The case for hope

And the "cynical genius" illusion

It’s 2:34 in the morning and I feel like I haven’t slept since American Idol was in its sixth season. My kid screams, “MAMA!” and I stumble into his room ready to pass out.

“Yeah?” I ask. “Whath wrong?” My retainer is still in.

“Blanket,” he says.

I put the soft quilt over his belly and tell him to go back to thleep. “Stay mama,” he whispers. And well, how can you argue with that?

His cheeks glow softly in the purple nightlight. “Sing a song,” he says, so I hum Frère Jacques, then tell him to go back to sleep. 

“Stay mama,” he whispers again.

“Okay, bud,” I tell him. No wonder I feel like I haven’t slept since 2007. I’m fully awake now, fully aware that I won’t be going back to bed anytime soon, already calculating how much sleep I can still salvage at this point. “Why don’t you think about some things that make you happy?” I suggest. “Sometimes that helps me go to sleep.” 

He blinks at me, his face still.

“You know what makes me happy?” I ask. I think about our trip to the café that day. “Remember when we went to the coffee shop?” I ask. “You had your muffin, and we held hands, and we found those big yellow trees? The wind blew, and the leaves fell like rain? That makes me happy.” I smooth his hair and rub his cheek, wondering if he’ll offer something as vivid. What’s made an impression on him, I wonder.

I ask, “What makes you happy?”

Before I can even finish the question, he says, “Peanut butter.”

Of course. I was hoping he’d remember an equally sentimental moment, but who can compete against everyone’s favorite condiment? I stretch out on the shaggy carpet and laugh. It’s been a while since I’ve had a laugh, and it feels good. It doesn’t fix the exhaustion or change the fact that I’ll be running on fumes tomorrow. But in that moment, laughter feels like a release—a small rebellion against the chaos, a way to let go of the exhaustion, the endless list of things to do, the way these moments stretch forever yet vanish all at once. It feels like hope.

Not long ago, I worked on a Hidden Brain episode with the psychologist Jamil Zaki. He said something about the difference between hope and optimism:

“Hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will be better. I think of that as rose colored glasses—something that can make us complacent. Hope is the notion that things could get better. And it often coincides with a lot of dissatisfaction with how things are now. Hope is a choice.”

People think hope is naive or lazy. That it means accepting the bad and turning a blind eye to it, but for me, it’s the exact opposite. Hope is the only thing keeping me from feeling engulfed by the bad. It’s a way to survive.

I think people resist hope because they think being cynical means they see the world more clearly. Psychologists even have a name for it: the cynical genius illusion. And as Jamil mentioned in the interview, the opposite is true — cynical people are worse at detecting lies, for example. Skepticism distorts a person’s perspective, it doesn’t bolster it.

Hope, at its core, is about persisting with progress even when everything around you says it’s pointless. Think about the most world-changing movements. Civil rights, women’s suffrage, the fight against apartheid. Hope was essential for motivating people to take action. Activists weren’t driven by blind optimism but by the idea that a better future could exist, even if they couldn’t see it yet.

Hope doesn’t mean ignoring hard truths or pretending everything is fine. It means confronting reality with the conviction that our reality can be transformed.

Untranslatable words to consider

Weltschmerz: "World grief": “I find hope in the fact that a word exists to describe this feeling in the first place. It’s evidence that humanity has the capacity for something beyond the cruelties we observe. Even when it’s hard to do so, we’re capable of imagining a more ideal world. A world in which unfathomable suffering remains unfathomable.”

Shareworthy

• I helped write this Hidden Brain episode about living with uncertainty.

• My friend Emma Pattee wrote a beautiful piece about pregnancy for Vogue: “I was running out of time, so I did what any crystal-loving horoscope-fluent millennial does in a time of trouble, I went to see a psychic.”

• I’ve been thinking about this other Hidden Brain episode I worked on a bit ago: How to Change the World.

-Kristin

P.S. I’m thinking of hosting a Zoom writing session where I share a random untranslatable word (like hiraeth or komorebi), and we spend some time writing on it together. Would you be into that? Hit reply and let me know.