Working Hope and Environment

When we confront with unfamiliar phenomena or paradigm shifts, alarm and anxiety often prevail, leading to defense mechanisms such as an inability to comprehend transformations or, worse yet, demonizing them without understanding. The incessant barrage of information about catastrophes, particularly climate change, fails to create a supportive environment for working through anguishes and fears. Like Odysseus, we must navigate between the Scylla of mere negationist optimism or regressive hope, and the Charybdis of nihilist pessimism and fatalistic inevitability where recognizing the problem is strictly connected to the desperate impossibility of immediately solving it. It is impossible to respond to the difficulties proposed by the environmental crisis with the manic hope of repair through easy solutions – a hope often followed by disillusionment and the end of expectations if the solution does not arrive rapidly, within the desired timeframe. With the working hope, we can envisage a good enough life, in which there can be room for love and creativity, counteracting magical and illusory thinking, and looking with sincerity and integrity even at the negative aspects of existence, offering the means to experience them with reflective consciousness through the patient and continuous work of symbolization.