Positive News · 1 hour ago

Caitlin Moran on How to Find Hope When the World Feels Hopeless - Positive News

Caitlin Moran didn't set out to write a manifesto - she set out to feel less awful. What emerged from a year of rewilding her garden, picking up litter, and stepping off social media was something quieter and more durable than optimism: a working theory of hope as an act of will. Quoting Nick Cave's definition - "Hope is optimism with a broken heart" - Moran argues that despair is not a natural response to difficult times but often a manufactured one, that "an anxious, depressed and suppliant populace" serves the interests of those who benefit from inaction. She traces her own refusal to accept helplessness back to a childhood in poverty, where she decided early that "I don't accept that things can't get better" - a sentence that has quietly shaped everything since. The book she wrote from that place makes the case that the most radical thing ordinary people can do right now is look their children in the eye and mean it when they say there is a way through.