It’s natural to be scared.
I wake up every morning dreading what’s to come. The laws of gravity seem to have been overturned sometime in the last few years, and now up is down and down is up.
We ignore climate change at our own peril, willfully and blindly, and instead fight political battles where one side brings a knife and the other brings a nuclear bomb.
And tech companies continue their rampant disruption of everything we thought we knew, ripping up old social contracts with reckless abandon and questioning everything. Even truth.
It’s natural to be scared.
But then you run across little rivulets of hope like this one. A simple Google doc entitled “What Could Go Right,” it’s a complilation of “hopepunk” stories put together by my friend Olivia Wylie.
Hopepunk is the opposite of dystopia – it looks toward the future with a hopeful gaze, and makes assumptions like “maybe we really will figure this all out” and “maybe there is still some good in humankind.”
And it’s exactly what I needed right now.
It’s natural to be scared.
But it’s human to take a deep breath, get up, and do something about it.
I have to believe that hope still exists. That the fundamental rules of the universe have not actually been turned upside down. That there are enough of us who believe in life, in love, in equality, and in the future to make a difference. To right this ship and set it back on course, if only we can come together, roll up our sleeves, and work on it.
So I open up my laptop, and I type that single word.
Hope.
I stare at it for a bit, letting it roll around in my brain and on my tongue.
It’s natural to hope.
And then I take a deep breath and reimagine the world as it could be. As it should be. As it might still be.
I repeat to myself, over and over again:
“There’s a way to make all of this right.”
And then I start to write.