A year-end reflection
Today and tomorrow, hope is the better choice. And hope with material change is the best one.
I’m writing this post on December 13th as I prepare for a quick trip to Toronto for work and a few more furious days of writing and speaking and recording before I take a break on December 18th. Like you, like everyone, I’m tired but transfixed by everything. Still, I’m going to try to take ten days to read a few of my favourite books (hello, The Count of Monte Cristo), play some video games, hang out with my dog, and watch some epic adventure flicks. Next week, I’ll be sharing a re-post essay on why robots won’t save us, and then it’s back to original content for the new year—the first bits of which will come to you from Mumbai, India, where I’ll be visiting for a wedding. I plan on working hard on this Substack in 2023, on growing it, and on becoming a better writer. So, I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.
This time of year is replete with year-end reviews and you’ll find them everywhere you look. Indeed, you won’t be able to miss them. I’ll leave those to other people who’ll do a fine job synthesizing the ebbs and flows of the past twelve months. Instead of that, I want to take a moment to say a few quick things about where we’re at right now and how we might think about where we’re headed. And then I’ll leave you to your holidays with my deepest thanks for being here with me and making this Substack a success.
The problems we face are a mix of old and new challenges ranging from the inconvenient to the existential. We’ve long faced inequality, natural disasters, political decay, institutional brutality, and more. Today, those threats seem turbo-charged and exacerbated by the biggest baddie of them all, climate change.
The speed and frequency at which we meet and process bad news day-to-day is unprecedented and overwhelming, producing a sort of daily deluge of doom that our tiny bipedal minds are not particularly well-adapted to process. It’s easy to become exhausted and distraught—indeed to become hopeless. But hopelessness, while both understandable and rational, is also counter-productive.
Strategically and morally, hope is the better frame to adopt in the face of our collective challenges. We know that hope is more likely to energize us and to deliver productive solutions to our problems. We also know that to hope is to accept that we both want and are willing to work for better. For those is relative positions of comfort or privilege, hope is a moral imperative. Giving up hope may cost you a lot less than the effects of its abandonment have on others, particularly those who are vulnerable or marginalized. We owe it to one another to adopt a hopeful posture of solidarity as we fight for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable world. Not everyone can be hopeful, of course. As we know, the range of options available is not the same for everyone. But on balance, most of us have some room for hope.
A better world driven by hope must be materially more equal as well as inclusive of deep difference and diversity. As I’ve said many times before, our fundamental problem isn’t scarcity. It’s the distribution of abundance. We can’t forget that, especially right now as we face the rising effects of climate change, an affordability crisis, and an ongoing pandemic that has cost some people far more than others—and continues to. There is no excuse in this century for mass material exclusion and the suffering it brings. And that is a problem for everyone. As history has taught us again and again, our collective future is bound up with our individual futures, and what happens to me can easily affect you, and vice versa, particularly when scaled to the level of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of us.
I don’t make resolutions as the close of the year, but I do take time to reflect on previous months, to re-tool, to seek areas of improvement, and to check in on past goals and to set new ones. Maybe those are resolutions, after all. But whatever you call them, they work for me.
In 2023, I’m aiming to be more conscious of the values that drive me and my work. I’m also aiming to take my own advice and to choose hope as the animating principle behind my work—hope in the service of justice and equality. I don’t intend to adopt that approach as a sort of naive Panglossian innocence (that’s a good way to get crushed, and to fail). Instead, my hope will be a foundation on which I build tactics and strategies that work to deliver better outcomes over time. My hope will be a belief that with enough time, effort, failure, struggle, community action and connection, listening, learning, and more effort still, lots of good work is possible. And if each of us tries to do some good, hopeful work in our little chunk of the planet, the wins will add up fast. So that’s what I’m going to do. Right after I finish reading The Count of Monte Cristo.
I especially liked the statement that for those of us with means, hope is a moral imperative. Thank you.
Thank you for this reflection. I had to look up Panglossian ... haha. That I am not! But this reminder ... that hope is a moral imperative ... might just move me in the right direction.