Keeping hope alive (and other ways to combat despair and cynicism)

These days, if I’m having trouble writing, focusing, or generally doing something that requires a degree of internal motivation, I can mostly trace the source of my paralysis to feelings of cynicism and despair. There’s nothing like cynicism as a motivation killer. The good news: this essay is only tangentially about those feelings. Mostly, it’s about strategies for combating cynicism and despair. It’s about the struggle to find impactful directions to move in, the difficulty of figuring out which size bite of the world’s problems to try to take, and the ever-present difficulty of keeping hope alive. It’s an attempt to puzzle out how to keep putting one foot in front of the other, when surrounded by demotivating events and narratives.

Finding the right direction

For some time now, we’ve been living through a polycrisis – there are an enormous number of problems that all require immediate attention and action, and the multiplicity of these problems compounds them. Everything seems to be going wrong at once. In the face of too many different problems that all seem equally urgent, the desire to, in the abstract, make the world better, sags under the weight of all the things that need to get done. That way lies exhaustion and cynicism.

One way of tackling the powerlessness of too many problems is specialization. Pick a direction that feels right and go there. Personally, I find this one is often easier said than done. As someone with too many interests and too many causes, finding focus can be difficult. When all the causes are worthy and urgent, finding a direction to move in isn’t always easy.

If I look at the causes and actions I’ve stuck with over the years, and at the impactful people around me, I notice a few things about the selection criteria. The first criterion is so obvious that it’s almost not a meaningful criterion at all: you should care about the thing more than you care about other things. The importance of this will become clearer in a second. Beyond that, is there something specific in your skillset or situation that makes you more useful to this cause than the average person, and will contributing to the cause put you in proximity with other people who expand each other’s capacity? It’s easy (and even pragmatic) to make choices based on those last two criteria.

I’ve done this before: an opportunity to do something good and impactful lands in my lap. It’s full of people pulling in the same direction, and I have skills that are useful. The only problem is that it’s something lower on my list in terms of my own drive and motivation. It’s not necessarily the thing that puts the most wind in my sails. Contributing to these tangential causes can be fine for a while, but for me at least, I eventually find an internal conflict, a desire to be spending more time on actions that line up more closely with my own affinities and priorities. The best direction is one that you want to keep committing to every day.

Calibrating size of bite

A few years ago, I had some career coaching. It took me until then to properly understand and internalize the concept of “spheres of influence” in the interpersonal and organizational sense. To very briefly paraphrase what that coach tried to help me learn: there are certain aspects of our lives and work that we have the capacity to control or influence, and there are aspects where we have less or no control. A mismatch between the action one is trying to take and one’s capacity for control or influence in the sphere in which that action is taking place is a good recipe for exhaustion and frustration.

I am not the best person to coach, because though I believe in the project and am a participant who is both enthusiastic and keen, I have not historically been the best at learning to limit my ambitions. This is not a humble-brag. Many of the people I know who are successful at making change in the world are good at recognizing what they can influence and what they cannot, and putting their energy into the efforts where it will count most. Flailing ineffectually at wrong-sized problems is not as effective as finding the right-sized problem in the subject area you care about, and channelling your efforts in a clever and targeted way.

When I was younger, full of energy, and full of reforming zeal, I looked very sideways at people who chose to invest their energy only in things within their direct sphere of influence. Surely, I thought, caring about the larger issues in the world is important – being an engaged citizen, being informed, these are crucial traits for being an active member of society. Surely, sticking your head in the sand and not engaging with things you can’t influence makes your world small, and your worldview less complete. That may still be the case. But in the intervening years, I’ve come to understand the value of narrowing focus, as least a little, in order to have the energy to make impactful change. Minutely knowing what’s going on in the world may seem, in the abstract, like a valuable goal. And if it’s possible to do that without becoming exhausted, great. But in a news cycle which has such an excess of churn, and so many things to be distressed about, being informed can be not only a full-time job, but also a mental and emotional drain. There is value in having a degree of specialization, and in making deliberate choices about how much to try to change at once.

This is why taking the right size of bite is important. In order to stay motivated, and in order to not give in to despair, seeing some impact can be handy. With a massive goal (like stopping a war or reversing climate change), failure is inevitable for most of us. Recognizing the cumulative value of small impact is one way to keep the fire burning. Achievable milestones are still milestones, and have the bonus benefit of being more motivating than huge abstractions. Celebrating the small wins may seem hollow in the face of massive problems, but it’s important.

Getting the IV into hope

The third important but difficult task in combating cynicism and despair is keeping hope alive. Giving into inevitability is profoundly disempowering. If we believe that the world’s problems are all too big, that others with more power will make the decisions, that it’s our job to sit back and accept things as they are, then there’s very little motivation to do anything. While I’m not advocating for pretending that everything will be okay in the face of huge evidence to the contrary, I do think it’s important to believe that things can change, that the world can be different, and that hope has value. Changing all the things we want to change may not be possible, but in aiming for big change, it may be possible to collaterally make smaller change, or we may meet some good people along the way.

So how can we keep hope alive? Like all the other tasks, this one is difficult. It’s in the interests of entrenched powers to make change look impossible. The language of inevitability (“It’s already here, we’re not going to put the genie back it the bottle”) makes hope for other things seem futile, silly, and unrealistic. So, two things I like for keeping hope alive: looking for the small examples of things I want, and brushing up on history. Both of these offer opportunities to remind ourselves that specific changes aren’t inevitable, that alternatives exist, and that the march of progress is neither linear nor pre-determined. We can hope because we have agency, and because the efforts of others, past and present, have shaped and are shaping the world we live in. From there, it’s only a short step to believing that our own efforts are still worthwhile.