“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” Every time I hear that line I’m struck by how it manages to comfort and challenge at once. It’s drawn from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Season 2 episode “Peak Performance.” Captain Jean-Luc Picard isn’t offering Lieutenant Commander Data a platitude. He’s reminding him that adherence to principle, even flawless execution, cannot guarantee victory. The real triumph lies in holding fast to one’s ethics, regardless of outcome. I’m well aware that Trekkies and Erykah Badu devotees do not often share the same conversations. Their fan bases orbit different cultural constellations. And yet, when I pause to listen to Picard’s measured wisdom alongside Badu’s impassioned directive to “stay woke,” I find a single, resonant truth: both call us to engage with the world as it is instead of as we might wish it, while refusing to surrender our agency. When Erykah Badu first spoke “stay woke” in her song “Master Teacher” and later in interviews, she was channeling a kind of communal counsel. She traced its origin to the informal gatherings, the late-night talks and neighborhood circles where people compared notes on local power structures, on the invisible contours of opportunity and exclusion. Badu did not frame “stay woke” as a magic incantation that would secure justice overnight. Instead, she presented it as a form of moral muscle memory: an ongoing practice of attention, of naming the forces that shape our lives, even when the immediate effects feel small or elusive. By the time the mid-2010s arrived, “woke” had leaped from those grassroots conversations into the global limelight. Beyoncé summoned it onstage with Formation, converting concert halls into classrooms of collective remembrance. Social-media activists emblazoned #StayWoke on protest placards and Instagram feeds, transforming personal feeds into archives of injustice. Suddenly the term carried the electric charge of possibility. It was more than slang; it was an invitation to observe, to learn, to resist the seduction of complacency. But even as “woke” galvanized communities, it became vulnerable to dilution. Corporations hoping to signal solidarity or tap into cultural currents plastered it on mugs and T-shirts, sometimes without grasping its seriousness. Advertising campaigns hinted at it; talk-show hosts debated it; news outlets chronicled it as the latest trend. The very ubiquity that had elevated “woke” threatened to hollow it out, turning a call to awareness into an empty slogan. And then came the backlash. Commentators on the right seized upon “woke” as the perfect foil for any program or policy they opposed. Campus dialogues around inclusive language were labeled hijinks of the “woke mob.” Corporate diversity workshops were dismissed as performative virtue signaling. Pundits like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson railed against “woke culture” as an authoritarian impulse, a kind of ideological contagion that needed to be stamped out. Some state legislatures even introduced measures to ban “divisive concepts” from classrooms and workplace training. In their framing, anything that could be caricatured as an excess of awareness was declared insincere, a sign that the idea had no real substance. In a twist of irony, the right’s reductive use of “woke” echoes the very dynamic Picard describes. Data, playing a strategy game aboard the Enterprise, follows every rule without error and still suffers defeat because the game’s parameters are stacked against him. That fallen yet unbroken posture is familiar to activists who have marshaled facts and ethics only to watch headlines, policy debates, or viral memes render their efforts moot. We learn what it means to do everything right and to lose anyway. That is not proof of failure but evidence that the world does not always reward virtue with victory. I find myself caught between these two worlds. On one hand, I believe fervently in the power of awareness: of naming injustice, studying history’s blind spots, insisting that discomfort is a necessary companion on the path to change. On the other, I have watched “woke” devolve into a buzzword either overhyped or demonized. I have hesitated before typing it, worried that its meaning has become so entangled in partisan barbs that its original force no longer pierces the fog. And yet Picard’s insight calls me back. Even if a single word or a single action does not bend the arc of the universe toward justice, the act of engagement remains its own reward. There is dignity in aligning one’s conduct with one’s convictions, in refusing to abdicate the responsibility of awareness, even when cynicism runs high. Just as Data’s flawless defeat does not diminish his brilliance or his humanity, so awareness retains its value even when it fails to achieve its desired ends, whether in the form of a pop-culture mantra or a careful argument.Perhaps the most important lesson is this: moral agency does not ensure a particular result. Awareness does not guarantee a policy win or a viral moment of truth. But without vigilance, without the discipline of attending to what lies beneath the surface of daily life, we forfeit our chance to shape reality at all. In that sense, “staying woke” is not a promise of triumph but a practice of resistance. It is the refusal to drift off when the world’s signal turns static, the insistence that we can do no less than keep our minds unclouded. Whether you derive that lesson from the corridors of the Enterprise or the verses of a song, it stands firm: sometimes, even when we do everything right, we will lose. That is not a flaw in our character. That is simply the nature of life. And it is in the persistence of our integrity, our curiosity, and our solidarity that the true measure of our efforts is found. In the face of co-option, mockery, or outright hostility, we continue to engage, learn, speak, and act. We stay woke. We commit no mistakes. And if we lose, we carry forward the conviction that what we did was worth doing. Because that, above all, is life.

The hood of a car while its driving down a road at twilight.