Sometimes It's Okay To Give Up Hope: The Future Isn't Lost
Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash
I talk to my friends, and the futures they paint for me are bleak: Gilead, Bladerunner, Max Max. They tell me that there are no good futures left: that we are irreversibly headed for constant wars, depleting water, food shortages, and reduced life expectancies. As Bill McGuire, a climate scientist at University College London, told The Daily Beast of climate change: "There is no doomerism, simply realism.”
I am not one to sugarcoat our present reality (see We Might Be Headed For a Great American Famine). There is nothing wrong with recognizing current dangers, and those who tell you to ignore reality under the banner of positivity or optimism are being toxic (see toxic positivity). You should be allowed to be pessimistic, to point out the inefficiencies and cruelties within this system, and to say that they are wrong.
However, there is a world of difference between recognizing that things are dark and claiming that there is no hope for the future — and that's the tension I want to discuss today. Because while things are bad, the assumption that the future is already lost, that our lives are forfeit, is a dangerous thought distortion that ultimately cedes ground to those f@cking up our world.
Beyond hope and hopelessness
When we talk about words like pessimism and optimism, they can get muddied very quickly, depending on the context. With pessimism, are we referring to the feeling (i.e., anticipating a negative outcome from any given situation) or the philosophy (i.e., assigning a negative value to life or existence)? Optimism is used colloquially to mean that things will generally work out, but as a philosophy, it is associated with the world being fundamentally good, and even by some that we are living in the best of all possible worlds.
In general, I don't find it very helpful to turn concepts such as "pessimism" and "optimism" into static personality traits that are either all-positive or all-negative, when doing so ignores the context at play. While being permanently dour is not always helpful, sometimes it's okay to be hopeless or critical about things, as it's just common sense that results from years of personal experience.
For example, while I am hopeful about humanity's overall potential, I can be pretty pessimistic about our current political and economic systems — because, from my perspective, they are f@cking up the world. There is a rather clear correlation between wealth and higher emissions. More affluent people pollute more than anyone else. Why would I be waiting for capitalism to solve the problem of our deteriorating ecosystem — a problem it caused? That's like watching someone punch you in the face nine times and expecting the tenth one to be different.
When we don't address the context for our optimism and pessimism, this conversation about hope and hopelessness becomes a series of meaningless slogans.
Optimistic about what?
Pessimistic about whom?
These questions are far more helpful than claiming to be a run-of-the-mill optimist. If you do not define what you are optimistic about, it implicitly means that you are optimistic about the status quo, and from where I am looking, that mindset is equally as dangerous as having no hope at all.
Yet removing the context in the opposite direction is still not helpful either. If you have given up on the future and claim that your life is already forfeited because of a fear of fascism or climate change, I want to likewise challenge this assumption. The future is not lost because it has yet to happen, and there is still time to build something else.
A cause for hope and despair
Again, this article is not telling you to take your causes for concern over our system and to bury them under a facade of acceptance for the status quo. No one wants that, especially this disaffected blogger who routinely criticizes our larger society (see The Most Exhausting Part About America Is The Pretending).
Yet it might be helpful to imagine the possibility that things can improve because none of us can truly predict the future. Contrary to popular belief, we are a technologically advanced species that has the resources to change many things extremely quickly. We can split and fuse atoms, go into the void of space, genetically modify plants and people, and are quickly verging on advancements that, to our ancestors, would have been viewed as signs of Godhood. We have the means to do so much more good than what we are doing presently.
Where we have yet to advance very much is with social innovations. Because of a few scraps of paper and 1s and 0s in a computer, we let billions starve. The lines of ink on a document allow us to justify refusing people access to technologies and resources that could genuinely improve their lives. If we were to “innovate” our economic system (in other words, move beyond capitalism and liberal democracy), we could begin to solve many of our problems.
Imagine a world where there is no oil industry that blocks climate change legislation. No agro-business pumping processed foods into all of our diets. No defense contractors siphoning away our resources to wage war. No lobbyists keeping an industry alive through bureaucratic inefficiency (see Turbox Tax, healthcare, the penny, and more). A world where basic needs are provided for, and the full potential of every human brain is working on solving our most severe problems from the bottom up.
This world could be within our grasp, but we aren't going to get there with our current political and economic frameworks. Historically, it is, in fact, because of people working against capitalist interests that many of the gains we know today have occurred. As Linda McQuaig writes in Rabble:
“…according to British anthropologist Jason Hickel, who notes that the dawn of capitalism plunged much of humanity into misery, with reduced nutrition. As a result, life expectancy actually fell in Britain, dropping from a lifespan of about 43 years in the 1500s down to the low 30s by the 1700s.
Life expectancy only began to improve towards the end of the 1800s — and only because of the public health movement, which pushed for separating sewage from drinking water. This extremely good idea was vigorously opposed by capitalists, who raged against paying taxes to fund it. So sanitation, not capitalism, may be humanity’s true elixir.
Indeed, things only truly got better, says British historian Simon Szreter, after ordinary people won the right to vote and to join unions that pushed for higher wages and helped secure public access to health care, education and housing — again over the fierce objections of capitalists.”
To solve our problems, we need to "innovate," which means realizing that some systems and beliefs are hopeless. It's vital to be skeptical of the status quo for genuine change to flourish, but for that skepticism to work, it also means acknowledging that a good future is possible. It means giving yourself the grace to hope for something better.
A future conclusion
In many ways, all this talk about the world collapsing gives the powerful too much credit as it assumes that they will control everything forever. Systems change. As Ursula K. Le Guin said in a speech in 2014: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
The rich already control much of our present. They write our laws, decide our salaries, and often (either directly or indirectly) choose who lives or dies. Why give them our future too? Why cede that ground to them in your head?
Recently, I have refused to give the powerful the mental victory of our collective defeat. I have permitted myself to imagine that there is a possibility for things to get better, even if that better tomorrow only exists within my mind. This shift has been freeing because it has allowed me to keep going, to not wallow in despair, and to begin asking myself how I can obtain that future.
I know things are bad right now. You can spiral down the infinite what-ifs of the future, where you imagine all the horrible things that can happen. Moral panics. Fascism. Climate change. The list goes on. But flip that logic on its head, and ask yourself: "What if I survive?" What if the future does become better? And what will it take to help that happen?
Contrary to what some may think, the rich do not yet own the future, and it's time we start acting like it.