When 2026 begins with violence after an incredibly horrific 2025, it’s hard to feel light and hopeful. I had a heartfelt conversation with my dear therapist friends and we really struggled to make sense of it all, but what we ended up with is that chaos and tragedies are well known in our lineage. All 3 of us are only one generation removed from cultural revolutions, war and trauma. Yet, our lineage lives on. This means that we have the tools and resilience to survive this current climate. I stumbled on this old podcast with John Green and Rachel Martin that really helped solidify why hope (and not despair) will keep us stable during trying times. Below is an excerpt that stayed with me and I hope it can help you.
MARTIN: What’s a lesson you keep learning again and again?
GREEN: Oh, what a great question. I keep learning again and again that hope is the right response to the human condition. And I have to learn this over and over again because despair is an incredibly powerful force in my life and something that I have to battle on an almost daily basis. So much of my brain tells me that there’s no reason to get out of bed or do anything because nothing matters because the oceans are going to boil in a billion years because the world is going to end long before that for me and for everyone I love and probably for humanity itself, and people are so monstrous and capable of such horrific behavior toward each other and toward the world. And that despair is so powerful because it tells this complete holistic story. It explains everything. Everything is the way it is because everything and everyone sucks.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
GREEN: What an incredibly powerful way to look at the world.
MARTIN: Yeah.
GREEN: It just happens to not be true, right? Like, it happens to be a lot more complicated than that. The truth is much more complex than that. And so I have to remind myself of that almost every day. I have to relearn that lesson that, like, there is cause for hope. I actually – I keep in my wallet a little note that says, the year you graduated from high school, 12 million children died under the age of 5. Last year, fewer than 5 million did. That progress, which is real and which is felt in the lives of millions of human beings and the tens of millions who love them – that progress was not natural. It was not inevitable. It did not happen because it was always going to happen. It happened because millions and millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions of people came together to make it happen, to make the world safer for children. We decided that we were going to prioritize that, and when we prioritized it, we had tremendous success.
And I keep that because I want to remind myself that this is the truth. Like, that is an inalienable truth – that we can make the world better for the most vulnerable among us. We just have to decide it’s a priority. And so there is cause for hope. There’s always reason for hope because we have this incredible capacity to collaborate together, to make the world better together. And yet at the same time, we also have the capacity to make the world worse together, and it is so much easier to destroy progress than it is to build it. As we have lately found out, it is so much easier to destroy institutions than it is to build or maintain them. And I have to hold those competing ideas in my mind at the same time, which is the hardest thing in the world for me but also kind of the most important.
MARTIN: What’s the first rung on the ladder out of the pit? You know what I mean? Like, when you wake up and you’re – and it’s there again, and the darkness and the despair and the oceans and – ugh. What – when you look for the evidence that people don’t suck, what’s the first step?
GREEN: See how we can love each other.
Read or listen to the whole podcast here: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/27/1244131628/author-john-green-interview-tuberculosis-the-fault-in-our-stars
Thien Pham, LMFT 