Today I’m going to talk about a form of radical resistance that anyone, no matter their situation, can engage in: cultivating hope.
Are you filled with hopelessness and despair at the state of the world? I have some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is you’ve fallen for a tool of the status quo. Despair freezes us. It keeps us from imagining and working towards a better world. Despair is easy, because it means we have no reason to take action to make things better. Capitalism? Our oppressors? They want you hopeless for a reason. Because you’re easier to control that way.
The good news is! There’s a lot of very real reasons for hope. However, hope is something you have to cultivate. It takes work. It is a radical act. It is looking at the status quo and going “actually, no. I refuse.”
Maybe you can’t risk losing your job to unionize your workplace. Or maybe you’re an oppressed minority who can’t risk going to protests because our criminal justice system is racist. But cultivating hope in yourself is just as radical an act of resistance as those two things. It is another form of imagining and working towards a better world.
It’s not as flashy as starting a union or going to a protest, true. Maybe it feels selfish, like you’re only helping yourself. But that’s not true. It’s a lot harder to help others when you, yourself, are frozen by despair. By working on yourself, you are making it easier for you to help others, in whatever form that takes for you.
For me, since I started my hopepunk practice I have been more able to engage in activism, even if I no longer post about it. Before calls to action froze me. I was so overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of our problems that I was unable to address any of them.
Since I’ve started cultivating hope in myself, I’ve unfrozen enough that I was able to choose the causes that matter to me and put my energy there. I engage in more charitable donations and political actions now than I did before. I am happier and also helping others more than I did before.
Cultivating hope in yourself is hard at first. You feel defeated before you even start. But you start putting work in and you find a little hope. And then a little more. And a little more. And then, suddenly. It snowballs and you’re doing better than you have in years, and hope comes easier to you now.
If you don’t know where to start, go follow @hopepunk-humanity @hope-for-the-planet @afeelgoodblog and @reasonsforhope or follow the hopepunk tag
There’s also things like the good news network, who have a daily email they send out with a handful of positive news stories. Some of them I find kinda dumb and shallow like “lost dog returned after 3 years” type stories. But there’s also a lot about scientific advancments in green energy, medical care, etc that I find helpful for cultivating hope. Did you know about the CRISPR gene editing tool that’s being used to cure incurable illnesses? I didn’t! And now I do! afeelgoodblog also runs a substack “best news of last week” newsletter every Monday that I find has stories with more substance, tho it is US focused.
Despair isn’t helping anyone, especially not you. Engage in a radical act and start cultivating hope in yourself. You deserve to leave that despair behind, and in the process, you are directly going against the powers that have decided we are easier to control if we are miserable.
this is something i try to share are promote as much as possible
I want to be involved in cultivating hope especially in the area of Internet resources. It is getting harder and harder to find useful websites, even though they’re out there, because capitalism makes it hard to find anything except what makes the most money for the most powerful. And for the same reason it’s getting harder to even communicate with other people online–which is a vital thing to be able to do if we’re gonna help fix any of the other problems in the world.
I want to be one of the people who knows where the useful websites are. And the good ways of sharing info. I want to team up with everyone else who knows these things, pool resources, help others who need them.
It’s a little thing, it’s not unionizing or protesting in the streets, but it’ll make some difference.