Finding Hope
How to find hope when everything seems hopeless.
Thinking of the old adage of ‘if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all’, leaves me practically mute some days.
Mother Earth is over us, expressing her displeasure at our willful idiocy through fire, flooding, and blistering heat. Meanwhile, too many with power and wealth never graduated beyond the low social empathy found in particularly heinous 7th graders, culminating in two particularly arrogant specimens heading to space (and sadly returning), then thanking we little people for making their personal dream come true. We still aren’t through the pandemic, with the highly contagious delta variant spreading faster than a California wildfire. The same pandemic which has disrupted the entire world tilted the scales even more towards a few (vile) tech bros. The combined stock market valuation of the top 7 tech firms increased by about 70% during the pandemic, to more than $10 trillion, roughly the size of the entire U.S. stock market in 2002, all while paying far less than their fair share of taxes. Record earnings reports are expected in the next week and Apple alone is sitting on enough cash to give each person in the U.S. $600. Meanwhile, 1 in 6 American children lives in poverty and 1 in 4 adults have had trouble paying the bills since the pandemic started.
It’s not just on the global level. It is death by a thousand cuts in so many areas. The Olympics are on, always an inspiring and uplifting opportunity to witness dedication and athletic excellence. Yet the pathetic armchair commentary continues. The reporting on female athletes has more than a whiff of ‘it’s amazing they can even compete’, ‘what a surprise they won’, ‘winning, but the competition wasn’t as stiff’, while the supremacy of the male athletes is accepted, even when they lose. To appear equal-opportunity, sometimes the commentators are negative about the athletes, no matter the gender, because they mess up, don’t perform as usual. As if the commentators ever, even in their dreams, possess the determination, talent, and physical prowess of a single Olympian on their worst day. Don’t even get me started on the clothing issue. Why we are still stuck with a bunch of perverted old guys setting standards for women’s clothing is beyond me.
As I said, there are times when it can be hard to find anything positive to say. This especially gets to me because I have little patience for constant whining and no action. Anyone can complain about a situation, and many people do - journalists, everyone on social media, all those who try to gain power through fear-mongering. Pointing out what is wrong with a situation may be satisfying (I guess), but it never changes anything. It’s like my complaining about the dang flies that keep coming into my house, I can complain all I want, but if I don’t DO something, anything, nothing will change.
Complaining does not result in change.
Action results in change.
When we think the world is hopeless, we stop seeing the point in trying to change. We doubt our individual actions will accomplish anything. At our lowest, we look at the stories of criminals and selfish individuals and start to think that’s the only way forward. Yet what we are told about hopelessness couldn’t be further from the truth.
I have 3 tips for finding hope when all seems hopeless:
1. Strictly limit your time following the news and social media. Better yet, if you are feeling hopeless, take a news break, the bad news will still be there when you return. I remember researching violence for a gender course at LSE years ago and being stunned by the consistent and compelling research that showed that the news was more damaging to children than violent movies (children understand the news is real and movies are make-believe), and that violent images beget violent actions, regardless of the form of media. It’s gotten much worse since then. Approximately 90% of all media news is negative and sensational stories form 95% of media headlines. (and by sensational, I mean negative, violent, hateful)
2. Read “Humankind: A Hopeful History” by Rutger Bregman. A wonderful friend in London recommended the book to me a couple of weeks ago and it is changing my world. It’s one of those books that you only read a few pages and then have to stop and absorb the magnitude of the facts and how they point to the fact that humans are actually inherently decent.
3. Watch the opening credits of ‘Love, Actually’, the people meeting at Heathrow Airport’s arrivals terminal. Because, yes, as Rutger Bregman tells us, and as I think we all intuitively know, there is far more love and hope in the world than hate and violence.
So next time you are angry, upset, and want to complain, find some action, any action, you can take to start changing the situation.