If we do our best with what we have, we should remain hopeful in the promise of a beautiful future–even if it is one that has not yet arrived on our shores.

Hope is confidence. Hope forces us to believe in the promise that tomorrow will be better than today and will most certainly be better than yesterday.

Hope, as a basic premise, is the trust we have in our own future and our ability to interact with the world in a positive way. Hope, however, is a loaded word and not always a positive one. It can, given the wrong circumstances, lead us towards an optimism bias.

In today’s world, hope is chiefly about social and economic empowerment.

Our relationship to the past remains one of the keys to the future. History, however, is always open to perception bias. Can we truly transcend our past? Can we transcend it till the point that it feels sufficiently far away?

Policymakers usually end up dealing with the past in the most selective and contradictory manner. In certain nation-states, large segments of the population still have difficulty facing the past and therefore have neither been able to offer it a burial nor a cremation.

To remain hopeful about the future, the goals we have must be aligned with the future that we are longing to construct, to create and to consolidate.

Hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism can lead us astray with overpromising and underdelivering.

The goals we have, therefore, have to speak deeply into our deepest dreams. Most of us have common dreams, but who said that there’s anything wrong with that?

To remain a hopeful society, we are all called to collectively: lift large segments of our population out of poverty, forestall pending, foreseeable and unforeseeable economic disasters, prevent the spread of diseases as well as reduce the gap between the individual and society-at-large.

While the challenges we face may be real, they should not weaken our ability to hope. Hope need not need to be based on grand visions, but can simply be based on a vision of steadily improving our reality.

This vision is not modest by any means, but rather, a realistic one.

Will it be enough in the long-run? Well, once a goal has been reached, a new one will always emerge and awake.