Have you given up hope for the future?

In My Humble Opinion
1
  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

I’m not handholding anybody here. It means what you think it means. Go with your heart.

If you answered yes, what has or is going to change in your life plans because of it?

I’ve discussed this before, and often due to current zeitgeist, but I was inspired further by foolishly taking the current president’s name off my verboten tag list to see what was up, and was struck by the overwhelming hopelessness of it all, to the point where I wonder why some commenters are even still here and talking about anything regarding “fun” stuff or the future. (My sense is that some folks feeling this way wanted to share this feeling as much as possible, to persuade others to feel as they do. No offense intended to anyone on this board; I may not be talking about you specifically, and it seems to me like a microcosm of the internet in general in that way, so I don’t want to single out this board either.)

It also occurred to me that the sample might be self selecting, or my impression just plain wrong, so I wondered what the general sense here actually was.

Gotta tell you, though, I’m reassured by the thought that 99.9% of the hopeless people here and elsewhere aren’t really making life decisions as if they didn’t have hope, for their sakes…

2

I answered “no” because I didn’t really have hope to give up, in the sense I understand the question.

I have always been enormously cynical. History shows us that people, in the aggregate, are foolish and short-sighted and self-destructive, and that the pendulum swings inexorably between periods of relative positivity (peace, progress, enlightenment) and periods of abject, paralyzing horror. It seems delusional to me to believe that the encouraging steps forward (e.g. the election of Obama) would not be matched at some point by depressing steps backward.

So I never felt any kind of hope that we’d “turned a corner,” that the progress we’d achieved had been cemented in place as a backstop against future regression. My philosophy is that sometimes we’ll have good times, and sometimes we’ll have truly awful times, and all we can do is make the best of it, either way, while we’re here.

Current events aren’t shocking to me. They’re just a confirmation. So there was no “hope,” insofar as that means anything, to be punctured and lost.

3

I hadn’t considered the aspect of what “giving up hope” means to different people. Excellent.

For the record, my personal definition of the phrase involves believing with certainty that life and humanity can’t improve and will only get worse (not even plateauing), whether you always thought that way or not. But like I said, use your own meanings; I can’t stop you and it’d be counterproductive to boot.

4

Hope is a funny word to me. I don’t hope. I do, or I do not. I’m am still doing so in that context I have ‘hope’.

I’m a lucky one. I don’t fall into any of the categories that are getting attacked. Yet. My wife and I are just about ready to retire, should be quite comfortable. I do have a concern about what could happen to our savings if someone throws a wrench in the works, or just decides to take it. The law has taken a back seat to many of these thugs.

My other concern is Medicare, which I think will come under attack pretty soon.

5

Although I voted Yes, I’m on the fence as far as the future goes. I sincerely hope that saner minds prevail and that we can restore the country back to a “normal” state, but I’m worried that Trump, and his wealthy allies, have become the new “normal” and over the next few years we will continue moving to the right at an ever increasing pace. Only time will tell.

6

I answered “Yes” for the same reason, weirdly. I probably had some at some point in my life.

7

My over/under for the end of human civilization as we know it is 2099, so I think that answers your question. LOL

8

Much like Cervaise, my understanding of humans is that the proverbial “arc of justice”, in that improvements become solidified, is a fallacy. Sometimes we are in an upward arc, sometimes we are in a downward arc. Even when we are in an upward arc, there is always the law of “regression to the mean” exerting downward pressure. I also tend to see patterns that I refer to as Newtonian, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

In respect to hope, I do have hope of a better, sensible, more just and kind future. However I’m not optimistic that the time horizon will mean I will see it in my remaining active lifetime. (Sure, maybe when I’m a bag-of-bones sitting in a corner with a blanket over my knees I’ll see it.)

9

I voted no because I have stopped caring about the US political system as it is hopelessly broken for the forseeable future. I will now concentrate my efforts on making my life better and stop worrying about how humanity as a whole is doing. So I am founding my hopes on my own personal situation and not that of the nation, this nation is now in a hopeless situtation, but I do not have to be.

10

This is where I am as well. Stop reading and watching national news, mute he-who-shall-not-be-named and the Politics and Elections in this forum, and focus on your own corner of the world - step out of the bubble and you’ll see life is good. Make your community better. I am not going to let the current political situation manipulate me into a constant state of outrage for the next four years. You can control what you see and hear, but you cannot control the politics, so just tune it out.

I am fortunate to live where I am unlikely to be directly affected by many goings-on at the national level, so I am just going on with life, like I did in 2016. Ask yourself - how might you be directly impacted by the current administration, and be honest. Worrying about others doesn’t count - how are “you” likely to be affected?

11

Optimist!

12

Now you’re catching-on! See, it works!

13

Don’t make me quote Niemöller at you.

14

Voted no. Thankfully, human politics are measured in human lifespans, and in that sense, I’m not too worried about it. I dislike the current trajectory of American society, but in fifty years it’ll be ancient history. In a hundred it’ll be forgotten.

The first time around, I was pretty upset about it and dove headfirst into activism for a few years, but it didn’t really accomplish anything at all aside from making a bunch of enemies unnecessarily.

