miscellany

Hope as a Discipline

Reflections on 2025. Survival is a slog, sometimes.

chorui halim

31 Dec 2025 — 3 min read

There's a lesson I find myself learning over and over and over. All these things that are presented to as simple and childish - kindness, love, hope, happiness - take constant work to keep up. Some years the work is easier than others, but the work is always there. The work is all there is.

The shortcut, if it's available, is to shut out the rest of the world and focus just on myself and my family. It's tempting to take it. But in doing so, I'd be shirking my responsibility. Because the work isn't just to maintain kindness-love-hope-happiness, it's to cultivate it in service of building a better world. Which requires facing this world and refusing to flinch.

When I was younger, I thought that once I moved out of my parents house - once I graduated high school or college - once I met someone I loved - once I made some new friends - once I had kids - that at some point the work wouldn't be so hard anymore. I was wrong. It's hard forever. It's okay that it's hard. I still have to do it.

This year was the worst one I've had in a while, but I survived it.

Here's what helped:

Finding a physical space with people who also see the world clearly, and visiting it at least once a month.
Bringing my friends food when they're sick or sad.
Removing the element of surprise from current events by reading more about history and economics.
Getting on better meds for my chronic illness.
Challenging myself to get as far into the day as I could without looking at my phone (granting do-overs as necessary).
Replacing my doomscrolling habit with a reading habit.
Leaning into moments of quiet and stillness and discomfort; resisting the urge to fill it with something else.
Playing an instrument - badly. Getting better at it over time.
Keeping a commonplace book.
Talking to children about everything and nothing.

Here's what helped even more: practicing imagining a more loving world, and mapping a path to it.

I'm not an optimistic person by nature. I'm not under the delusion that 2026 will be any better than this year. But the work goes on, and I'm okay with that.

I'm wishing you a hopeful new year, too.

Reads for the New Year:

I really recommend reading the whole essay ("The Miracle of the Mundane") from Havrilesky's collection What If This Were Enough? It's at the end of the book and my favorite of the bunch. I tried to transcribe the entire thing into my commonplace book and gave myself debilitating wrist pain for weeks.