On hope in a suffocating world
Hope dies first, not last. It is powerful but its fragility makes it a scarce resource in current times. We just have to look around.
We see the conflicts in Russia and Israel, the oppressive regimes of Afghanistan and China as well as the looming threat of climate change, pandemics or mass surveillance. The news report searing heat waves, hungry hurricanes, and dying species. We see millions starving while the hills of food waste grow. Our phones are made out of child labor, our clothes drenched in blood, and our Amazon packages delivered by people who aren't even given the time to pee. The majority of produced meals are poisoning us. Our environment is structured to keep us sedentary. Social media is designed for addiction. From our atrophying communities, the danger of backsliding civil rights, to the popular songs on TikTok, look at reality and you might begin to despair. Despite all this, hope can still exist.
Stoicism in a nutshell
The stoics offer a pragmatic perspective on hope. Reason is God, and God is the universe. That’s why we should live according to nature. Living according to nature means being virtuous as your behaviour is the only thing you control. Therefore, virtue is the only necessary good. All others are merely preferable. The four most important virtues are wisdom, justice, courage and temperance.
Hope for the stoics means that if your actions are the only thing you control anyway, does despairing help? If you act good, all that truly matters is good. Of course, this is way easier to assert when you believe that the universe is reasonable. Most modern stoics disagree with this (they're more frat bros) but the usefulness of that philosophy still applies.
Because despair does not actually help us. If we've lost our job due to an accident and are now paralysed from the legs down, to give an extreme example, hopelessness is understandable. If we look at actual statistics though, most people can adjust and continue living quite happily.1 I’m not saying being disabled doesn't suck. It does. You might be less happier then you were before. The suffering you endure to get back to an okay life is also very shitty. I'm not denying the pain. I'm affirming that even in such a situation hope is reasonable and helpful. If you just declare that you’re doomed and treat your life as already lost, you will loose it.
Kids as a form of hope
Having kids is an act of hope. It is believing that shit is meaningful even though you're afraid. That your partner might not pull their weight, divorce you and leave you with full custody of the children. That you’ll burn out, loose your old life, loose yourself in the process. Is it okay to have kids if war exists? Is it okay to have kids if they might get depressed? Am I allowed to have them if it kills our planet, and shouldn’t I only adopt? So many children are lost and I want new ones?
Following that logic, are we not arguing for our own doom? Are we not arguing that we all should have never existed in the first place? Because some became parents in far worse circumstances. People had children while living in huts. People had kids while being slaves. They had them during the Black Death, while working 12 hour shifts at factories and in World War 2. These were catastrophic prospects compared to the average living standard in western countries.
Hold onto your "Ok Boomer" jokes and critiques for just a second more please. I'm not proposing that current generations are too soft and we need to man up. The parents there may have had untreated mental illnesses, were not at all prepared to have kids or complete train wrecks at parenting. If you identify with any of these traits, I strongly encourage you to postpone having children until the situation changes. We also can't forget that birth control was basically nonexistent for the majority of human history. That we can now decide whether we have children or not is fucking awesome.
My point is that most people are against self-destruction. Therefore, it is morally okay to have kids in an imperfect world. Before you protest and say humanity should have never existed because you're 14 and deep, please shut the fuck up. Do you want to kill your best friend? If you propose that we all should have never been born, you are arguing for the nonexistence of your friends, your pets, your family, your romantic parner(s) and your children. You are asserting the worthlessness of art, music and dance as well as literature, culture and sports. You denigrate your nation, science, philosophy and religion. I know that in the depths of your mind, there exists at least a particle of you that values something or someone on that list.
Having hope doesn't mean possessing a clear answer for these questions. It all just comes down to so much uncertainty and decisions outside of our control. Having hope means being aware of all possible noes and to still say yes. Maybe all our meaningful experiences come down to acting against rational doubt because our souls said yes. I will put in the work, even though it will probably fail at least a little bit. Being a human means being weird. Being a human means being a looser. Being a human means being fine with that.
What hope is
I'm currently volunteering at an organisation for homeless people. One of the things I'm taking away from there is that while some of them maybe did some stupid decisions, many of them just had shitty bad luck. With the right skills and social net you can avoid ruin. A crisis can cause you to loose this all though, or make them tougher to use. And if we're honest, many people aren’t prepared for a crisis anyway. They just were lucky enough to avoid them so far. It gets you thinking. One mistake can take you out. One wrong step and you loose everything. I'm afraid I might end up in their place. If everything’s so fragile how can I be sure all will hold? I'm scared I'll regret my life and won’t have the time to redeem it. I’m worried I’ll get into a car accident and will endure chronic pain. I'm afraid of forgetting myself and afraid of wishing I would. Most of all, I fear that my loved ones will die or abandon me.
I feel cringe for that. “Bro you're weird” type of cringe, like my brain is fucked up, because a normal young adult surely never thinks about that. I’d prefer brain rot to this. And that’s okay. I am slowly realising the sheer realness of it all. This is real life. We have no idea if that’s our only shot or if there’s anything after death. We can only act and wish for the best. Because having hope doesn't mean ignoring all evil in the world.
This ain’t hope2
Ignoring our worries is not the solution. Once you glimpse into the possibilities, you can't unsee them. On some level we’ve always known them. We don't articulate them, but we feel them subconsciously. If we ride a rollercoaster, we’re filled with adrenaline. We experience a visceral, instinctual fear. It hurts when we perceive social exclusion or receive rejection. Even measuring whether your sibling and you got the same amount of chocolate when halving it shows that we dislike unfairness and are scared that somebody might prefer someone else too us. It shows an almost universal fear that the thought inside of our head which asserts that we aren’t deserving of love might turn out correct.
Hope is looking unflinchingly at reality. It is acknowledging that you could fail but you’ll do the work anyway. To affirm life despite all the reasons for despairing. Delulu is not always the solulu, but sometimes it is. Hope is persevering despite suffering, despite fear and despite your current situation. It is persevering against all odds. It is irrational and maddening, and really fucking hard when you're tired and pessimistic. It is going all-in into life. And it is the only option we have. As long I live, as long as I stand, as long as I breathe, it's not the end. I can still hope. And as long as I hope, I can find the courage to keep on living.
I live, ergo I hope. I hope, ergo I live.
Best wishes,
Somebody
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21870935/
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