The better future

An interview with hope

An abiding reality of human life is that, unless we go to great lengths to pad ourselves in delusion, the world is a terrifying place. Some padding and a little delusion are necessary. We take comfort where it can be found. We do this to remain upright.

To live holding both the terrifying and unjust in mind while at the same time finding strength to do the drone work of living is a juggling act we perform with various degrees of success at different times of our lives. Sometimes, when our juggling is going well, we even manage to access a rebellious, subversive joy.

Last week, my padding was wearing thin. South Africa’s power facility, Eskom, has been bled dry through such gross mismanagement and corruption, that ordinary South Africans have less and less access to constant, reliable power. The effects are too numerous and too horrendous to hold in mind. Last week it felt as though for many people it was all too overwhelming to brace themselves against.

The fear is real.

The very, very worst part of the Eskom debacle seems to me the complete and utter lack of light (ahem) at the end of this tunnel. There appears to be no stopping the crashing now, no plans and no ideas; no leaders so appalled by the free fall that they’re prepared to light their own torches to usher us out of this unfolding calamity. It feels hopeless.

A terrible thing overcomes me sometimes when a widespread (and very real) despair becomes so intrusive that I cannot steel myself against it. It happened with the xenophobic violence of 2015. The ‘terrible thing’ is a clusterfuck of grief, grievance and hopelessness that simultaneously ignites a fuse of panic and dumps a weighted blanket of depression over my head so I cannot see any light at all. It is such a spectacular disenchantment with people and systems that I want to dig a hole and crawl into it forever. I see no way to be of use to anyone or anything, let alone pit myself in my small ways against a colossus of outrage and injustice.

‘Hell’ by Pedro Correa

Now that I am older, I know that I have remedies stuffed into an imaginary Gladstone bag for this affliction of the soul, so that the despondency is less persistent, if not less intense.

But last week a new tincture was added unexpectedly. It happened during a lightly life-changing conversation over a candlelit (loadshedding) vegan meal of tomato risotto and salad with Sam, both our daughters and our two very good friends, Dassie and Annie, who were hosting us.

I subsequently asked Annie to help me remember the conversation, because I wouldn’t do her thought processes justice in my own words.

I am so happy to share her very thoughtful ideas on hope with you, because they came to me at a time I needed some new perspective with which to engage on how to live fruitfully in the midst of hope’s apparent absence.

I follow up the short interview with some of the remedies I use when The World Is Too Much With Us.

I hope you’ll find some comforts here.

Anneleigh Jacobsen’s non-simplistic, non-linear take on hope

K: I have never thought to ask you about why the single visible tattoo on you is the word ‘hope’. Why ‘hope’?

A: People like to quote the Bible verse ‘faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love’ thing when giving reasons for why they carry on, but I believe that while love gives us meaning, it’s hope that keeps us going. I suspect that’s why there are so many quotes by amazing thinkers about hope. But I also think that a lot of us don’t always – or even often – feel hopeful. Particularly if we view hope, as the Reverend Alan Storey did, as ‘the belief that tomorrow can be better than today despite all evidence to the contrary’.

I don't believe in the idea of hope as an eternal motivator, but I do think it is what drives humans forward and so it’s a curiosity to me. We motivate ourselves with stories we tell ourselves based on no logic or evidence, and yet it is often enough to get us through and to spur on amazing things.

It's such a contradictory concept at the heart of what makes us human. One of my favourite quotes about hope is from the second Matrix movie. The architect of the matrix tells Neo that hope is ‘the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness’.

K: What is hope then? Is it simply a fairy tale we tell ourselves to get through?

A: It is most definitely slippery. Most of the definitions or usages point to believing in – and working towards – a better future rather than just sitting back and, well, hoping it might happen.

That is part of my tussle with the word: it engenders great things, but it can also be a complete cop-out when it presupposes a magnanimous universe that has our best interests at heart.

Hope is Dickinson’s ‘thing with feathers’ that ‘never asked a crumb of me’.

It’s Tutu’s ‘being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness’.

It’s Chesterton’s ‘Hope means expectancy when things are otherwise hopeless’.

It’s Aristotle’s ‘waking dream’. 

One of my favourite Nelson Mandela quotes is about hope:

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.

And that one perhaps comes closest to why I haven’t fully given up on hope as a concept, why I carry it with me and reflect on it.

