recovering idealist, on staying hopeful when the world gives you every reason not to
020 | Hue's Cues: your weekly dose of inspiration and insights for your brain, mind, body, and soul.
I consider myself a recovering idealist.
Looking back, experimenting my way through different lives, one thread runs through: an enduring belief in how the world could be.
Eager to find the good in people and find the possibility of light when darkness blinds. I’m an optimist by default.
That’s why it’s called idealism: a stretch that feels almost out of reach, most real in my imagination; promising a different outcome, for a future we’re all still creating.
Most of us begin this way: optimistic, hopeful for the world. But then reality strikes and brings us down back to earth.
You learn that almost nothing unfolds the way you imagined it. Sometimes your instincts prove right, other times you’re so spectacularly wrong you’re left questioning everything you thought you knew.
So you learn to give room to hope, to coexist with the realities you can’t wish away: choosing optimism without pretending life is ever easy, believing in people while accepting they’ll sometimes let you down, and forgiving the world for all it’s imperfections.
I’ve come to think of hope as a practice. Holding on to wonder without expecting the world to be perfect; an attitude, to wear like a badge of honor. To choose again and again, even when the world hands you every reason not to.
And why the question hovering this week: how do you keep reaching for a world as it could be without lying to yourself about the world as it is?
This is why I identify as a recovering idealist. No longer as someone who’s naive, but someone who’s choosing hope as my default.
Not because the world doesn’t disappoint, but because I can see a different future. Staying hopeful in a world that feels chaotic and unjust is the work.
I write about the small things that compound into a life well-lived: brain, mind, body, and soul. It’s free to join. If this is speaking to you, becoming a patron is the best way to keep what’s being built here going.
Nourish the brain with fermented foods. The ferments you consume might shape how you feel too. A 2024 review published in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society (Cambridge University Press) reviewed dietary fibre against fermented foods and saw how the pre-, pro-, post-, and symbiotic properties of ferments as one of the most potent things you can do to shift your gut microbiota, which sends cascading signals up the microbiota-gut-brain axis (ICYMI: our gut and brain are connected). While no one has fully mapped how it works yet, they’re calling it one of neuroscience’s most promising frontiers, and a 2026 Mayo Clinic pilot trial in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine takes this thesis further: over twelve weeks, long COVID patients eating lots of fermented foods reported real improvements in anxiety, PTSD, and quality of life. The more fermented foods they ate, the sharper they scored on cognitive tests. It’s a small study, and the researchers are the first to say that a bigger one is needed, but the signals are hard to ignore. Why I am forever grateful that my weekly cheese habit is officially, scientifically validated, and why I’m making more room for more tempeh in my life. (Tempeh, a traditional Indonesian food made from fermented whole soybeans).
Stimulate the mind by challenging accepted norms. Not in the spirit of a rebellious teenager, but in the softer sense of not taking everything we encounter at face value. I’m learning to dig into the why, the intensions behind things because we eventually grow up realizing the world we once believed in isn’t always what it seems. Psychologist who study memory call it the cultural life script: research shows that across cultures, the events people expect in a “normal life” cluster almost entirely between 15-30: graduation, fall in love, marry, buy a house, and while the script itself isn’t malicious, it’s a legacy system bound by unquestioned tradition; never adapted for the pace, neither the reality of modern life today. Like defining what success actually looks like for you or whether the steady, respected job your parents wished you into is really the one you’d have chosen for yourself. Whether settling down before you’re 30 is a deadline that matters, or simply a strong suggestion culture made a long time ago. Whether your dream life is yours or someone else’s dream for you; one you might have inherited, but never thought to question. Eventually, in the stillness, you’ll notice the difference between the checklists you’ve been taught to value which might have been handed down too. No one is a villain. The scripts that were passed down masked “this is how it’s done” into “this is what I want.” Challenging it, when it doesn’t feel right anymore isn’t burning tradition, it’s about asking if the life you’re pursuing still aligns with who you are and who you’re becoming.
Set the mood for rest and recovery. There’s been a lot of buzz around nervous system regulation. It’s unseen, but this web of cells and organs are what runs the show: it’s how your body reads its environment, processes what’s coming in, and in turn, shapes how you think, feel, and move too. The brain, spinal cord, the nerves, and the ganglia all firing electro chemical signals back and forth, all day. The environment you build for rest and recovery matters more than you’d think. One experiment showed how people who took a short rest under softer, dynamically shifting low light showed higher “rest-and-digest” activity in their autonomic nervous system and reported feeling more restored than when they rested under standard, steady lighting. Lighting is one of the most underrated tools for changing how a space feels. One gadget has transformed my home: the Philips Hue. I wish this was sponsored, because, I will talk your ear off about how great this product is. (And yes, our brands share the word Hue. Some things are simply meant to be. Ha ha.)
Training the soul to stay comfortable at my pace. The pull to do more, for the sake of more is strong. The tides are hard to resist, because the current of culture, economy, and media, are relentless. Psychologists call this the tyranny of busyness: research on motivation consistently finds that when we pursue activity driven by external pressure rather than internal meaning, we accumulate effort without accumulating fulfilment, even when we succeed. Am I doing more to simply do more, or am I doing more to serve the mission I believe I am here to serve? The latter is what I want my soul’s energy on. But it’s also relative: every job doesn’t need to serve a mission, neither does every life need to serve a mission. In a life with finite minutes: how can I use the time I have left on this earth to serve in the best way I know how? There is enough chaos and suffering in this world, we need more of us to try to create more beauty, wonder, and peace. Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946), writing from inside a concentration camp called this, the last of human freedoms: the choice to orient your life toward meaning, regardless of what the world is doing around you.
“like sunlight had decided to become a flavor…” sentimental being
There’s little excuses when it comes to eating healthy these days. The ideas are endless. I can’t take credit for this recipe. I found it on a scroll-session one day.
And I’m grateful and happier for it. Not only is this easy to make. It’s high in protein, nutrition, and polyphenols—and it is one of my favourites, ever. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.
