Nearing graduation and entering adulthood is the time in most people’s lives when they worry the most about the future, and the state of the world as it is today just makes the worry worse.

Hope, fear, optimism and pessimism are all base human emotions. They are reactions to stimuli, survival instincts. Fear keeps you safe, and hope keeps you going. That’s in the distant past, before society developed entirely. Hope and fear are much more useful in the wild than in the contemporary world.

They are still inseparable from the human condition. Optimism and pessimism are impossible to remove. The more popular choice between the two traits is pessimism, and in that, the more popular form of pessimism is apathy as compared to fear. Pessimists don’t fear the future, they just don’t expect much from it, or don’t care at all.

Environment and circumstances affect outlook in an enormous way. For example, most of those interviewed are seniors, as am I, and graduation is not far from now. Not often do people worry about the future more than their senior year.

“I’ve been like this for… since I could talk, really. Something big’s going to happen, I’m just along for the ride,” senior Corbin Murdock said.

Murdock’s point of view, as he describes himself, is pessimistic, he tends to think more about problems and issues rather than positive traits. His decision to roll with the punches of reality is almost hopeful, as it implies he’s not truly worried about the future. He’s got deeper emotional complexity than only ‘hopeful’ or ‘fearful,’ almost everyone else does, too.

“I think I’m more optimistic. I feel like a lot of past trauma has just kind of built up, and like, everything always got better. No matter what happened to me, it got better from there,” senior Ava Dover said.

You would imagine the default reaction to misfortune or trauma would be abandoning hope, but it’s really the opposite. Hope is the only ‘positive’ emotion to come from negative situations, typically.

Personal philosophies can come from family influences, as well, not just personal nature.

“I think I’ve kind of been… subconsciously indoctrinated since a kid, to naturally be wired a little more pessimistically, and I’m trying to overcome that,” teacher Tom Mollison said.

Mollison says that he actively works against this pessimism, because he doesn’t think it’s healthy. Pessimism and optimism are separate from hope and fear in one simple way. They’re broader than mere emotions. Hope and fear are reflexive emotions, while pessimism and optimism are states of mind and can be changed.

Hope is just as much a roadblock as it is a tool. In the story of Pandora’s Box, after all the evils and sorrows fled into the world from the box, the only thing left in it was hope. Hope was among the evils released. Hope can be the bait that drags you on through misery, no matter how unrealistic it is.

Hope, fear, optimism and pessimism are connected by one major trait in each one: they’re all based on thinking about the future. Every one of them involves looking forward in some way.

The consensus on the near future among students is a pessimistic one. Many young people don’t expect a good time to come. It is important to know that pessimism is a feedback loop, or at least can be manufactured. The news holds negative stories much longer than positive ones because they’re more engaging, and social media algorithms similarly hold onto negativity.

“What you see is gonna be what you think,” sophomore Landon Eacker said.

Input has a huge influence on outlook, that almost goes without saying.

Leaving high school and entering adult life is a stressful, worrisome time in anyone’s life, that environment magnifies both hope and fear in equal measure. There can be just as much hope looking forward as there is fear, the two emotions show up in the same scenarios often.

Fear is the default for a lot of people looking into the future, but hope develops with time. As grim as the world may seem, with war, genocide and economic downturn, it hasn’t extinguished all hope.