In times like this, it’s easy to fret and get angry, or to turn a sense of powerlessness into apathy. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed too, and to throw up your arms in despair. Certainly, that’s how I’m feeling right now.
Where, then, can we find some hope?
I’m taking my mother’s advice and counting my blessings. It might sound like dodgy silver-lining nonsense, but it works.
Gratitude forces us to remember the good things in the world – birds singing outside the window, the smell of coffee, a conversation with a friend or a kind word from a stranger. Gratitude doesn’t make the bad things disappear but it stops them from becoming the whole of reality.
And perhaps there is something else going on too. When we’re anxious about the future, we project the present forward and assume that tomorrow will be an extreme version of today. But that needn’t be the case. There are constraints, of course, and the past matters, but within these limits, there is still possibility. The future isn’t written.
We often forget this. We look at the world around us and imagine that because things have happened in a particular way in the past, they will continue to do so. But that is to confuse probability with inevitability. Philosophers call it ‘the problem of induction’.
If the future is open, then we have some capacity to influence its outcome. As long as we’re alive, we are here and we can act. It’s extraordinary, when you think about and we should be grateful for this remarkable gift.
Even when circumstances constrain us, we remain involved by deciding how to respond to a situation and what to do as a consequence. This type of existential freedom is both liberating and terrifying because it implies responsibility. As Sartre reminds us, many people prefer to abdicate such agency to avoid accountability.
After all, there is comfort in saying: ‘I can’t do anything about it. I didn’t choose my parents, my genes, the country I was born in, my culture or the historical times in which I find myself. I don’t control the actions of governments or armies. I can’t control the economy, the weather, the behaviour of strangers or what somebody says about me on the internet.’
But surely it is better, and more honest to say, ‘I may not be the sole author of my life, but I refuse to be carried along by somebody else’s story. I have some authorship and I must embrace it to be truly myself.’
Viktor Frankl, writing from his experience of the concentration camps, argues as much. There always remains a dimension of freedom, he says. Suffering may not be a choice, but our response is, and this distinction matters even when we are genuinely powerless.
We can despair or we can do some small act, like going for a walk or helping someone out. These won’t solve the world’s problems, but perhaps that isn’t the point. The point is to find the courage and hope to keep going.
Paul Tillich reminds us that we don’t become courageous by first making anxiety disappear. Courage is what allows us to affirm life and act while the anxiety remains. In the same way, we shouldn’t wait to feel hopeful before we act hopefully; rather, we should act first and wait for hope to follow.
When we do the small things that are within our power to do, something changes, not in the world at large, but in ourselves. If we do them for the good of those around us, then hopefully something changes in others too. All around us are people struggling with the same issues, and with problems we can’t even see. We don’t know the storms other people are navigating.
If the future is open, then what we do matters. And how we respond to our feelings matter too. Why? Because feelings are not conclusions. We might feel powerless but that doesn’t mean that we are powerless. Feeling hopeless doesn’t prove there is no hope. The ship may be heading towards the rocks but that isn’t a reason to give up. The crew might not know how the story ends, but they can still try to do their best in the meantime.
We can recognise the limits of our power without surrendering the little power we happen to have. We can take responsibility for the small part of the world that has been given to us. And we can walk alongside other people who are trying to do the same.
Hope isn’t believing that the rocks aren’t there. Rather, it’s looking at the rocks, recognising that we can’t control the sea, and choosing to keep steering anyway.
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