Hope as Praxis
Looking at the idea of hope as something we consciously practice and cultivate, not just a passive feeling. It’s a necessary practice in the face of enormous chaos and crisis.
by Page Lotze · updated 1mo ago
Hope as Praxis
Looking at the idea of hope as something we consciously practice and cultivate, not just a passive feeling. It’s a necessary practice in the face of enormous chaos and crisis.
by Page Lotze · updated 1mo ago
By conventional wisdom, hope is empowering, noble, even audacious. In the face of threats to democracy and the slow catastrophe of climate change, we are told, it is vital not to give up hope. Yet as an episode of the sitcom Ted Lasso reminds us: “It’s the hope that kills you.” To hope is to risk the agony of defeat. And what good does hope do as t
... See morePage Lotze added 1mo ago
But hope is not what most of us think it is. It’s not a warm, fuzzy emotion that fills us with a sense of possibility. Hope is a way of thinking—a cognitive process. Yes, emotions play a role, but hope is made up of what researcher C. R. Snyder called a “trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.”
Page Lotze added 1mo ago
Page Lotze added 1mo ago
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously hea
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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.
Page Lotze added 1mo ago
Page Lotze added 1mo ago
Page Lotze added 1mo ago
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 morePage Lotze added 1mo ago
Page Lotze added 1mo ago