Do you feel hopeless about humanity? Look for the good things – and build a bridge towards them

Something quite peculiar has happened to my Facebook feed, and I like it. (Yes, I am still on Facebook; I like to call it “research”.)

One day, a few months ago, a post popped up from a group called Poisons Help: Emergency Identification for Mushrooms and Plants. I don’t know why the algorithmic gods delivered it to me, but I was curious, so I clicked.

I saw a photo of a fungus growing on a tree stump, and a message from a panicked man whose dog was vomiting. Further photos showed the “vomitus”, including bits of regurgitated mushroom. Strangely, this was not off-putting. The owner, fearing his pet may have eaten something toxic, had come to the group seeking urgent guidance. And he got it, because the group members are vetted experts around the world, available in emergency situations to share their knowledge and, when possible, identify potentially toxic plants and fungi. In this case, they offered reassurance: the mushrooms were not dangerous.

I now find myself reading post after post, each vibrating with love, terror, generosity, expertise, urgency, understanding, respectful debate, reassurance or advice to contact a vet immediately. And such gratitude! When cases are resolved and pets survive, the posters are so grateful to have had access to this remarkable free resource. It feels like a beautiful pocket of hope and light on the internet.

And I don’t need to tell you, of course, that a lot of the internet feels pretty bleak. From trolling to extreme pornography, it can seem overwhelmingly awful, and getting worse. That’s why I like to get lost in this very specific and specialised corner: it reminds me that there is good out there too.

It is easy to feel hopeless about humanity – especially in January. Trump (again), wars (again), the climate crisis and the destruction of nature (still), violence against women and children, poverty, racism, xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia (always): there is much to despair about. It can feel difficult to hold on to the reality – because it is a reality – that there are also good things happening in the world. For one thing, people who have studied and worked hard to become experts in their field are using their knowledge and skills to help others.

This is something I see when I go to work in the NHS. For all the talk of its brokenness, all the cuts – sorry, “savings” – and the low staff and morale, every day my colleagues and I (in the clinic where I work and throughout the service) go into our consulting rooms and treat patients, and many of those patients grow and develop and make changes and get better.

Some things get worse and some get better, and it is our responsibility to hold both of these things in mind. As well as facing up to, and standing up against, the bad that is happening, we need to hold on to the good. It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the bad, to lose hope and feel that that is all there is. And if you are a person whose home and family have been destroyed by war, or who is surviving a disaster linked to the climate crisis, or whose mind is ravaged by mental illness, it may not feel possible to see the good anywhere. But I think all of us can fall into that state of mind. It takes work to maintain our grip on the good in ourselves, in others and in the world.

Now, this is not positive psychology, an optimistic, manifest-and-it-shall-be way of building a better life. I’ve written previously about gaslighting yourself, pretending everything is good. But if we can hold on to the good, and the potential for good things to emerge, we can lay the groundwork for more good things to grow. This was an idea that my rabbi spoke about in a sermon recently, talking about the Israel/Palestine conflict: that however devastatingly, traumatisingly far away peace may seem, we have to believe that it is possible, and behave as if it is plausible, so that we can begin building the bridge that may get us there one day. We can start to lay the bricks.

I like this idea of laying bricks, beginning to build a bridge. It reminded me of my recent visit to the Natural History Museum in London, where I met James Maclaine, senior curator of fish. He led me into the collection stores of the Darwin Centre, which most visitors do not get to see: an enormous basement treasure trove with more than 27km of shelving holding millions of glass jars and tanks, some dating back hundreds of years, containing Darwin’s pet octopus, Archie the giant squid, platypuses, sharks and frogs. I like to imagine the Victorian scientists writing the spidery specimen notes and labels that would be deciphered by Maclaine more than 150 years later, laying the bricks for a fishy bridge from one generation to the next – one that continues to grow. Walking into that room made me feel quite emotional; James told me it made him feel excited – and that is why he is a senior curator of fish, and I am a psychotherapist.

You don’t have to be a curator of fish or a peace activist or a fungus expert to start building a bridge. You can do it in your own life. When things feel bleak, you can try to hold on, somewhere in your mind, to the potential for things to get better. To remember that for all our capacity for destruction and inertia, we humans also have a capacity for feeling and thinking, for creativity and growth. You can start to lay the bricks for a better life, whether that’s through therapy, or a visit to a museum. You can see what is not going well in your life – and what within that is in your power to change.