An Alternative to Hope
March 10, 2025 10:01 AM Subscribe
Emily and Amelia Nagoski discuss how to cope when you've either lost your hope or never had any. Emily and Amelia made the Feminist Survival Project podcast in 2020. In 2025, they brought it back. In a recent episode, they discuss what to do when you don't have hope.
Notes I took from the podcast:
* Emily has to say that her hope is "broken" rather than "gone" because people get freaked out that you're not going to try any more.
* Hope is measured in pathways and agency. Pathway: "I can think of many ways to get what is important to me, I can see a way forward." Agency: "I can meet my goals." But the problems on the news are too big for any individual to think their way out. This would take collaboration on a massive scale, and no one has that individual power except for maybe four people in the world, who are the actual problem right now.
* Hope doesn't take scale into account. Hope is a general sense of positivity. Faith is a belief in something and is more specific.
* The Monitor keeps a ratio of effort to progress and "has a very strong opinion of what it's supposed to be." It objects when you put in a whole lot of effort and don't make much progress. If no amount of effort will make progress, such as constitutional crisis...How do you keep the motivation to keep on trying when nothing you do will make any progress?
* Emily's answer is faith, even if she's an atheist.
* Stillness, time and rest help you heal. Stay with the people who care about you.
* "Hope is a scam." It's great if you have access to it, but if you don't, there are other options that are very good.
* What people fear is that if they lose access to hope, they think there are no other ways through the jams of their lives, they have no agency or pathways, they become stuck or isolated. My brain has decided that if I can't change these things, I can't change anything.
Step 1: ask for help. Have a list of 3 people at minimum, one of whom should be a professional.
Step 2: Numb intolerable pain in whatever way helps. Do whatever it takes, whatever way helps. Food, drugs, television, whatever lowers the pain to a tolerable level. Do things that help you to release the pain, clean the wound.
Emily also wrote a Substack article and did a separate video on the topic. She lost her hope 20+ years ago, how's she been doing since then?
Notes I took from the podcast:
* Emily has to say that her hope is "broken" rather than "gone" because people get freaked out that you're not going to try any more.
* Hope is measured in pathways and agency. Pathway: "I can think of many ways to get what is important to me, I can see a way forward." Agency: "I can meet my goals." But the problems on the news are too big for any individual to think their way out. This would take collaboration on a massive scale, and no one has that individual power except for maybe four people in the world, who are the actual problem right now.
* Hope doesn't take scale into account. Hope is a general sense of positivity. Faith is a belief in something and is more specific.
* The Monitor keeps a ratio of effort to progress and "has a very strong opinion of what it's supposed to be." It objects when you put in a whole lot of effort and don't make much progress. If no amount of effort will make progress, such as constitutional crisis...How do you keep the motivation to keep on trying when nothing you do will make any progress?
* Emily's answer is faith, even if she's an atheist.
* Stillness, time and rest help you heal. Stay with the people who care about you.
* "Hope is a scam." It's great if you have access to it, but if you don't, there are other options that are very good.
* What people fear is that if they lose access to hope, they think there are no other ways through the jams of their lives, they have no agency or pathways, they become stuck or isolated. My brain has decided that if I can't change these things, I can't change anything.
Step 1: ask for help. Have a list of 3 people at minimum, one of whom should be a professional.
Step 2: Numb intolerable pain in whatever way helps. Do whatever it takes, whatever way helps. Food, drugs, television, whatever lowers the pain to a tolerable level. Do things that help you to release the pain, clean the wound.
Emily also wrote a Substack article and did a separate video on the topic. She lost her hope 20+ years ago, how's she been doing since then?
"Hope is justifying your feelings, thoughts, and plans based on your assessment that a desired outcome is possible.Amelia has their own follow-up video on the topic, from the POV of someone who never had hope, citing fiction books as well as their own book, Burnout (notes on the book here).
I had a series of life experiences that broke the link between my assessment of whether or not a desired outcome is possible and whether or not I think, feel, or plan anything about that desirable outcome. I lost my ability to justify my thoughts, feelings, and plans based on what I thought was possible.
That noncontingent sustaining energy is an unimaginable hope.
What’s it called, when you have no reason to believe a wanted future may come to pass and yet you continue to work toward it just as if you did believe you could make a difference? What’s the name for that emotion, when you walk toward the world you want, knowing that each next step might be off a cliff?
What’s broken in me is not my ability to imagine but the sense that I’m justified in believing I can create the outcome I imagine.
What’s not broken in me is my sense that I am justified in believing I’m working to create what I can’t imagine, the vast unknowable. Faith is an unimaginable hope, a hope for something we believe without reason is on the other side of the mountain."
"Hope is maybe not the thing, all the time."Related topic: NYT: How I Lost Hope and Took Up Singing
"I think there is an alternative power that can pull you through, and that's love."
"When I had given up hope altogether, my sense of abandonment was colored in sadness, for sure, but also with shades of profound relief. Feeling angry and powerless gave me a new freedom to do anything I wanted. I was enjoying the moment, instead of worrying about the uncertainties of the future or mourning the past life that would not return. We can’t live without hope forever, but sometimes it can be OK to let go of it. What you find instead may even help you get through."
Derrick Jensen:
posted by Lemkin at 10:57 AM on March 10 [8 favorites]
More from that article that stood out to me:
But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.posted by jenfullmoon at 11:52 AM on March 10 [6 favorites]
Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they’ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
I like Community's take.
