We live in times of losses — enormous and barely noticeable, obvious and ambiguous, personal and collective. In a situation where it is almost impossible to ignore the world's instability, we learn to cope with the death of loved ones and the unending stream of news about the deaths of strangers. German writer and journalist Daniel Schreiber re-reads works of philosophers (from Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers to Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler) and writers (from Joan Didion to Joseph Brodsky) searching for ways to deal with losses in a world that still seems familiar, but already feels replaced by a more sinister version. And he finds hope in a new — cautious, less encouraging, and more realistic than before — "confidence of lowered expectations" toward an uncertain future.