How to stay hopeful about the future?

Arguably, the worst person to ask the question “how can you stay hopeful for the future?” is a final-year bachelor's student, currently locked in a valiant battle to finish her thesis. To be very honest, I haven’t been thinking about the future at all much lately; these past few weeks I’ve lived day by day, financially drained by the university Spar as I survive on a diet that predominantly consists of dried-out feta boreks. 

Sincere apologies for anyone hoping for a Thunbergian how-to for hope, because my answer to that question truly depends on the day. 

Ask me after spending all day online, I’m The Cynic. “How can you stay hopeful about the future?" Well, don’t read the news (sorry, DUB). Ignorance is bliss, so get your shovel out and bury your head in the sand. 

But ask me after my morning run, I’m The Romantic: “The world is a beautiful place, of course there’s hope!”- hope is in the sunrise, romanticise walking past the canals, and life is soundtracked by Louis Armstrong's “What a Wonderful World”. 

Yet if you ask me after a few hours at a terras, and I’m The Existentialist: we live on a rock hurtling through space, so have hope in the fact that nothing matters in the end. Have fun! Send the text! Book the trip!...until you ask me after a few more hours at that same terras, and The Existentialist turns bleak: we live on a rock hurtling through space, so why bother to have hope at all. 

But right now I am none of the above, as my academia-induced hermitting has made me incredibly short-sighted. I have no idea what I'll be doing beyond summer vacation, let alone in 5 years from now, turning the question at hand into just - “future?” It feels a bit self-centric to admit, but it is hard to picture "the" future when you don't even know who you will be when you witness it.

What I find interesting about the prompt at hand is that older people love asking this question to younger people - I guess a perk of growing older is getting to do a bit of Lorax-ing. I suspect they ask us about the future not because young people know anything about it, but because they remember what it feels like not to know. So when people ask whether I am hopeful, I don't think they are really asking me to predict the future.

Instead, older people, in my experience, have mastered the art of disguising advice as questions. When they ask whether I am hopeful, they are not looking for an answer so much as offering one. Beneath the question is a quiet suggestion that things have a way of working themselves out.

My dad's approach to the matter is to send me the link to Swedish House Mafia's "Don't You Worry Child" every few weeks, convinced that he’s a “cool dad” (I don’t have the heart to point out that this song came out in 2012). I roll my eyes, but what I haven’t told him is that I have found myself listening to it after a particularly hard day of thesising. 

Marisca Westerhof is the winner of the 2026 Campus Columnist Competition. She has been selected among almost 50 candidates to write a column on DUB's English page every three weeks in 2026.