‘Hope for Cynics’ (and Everyone Else)

Understanding the possibilities of how things could be different is Kyle Taylor’s antidote as another heavy year looms

Republican House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch ‘MAGA’ defender, has said she will leave Congress in January after Donald Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein affair Photo: Francis Chung/Politico/AP

Hope is a funny thing to be prescribed.

People mean well when they say it: stay hopeful, look on the bright side, it’ll be all right in the end.

But, more often than not, the effect is the opposite. Being told to have hope when the world feels like a dumpster fire is a bit like being asked to admire the view while the train you’re on is visibly accelerating towards a cliff.

It’s not that the instinct is wrong. It’s that hope, as an instruction, often doesn’t work.

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently.

For more than a year, I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a book called ‘The Little Black Book of the End of the World’ – a pocket-guide to our collective doom-scrolling. The premise is to determine what will kill us first – climate change, conflict, computing, or capitalism?

It felt appropriate for an era in which the news cycle seems to be designed not merely to inform but to erode our will to live.

But then a colleague said, almost casually, “why not write ‘The Little Black Book of Saving the World’ instead?” They were right, and ideas around this reframing lodged somewhere deep inside me.

Because if we really are living through the end of something, it’s worth asking what might be beginning too.

That shift in thinking collided with my recent reading of Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki – a book far wiser than its title initially lets on. Its central thesis is that hope is not something you can simply assert but something that must be earned.

The message I took from Zaki is deceptively simple: stop telling people to have hope, and start giving them a reason to do so.

So here are some reasons – political, personal, and somewhere in-between – for why hope is not only possible in dark times, but necessary.

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