You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. It's really easy to feel helpless lately. We are living in difficult or hopeless times. I don't need to tick off the reasons why, but the writer Wajahat Ali encourages us to keep hope alive during this time of tumult and a devastating war in Europe.

His wide-ranging TED membership conversation with Ted's current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rogers covers everything from camels to Chaiti to Kung Fu Panda 2 as part of his message to invest in hope.

We should note this conversation was recorded on January 20th, 2022.

The last time I addressed this august TED crowd was in 2019 from the main stage in Vancouver,

where I was giving my talk, my first TED talk, on the case for having children.

And that's where I shared the news I had just received earlier in the week that my then two-year-old

daughter, Nuseba, was diagnosed with stage four cancer and needed a full liver transplant.

So, how have your past three years been? As you can

mention, our last three years have been eventful. However, they have given me some tough, learned,

lived experiences and lessons about these ephemeral thing we call hope.

And apparently there's a huge demand for hope right now.

In 2022, we're all dealing with multiple crises.

A pandemic has killed 900,000 Americans.

There's a partial lockdown.

There's disinformation.

There's income inequality, the rise of

white supremacy. People telling people like me, go back to where you came from. We have to learn new

Greek letters every few months. And oh yeah, there's climate change. But other than that,

things are pretty peachy. And with all of that, you might be asking be asking well then why should we be hopeful in such

hopeless times with jahad and that is a very valid question and it's a perfectly fair question

but hope is what allowed me to believe that my daughter would somehow survive.

And she did.

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