How to Be Hopeful: What I Learnt From Caitlin Moran
Feeling hopeless about the state of the world is, these days, less an occasional mood than a background hum. So when I went to see Caitlin Moran talk about her new book, How to Be Hopeful, I didn't expect to come away as uplifted as I did.
Her premise is simple, though not always easy: stop trying to fix everything, and do what you can in your own part of the world. Change what you can in your part of the universe. Small changes in your own life ripple outward. That's not a throwaway line, it's the architecture of the whole book, which moves through three stages: Despair, Repair, and Thankfulness. Not denial of what's genuinely hard, but a deliberate refusal to let the hardest, biggest, most unfixable things be the only thing you're allowed to feel.
It all adds up and ripples out
Like all her books, it touches the existential without staying there. It's warm, funny, and full of small, doable steps, how to have a good minute, how to have a good hour, how to have a good day. Not how to have a good year, or a good life, or a good world. A good minute. Because, as she writes, "happiness is a thing that must be done over and over again." It isn't a state you arrive at and keep. It's built, repeatedly, in small units, the same way a habit is built, which is a piece of research I come back to constantly in my own work: it's not the size of the action that determines whether it sticks, it's the repetition.
This is, almost word for word, the first step of The Small Redesign: Notice. Before anything changes, you have to actually see what's happening, rather than letting the noise of everything-all-at-once drown it out. Moran's version of this is resisting the endless scroll of a news cycle and an algorithm built to keep you anxious, adrenalised, and angry, not by pretending the world is fine, but by refusing to let something designed to keep you activated be the only lens you see it through.
How to have a good algorithm
That chapter title alone is worth sitting with. We talk a lot about mindset and resilience, but rarely about the fact that a huge amount of what we feel day to day is being actively engineered by something with no interest in our wellbeing. Choosing what you let into your field of attention isn't avoidance, it's one of the most concrete forms of agency available to you. You can't control the news cycle. You can control what runs through your hands and your eyes for the next five minutes.
Being grateful, properly
Gratitude gets a bad reputation sometimes, reduced to a journaling cliché. Moran's version is more active than that: it's not just noticing what's good, it's treating that noticing as a discipline, something you build the same way you build any other habit, because the brain that's trained to scan for threat has to be deliberately retrained to also scan for what's working.
A few things to try
In the spirit of small, doable steps rather than a total life overhaul:
Have one good minute before you check your phone. Not your whole morning, just the first sixty seconds. Notice where you are before you let the algorithm decide where your attention goes.
Pick one thing in your actual control. Not the state of the world your street, your inbox, your next conversation. Do that one thing.
Name one thing you're grateful for, out loud or on paper. Not the big obvious things, something small and specific from today.
Audit your algorithm, not just your diary. What's running through your hands for an hour a day, and is it making your days better or worse?
None of these need to be done perfectly, or all at once, or exactly as written here, the whole point, Moran's and mine, is that you adapt it to what's actually true for your life.
If this resonates and you want a bit more structure for noticing what's going on beneath the noise, The Small Redesign is a free workbook built for exactly that first step.
