There is a feeling of dread lurking in my everyday. Wars, famine, the cost-of-living crisis, governments turning their backs on the most vulnerable, inhumane asylum seeker policies, the rise of the far right in Europe, the climate crisis.
I know this is not the first time in the history of humanity that it seems like it is all going to shit, but that knowledge does not necessarily bring me any peace.
As a young, white person from a middle-class background, I feel it is my responsibility to honour the privileges that have been afforded to me, but it all seems a bit futile, like walking uphill knee-deep in mud. What do we do? And how do we find the courage to do it?
Question has been edited for length
Eleanor says: Like you, I can be prone to despair when I think about the state of the world. Sometimes it’s despair about the way the arc of the universe will in fact end up bending. Sometimes, worse, it’s despair about one another, a misanthropy that so deflates expectations I’m no longer even surprised.
So what do we do? Small things. You know the answers. Build in your community, help the people you can help, be reliable. But how do you find the courage to do it? Much harder question. The trouble – as you know – is that despair is totally corrosive to resolve at the same time as seeming so totally rational. It’s like being 99% sure a thunderstorm is on its way and trying to motivate yourself to plant little fragile seedlings. Why would I, when it’s so likely to come to nothing?
It’s easy to think hope is something we find justification for out there in the world. Show me the sign that voting and petitioning or taking out the recycling will make a scrap of difference: tell me where to look so I can see a beam in the darkness.
There are places to look for these (like this cheering good news bulletin). But I think a more interesting way to respond can be to think about things in reverse. Hope isn’t something you have in response to seeing glimmers of good out there. It’s because you decided to have hope that you see those glimmers. That is, hope isn’t just a matter of what you think is likely. It’s also a matter of what you choose to pay attention to, where you spend your mental time. And that – more so than the state of the world – is up to you.
Indeed, from a certain point of view, we had better choose to cultivate hope instead of waiting for it because that’s the only way we’ll be able to show up for the people who have it far worse than us. If we owe it to those people not to abandon the fight, and if resolve is eaten by despair, then for their sake we had better not collapse into anaesthetic, throwing-hands-up thinking of “it’ll never make a difference”.
For me, it’s a lot easier to sustain hope or optimism when I think of it like that: something hard that we can do for other people’s sake, not something we feel once you get the evidence. As the activist Tom Ammiano said: “People think hope is this ephemeral hallmark sentiment. But hope is getting your ass kicked and getting back up.”
There are other people out there who are also looking for reasons to keep going despite the avalanche of reasons to turn nihilistic. For each one of us who collapses into self-excusing despair instead, that’s one less person they’ll see; one less indication there are others who feel like them.
It will be very hard. All this reframing doesn’t actually change the fact that many of your efforts will go unrewarded. But maybe that’s a place to start: instead of aiming at changing these massive global problems, aim at doing small things whether or not they make a change. Go to a protest, offer to help in a local mutual aid group, volunteer somewhere new. You may find that simply doing without an expectation of success helps fuel the engine of hope.