Holding on to Hope By Chris O'Shaughnessy
It’s nothing short of stating the obvious to note that it’s been a rough year. For many across the globe, 2020 will be remembered infamously, with 2021 starting out hot on its heels. That’s not to say good things haven’t happened, and it’s not to say other years haven’t brought hardship, but the previous year has been exceptional in the scope of its impact: we’re experiencing a global phenomenon in the form of the coronavirus pandemic. I think it’s partly because of the near-universal nature of our difficult experiences that finding hope is even more a struggle now than before. In my opinion, hope falls into that strange category of words or concepts that we all have some degree of familiarity with, but still struggle to concisely define (I think “culture” is in the same group).The good old Merriam-Webster dictionary says hope is “to cherish a desire with anticipation: to want something to happen or be true.” I particularly like that definition because it has “cherish” in it – and I think we should take every opportunity possible to cherish things! To take it further, I think a defining characteristic of hope is that it’s a process – it’s the journey rather than a destination. Wish fulfillment could be a destination, an end in and of itself, while hope is the journey…that’s an important distinction. I’d been speaking about hope at international schools, conferences, retreats, etc., even before the pandemic because of various alarming studies that showed an increase in hopelessness in young people (Twenge, 2019), and because of the interesting connection I saw with Third Culture Kids and Cross Cultural Kids. I think there
is a direct correlation between a lack of connection, and a lack of hope. The more disconnected we are, the more hopeless we become. There are all sorts of reasons we were becoming more disconnected even before the pandemic. Increased use of social media is a big one. I’m not against social media – but I do think it’s like junk food: it’s got all the taste, but none of the nutrients. Real relationships require joint interest AND joint investment or risk. Social media gives us the interest…but none of the investment or risk. Junk food (social media) tastes good, but it’s no replacement for actual nutrients (interdependent relationships). Beyond that, we just don’t need each other the way we used to. Thanks to affluence and technology we can accomplish so much on our own now – and why wouldn’t we? Any opportunity to decrease risk (depending on someone else) is attractive. The downside is that we actually needed that little bit of risk/interdependence for the relational nutrition. Loneliness hit us hard in the pandemic, but it was a growing concern even before that – and loneliness is tied closely to hopelessness. “One study, published in the American Sociological Review (ASR) and authored by Miller McPhearson, Lynn SmithLovin, and Matthew Brashears, sociologists at Duke and the University of Arizona, featured 1,500 face-to-face interviews where more than a quarter of the respondents — one in four — said that they have no one with whom they can talk about their personal troubles or triumphs. If family members are not counted, the number doubles to more than half of Americans who have no one outside their immediate family with whom they can share confidences.
