The Right Wants Us to Submit to Nihilism. Here Is Where I’m Searching for Hope.

Every day I encounter, in some form or another, the idea that everything is doomed to always get worse. Faced with a daily inundation of horrors and political bad news from around the world, it’s easy to slide into feeling that nothing can change and that no actions we can take make a difference.

But we have to resist this feeling, because this is the mindset of nihilism — it’s what authoritarians want us to feel. Their power thrives on our exhaustion and silence.

I often wake up and fall asleep unsure of my own ability to truly face this world as it is, in the fullness of pain and grief, in the obscene cruelty of a genocide aired on social media. I watch fascist leaders on TV making light of others’ pain and bragging about being strong men, hypocritical liberals claiming empathy while funding destruction.

I protest and write and collaborate and read, looking hopefully to literature and science fiction for a sense of a better future, or at least a more deliciously imagined one. But every day I also contend with nihilistic ideas, the worry that people are set in their ways, the fear that nothing can change for the better.

This is the work of media overwhelm and attention saturation, the constant feed of outrage mixed with frivolity, without suggestions for action or connections to others. The current media landscape, and the trend toward believing that everything is always getting worse, can create a feeling that nothing we do makes any difference. We cannot let this work on us.

Daily inundated with pulls toward nihilism, I stay hopeful through a careful practice, a careful focus on what matters. Here are five things keeping me hopeful right now.

1. The Elders

I have been listening to The Nerve! Conversations with Movement Elders, a podcast of the National Council of Elders that pairs young activists and organizers with elders who have been in the movement since the 60s or 70s. In the most recent episode, elders Frances Reid, Loretta Ross and Barbara Smith joined with younger activists Nautica Jenkins and Hannah Krull to talk about voting and national politics.

“No Black person has ever had the luxury of relying on the Supreme Court for our liberation,” said Ross, a longtime southern Black organizer, responding to questions about recent devastating Supreme Court decisions. “We never fell for that okie doke … it’s people’s power that decides how people’s human rights are upheld and respected.”

The elders throughout this podcast series assert that we need multiple tactics, long-term visions and also short-term strategies to improve immediate conditions. They discourage activists from getting broken down by infighting or seeking political perfection over effective action. And they discourage us from thinking of ourselves or our moment as special.

“One of the sayings from the civil rights movement that I was told,” Ross said, “was that we’ve got to stop thinking of ourselves as the entire chain of freedom. Because the chain of freedom stretches back towards our ancestors and stretches forward towards our descendants. We just have to make sure that the chain doesn’t break at our link, do not give up because of apathy or being so sure that we’re right that we’re not willing to question what we’re doing, or how we’re dissuading people from being active.”

It’s easy to slide into feeling that nothing can change and that no actions we can take make a difference…. It’s what authoritarians want us to feel.

2. The Young People

At the Socialism 2024 conference in Chicago this September, I heard members of the youth antiwar organization Dissenters speak about their practices of international solidarity.

A lot of the ambient “kids-these-days” talk is about how young people don’t know about organizing for power, or are obsessed with superficial and siloed forms of identity politics, or are apathetic. Anyone who believes that would change their minds if they took the time to listen to youth organizers like these speak about global imperialism. Three Dissenters — Christian Ephraim, Rubi Mendez and Josue Sican — reported back on their recent delegations to Cuba, the Philippines and Guatemala, giving detailed analyses of the lessons about the force of U.S. imperialism and the power we have to challenge that from the belly of the beast. They drew parallels among anti-imperialist and workers’ struggles around the world, connected U.S. support for dictatorial leadership abroad to U.S. support for the genocidal Israeli government, and provided specific action steps for supporting struggles in each country.

Meanwhile Peyton Wilson, the communications organizer for Dissenters who moderated the panel, called on everyone in the room to stop being despairing and instead “join an organization.” The message felt disciplined, old-school, inspired and fresh. I thought to myself, imagine being born after 9/11, into a society of mass shootings and endless war and climate catastrophe; coming of age as Donald Trump was voted into office; going out into the world just as the Democrats served up another four years of half-baked policy; and deciding that the only option is to acknowledge your relative privilege and access and keep on fighting with everything you’ve got. It put hope in my bones to see and feel this — not naïve optimism, but a refreshing sense of responsibility.

