In an age of political, ecological and social strain, hope is often mistaken for denial. But real hope is neither passive nor naïve – it is a choice to keep acting, even without guarantees.

Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes things will turn out fine; hope understands they might not – and insists we keep working anyway. Hope is not a mood or a posture; it is a discipline, a daily rehearsal of the future we refuse to surrender.

It is easy to confuse hope with denial in difficult times. We live in an era of fraying certainties: democracies wobble, ecologies collapse, economies strain, and powerful interests offer distraction instead of direction. To speak of hope risks sounding naïve, even irresponsible. Yet to abandon hope would be a deeper mistake – one that yields the field to cynicism, and cynicism is a luxury only the powerful can afford.

Hope is not passive. It requires courage, because it asks us to imagine a world that does not yet exist and to act as if it could. To hope is to refuse inevitability: to reject the story that the future is already written by markets, algorithms, or empires. Hope is the stubborn belief that collective agency still matters, that institutions can be changed, that communities can rise, that humanity can be more than a footnote to climate physics or geopolitical rivalry.

Hope lives not in grand declarations but in practice: the neighbour planting trees in a warming city, the student organising when it would be easier to scroll, the artist who insists that beauty and truth still matter in a noisy world, the volunteer who shows up week after week without applause. Hope is the quiet labour of repair.

But hope also requires honesty. It asks us to see the world clearly – its cruelties, exclusions, and urgent dangers – and still choose to build rather than retreat. True hope widens the circle of concern; it is not a private feeling but a public ethic. It says, No one is disposable. No future worth having is built for a few.

We inherit hope from those who walked before us – people who had far fewer resources and far more reason to despair, yet who marched, wrote, sang, built, resisted, and imagined. Their hope was not based on guarantees. Like a seed in hard soil, it sprouted because they planted it.

Our task is the same. Not to predict the future, but to shape it. To keep alive the possibility of better systems, better cities, better relationships, better ways of living on a finite planet. Hope is not certainty; it is commitment. It is the decision that the future belongs to those who care enough to change the present.

Hope begins with the recognition that we are still here, still able to choose. And that is enough to start again.