Hope is Messy. Choose Hope Anyway.

Or: Hopelessness sucks.

I often fall victim to hopelessness and nihilism. Sometimes, when I look at the news, it feels like there is no reason to keep going. Fascism is on the rise. Unchecked gun culture in America kills countless people every year. If climate change doesn’t kill us all, global wars will.

When I look at everything going on, it’s really easy to feel like there’s just no point to anything. Why bother? The world is falling to pieces around us, so why put any effort into anything at all?

Hopelessness is comforting in a lot of ways. If everything is hopeless, why bother with anything? All the energy and effort that I put into anything I do will be all for naught anyway. Whatever I do or try, all that energy is going to ultimately be wasted effort. Any attempt to change things for the better will, ultimately, fail because the powers that be will fight it tooth and nail.

Doing nothing is easy. You don’t have to put any effort into doing nothing — you can just sit and play video games or watch Netflix while the world burns down around you. It’s a weirdly comfortable feeling to know that nothing you do will matter in the end. It means that you don’t have to try hard, because there’s no point in dumping energy into something that doesn’t make a difference.

It happens to me a lot. I look at the state of the world, I look at what I can personally contribute to fix things, and it feels like I’m a mote of dust on one side of a global scale — ultimately inconsequential. The weight that my mote of dust adds to that scale isn’t going to make a difference in the end, so what does it matter?

What’s the point?

Hope is harder to deal with. If I look at the world and think to myself “I might not be able to do much on my own, but I can still do something,” that takes effort. That takes energy. I can’t just wave my hand and say “oh, it won’t matter in the end.” I have to actually do something.

That’s hard. There are days when I don’t have the energy to make food for myself, so what kind of energy will I have to stand up and fight injustice? I’m just a mote of dust, after all. What good can I do in the fight against fascism if I can’t even care for my own basic needs?

It’s messy to have hope. To look at the world and think “yeah, everything is terrible now, but what if it all works out? What if everything turns out fine in the end?”

You can’t hand-wave away hope the same way that you can hand-wave away hopelessness. When things are hopeless, you can just say “why bother, there’s just no point.” If you have hope for the future, it’s much harder to just stand by and do nothing.

(You can have hope and just stand by and do nothing — it’s called religion, and quite a few people put their faith in whatever god they worship to fix everything in the end. If you haven’t guessed, I think that’s idiotic.)

Hope means that things might work out in the end, and if things might actually turn out okay, that takes work. We have to work to ensure that climate change doesn’t kill us all. We have to work to ensure that the right doesn’t overtake the country or the world with their brutal, awful fascism. We have to work to ensure that the wars that are being fought in the world right now don’t wind up escalating, that we are able to have a peaceful world in the near future.

We have to work to ensure that the kids that are born today have a world to inherit tomorrow, and that is going to take a ton of effort and energy. If we want to hold onto hope, we absolutely need to work to make sure that even a little bit of the good stuff we want to happen will come to pass.

If we want to have hope, we’ve got shit to do.

Hope takes a bunch of energy and effort, and that can be hard. We have to actually do stuff to try to get the future we want to materialize. On top of that, there are no guarantees that it will work out in the end. We might work hard and dump all of our energy into our hope and wind up not reaping any of the benefits.

So why bother?

Why not let yourself sink into the comfortable hopelessness that is just so much easier than all of the work and toil and pain and suffering that hope requires?

Because hope has the potential for happiness. For joy and exuberance. For the best possible result.

It may be foolish to think that this world might ever experience a happy ending, since that’s the realm of fairy tales and not reality. That kind of stuff doesn’t actually happen in the real world.

It could, though.

Hope — that messy, terrible thing that requires so much work and effort and energy — has the potential for a happy ending, the fairy tale “happily ever after” that everyone scoffs at. We could have that, if we have hope — and, of course, put in all of that work to bring that happy ending about.

Happiness is frequently the result of a combination of hope and effort — the idea that things could be better and the work it takes to bring that about. Sometimes the work is easy, but it frequently isn’t, and that can be difficult to manage. Hard work is, well, hard, and most people don’t like hard work and avoid it whenever they can.

But, if we want to experience the happiness that comes from our hope for the future made manifest, we have to put in that hard work.

Our dust mote might not add up to very much when it falls on the side of hope, but we all have the right to decide which side of the scales we fall on. The side of hope might not be the easiest or most comfortable side to choose, but it has so much potential to be worthwhile in the end.

Sometimes, we have to take a chance on the notion that the work and effort and energy that we are putting in might actually come to something good, even in the face of everyone telling us otherwise. We have to power through the garbage, the naysayers, the powers that be which are working against us at every turn, for the potential that it will work out.

It sucks. It really does. Having hope and fighting for a better future is hard, and the rewards often seem nebulous and far away. But if we don’t put in the work and effort to have hope, if we let ourselves succumb to hopelessness, we miss out on so much of that potential for the joy and happiness that comes from hope.

Sometimes, we have to work through the messiness, and sometimes misery, of hard work and effort to grasp that happiness. Still, I tend to think that happiness is something that is worth the effort.

Be well out there.

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