by David Fireman, LCSW
The role of hope in Greek mythology, particularly in the story of Pandora’s jar (commonly mistranslated as box), is puzzling at best. According to Hesiod, Pandora, the first woman created by the gods, opened a jar that released all the evils into the world: disease, sorrow, death, and suffering. The only thing that remained inside was hope.
We live in complicated times. The world feels like it’s unraveling in ways both sudden and slow. Climate disasters, political turmoil, economic instability, and the constant churn of bad news. Every day seems to bring a new crisis, a fresh reason to despair. “Disease, sorrow, death, and suffering,” indeed.
The weight of uncertainty can be stifling, making it easy to slip into apathy or, just as easily, to be on fire with outrage. Both responses are understandable, even natural, but they can lead us away from something essential: the ability to hope and remain kind, to stay connected to what is true, and to carry a vision of a greater reality beyond the cacophony of the moment.
When faced with overwhelming circumstances, apathy often presents itself as a self-protective mechanism. It can feel easier to turn away, to stop caring, to numb ourselves to the pain of the world. If nothing we do seems to make a difference, why keep trying? Apathy dulls the edges of our emotions, but it also disconnects us from what makes life meaningful, our relationships, our sense of purpose, our ability to experience joy. Similarly, despair can become an almost comfortable state of mind, a place where we resign ourselves to hopelessness because hoping feels too hard or risky. After all, to hope is to open ourselves to feeling vulnerable; it requires us to believe in possibilities that may never come to pass. Indeed, at some point in life—perhaps after a loss—it dawns on us that we cannot ever be totally protected; another grief. And yet, without hope, we become passive, unable to imagine a future worth working toward.
On the other side of the spectrum, is outrage, a force that fuels much of today’s discourse. The sheer volume of injustice in the world makes it easy, perhaps even necessary, to feel anger. Anger can be powerful; it often inspires action, giving voice to the voiceless, and demanding accountability. But it can also become all-consuming, burning so hot that it leaves no room for anything else and spiraling toward primal wildness. When outrage becomes a way of life, we risk losing sight of our deeper selves, allowing our identities to be shaped more by what we are against than what we are for. The constant cycle of anger stoked by social media, and news engineered to provoke can make it difficult to step back, breathe, and remember that there is more to life than a race to the bottom of the brain stem.
In the midst of all this, kindness can feel like an impossible task. Not just kindness in the superficial sense of pleasantries and politeness but robust kindness: the ability to be supple in a world that rigidifies us, to act with empathy even when anger would be easier. Kindness requires strength because it means resisting the pull of cynicism. It means choosing to create rather than destroy, to hold space for complexity in a world that prefers to divide everything into simple black and white categories of good and bad.
So how do we hold onto kindness and hope in such a fractured world? One answer is to stay connected to something larger than ourselves. Whether that is faith, art, philosophy, nature, or simply the belief in human potential, we need something that reminds us that this moment no matter how dark is not the whole story. Throughout history, people have endured times of unimaginable suffering, and yet, they have also created beauty, forged deep connections, and fought for a better world. Staying in tune with this greater reality means recognizing that we are part of something vast and unfolding—even cosmic—that our individual actions matter even when they feel small, and that the things worth fighting for: justice, love and truth transcend the chaos of the present moment.
It is far from easy to carry this perspective. It demands a willingness to step outside of the unrelenting barrage of negativity. It means cultivating countercultural practices that support and slow us down like reading poetry, walking in the woods, sitting in silence, engaging in deep conversations. It means allowing ourselves moments of joy, even in the midst of struggle. It means resisting the idea that we must always be reacting, always be fighting, always be consumed by the latest crisis. There is wisdom in knowing when to rest, when to listen, and when to simply be.
There will be reasons to despair, to turn away, to lash out in anger. But there will also be reasons to hope, to love, and to create. The challenge is to choose, again and again; to acknowledge apathy and outrage but to fold in hope and kindness too.