Why I Don’t Rely on Hope

“People have told me that this approach is a kind of hope in itself, that I have found hope in the way I abandoned hope. At that point, the words we choose do not matter much. What does matter is getting out of bed in the morning and finding work worth doing.”

“Where do you find hope?”

“How do you sustain hope?”

Those are probably the most common questions in response to more than three decades of writing and lecturing about today’s multiple cascading social and ecological crises.

For years I struggled with how to answer, wanting to be honest but sensitive to the anxiety that typically motivates questioners. My answers have changed over the years, but my various responses always seemed inadequate to me.

In the past few years, after much reflection about my life, I have settled on a simple response: I do not find hope anywhere, and I cannot sustain what I do not have and never had.

Hope has never been terribly relevant in my life and has never been a large part of my motivation to act in the world. I know that hope is important for most people and that many find reasons to have hope. Neuroscientists and psychologists have called this tendency in most people an “optimism bias,” and I have no quarrel with those who hold onto it.