You’re Out There Alone, and You’re Probably Scared: Choosing Good in a World that Feels Hopeless

People can’t be good. Or maybe, there isn’t any “good” to be had. 

That was what I believed through most of high school. The news showed me unlimited examples of people doing bad things to other people. Every scroll through my phone colored humanity in strokes of selfish, shallow behavior and cruelty under the guise of self-expression. “Being good”– whatever that meant –felt as cheap as the “happily ever after” tacked on at the end of fairytales, because that’s all it was– a fairytale. I didn’t see people doing good things to other people. There were no bright colors of selfless, meaningful behavior and kindness without publicity. It seemed people no longer agreed on what being good meant, and instead promoted this idea that there is no good or bad. If that’s true, then we are all in a cacophonous void of meaninglessness. That’s pretty bleak.

That bleak landscape was my worldview and my Instagram feed for years. I forgot what goodness looks like. Until July 11, when I went to the opening day of the new Superman movie and I saw goodness playing out on the screen. 

I know that might sound ridiculous, but if goodness is a fairytale, this was the fairytale that changed me. 

In this movie, Superman is good. He’s a hero who saves everything from a dog to a child to a squirrel during a monster attack– he even tries to save the monster. He’s a hero who stops a skyscraper from falling on top of one woman. He mourns the loss of a man who had fed him falafel as if the man was his brother. He’s a hero who, when asked why he was going to save an unruly dog at the risk of his own life, said, “He’s out there alone. And he’s probably scared.” 

Watching Superman, I felt hope. 

I saw a man, albeit fictitious, going around doing good. His version of good resulted in kindness, light, even hope. 

But what does it matter? After all, he’s fake. Once I left the theater, the real world hadn’t changed. The constant influx of bad news scrolled past on my phone just like it did before, the world was still falling apart at the seams, and people still did bad things to other people. But something had fundamentally changed in me. I found myself believing that people can be good, and if people are good, there is hope.     

I made the decision to change. I’m not as fast as a speeding bullet and I can’t stop a building from falling on somebody, but I can still choose to be good.

Everyone has that choice. Everyone chooses what they value. Actor Wendall Pierce, who played Daily Planet editor-in-chief Perry White in Superman (2025), in explaining the power of stories on our cultural mindset said, “[W]e go into a small theater because we want to see collectively, decide what our values are and who we are, where we’ve been, where we’ve failed, where we can triumph. But [we] ultimately decide what our values are and walk out of the theater and act on those.” Some walked out of Superman and criticized him for being too open, too kind, and even weak. This criticism of a character’s efforts to be good reflects a cultural decision to embrace hopelessness, to eschew the idea that a person can be good just for the sake of being good– and instead believe the worst in humanity, wallowing in selfishness and shallow endeavors. 

I’m tired of people choosing to be hopeless. I am tired of the dark teen angst and the way everything has to be a battle. I’m tired of the nihilistic views that nothing matters and it never has, that the only person we have to care about is ourselves. I’m tired of believing that people can’t be good. Because they can. Because I can. And so when I walked out of Superman, I made the conscious decision to see people the way that he did and to look to the future with hope. I decided I value being good and I want to act on that value.

As a result of that choice, the hopelessness I once felt about the world has been replaced with hope: “the idea that good things are going to happen because we can make them so.” I can’t stop a monster from destroying a city, but I can tell people how much they matter. I can’t save a country from an invasion, but I can help a freshman find her Spanish class. I’m not Superman, but I don’t have to be a superhero to do good. 

I choose to wake up every morning and see the good in people, see the good in the world around us, and to have hope. And that has made the world so much brighter.