Following the Last Few Years I’m Feeling Empty and More Cynical Than Ever. I’m Losing Faith in Other People, and I’m Scared to Pass These Feelings to My Little Son. Do You Still Believe in Us (Human Beings)?

In America, there’s this very strong need to be hopeful and comfortable. You get the message early on that if you want to get ahead, don’t talk about the really dark stuff. If you want to have friends, don’t tell them how bleak it is. But, inviting people into their honesty can be very liberating. And letting people know they’re not alone in all th

Trust, the willingness to be vulnerable to others, is an expression of faith that they will do the right thing. It is how hope lives between people. By eroding trust, cynicism steals our present together and dampens the futures we can imagine.

hope is one of cynicism's first casualties.

Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.

It seemed to me that, given the bleakness of our predicament, the problem of hope was crucial—a world-sized version of the problem of maintaining hope in the face of individual mortality—and that genuine hope insists on honesty and love. On honesty because hope is an investment like any other, best made with a clear eye. And on love because, withou