A Playlist for Hope

For many moons, my emotions have been bouncing all over the place. Sometimes up, sometimes sideways, but always lower, kind of like the ball in a pachinko machine. When I catch myself on a downward trend, what works for me is to intentionally turn to something uplifting. Right now, looking for reasons to be hopeful is lifting my mood. Music works really well for me so I created a “Hope” playlist.

Shakespeare wrote five-act plays. Let’s ride his coattails and see whether approaching hope in five acts will bring some to you, too. If you just want the music playlist, scroll down.

Act 1: Things have been Much Worse

Ofttimes it seems like the world was better awhile ago, and a lot better a longer while ago. It feels like the world has never been this bad and, as bad as things are, they keep getting worse. Actually, things have been way worse than they are now. It feels worse, in part because most news sources focus on bad news instead of good, and in part because of our hardwired psychology. Our brains easily obsess over trouble. We view the world through an anxiety-inducing cataclysmic lens.

I am going to cherry pick recent history for a few ways in which our world is much better than the world used to be. We are only going to consider the last 200 years. We will skip the obvious targets farther back, like the Crusades and invading Mongols and Roman conquests. Let’s consider five things: life expectancy, Nazis, authoritarian governments, disease, and car crashes.

Just 200 years ago in the United States, White men used to die by the time they were in their mid-to-late 30s.¹ By then they would be years past siring whatever offspring they were going to sire. Just wham bam bye bye ma’am with no need for a 401(k) or a mid-life crisis.

Today, though, men in the US have a life expectancy of almost 76 years.² That is long enough so that my grandchildren ought to have living fathers for a long long time. It is not all rosy by any stretch of the imagination. American Indian and Alaskan Native males have life expectancy only into the mid-to-upper 60s. That is a terrible discrepancy but it is still better than where we were a couple hundred years ago.

Nazis are in the news a lot these days so let’s consider them. While executing their “Final Solution,” the Nazis murdered 8,305 people on average every day for 1,205 days.³

Let that sink in for a moment.

We all agree that way too many innocent people are getting killed in our world today, some in war zones, some by cartel violence, some from drugs; pick your tragedy, there are plenty to choose from. But no one is systematically murdering 8,305 people… every day… for over three years.

Gathering all of the numbers and doing the arithmetic is hard so let me help you. The Nazis planned to murder, murdered, and meticulously documented the murders of 10 million people.

How about authoritarian governments? We Americans are stressing mightily about big Government and draining the swamp and transparency and where and when the military ought to be deployed. There are lots of other non-democratic governments today which are imprisoning and murdering people. But no one is even beginning to approach Joseph Stalin’s brutality. Starting just 102 years ago, Stalin killed around 10 million people.⁴ In addition, he sent about 18 million to the Gulag labor camps.⁵ You may fret about the actions of recent US governments but I’ll bet you are not worried about people being killed or “disappeared” into labor camps by the millions.

As an aside, I studied Stalin in social studies class in school. He was history, even ancient history to my teenage mind. But at the same time that Stalin was just getting rolling, my grandfather, Dr. Abraham Serby, was a freshly minted med school graduate and the third resident at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. While I was studying Stalin, my grandpa was decidedly alive, actively practicing medicine in Chicago (and still on the staff of Michael Reese Hospital), and definitely not ancient history.

And speaking of medicine, let’s look at deaths from diseases. Way more people died from diseases before we had vaccinations.

Take a look at these two pandemics, both of which happened before vaccines were available. The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 killed about 20 to 50 million people.⁶ More recently, COVID-19 killed about 14.9 million people just in the years 2020-2021.⁷ Returning to flu, now that vaccines are widely available, it “only” kills 290,000-650,000 people annually.⁸ That is two orders of magnitude better than where we were just over 100 years ago.

Let’s take one last stroll down nostalgia lane, to those idyllic days of the 1950s in the United States when life was simpler and the living was easier. Back then there were over 20 deaths from car crashes per 100,000 people every year. In 2023, with the advent of seat belts, shoulder belts, and a whole host of other safety devices, that is down to 12.2 deaths per 100,000 people.⁹

I could go on and on but you get the point. There is an endless list of ways in which life today is better than it used to be. I have faith that things will keep improving. That faith gives me hope for tomorrow.

Act 2: Have Faith In Your Neighbors

If I had to make the world better all by myself, of course it would be too big a task. But I know that our world is full of people who share the same dream with me: when each of us makes a small positive difference then tomorrow will be better than today. This is not blind faith on my part. I have proof.

Have you stopped to think about how much faith your put in your neighbors to act in your best interest? Sure, I get it. You might consider them to be the scum o’ the earth because they have those yard signs and bumper stickers. They might have demonstrated their utter disregard for sanity by voting for that candidate. But you walk across the street without worrying that they will maliciously run you down with their car. When a traffic light turns red, you trust that (pretty much all) other drivers will obey it.

If you collapsed while mowing your lawn and your neighbor saw you, they would call 9-1-1, right? Of course right. And they have faith that you would do the same for them.

You need only turn to sources like Good News Network or the Positive News Foundation to read story after story of people being good to people.

This is not new news, naturally. Voltaire (1694-1778) said,

The friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, these things do not perish and cannot be destroyed.

When you take a breath and consider with an open heart, you will see that every person, every day, is simply trying to have the best day that they can manage. Each of us wants to wake up in a safe place, eat good food, love and be loved by friends and family, and sleep peacefully. If you have faith in that then it is a little easier to hope that they and you can find common ground. Our differences are only in how we want to achieve our dreams.

