Have you ever been ghosted because you told a friend you believe societal collapse is coming? Have you ever been told to shut up because you have a dark view of the future?
Why would someone react to you like that?
In my first years as an activist…
I preached a gospel of hope, big hope, capital-h Hope.
I believed that we could save ourselves. I was convinced we could fix whatever was wrong with the environment. And whatever was wrong with us humans, too.
I was pushing hope hard, right up to the breaking point, so I needed bolstering. That meant that if you were someone who had doubts about hope, I couldn’t risk being around you. And if you were a nonbeliever, I didn’t want to know you existed.
Nonbelievers scared me…
What if they’re contagious? What if my belief is not as strong as I think it is? What will happen to me?
I can tell you…
The person I was back then would not have wanted to know the person I am now.
And then when hope disappeared on me, I was scared all over again…
What about my friends? Would they disappear, too? Would the new me, empty of hope, be too scary for them? Would no one want to know me? Would I end up alone?
When I lost hope, I did in fact lose people. I haven’t ended up alone, but I have lost people. And I miss them, but I get it.
Hope is such a powerful force. Such a sweet force. It lifts our spirits. It keeps us going against the odds. So why would we ever want to give it up? We wouldn’t.
But the reality of the danger we’re in, the cold truth of our precarious situation, is diminishing hope day by day, making it harder to hold onto, taking the heart out of it. And for some of us, taking hope away entirely. And taking it away even though we fight hard to hold onto it.
And now we’re set up for a crisis in our relationships.
Remember, we humans are compulsively divisive. We make divisions between you and me and us and them over politics, race, religion, sports, so many things.
We can do that, too, with the issue of hope, and I do not want to see that happen. I do not want to see long-term friendships fail, or working relationships fracture, or intimate partners break up because they have different views about the future.
But we’re vulnerable. Let me explain.
The way I see it, there are five segments on the hope continuum:
1. People who are steadfast believers.
2. People who are in and out of hope depending on the day.
3. People who are agnostic and just do their work and don’t think about hope.
4. People who believe that collapse is coming, but have a small-h hope that some reduced version of humanity might survive and even thrive.
5. And then there are people like me who believe we’re going to crash through collapse into extinction.
Activist work is so hard and the issues we confront are so overwhelming that we can get loaded up with distress. And what do we do with that distress? We can deal with it directly ourselves, and many of us do.
But it’s also possible, and very human of us…
To take out our distress on other people.
To give ourselves permission to complain about them or attack them just because they’re on the other side of a boundary—for example just because they’re in a different segment on the hope continuum.
And that’s so not okay. because, in this dark moment in human history, it’s just simply a fact that…
We need each other like never before.
Our good hearts are more important than the hope segment we happen to inhabit.
A central focus for post-hope activists is to dissolve boundaries. Or if we can’t dissolve them, to transcend them. The last thing we need to be doing now is creating unnecessary enemies. We have more than enough real ones.
And so I wish for us, for us activists who care about the future, that…
We find a way to care about each other even more than we care about our fate.
And if we do this, we’ll all get to have more allies and more friends.