Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

The Human Experience

Hope: Blessing or Curse?

John Creigan considers whether hope helps us thrive or holds us back.

Hope is often celebrated as one of humanity’s greatest virtues – a force that sustains us through adversity by fuelling dreams of a better tomorrow. It’s revered in literature, psychology, and philosophy as a beacon of resilience and optimism. Yet I find myself questioning whether hope is as universally beneficial as we often believe. Could it be that hope, so often hailed as a blessing, contains negative consequences we rarely consider? Is it possible that hope sometimes hinders, rather than helps, human flourishing?

Consider this, for a start: for hope to exist, there must also be doubt. Hope does not thrive (and is not even needed) in certainty.

…