Godot isn't coming to Damascus

When one moves from Boston to the Bay Area, one’s life is undeniably privileged. There was a moment the other day where my power flickered because of some maintenance in the building, and I genuinely felt inconvenienced. I had to catch myself on that. What harm did I really experience? None. But this is the inescapable texture of a comfortable life, insulated by privilege, distance, and choice.

I have my own real challenges, sure. But the discourse I’m increasingly surrounded by is one where risk means career pivots, startup equity, or SAFE notes, not the kind that sends friends reaching for their phones with genuine concern. When we reach this level of comfort, there are some risks most of us don’t even entertain.

The recent DMs and conversations that prompted me to write this all converge on the same question, usually couched in genuine concern: “With everything going on, are you really still going to Damascus?” The unstated subtext is, of course, that a sensible person wouldn’t right now.

It’s natural to avoid risk. If anything, the dominant mode of the professional class is one of a preference for sterilized, abstract commentary from a safe distance over tangible, risky participation. I’ve seen my fair share of this in and out of science. We’re taught to advise, consult, and strategize from positions where we bear very little of the consequences if our strategies fail. Having skin in the game is an important antidote to this.

This endless optimization for safety creates what I’ve started thinking of as a diaspora-wide production of Waiting for Godot. For fourteen years ¹ 1 since the 2011 revolution , we’ve been waiting. Waiting for the regime to fall, the violence to stop, foreign investment, sanctions to lift, the perfect risk-free moment to engage.

Even now, with Israel bombing the heart of Damascus in Umayyad Square last week ² 2 where my friends and aunt were at the time , violence flaring in the south in Suwayda, and sectarian tensions rising, the instinct is to wait longer. Syria is on edge, but perhaps inescapably so.

I’m writing this first and foremost as a dialogue with myself. I’m also writing it with those like me in mind. You left young and built entire lives elsewhere. Maybe you were even born elsewhere but feel a connection. You developed expertise and networks and something to lose. You too check the news from Syria while drinking morning coffee in London or Berlin or Dubai, feeling that familiar knot of guilt and longing and fear. We tell ourselves it’s not yet time, that we’re too established now, too spooked by the headlines, too far removed. But that distance is precisely the thing we need to close. It’s imagined.

Godot, in this version, is a UN-certified, economically stable, politically secular, and perfectly safe Syria. Like in Beckett’s play, he never comes. The act of waiting becomes the entire point, a state of perpetual paralysis we mistake for prudence. But those of us living comfortable lives outside cannot keep waiting for Syria to stop being on edge before we decide to own part of this project.

So, am I going to Damascus? Yes. And my reasoning is both political and personal, though certainly not nationalist ³ 3 I don’t care for grand, empty gestures of patriotism . I’ll be staying at the hotel across the street from where those bombs fell in Umayyad Square, to speak at the opera house next door. On one level, this is simply about showing up to be useful to the rebuilding effort. But on another, it’s a political act, a signal to fellow Syrians who have endured fourteen years of hell that we in the diaspora have not forgotten them. It’s a defiance of the gravitational pull toward a new war, and an insistence that we can help write a different future together.

The choice comes down to two different kinds of risk: the small, comprehensible risk of being in a volatile place, and the far greater, more corrosive risk of letting an entire generation of Syrians become a diaspora of spectators, watching their homeland’s story unfold from a distance. Besides, who’s to say Syria can reach stability without us having relentless hope and optimism.

The future requires us to show up. I would rather risk being there for the messy, uncertain beginning than wait forever in the safety of the wings.