its own. In a similar way, perhaps human beings need certain provisional stories, hopes, and promises to get themselves moving. Childhood offers an even clearer example. We tell children stories about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and other fictions—not because those things are true, but because children do not yet grasp the larger logic of the world. So we give them symbolic structures, simplified meanings, motivating illusions. Those stories help carry them through a certain stage. Later, once they have matured, those stories are no longer necessary. Perhaps many of the promises we live by operate in a similar way. They give us a head start. They help us move before we are capable of facing the world in its full ambiguity. And then, if we are fortunate, maturity begins when we can slowly recognize that many of these promises were never literally real. They were scaffolding. They were atmosphere. They were inherited propulsion. To see that clearly may be painful, but it may also be part of growing up—part of moving into a more adult relationship with reality, where one can still act, still hope, still build, but without quite the same unconscious dependence on the fog.