3. Small-Scale Organizing Works.

In my capacity as the Abolition Journalism Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization, I work with a lot of incarcerated writers, and we often do flash call-ins and protests over censorship, clemency campaigns and retaliatory actions taken against our folks in prison. These abuses range from shutting people in rooms without AC during the hottest Texas summers to “sentencing” people to indefinite solitary confinement without due process. While not every one of these campaigns is successful, a surprising number are — when prisons target people with additional forms of punishment, they are also assuming the outside world won’t pay any attention. Just this year one of our folks finally emerged from years of solitary confinement; another accessed necessary health care; another had major advances in her case for freedom, all with the support of small but strong outside campaigns.

As incomplete and sometimes unsatisfying as they are, each success like this should be celebrated. They show people inside that they are not alone, and they show prison officials that they are being watched. They lead to concrete change and raise consciousness about the inherently abusive nature of prison itself. Phone blasts, emails, petitions — they make an actual difference and they strengthen our networks of resistance. Participating in small-scale actions like this reminds me to focus on what I can do where I am, right now.

4. Our Movements Are Changing the Conversation.

We are still witnessing a genocide in Palestine. We are still watching as people are churned and cycled through criminal legal systems in the U.S. We are still watching the acceleration of climate catastrophe as most of our leaders walk the deadly road of “compromise” on the Earth’s future.

Practicing hope means paying attention to what is possible, and planting ourselves in the places where we can help those possibilities grow.

But we also can’t and shouldn’t deny that our movements for justice are changing the conversation. Take trans people — currently a scapegoat and pariah of right-wing activists. I’m not happy to be in the crosshairs, but the reality is that we have cracked open a universe of possibility with our movements for trans liberation, showing people that gender is a constellation rather than a binary, influencing health care providers and educators and social services to expand and accommodate us, insisting on more expansive languages, and sensitizing the general public to the routine violence against us, particularly against trans women and Black and Brown trans people. There is immense vulnerability that comes with these successes, and it will take disciplined solidarity to stem the tide of the attacks on our communities. And still, we should not deny or ignore that we have, through organizing, changed the conversation about trans bodies — and therefore about all bodies — permanently.

In recent years, our movements have worked unexpected wonders in carving out space in the public conversation for abolition, and for mutual aid, and for just economic futures that see beyond capitalism. We have also moved the public in the U.S. significantly on Palestine; in spite of an aggressive and persistent pro-Israel propaganda campaign perpetuated from the very top levels of power in this country, a majority of U.S. adults support a ceasefire in Gaza and disapprove of Israel’s violence in the Gaza Strip. A Harvard Kennedy School survey this spring found that young people support a permanent ceasefire by a 5-to-1 margin. Led by Palestinians, U.S. solidarity actions have generated meaningful change in the conversation — although we have yet to exercise our power to stop the genocide. Building that power requires us to steadfastly recognize and build upon those wins. To ignore them only cedes more space to those who would have us give up hope.

5. Joy and Humor

In The Nerve podcast, Loretta Ross recalled a mentor of hers when she was young advising her to “lighten up.”

“You should have joy and pleasure from being on the right side of history,” he told her, “not anguish and despair. Let the other people have that.”

Joy is not just icing on the cake or the purview of the privileged. It is an exercise in hope that has always been rigorously practiced by people facing impossible situations of oppression. Laughter, pleasure and small acts of connection are precisely where we find our power — and the soul fuel that makes it possible to go on.

Hope isn’t a feeling or a firm belief that things will go our way; it is, as Mariame Kaba often says, a discipline. Practicing hope means paying attention to what is possible, and planting ourselves in the places where we can help those possibilities grow. These acts may be as simple as putting a pen to paper, picking up a phone to call or venturing into the streets to protest. Grief and even despair may overshadow us some days. But wallowing in hopelessness is exactly what they would have us do, those who would break the chain of freedom. Our actions, even in the face of apathy and overwhelm, are just links in the chain.

Note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Josue Sican’s name.