With age and a reluctant rollercoaster ride through the stages of grief, I chilled out a bit and turned my attention inward, towards my small circles of friends and family instead. In those tiny bubbles I find joy, and for further escapism I turn to nature and/or video games. Is it selfish and hedonistic? Yes, probably, but realistically a normal person has no power in US politics anyway (that’s not a bash against any administration, just the gerrymandered two-party first-past-the-post electoral system with legalized bribery that we have).

There’s a lot of permanent damage that can be done in the next fifty years, from climate change to a resurgence in authoritarianism and the end of democracy and all that, but you know… history happens in cycles. And evolution will continue. I don’t share the sense of predeterminism, either for the better or worse, that some people have. We’re neither doomed nor near salvation; it’s a dynamic system that continuously adapts and self-balances. America may fall; some other superpower will take its place. Peoples and species will be displaced, populations will collapse, some pocket of survivors will take over, or a new primate / dolphin / corvid species will rise to dominance.

I think fundamentally we are still limited by our ancient biology and there is only so much “enlightening” that culture and education can do for us. We’ve probably surpassed that limit already – way too much noise for our primate brains to filter out successfully – and circled back to more primitive in-group tribal violence. I don’t think human societies can really evolve past cyclical collapse without an underlying biological/genetic change, and that’ll take evolutionary time.

Who knows, maybe AI will help. My hope is that some small country (or maybe space colony) will explore AI based governance and find runaway success there, and that maybe that’ll trickle back down to Earth at some point.

Of course, it’s easy to think this way when I don’t/won’t have kids. Whatever happens in the future, it’s just speculatory sci-fi for me… I don’t have to worry about any offspring suffering through it. It’s when I see Gen Z or younger kids that I worry for them. Maybe in 50 years all of this will be behind us, but that’s still well within their lifespan, and man, is it gonna be rough. But hopefully they’ll have grown up in adversity rather than comfort, and will have developed better coping methods and overall resilience because of it.

15

I voted “No”. When I was a kid, I lived under a racist, fascist regime. Now, my country, troubled as it is, is free. So I know things can change for the better.

That, plus I expect great things from our coming AI overlords.

16

Yes, I think. I anticipate severely bad outcomes that I don’t expect to live long enough to see rebound from.

I think I’m reasonably well-equipped to ride a plane down as it crashes and live day-to-day life with day-to-day pleasures. Good food, good company, a warm fire, a nice wine, none of that has lost its appeal.

I’m turning my eyes away from the big-picture stuff for awhile.

17

The thing is, that midpoint on the pendulum swings seems to be moving leftward inexorably through history. We no longer have slavery, gladiatorial combat, bear-baiting and other animal cruelties as popular entertainments. Women can vote. And so forth.

So I haven’t given up hope either; I know that the pendulum will swing back the other direction at some point- it’s one of those three steps forward, two steps back sort of situations.

I will admit that I’m dismayed that somehow there was an entire huge strata of the population who were so sorely misunderstood, and wonder how we got to this situation. I mean, I grew up in suburban Texas, and when I went to college, there was this whole bizarre super-churchy, super-rural crowd who were a very foreign thing to me. They dressed differently, they acted differently, and they had some awfully strange outlooks on things. But I sort of dismissed it as just ignorance borne of limited experience (I truly believe some of them saw their first black people in college, for example), and didn’t really consider them as anything other than unfortunates who were stuck living in the hinterlands.

Fast forward to the Trump era, and suddenly they’ve got a political identity of their own, and it’s centered around feeling persecuted and forgotten by people like me who just dismissed them as ignorant. I kind of wonder how they sailed under the national popular radar like they did.

18

Previous to 2016 my hope for the future rested on the global progress of liberal democracy.

I am pretty sure the world liberal democratic order is dead, at least in the form of anything that rests on the postwar US-led order. Something comparably good might replace it. Maybe even something better. But whatever that is, it will have to struggle against the overwhelming social currents of climate change.

I’m trying carefully not to assume the worst will happen, but I also don’t see any fount of hope either. Just taking it one day at a time.

19

I grew up in the 80s. If you had told me as a kid that when I grew up, I would be living in a world threatened by war with Russia, a Middle East in perpetual ideological conflict, powerful global corporations with unchecked power to monitor our every move, Wall Street excess, takeover by AI, clime disasters, global pandemics, and Donald Trump was president…

…I guess I would have believed you.

20

I have given up some hope - not all.

I answered yes because my default hovers somewhere between despair and momentary motivation.

Plans for retirement are now on hold pending what happens with medications/Medicare.

Suffering from long Covid and battling anhedonia/brain fog/fatigue. It’s difficult to find the motivation to get through the day.

Everything I have needs replaced. Car, living arrangements, computer, tablet, eyeglasses, coffee pot, doors and windows, floors, ceiling in the bathroom - the list is endless.

I’ve been sleeping on a lovely mattress on the floor in the living room but I really need to get rid of some old furniture and buy a new bed.

So for me I have been struggling the last several years and the political changes/climate has just put a dark aura around all of that.

Plus my family are all deceased and I really wouldn’t mind joining them. I would not hasten that but it’s OK if it happens.

So my future is planning for being here temporarily and planning for end of life.

It’s unsettling at times.