'Frankie' Dart: Oh God no, I never hope. Hope is pouting in advance. Hope is faith's richer, bitchier sister. Hope is the deformed attic-bound incest monster offspring of entitlement and fear.posted by Mayor West at 1:18 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]
I personally prefer Václav Havel's definition of hope to the one used in this episode, and is more similar to what Emily is talking about when she refers to faith. Havel places less emphasis on having the expectation of a certain outcome: Hope is "an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed...Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
posted by rcraniac at 1:42 PM on March 10 [8 favorites]
posted by rcraniac at 1:42 PM on March 10 [8 favorites]
“No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.” --- Thomas Ligotti.
posted by SPrintF at 2:19 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]
posted by SPrintF at 2:19 PM on March 10 [4 favorites]
An alternative understanding of hope: "People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider's webs. It's not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go." (from this tweet, several years ago).
Against which, from seemingly ages ago when all we worried about was COVID, nihilism can help.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:01 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]
Against which, from seemingly ages ago when all we worried about was COVID, nihilism can help.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:01 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]
There's a quote apocryphally attributed to St. Augustine that i've always loved (probably even more so because he didn't actually say it, tbh, because fuck St. Augustine):
Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.posted by adrienneleigh at 3:06 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]
I'm not a very hopeful person - been crushingly let down one too many times to be able to rely on it. I really don't understand faith though - it feels like it demands a level of certainty that I just cannot comprehend. It's like hope but...worse, somehow? Like you just "know" things will work out? What's that like?
I have contemplated posting on AskMefi about how people can have honest faith in anything. Like, how does their brain make that possible? I am honestly jealous of people more secure in their faith - I wish I could be too, but then I feel like "how can you be so sure, do you not remember all the times the rug got pulled from under you" and just aaaahhhh
posted by creatrixtiara at 4:57 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]
I have contemplated posting on AskMefi about how people can have honest faith in anything. Like, how does their brain make that possible? I am honestly jealous of people more secure in their faith - I wish I could be too, but then I feel like "how can you be so sure, do you not remember all the times the rug got pulled from under you" and just aaaahhhh
posted by creatrixtiara at 4:57 PM on March 10 [5 favorites]
creatrixtiara: I've been ruminating on your questions for a few hours.
I think for me it's a combination of deeply ingrained habits, and willful self-deception based on the belief that if I think I can succeed I will actually have better odds of success.
The ingrained habits part is mostly to do with how I was raised and the norms I internalised about How One Behaves. I have to do the things it is proper to do and one of the things that it's proper to do is act in pursuit of what I believe. Even when I am very depressed, I mostly continue to do things out of a sense of responsibility and guilt, and because of my values, that means I do things that might advance my values because I'm supposed to, even though my brain is screaming they are pointless and won't work.
The wilfull self-deception part is: I know that if I ask myself "if I were to succeed, how would I have got there? how can I get there?", that is how I solve problems and sometimes do succeed. I will imagine failure in pursuit of proofing my plans against failure, but I try not to do that too much or I'll fall apart.
Mostly I think about that Gramsci aphorism: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. If he could write that in jail because of his beliefs, I can run with it.
I freely admit that I've probably had enough good luck in life not to be thoroughly crushed, and other people will have had enough bad luck/forces against them that they justifiably can't sustain the beliefs I have. OTOH, that maybe makes it more my responsibility to keep going. I dunno.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:15 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
I think for me it's a combination of deeply ingrained habits, and willful self-deception based on the belief that if I think I can succeed I will actually have better odds of success.
The ingrained habits part is mostly to do with how I was raised and the norms I internalised about How One Behaves. I have to do the things it is proper to do and one of the things that it's proper to do is act in pursuit of what I believe. Even when I am very depressed, I mostly continue to do things out of a sense of responsibility and guilt, and because of my values, that means I do things that might advance my values because I'm supposed to, even though my brain is screaming they are pointless and won't work.
The wilfull self-deception part is: I know that if I ask myself "if I were to succeed, how would I have got there? how can I get there?", that is how I solve problems and sometimes do succeed. I will imagine failure in pursuit of proofing my plans against failure, but I try not to do that too much or I'll fall apart.
Mostly I think about that Gramsci aphorism: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. If he could write that in jail because of his beliefs, I can run with it.
I freely admit that I've probably had enough good luck in life not to be thoroughly crushed, and other people will have had enough bad luck/forces against them that they justifiably can't sustain the beliefs I have. OTOH, that maybe makes it more my responsibility to keep going. I dunno.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:15 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
Also, I realise what I've described doesn't sound a lot like faith. But I think at a practical level it might be what faith amounts to.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:17 AM on March 11 [2 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:17 AM on March 11 [2 favorites]
I have had neither hope nor faith for a ridiculously long time but like, apparently you keep waking up anyway, so you might as well do something.
May I propose as another alternate motivating force: pure, seething spite. It has gotten more accomplished in my life than any other internal force and wow does it ever have a million extremely deserving targets nowadays!
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:18 AM on March 11 [2 favorites]
May I propose as another alternate motivating force: pure, seething spite. It has gotten more accomplished in my life than any other internal force and wow does it ever have a million extremely deserving targets nowadays!
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:18 AM on March 11 [2 favorites]
I wish I could rely on spite but I've known one too many people who use spite for evil
posted by creatrixtiara at 8:31 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
posted by creatrixtiara at 8:31 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
I’ve been without hope for a long time. Just listened to the podcast episode and I feel so validated and comforted. Thank you for this post.
posted by bunderful at 1:25 PM on March 11 [2 favorites]
posted by bunderful at 1:25 PM on March 11 [2 favorites]
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