Hi, today I just wanted to share a thought that I’ve pondered on for quite a while. That is, what is the greatest loss a man can have? Now, many people have a varying degrees of answer to it, it could be friends, health or it could be wealth or money as well for some. And to a degree, I do see some truth in it. However, the biggest loss according to me is something beyond and bigger than this. It is the loss of hope. You can call it hope, or faith, or belief, but I hope that you get the point. Because the important thing is that if a man does have hope in himself and his surroundings, it becomes a lot more easier to deal with and overcome with the struggles faced due to the usual ups and downs of life, or even the ones which comes from the lack of the things mentioned previously, the lack of friends, a good health or money for that matter. Having some hope within yourself in a very weird way, at least anecdotally increases your resilience for a lot of things substantially. It makes you to keep pushing further in the hope of that something better is just about to come, or that the times will change, or as the saying goes - this too shall pass. Now if you look at this perspective from an objective sense, it hardly makes any sense. Just as you can hope for something better, there is a similar likelihood that things will go worse as well. And it is a very valid way of looking at it. But somehow, that’s the point. The point here is not to get into the nitty-gritty of knowing what will happen or how it will happen. It is to have a believe within you that irrespective of what the current circumstance are, things have gotten better in the past and they will continue to get better in the future as well. From my limited knowledge of the world and the people who reside in it, I’ve come to this realisation that almost all of us are doing it consciously or out of habit almost every single day. For example, many people engage in this practice of optimism through religion. In almost every major religion out there, having faith is the basic criterion. Faith not only in accepting that there exists a divinity for all of us, but also in the fact that this divinity is actively looking out for us and is making sure that we’ll be alright and everything will turn out to be fine. Now coming onto the title of this, how is this the greatest loss a man can have? Well, from what we’ve just talked about, it is clear that this hope and optimism is what allows us conscious beings to keep waking up every morning in hopes of that the things will turn out to be alright. And if, due to our cynicism and the tendency to turn into a nihilist, we somehow lose this hope, life would eventually and ultimately loose all its meaning. No particular action would make any sense at all. Thoughts like “If things are not never going to get any better, why even try?”, “I’ve been born this way, and this is probably how I’ll die too” and “None of the people I’ve met before were the right one, so there is nobody for me, I should stop trying” would flood our consciousness. And this to me, feels like the greatest loss a person can have. Because without hope, life reveals its sheer lack of answers and certainty to us. It shows us that we don’t know things, we don’t know how it’ll turn out for us, are we going to be alright in the next 10 years? Will I every be able to overcome the hurdles I’m facing now? Life doesn’t every answer these questions to us. You only find out only when a certain time has passed already and you’re looking at it from hindsight. Especially in the current state of the world, where the global conflicts, the general societal shift towards close-mindedness, economic hardships, environmental concerns and most importantly, the arrival of Artificial Intelligence, hope becomes the only beacon of light we can latch onto with all our lives, it is the only thing that we can rely on to console ourselves that things will be alright. It is the only thing that will keep us pushing ourselves to actively try to make our lives better because we do believe that things can get better. Because, without hope, who we really are and what can we even try to be? Thank you.