Page Lotze

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.

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

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,

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.