What hope gives us is, maybe, the means to make better choices. 

K: How do you link hope to your understanding of what the meaning of human consciousness and life might be?

A: Hope is inextricably intertwined with beliefs and our eternal quest for meaning. It’s linked to how we view ourselves relative to the universe, what we know of it, and how we fit into it. 

My view of us is that we are a self-conscious, self-reflexive evolutionary experiment. 

For one infinite moment in the span of time, matter and energy, the universe has become, in us, conscious and able to look at itself in wonder. Likely not the only instance of this, statistically, but for now, for this instant, we are part of the universe that has taken on a form that is able to perceive and conceive of itself and be amazed by the grandeur, the scale, the seeming impossibility of it all. We are the universe being amazed by itself for a glorious moment of light amidst the infinite darkness, and that, in and of itself, is a kind of purpose for us.

The last stars will die out 120 trillion years from now (at most), followed by 10 to the power of 106 years of just black holes.

Condensed, that's like the universe starting with 1 second of stars and then a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion years of just black holes.

Stars are basically the immediate after-effects of the Big Bang. A one-second sizzle of brightness before settling into an essentially endless era of darkness. We live in that one bright second.

Tim Urban of Wait But Why

We have become conscious in order to understand in some small way, how spectacular it all is. And to be thankful for being in this flash of consciousness and part of such an awe-inspiring whole. 

Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

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My own seven mental condoms against despair

The majesty of the idea that meaning is simply this – that we are here to observe and marvel during this intergalactic millisecond of light – is, for me, a potent elixir against despondency.

Here are some of the medicines in my imaginary self-doctoring bag. They’re not particularly original, but they come through for me every single time the darkness of the world becomes oppressive:

1.     Whenever the proverbial apocalyptic shit hits the proverbial fan – war, famine, flood, plague – I remember that this is when ordinary people become extraordinary. Think of how people rally when around – even you, you rally around! – when domestic calamities beset others. When things become mega-kak, more people seem to become mega-amazing.

2.     Focus on the makers. Comedians, acrobats, app designers, glass blowers, inventors, film makers, illustrators, song writers, novelists, painters, sculptors – and all the other kinds of makers I haven’t named – know how to turn nothing into something and often they make things that simply stun all the crappy feelings about the crappy side of the world right out of me.

3.     Work. I know not everyone loves their work as much as I love mine, so it might not be a feasible escape, but when I’m working, I can lose myself in it. Plus, it is a form of making. As long as I am making, I’m too distracted to notice the gloom all around. Work also tends to drag in its wake a happy collection of flotsam and jetsam: fertile collaboration, new ideas, and the brick-by-brick construction of something that is on-goingly and ultimately rewarding. I also find that money I earn myself, however little it is, by the sweat of my very own brave brow, always makes me feel competent and satisfied with my own sense of self-worth, which boosts my sense of agency. So that’s an extra bonus.

4.     Physical effort. I find it hard to ruminate when I am out of breath, tangled in a yoga pose, hiking up an incline or dancing. Extra points to physical effort for a) production of short-term psychoactive effects that make you feel calmer and b) the long-term effects on your general health and well-being.

5.     Connect with strangers. Sounds weird, but I get an incredible high from connecting with people I meet in my everyday life. Most people are really nice and I find that so many South Africans just have this instant default mode to laughter, which might be the only thing we truly have in common with one another across all our many divides. During authentic connections, however fleeting and brief they are, people will often afford you glimpses of their own rich lives, negating the tendency we have to slip too far down into our own dramas.

6.     Don’t make it worse for others. Don’t bitch and moan. I realise we all do it sometimes, but it needs to be taken in hand because moaning has a visceral effect on other people. I try to keep a lid on it when it seems like the world is irredeemably ghastly because there is no possible way that moaning is going to make anyone or anything better. In fact, I feel that the best thing to do, for myself and for people around me, is to notice the good things.

Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

Rebecca Solnit in Hope in the Dark

7.     Do something to make the world around you better. This is especially important when it feels like the things that are wrong are way bigger than me – like systems of terror and oppression, or climate change. Feeling like I have some agency ­to make some minuscule difference helps me enormously.

We must always remember too: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, Lovers!

Lots of love,

K

PS: If you know someone who needs a strong dose of pick-me-up right now and who might benefit from Annie’s insights, consider giving them a paid subscription to Love Letter.