What’s on the other side of hope?

What do you do when you feel that you have no more hope for your central mission? You don’t understand the point of going to another climate march or signing your 15th Greenpeace petition. While you don’t say anything because you’re afraid of being labelled a “downer” or pessimist, you’ve lost the connection between your daily activities and the deeper reasons for doing them. Experiencing uncomfortable internal dissonance between your established beliefs about yourself and your real-time thoughts and actions, you end up lying to yourself or others. 

When I’ve felt this way, I’ve assumed I had lost the thread of meaning of my life, and along with it my identity: “if I’m not excited about environmental activism right now, I’m not an environmentalist; if I’m not an environmentalist, then what am I?” I’ve added shame to the confusion and loaded myself up with “shoulds” and “try harders”. And I bet I’m not the only one doing so. In the environmental community, we are encouraged to “keep up hope”, which means stay positive. A “good” environmentalist is an optimist, a bad one is a pessimist (or not an environmentalist at all). But “stay positive” isn’t helpful advice for everyone. To me, it feels fake, dismissive, and not well-thought out. I can’t pretend all our environmental problems will resolve at T minus 1 second (the greenhouse gases will reabsorb, the whales will re-multiply, and the plastic will safely disintegrate). 

For the betterment of the individual and the cause, I think there’s room for a more somber discussion of possible outcomes and how to live – really live – with them. The question of what to do after you lose hope is more interesting to me than how to maintain hope. Attempts to answer the latter may amount to nothing more than a forced injection of false optimism, while a reckoning with the former helps you deal with any number of outcomes you cannot control (most of life!).

I’ve asked a few people for their perspectives. In response to my agonizing about being “too pessimistic” and “not hopeful enough”, a trusted mentor once challenged me: 

What if instead of being too hopeless you’re actually too hopeful? You still have hope that things will get better, that you, individually, can play a role in bringing about positive change for the environment and endangered species. You know that everything will ultimately perish, that even if you try your best, one day everything will go extinct. Knowing this, what do you want to do? What would you do differently if you had no more hope, if all was lost, if nothing mattered? 

The single biggest existential dilemma for me right now, the stem cell that contains the future of all my actions, is how to move beyond optimism vs. pessimism and find a different lens through which to view my actions. I’m still trying to answer this for myself and in the process have found Viktor E. Frankl indispensable. The Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor turned writer found that concentration camp prisoners who maintained a belief in the meaning of existence equipped themselves to withstand the mental and physical tortures of camp life better than those who gave up. Meaning did not mean a singular, overarching storyline that applied to all individuals — meaning was something each individual created for them self. 

Frankl challenges us to take the question normally asked, “what is the meaning of life,” and flip it on its head: 

“….it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

We are responsible towards our lives and must decide what to do with them. Accepting the role of individual agency, we choose what would giveour lives meaning, for ourselves alone. We stop doing something because we expect or depend on an outcome. It is the doing that sustains us, no matter the result.

For me, relaxing my idea of hope doesn’t mean I give up and cease to participate in life (that’s nihilism, or believing that life is meaningless). It means that I can’t hide under the illusion that there is a grand story arc to my life that will present itself if I listen hard enough. I can orient myself to life, actively creating the meaning I seek: volunteering when I feel pulled to a cause, resting when the pain becomes too much and I need to reconsider.

What matters to you and what you do are your choices to make, and the answers can change. There are no shoulds, because your life becomes a sequence of actions empowered by your own, and only your own, ability to choose. Your engagement with the world, and the direction of your passion and dedication, can wax and wane or change in form.

“Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism! How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?”

— Viktor E. Frankl

I now believe that optimism and pessimism are both versions of determinism: something will happen without your participation (either good or bad). Counterpart to both is an engaged realism, a place where I see immense freedom, possibility, and kindness towards self. I don’t have to convince myself that things aren’t as bad as they seem — I decide what to do when they really are. It’s not for me to lament what is happening; it’s for me to decide how to respond. My passions and efforts may be illusions that don’t create the change I wish they would. I recognize them as illusions and decide to dance with them anyways. 

The question of what you should do when all hope is lost gets turned back on you. What can you offer, and what will you care about, when all hope is lost? The answers you provide yourself. Your actions and thoughts, and decision to engage with the world, create the hope you seek.