Hope Is The Right Response To The Human Condition
At this time of year, joy eludes too many people. Many are hopeless about the future. Others struggle to get through the day. Some feel at a loss, or worse, are presently mourning the loss of a loved one, or their job.
John Green, YouTuber and author of Everything Is Tuberculosis, knows something about despair, and offered these words in response to the question What’s a lesson you keep learning again and again? posed by Rachel Martin, during an episode of the show Wild Card on PBS.
“I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition and I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life and something that I have to battle on a daily basis.
“So much of my brain tells me that there’s no reason to get out of bed or do anything because nothing matters because the oceans are going to boil in a billion years, because the world is going to end long before that for me and everyone I love, and probably for humanity itself, and people are so monstrous and capable of such horrific behavior toward each other and toward the world.
“And that despair is so powerful because it tells this complete holistic story. It explains everything the way it is because everything and everyone sucks. What an incredibly powerful way to look at the world. Yeah, it just happens not to be true.
“Like it happens to be a lot more complicated than that. The truth is much more complex, and so I have to remind myself of that almost every day. I have to relearn that lesson…that there is cause for hope.
“I keep in my wallet a little note that says, ‘The year you graduated from high school, 12 millions children died under the age of five. Last year, fewer than 5 million did.’
“That’s progress that’s real and which is felt in the lives of millions of human beings and the tens of millions who love them. And that progress was not natural, it was not inevitable, it did not happen because it was always going to happen, it happened because millions and millions of people came together to make it happen…to make the world safer for children.
“We decided that we were going to prioritize that, and when we prioritized it we had tremendous success, and I keep that because I want to remind myself that this is the truth. Like that is an inalienable truth that we can make the world better for the most vulnerable among us. We just have to decide it’s a priority, and there is cause for hope.
“We have this incredible capacity to collaborate together to make the world better, and yet at the same time we also the capacity to make the world worse together…and it is so much easier to destroy progress than it is to build it, as we have lately found out. It’s so much easier to destroy institutions than it is to build and maintain them, and I have to hold those competing ideas in my mind at the same time which is the hardest thing in the world for me but also kind of the most important.
— John Green, Author
Watch the full interview below.