Where do you find your hope?

[Luigi 7,870]

Whenever I feel down, sometimes I think of my beautiful fiancée.

[Midnight Solace 5,132]

Well, honestly, I think I only find my hope in FiM or my friends here on the forums. I'm just not sure if I say the right things to them sometimes...

Edited January 11, 2019 by Midnight Solace

[Phosphor 11,532]

My source of hope... I think it would be the universe. (Yeah, I probably need to go to sleep. lol.)There's so much out there to discover and learn. When I'm feeling a bit down or something, I tend to think about a subject that I liked in the past, such as electricity, chemistry, astronomy, etc. Catching up on that stuff really gets me going again. Also, I would include family. 

[CheeryFox 23,822]

From the strength of others and the universe - like @Phosphor said. 

[Here No Longer 5,277]

The only hope I draw anymore is from thinking about what I could be. Maybe some day I'll be successful and actually able to afford my own living. But I'm becoming progressively more and more unsure about that.

[Lucky Bolt 35,085]

I've never really thought of that before.  I guess the first thing that comes to mind is my friends and family. 

Edited April 14, 2019 by Lucky Bolt

[Muffinnz 3,222]

Nowhere, there is no hope

[aoEAF2FBvC0MIo2Q 3,673]

Certainly not from humanity. If anything, there is no more reliable a source of disappointment and betrayal than humanity.

Perhaps this isn't so much hope but more akin to strength. The fact that life on Earth has survived multiple mass extinction events does put things into perspective for me. Whatever problem I have, it is quite nothing compared to the utter calamity this planet has witnessed. Life had to be tough. So should I.
Life on Earth has always been brutal and unforgiving. If not from disease, predators, parasites and natural disasters, then surely from other individuals in your species. Ultimately, humanity is just another expression of nature's unbridled brutality and indifference.

[碇 シンジン 27,433]

In the end you can only find hope in yourself as other people are not you and your life is only your own not theirs.

[Steel Accord 6,660]

Many places, I'm naturally an idealist and optimistic . . . I think, family have called me a cynic in the past so maybe I don't quite have a good read on my own thoughts as conveyed by my actions.

To name one source of hope though, I find a lot of hope in history. As much as I try not to judge people and the modern world, as it would go against the very thing I'm about to say is wrong with it (how paradoxical) there is an ill I find very common among those I take the most serious issue with. That being an unawareness or inability to empathize with history, even as recent as a decade prior to one's birth. The most egregious example of this was also the genesis of my ire with this phenomenon. In high school one of my peers asked, with total unknowing seriousness "did they have sex back then?"

No joke. That didn't just end with him though, the same idea followed me. All the time I hear and read people complaining and despairing about the state of the world, how bad it is, how things are going to end soon. Acting as if those very same complaints have not been made by people just like them for literally thousands of years yet we're still here trucking along. Actually doing better than our ancestors. When, if you do know history, you can compare it to your present. In which case the present ALWAYS comes up better than the past! The Dark Ages, the Black Death, the Antebellum South, the Reign of Terror, the crimes of Qin Shi Huang, Caligula, and others. To which the obvious (and many times repeated to me) criticism is to point to any headline and say how bad things are now. 

My point being that things aren't any worse than they've ever been and that the problems we predict likely won't be the problems our descendants face because history almost never plays out like how people living in it think it's going to go. Just to use one example, the Soviet Union. Prior and during the Cold War, even if the conflict didn't escalate to the end of the world, the only time where I agree it was a serious possibility, people were certain that they'd be staring down the barrel of a constant Soviet threat. Then it totally collapsed. Cold War won and the looser lost so badly they fractured into successor states. Likewise in the 80's there was a huge boom of Japanaphobia because of their rising economy and co-opting of Western businesses. Thinking was that Japan would boom and economically bankrupt the rest of the world. Seems pretty silly now in hindsight doesn't it? By the way, this is all coming from a millennial. 90's kid. I was alive for none of what I'm describing so I'm not being swayed by nostalgia or having personally survived trying times.

That's the thing with history and where I find hope though. If you read into it as living, understanding that these were events that people just like you lived through, you begin to live not just outside of yourself, but even the scale of your own lifetime. That people came before you and will come after you. Any problems that you or even others have now are thrown into sharp relief, it becomes easier to discern what's a true problem and what are the same problems that people have always had.

Soapbox prophets, doomsayers, experts, scholars, people have been predicting the end of the world since it began and they've always been wrong. The only time I took such a prediction seriously is when it confessed that we won't know when the world will end.

"Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away. But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah."

~Matthew 24:35-37

That's where I find hope. Faith validated by the evidence of history. It's impossible to know what will come in my own life or beyond it. What's wrong with the world and what's right with it have both always been there and will continue to be there. While humanity as a whole has been on a steady incline since united Egypt, China, and Rome. Why do I believe that pattern will persist when others haven't? Easier to believe a trend with setbacks still on going on for thousands of years.

[Early Sunsets 2,107]

Desperation and my dreams. Neither are very good