‘How do we live in this terrible world?’ a reader asked me. Here’s the only answer I have | Jonathan Freedland

It’s a season brimming with tradition and, as longtime readers may know, my own custom has been to try, in the last column before Christmas, to find a few reasons to be hopeful. I was planning on doing that anyway, but my resolve was sharpened by a conversation with a reader who called in to last weekend’s Guardian and Observer charity telethon. Tammy, who is 75, made her donation but she also had a simple, if fathomless question: “How do we live in this terrible world?”

She proceeded to rattle off just some of the things that led her to put the question so starkly. She talked of the ongoing bloodshed in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza; she sighed at the imminent return of Donald Trump. And this week brought two more items that could be added to her list.

We learned more of the depths of wickedness plumbed by the ousted Assad regime, with the discovery of what appears to be a mass grave site in the city of Qutayfah, marked by trenches long and deep. It’s said that twice a week from 2012 until 2018, four trucks would come, each carrying more than 150 bodies, identifiable only by the numbers etched on their chests or foreheads. That would mean the remains of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, murdered by their own ruler, are in the ground of Qutayfah. And that is just one site. There are others. All this after more details emerged of the Sednaya prison, with its torture chambers and dungeons, where machinery designed to cut wood and metal was deployed against flesh and bone.

Closer to home, this week brought the sentencing of the three people who caused the death of 10-year-old Sara Sharif, one of them her own father. The details of her torment were so harrowing, they will haunt anyone who has heard them. The judge who sentenced the guilty spoke of “almost inconceivable” cruelty.

When you know these things, when events like these keep happening, it’s hard not to ask, as Tammy did: “How are we going to live?” Or, to make the question even harder: how can we live and remain hopeful, even optimistic, about the future? Here, then, offered in the spirit of the season, are some tentative suggestions.

One option is to switch off. I don’t mean cutting off from the world entirely, though occasionally that can have its place, but rather managing your diet of gloom. Professional journalists may need to keep across every breaking development and update, but there’s no reason for everyone else to do it. Yet I see too many people doomscrolling, or watching rolling news channels on a loop. There are plenty of good arguments for reducing your social media consumption, but overexposure to bad news is certainly one of them.

Still, that, I confess, is to skirt around the problem rather than to confront it. Even if you reduce your news intake, checking in only once a day, there are times when a mere glimpse of the headlines can fill you with despair. So how to manage that?

First comes the realisation that finding light in the darkness does not just happen; you have to work at it. Think of it as a variant of optimism of the will: willed optimism. It means making a deliberate effort to fight the pessimism of the intellect, which has a nasty habit of getting in first.

Recall the reaction to the election result in July. There was an immediate move to analyse the troubles stored up in Labour’s win: it was a loveless landslide, there was little enthusiasm, the vote share was small, support was broad but shallow. To say nothing of the sheer scale of the task confronting the new government. All of which was, and remains, true.

But it skipped too fast over what had just happened: Britons had ejected a rotten, useless Conservative party and handed Labour, so often rejected at the polls, a thumping majority. That was great news, but it required an active, conscious decision to savour it. We fixated on the cloud before we’d taken a good look at the silver lining. Of course, we can all see the defects in this new government – one of them being its dearth of optimism – but we might spare a moment to remember what it replaced, and what the alternative would look like.

Or, to take a radically different example, the impulse was strong, on hearing of the fall of Bashar al-Assad, to worry instantly about what would come next, specifically the prospect of an al-Qaida offshoot turning Syria into another oppressive Islamist theocracy. But willed optimism would lead you, first, to marvel at the pictures of Syrians at last freeing their loved ones from Assad’s torture chambers and, then, to allow that at least the possibility exists that Syria might break from its past, and the model set by most of its neighbours, to construct a stable, relatively free society. We don’t have to pretend that’s likely, but for a moment at least we can let in the possibility – and the hope.

As part of that effort towards optimism, we can draw strength from those who dare to swim against even the bleakest tides. I think of the staff of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, for instance, who constantly, and in the face of intense opposition, including a planned boycott by the country’s far-right government, urge their fellow citizens to face the reality of what their leaders and their army are doing in Gaza. That kind of work wins few friends. And yet, if Israelis and Palestinians are ever to find a way out of the current darkness, that is the courage that will be required. That such courage already exists, here and now, is grounds for hope.

Or I think of my friend and Guardian colleague Merope Mills, who endured the greatest loss any human being can face – the death of a child – and somehow turned that pain into a life-saving gift to others. Her remarkable, relentless campaign for Martha’s rule, giving families the right to request an urgent review of a loved one’s treatment in hospital, has already had a “transformative effect”, according to NHS England’s national medical director.

And sometimes it pays just to celebrate what is good. Last weekend, in what has become yet another seasonal tradition, I gathered with friends to watch the Strictly Come Dancing final. Trust me, you didn’t have to be a fan of sequins or samba to be awed by what happened there. Chris McCausland, a comedian who is blind, had surprised even himself by learning and mastering a series of ever-more intricate routines. It was inspiring, of course, but just as heartening was the knowledge, certain many weeks earlier, that the voting public was always going to make him their winner.

I’m not sure any of that answers Tammy’s question. How do we live in this terrible world? Perhaps by accepting that it’s the only one we have and that it’s not always so terrible – that sometimes, even quite often, it can be rather beautiful.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.