But what, you rightly demand, about when those kids got shot? As I proofread this, we are mourning the deaths of two children and the injuries of 17 more at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. And what about all of the rest of the killing happening all over the world? How can you have faith in people when they are ignoring this vital issue or actively working against that important issue?

It can indeed be easier to have faith that individual people will do small things right than that humankind will do big things right. Which leads us to…

Act 3: God’s Faith in You—and All The Rest of Us

If you are an atheist, stick with me for a few sentences. I have deep respect for you and I will circle back to atheism at the end of this act.

For all of us who believe in a Higher Power, “this Bud’s for you.”

Given all of the horrible things that people have done to other people throughout time, it can be hard to have faith that we will make the world better. There is, however, one being which has limitless faith: God.

Say what?!

Deuteronomy 32:4 reads (with my emphasis added),

The Rock!—whose deeds are perfect,
Yea, all of whose ways are just;
A faithful God, never false,
True and upright indeed.

A faithful God? To have faith in something, it has to be something that you do not control. Since God is the be-all and end-all of everything, in what would God have faith? What does God not control?

Let me propose an answer to you, while giving credit where credit is due to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ Z”L essay “The Faith of God.” God has faith in us. God created us and gave us free will. God could take that free will away but God never has. Why not? Because God has faith that we will do the right thing.

Going back to Genesis 1:26-27 we read,

And God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.”

And God created humankind in the divine image, creating it in the image of God—creating them male and female.

Being created in God’s image means, in one sense, that we ought to behave like God. So since God has faith in us, ought we not try to have the same faith?

I glean a lot of hope from that. If faith in people is good enough for God then it is good enough for me.

I say a little prayer every morning when I first wake up. I start by thanking God for restoring my soul to me. (Do you remember that children’s prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep?” Well now I have it back for another day.) It ends with a reminder that God’s faithfulness, in me, in all of us, never ends.

Returning to atheists: I get it. I have absolutely zero proof that God exists. I am definitely not trying to convince you that God exists. I just believe it. And the whole argument that I present in this act gives me hope. On the other hand, if you glean your hope from your faith in other humans, I think that is awesome. You do you and I’ll do me.

Now, with facts behind us and faith in hand, we come to hope.

Act 4: Hope Playlist

Enough words. Here is the playlist that I want to share with you: Hope: Tomorrow will be better than today.

OK, it’s me and I don’t know when to stop writing. Almost enough words. There are two non-English songs in the playlist which need a bit of explanation.

Nani Vazana sings Una Segunda Piel in Ladino. This language is a mash-up of Old Spanish with elements of numerous other languages including Old Aragonese, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and Andalusi Romance. It is written in Hebrew script.

Borrowing from Nani’s website about Una Segunda Piel (“A Second Skin”),

This song [is] about a Sephardic alternative passing-away ceremony. When you reach golden years (it’s usually on a round birthday like 70 or 80), you throw a big party. You treat your family and friends to food and booze and then, you invite them to sew around you the shroud of the dead. 

It takes about 2 hours to make and during this cocooned state, you’re suppose to meditate and think about all the things you want to leave behind in this world. When the cloth is done, it goes into the cupboard, symbolising all these things you want to break free of. You are then reborn, free from worries and cares, and can continue your life in a better way. This is why Nani named the song Una Segunda Piel, which means ‘A Second Skin’.

The last song in the playlist is Hatikvah and the title means, literally, The Hope.

Is there a song that gives you home for tomorrow? Let me know. This playlist will get better and better as we collectively grow it.

Act 5: Some Hopeful Photos

Let me wrap up with a few of my photographs which bring hope to me. (You can click on any of them to see them larger.)

This last one is not my photo but it is my grandson.

I wake up each day with a true sense of hope for the day and for the future. No, I am not minimizing the troubles in our world. But I do believe that we are on a path to improvement. We just need to recognize it.

I have one last ask of you. If you found a little bit of hope in this blog post, share it with someone else.

Notes

1. Hacker J. D. (2010). Decennial Life Tables for the White Population of the United States, 1790-1900. Historical methods, 43(2), 45–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/01615441003720449 ↩︎
2. Murphy SL, Kochanek KD, Xu JQ, Arias E. Mortality in the United States, 2023. NCHS Data Brief, no 521. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2024. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.15620/cdc/170564 ↩︎
3. Perplexity thread: Calculate the average number of murders per day that the Nazis committed while trying to execute their “final solution.” https://www.perplexity.ai/search/the-nazis-killed-about-10-mill-jmLCj8FeRlGGq8cIpNbFMA ↩︎
4. Steven Rosefielde,
   Documented homicides and excess deaths: New insights into the scale of killing in the USSR during the 1930s,
   Communist and Post-Communist Studies,
   Volume 30, Issue 3,
   1997,
   Pages 321-331,
   ISSN 0967-067X,
   https://doi.org/10.1016/S0967-067X(97)00011-1.
   (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967067X97000111) ↩︎
5. Stalin’s Purges. Genercide. https://www.gendercide.org/case_rwandastalin.html ↩︎
6. History of the Influenza Vaccine. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/history-of-influenza-vaccination ↩︎
7. 14.9 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/desa/149-million-excess-deaths-associated-covid-19-pandemic-2020-and-2021 ↩︎
8. Influenza (seasonal). World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(seasonal) ↩︎
9. Wikipedia contributors, “Motor vehicle fatality rate in U.S. by year,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year&oldid=1307974620 (accessed August 28, 2025). ↩︎