Hope

“I don’t understand why people welcome the new year so happily when it might turn out worse than the last one. I can’t see the point of greeting the coming year so eagerly when you don’t know whether it might be the most miserable of your life. If someone had told me four New Year’s Eves ago what was going to happen in the year that was starting…”

That’s what the person I met for lunch today, the last day of the year, said to me. The last day of the year: a day of reflection and looking back for some, of conclusions for others, of the famous goals or resolutions for the year ahead… Some see it out with family, others with friends, others with their partner; some prefer the peace of their own company and others a wild party (although we all know that these last two years, less than ever)… Either way, most of us welcome the New Year with joy and excitement. But if we stop and think about it logically, this person has a point… Why welcome the coming year so happily when we have no idea what it will bring? In reality it’s complete uncertainty: we have no idea what’s going to happen, either in our own lives or in the world. And yet it’s one of the few times human beings embrace uncertainty. Why? Because in this case hope wins out over fear. The hope that, if things have gone well, please let them carry on that way, or even a little better if possible; and if things have gone badly, I want to believe they’ll get better, I need to believe it. Hope sits above fear, and that’s why we welcome the New Year eagerly, with excitement, hoping that things will go well or better.

Hope is necessary because it acts as a driving force in life. When it wins out over fear, we have a reason to keep going, even in the worst of situations. When there’s no hope, the world turns dark and our light goes out. We need it to have some quality of life, to achieve our goals, chase our dreams or overcome our fears. Each of us with our own situation and purpose.

“Even if fear has more arguments, always choose hope.” Seneca

When all is said and done, the way we welcome the new year is just another way our mind has of bending reality so that we can live with it: psychological survival, nothing more, nothing less. Taking it for granted that next year will be just as good or much better is, after all, a cognitive bias that keeps hope alive so we can survive, psychologically speaking. It’s one of the hundreds of ways our mind adapts to the world we live in. And for that reason alone, holding on to hope isn’t just lovely and motivating, it’s also intelligent, because in a way it’s a strategy for adapting to our environment. Had you ever stopped to think about it like that?

Let’s give 2022 a warm welcome and see if it returns the favour…

Happy New Year!