Our days are both rough and slippery. Hope brings traction | Psyche Ideas
This is how we should approach life’s hardships, finding possibility where we can: the prospect of flourishing despite infirmity, of finding one’s way through loneliness, failure, grief, confronting the injustice and absurdity of the world. The question is not whether we should hope, but what we should hope for.
Kieran Setiya • What’s the Use of Hope?
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.
Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
Hope must carry us across the void of nihilism, of inaction and complacency, so that we make it to the other side. Once we cross, there is nothing to hope for anymore. There is no future to give ourselves to; we have arrived in the present as creative agents.
Hope Through Nihilism: A New Anthem for a Secular World
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,
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