E.B. White’s Beautiful Letter to a Man Who Had Lost Faith in Humanity
My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.
It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.
Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
I want to defend and buoy hope – it’s a fragile, quirky thing, but it has the power to help us act in the face of finitude
Hope is vitalising. When it pulses, we aspire toward better futures and conspire with what we have and have been. In its absence, we often grow listless, even court despair. I thus want to defend hope, underscore what we gain i... See more
Hope is vitalising. When it pulses, we aspire toward better futures and conspire with what we have and have been. In its absence, we often grow listless, even court despair. I thus want to defend hope, underscore what we gain i... See more
John Lysaker • Our days are both rough and slippery. Hope brings traction | Psyche Ideas
Tim: I think optimism is the expectation that things are going to be OK. That we’re going to get a good outcome. Hope is much more about meaning; hope is the will to hold on to our values in the face of difficulty. Optimism is one kind of hope, a rather flimsy sort of hope. What we need now is a more resilient kind of hope, one not based on an expe
... See moreAndrew Boyd • I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.
NC: Well, we are told relentlessly that the world is doomed. The media amplifies this idea to the point of hysteria. We are conditioned to only see the world in terms of oppression and corruption and degradation. To some degree it is hard not be sucked into this torrent of despair, to become hardened and cynical. However, it doesn’t take much to se... See more