Choosing a Better Future: an interlude on hope

In today’s world, it can be hard to find hope or optimism for the future. We’re inundated with daily messages about how we’re all fucked socially, economically, and environmentally. You can’t go online without seeing an article or post detailing some new reason to be fearful of the future. It’s hard not to sit at a baseline level of antipathy with this constant feedback of loop and “doomscrolling”. It’s either that or succumbing to being chronically outraged and fighting wars that can’t be won on social media. There is another option though, and that is to have hope. Not the naive or false hope that religions like Buddhism warn about, but a more grounded hope based on who we are and who we want to be in the world. 

Let’s get false hope out of the way. This is the type of hope that toxic positivity Instagrammers love to spout. It’s not rooted in reality. It’s essentially just wishing for an outcome, it’s akin to throwing a penny in a wishing well and just walking away. It’s not rooted in reality and oftentimes it’s just a fantasy. It’s intoxicating to fall into these daydreams about situations that may or may not happen. The danger lies in people thinking the only way to be happy is if somehow they luck into one of these situations. The classic false hope is winning the lottery. It would be great to actually win it, but the chances are slim, more than that there’s nothing you can do to bring that hope into existence. False hope is pretty much all based on chance. It doesn’t hurt to have dreams but they have to mean something and you have to be able to reach them. 

So what’s real hope? This is the kind of hope that can propel you into action and make your dreams a reality. This is the type of hope that isn’t just fantasy, it’s grounded in reality. It’s choosing to believe that you can do something or that something can be done. There’s power in this kind of hope because it can be animating. It’s a driving force, all great things require hope. You would never do anything if you didn’t at least hope it was possible. In that possibility is where the magic lies, hope allows you to choose to believe in a different outcome. This is why I love the title of Obama’s book “Audacity for Hope”, because it does take audacity to hope. It’s easy to fall victim to the trappings of the world and believe that we’re fucked. It absolves you of any action. Hope on the other hand requires you to do something because you believe in that possibility. You believe that things can change.

Hope is hard to pin down in our daily lives. We all have different things we want to strive for or look forward to. What unites that striving though is hope. Again, it’s the reason we act. More than that, the only way to hope is to act. Hope is an active process, it’s a feeling process. It’s bringing that possibility to life. The paradox of hope is that when we have the least of it is when we need it most. When everything is good, hope is sort of at the back of our minds. Sure we hope that the good times keep rolling, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about. In fact, that’s a little closer to the type of false hope that we discussed earlier because we’re craving that things stay the same and are fearful of change. When we’re at our lowest though, that’s when the hope I’m talking about is front and center. That’s when we need possibility. In those moments, what we need is change, we need possibility, we need hope to inspire us to act. Hope gives us the ability to choose a different path. 

That ability to choose a different path isn’t always an option though, or at least not an easy option. There are systemic forces that prevent us from acting or even having the option of a different path. Late-stage capitalism, systemic racism, and climate change are all forces that are bigger than one person. It’s hard to act on hope when you're facing the inertia of an entire system. Marginalized communities especially face the brunt of this inertia and it would be naive for me to tell them to hope. The thing though is that these communities show what real hope is about. Their collective action to fight for a better future is fueled by hope. If they didn’t hope for that better future and the possibility that they can change things then we wouldn’t see the amazing movements we’ve seen. Whether it was the civil rights movement in the 60s, Occupy Wall Street, the Green New Deal, or Black Lives Matter, hope is what inspired these movements. Hope-inspired action. There’s a huge lesson in that. They refused to give up that hope and that fueled their ability to keep going. As we face the seemingly insurmountable challenges of our age, the only thing that will make a difference is if we keep hope alive. 

I realize that using the word hope is messy, and might be too clumsy of a word for the concept that I’m describing. Striving might be a better term because it’s about the action we take to achieve something, but there’s something warm about hope. Hope is a word of the heart while striving seems to be more of the brain. Despite that the big idea is still the same, whether it’s about what we want to achieve in our personal lives or what we want to see in the world, we have the ability to be inspired by hope. We have the ability to strive towards that hope. Sure we can be optimistic about the future, which helps, but change takes more than just believing that things can work out. It’s believing in the possibility that things can change. It’s about hoping for a better future and bringing that hope into action. Once again I’ll close by saying what I’m choosing to do, and that’s hope. I hope you join me.