27 Oct 2026
Why Hope Is a Skill, Not a Feeling | Omer Golan
At twenty, Omer Golan was dead for a few minutes. What he saw while he was gone made him
angry, and the anger is the part of the story he thinks brought him back.
He was a musician first. Years of writing and playing, and then an injury in the army took it away. He
could not hear properly and could not feel his palm, so the strings came through at a resolution too
low to play. Painting was where he went next, and he will tell you it was not a leap. Rhythm, tone,
repetition, form. The same materials, held differently.
The few minutes he was gone, he saw his own funeral. A bird's eye view of his friends and family
standing around an open grave, reading his poetry and weeping. What he felt was not peace. It was
rage, because they had done something he would never have wanted, and because at twenty, as a
soldier, nothing in his life was under his control.
He is careful about what that was. He does not believe in anything mystical and says so plainly. His
explanation is a brain starved of oxygen firing all at once, every sense and story and belief mixing
together at the same moment. What stayed with him afterwards was not a vision. It was a clock. For
most of his adult life he worked on the assumption that he would not survive the year, so everything
had to be made now, and his wants and his needs stopped being different things.
That is the shape of the work he does now. Omer leads the MyWhatIf Foundation, which builds an AI
tool for trauma recovery that is being studied in four countries. His framing is that the brain is a
prediction machine and language is its operating system. The stories you tell yourself are the code,
and code can be read and rewritten. Trauma, in that model, is a prediction error. The brain has seen
enough danger to conclude danger is permanent, and then spends your life gathering evidence that it
was right.
So they built what he calls a what if machine. You ask it personal questions about your own past or
your own future and it writes you the alternative, using the words that have been found to move you
rather than the ones that shut you down. Not to tell anyone which future to pick. To make it possible
to picture more than one. People send him messages about coming off antidepressants, about
sleeping without nightmares, about suicidal thoughts stopping.
And this is where his definition arrives, the one the episode is built on. Hope is not a belief. Hope is
not optimism. Hope is not something fuzzy. Hope is a skill, and a trauma intervention, and once a
person has it they start to recover a sense of agency too.
Near the end he repeats something a Green Beret friend was told about life after service. You have
three options: Bible, bullet, or bottle. Ekaterina suggests he is building a fourth. He does not acceptthe number. Infinite options, he says. We all hold infinite possibilities.
In this conversation
Losing music, finding paint
The few minutes he was dead
Why he refuses a mystical explanation
Living on a shortened clock
The brain as a prediction machine
Hope as a skill rather than a mood
Bible, bullet, or bottle, and a fourth way out
Omer Golan, MyWhatIf Foundation
This episode discusses injury, near death and suicidal thoughts. Please take care while listening.
Artful Impact is a long form interview series and live Talk Series hosted by the impact artist Ekaterina
Sky, with artists whose work creates real impact and people creating impact in an artful way.
artfulimpact.us
Instagram: @artful.impact
