Something Stronger Than Hope
You already have it.
We were born in fire.
Some of us came of age during the war on terror. We entered the workforce during the great recession. We started families right before the worst pandemic in a century. Now we’re fighting fascists before breakfast. They tell us to hope, but we already tried that. I’m sorry, it didn’t work. But there’s good news.
We have something better.
Philosophers cautioned us against hope. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, philosophers saw hope “mostly as an attitude to reality that [was] based on insufficient insight into what is true or good.”
Here’s Seneca:
“Cease to hope and you will cease to fear… the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope… both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”
Cease to hope and yo…