It was summer in San Francisco. Hundreds of us had marched to City Hall for a protest. As the afternoon was ending and the rally was winding down, a cold fog blew in. The final speaker jammed the mike against his mouth to blast out a warning: “If you don’t have hope you won’t do anything!”

His tone of contempt implied: “And if you don’t do anything, you won’t be anybody, not anybody worth caring about.”

I shrank into my jacket, not wanting him to spot me because I don’t have hope. Cheers broke out all around and I shrank more, then checked myself, “Wait, he can’t mean me because I don’t believe in doing nothing. Maybe that’s just his fear talking.”

I remembered that fear…

If hope dies, everything dies.

That’s how it looks from the scared side of hope. But that’s not what life is like on the far side.

So what if hope is gone?

You don’t have to stop being yourself.

You feed the hungry because that calls to you. You help victims of abuse because you want them to be okay. You try to change the government because you can’t abide policies that cause mass suffering. You organize against war because you hate it. You work to save the planet because you care about the next generation. You build bridges across the divisions of race because that nurtures your soul.

We’re told we’ve got two options—believe in hope or drown in despair. But there’s a third way. Just because hope disappears, that doesn’t mean we have to stop fighting for what we believe in. Even when we’re left utterly without hope, we still get to refuse, absolutely refuse, to surrender to despair.

And when we do that, we discover that our hearts are bigger than our despair. We realize that…

Who we are matters more than our fate.

We find out that no matter how doomed the world, no matter how close death comes, we don’t ever have to stop caring, because…

Love does not depend on hope,

And…

Activism does not depend on hope.

I remember the last time I saw a two-year-old discovering “no.” Her determined pout and tough-guy posture made me want to take a step back. And yet there was this self-delighted hint of a smile that played across her lips from the beginning of her n-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o through to the end. She made the most of the moment. Her refusal was a stubborn self-affirmation coming from some place inside herself she didn’t understand and didn’t need to understand.

In moments now when despair swamps me, I hear a voice inside which plants its feet and stands its ground and says…

“Despair is not me. I do not choose for the world to be the way it is. If I were the Creator, hope would be real and love would be winning. That’s who I am. That person.”

Sometimes people call us names, those of us who believe that collapse is imminent, or that extinction is coming. I used to call myself those names, but not anymore. I never think of myself as a pessimist, a cynic, or a naysayer, even though I have such a dark view of the future. I’m not a nihilist—I’m a fighter. At least in my own way. At least on my best days. And even on days when I can’t find my fight, I still wish to be a fighter.

1.2  Make yours a very loving kind of fight

Warning
As you can already see, I’m talking quite directly about the death of hope. So this site is dark.

But the death of hope is only the inciting incident. The real story here is about upgrading love, asking more of it than we’ve ever asked of it, and then fighting for ourselves like never before.

But still this site is dark. So please take care of yourself as you read. Pace yourself. Take time outs if you need to. Find someone to read it with so you’re not taking this journey alone. And if you need to stop reading altogether, please do that, please stop.

If you want help with making a post-hope life for yourself, or designing your own version of post-hope activism, I do a special kind of coaching which I call Deep Advocacy. If you’d like to check it out, I’d be glad to talk with you to see if what I offer is a match for what you need or not.

There’s more information on the Coaching page. Or you can click on the Contact page to send me a note.

Best wishes,

Rich Snowdon