What If Hope Doesn't Need Certainty? (Part 1)
The exhaustion of trying to feel safe by predicting the future
For most of my life, I thought hope and optimism were basically the same thing.
If someone was struggling, you looked for the bright side.
If life got hard, you focused on what was going right.
If uncertainty showed up, you reminded yourself that things would probably work out.
I learned early that negativity wasn’t helpful. People could get stuck complaining, catastrophizing, and focusing on everything that was wrong. I didn’t want to live that way.
So I became someone who looked for possibilities.
Someone who tried to stay positive.
Someone who believed that attitude mattered.
For a long time, that worked.
Then life became more complicated.
Over the last several years, I’ve found myself sitting with situations that refuse to cooperate with prediction.
My daughter has faced health challenges that don’t come with guarantees.
Friends have received diagnoses that no amount of positive thinking can change.
Patients I’ve cared about have walked through uncertainty that medicine cannot fully explain.
And if I’m honest, I’ve noticed something happening inside me.
Whenever uncertainty appears, I start trying to solve it.
Not the actual problem.
The uncertainty itself.
I search for information.
I look for reassuring stories.
I run scenarios in my mind.
I gather evidence.
I try to calculate the future.
It’s as if some part of me believes that if I can just predict what’s coming, I’ll finally be able to relax.
What I’ve come to realize is that I’m often not looking for hope.
I’m looking for certainty.
And certainty is a demanding master.
When Optimism Starts to Feel Like Work
The problem is that life keeps placing us in situations where certainty isn’t available.
As parents, we cannot guarantee our children’s future.
As partners, we cannot guarantee the health of our relationships.
As patients, we cannot guarantee what the next scan, test, or treatment will show.
As human beings, we cannot guarantee much at all.
Yet somehow we keep trying.
We tell ourselves that if we can gather enough information, think hard enough, prepare well enough, or stay positive enough, we can finally feel safe.
But what if safety was never supposed to come from certainty?
Lately, I’ve started to wonder whether part of my exhaustion comes from feeling responsible for maintaining optimism.
Not just for myself.
For the people I love.
For my family.
For patients.
For a world that often feels fragile and overwhelmed.
There can be an unspoken pressure to stay positive.
To focus on the good.
To avoid negativity.
To reassure ourselves and others that things will work out.
But life eventually presents situations where optimism becomes difficult to sustain.
Not because we’ve become cynical.
Because reality has become more complicated.
The Difference Between Hope and Optimism
Recently, I’ve been reflecting on a distinction that has helped me make sense of this.
Optimism is the expectation that the future will turn out well.
Hope is remaining open to the possibility of good, even when you don’t know what the future holds.
At first glance, those definitions sound almost identical.
But in real life, they feel very different.
Optimism says:
“I think things are going to work out.”
Hope says:
“I don’t know how this will unfold, but I remain open to the possibility of goodness.”
Optimism is a prediction.
Hope is an orientation.
That distinction matters because predictions eventually run into reality.
Sometimes the treatment works.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes the relationship heals.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes the plan unfolds exactly as we hoped.
Sometimes life writes a different story.
If hope depends on getting the prediction right, then hope becomes fragile.
But if hope is an orientation toward possibility, meaning, connection, beauty, love, and growth, then hope can survive uncertainty.
A Different Question
I’ve started to notice this in my own life.
When my mind becomes consumed with trying to figure out what’s going to happen, the question I’m usually asking is:
What are the chances this turns out well?
It’s an understandable question.
But it’s also one that rarely brings peace.
Because the answer is almost always uncertain.
A different question has been more helpful:
What good remains possible from here?
Notice how different that feels.
The first question narrows our attention toward probability.
The second opens our attention toward possibility.
When my daughter’s health takes an unexpected turn, I don’t know exactly how the future will unfold.
But good remains possible.
Growth remains possible.
Connection remains possible.
Resilience remains possible.
Joy remains possible.
When someone receives a difficult diagnosis, the only possible good is not that the disease disappears.
Good may also look like:
Deeper relationships
Meaningful conversations
Reconciliation
Courage
Presence
Laughter
Love
The future may not contain the outcome we most want.
But it may still contain goodness.
Broadening Our Definition of Good
I think one of the ways hope becomes fragile is when we define goodness too narrowly.
We become attached to a single outcome.
The scan improves.
The treatment works.
The marriage survives.
The child never struggles.
And when that outcome becomes uncertain, hope starts to disappear.
But perhaps hope grows when we remember that goodness has many forms.
Sometimes healing is physical.
Sometimes it is relational.
Sometimes it is emotional.
Sometimes it is spiritual.
Sometimes the greatest gifts emerge in places we never would have chosen.
That doesn’t make suffering good.
It simply reminds us that suffering doesn’t get the final word.
Hope Doesn’t Require Certainty
That realization has changed something for me.
Because I no longer feel responsible for convincing myself that everything will be okay.
And honestly, that’s a relief.
There is a kind of exhaustion that comes from constantly trying to maintain optimism.
Constantly searching for evidence.
Constantly managing your thoughts.
Constantly trying to stay positive.
Eventually it can start to feel like another job.
Hope feels different.
Hope allows me to tell the truth.
Things are hard.
People are suffering.
The world is struggling in many ways.
Some outcomes may not be what I want.
None of that disqualifies hope.
In fact, I think hope may be most important precisely where certainty disappears.
The Opposite of Catastrophizing
I’ve come to believe that the opposite of catastrophizing is not optimism.
The opposite of catastrophizing is reality.
Reality includes pain.
Reality includes uncertainty.
Reality includes loss.
But reality also includes love, beauty, resilience, meaning, connection, healing, and unexpected grace.
Hope doesn’t ask us to ignore one side in favor of the other.
Hope asks us to remain open to all of it.
A Question I’m Learning to Live With
These days, when I catch myself trying to predict the future so I can finally feel safe, I try to pause and ask a different question:
What remains possible here that I cannot currently see?
I don’t ask because I’m certain the answer will be positive.
I ask because uncertainty contains possibility, not just danger.
And maybe that’s what hope has been all along.
Not confidence that life will unfold the way I want.
Not certainty that everything will work out.
Just a willingness to remain open to goodness, even when I cannot see the path ahead.
For someone who spent much of his life trying to feel safe by predicting the future, that feels like a different kind of freedom.
And perhaps a deeper kind of hope.
In the companion guide for paid subscribers, we'll explore the hidden ways we try to create certainty when life feels uncertain. You'll learn how to recognize your personal certainty-seeking patterns, identify when planning becomes spiraling, understand the body signals that often accompany uncertainty, and begin noticing the habits that keep you trapped in prediction. Because before we can practice hope, we often need to understand what keeps pulling us away from it.