Without that sense of agency, we’re incapable of doing anything at all. That is the place that hope needs to perch on, that I’m trying to articulate: that hope without any foundation of actual agency, any thinking, any knowledge, any ability to make or do change in various ways, is a meaningless thing. Like optimism. They’re not quite the same thing, but for me they’re closely related in that they’re just words without some kind of basis of action. And that action can be as simple as building a little wooden box in your garden to purify water, which is something that I’ve been doing this week. Or it can be as big as developing computer programs to analyze satellite photographs. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be the one piece that will save the world, but it definitely has to be something that increases one’s own psychological sense of ability to make change that is a prerequisite for any other kind of hope or optimism that we might face.