“It’ll get better.” It’s the first thing anyone tells you when you’re depressed, angry, grieving, or just stuck in a rut. A nice little phase to remind you to stay hopeful. Unfortunately, it’s only comforting for so long. At some point, things actually have to improve for that phrase to hold any power. Personally, I think I’ve reached the point where I think waiting for things to get better is just setting myself up for disappointment, and it’s taking its toll on my mental health. If you’re paying any attention at all to the world, things are not getting better. More and more people are struggling to survive. People are dying. Our leaders are suggesting we should just sacrifice our health to “boost the economy,” which is just another way of saying they want us out there dying in order to make money for people who already have more than they could ever spend in a lifetime.
I’m a middle class white woman and I’m worried about what my future will look like. Will I continue to have equal rights and freedoms? Will my son have clean air to breathe and water to drink when he’s my age? And while these are valid questions/concerns, when I stop to think about what is happening to the more vulnerable people in our society (people of color, immigrants, those who are surviving poverty, our trans brothers and sisters, etc…) it’s enough to make me want to give up all hope. They are dying. Things are not getting better.
There’s nothing I can turn to that even suggests things will get better. All of the momentum in societies around the world right now is moving in the opposite direction. More fascism. More isolationism. More militarism. Greater income inequality. We tried to put forth a progressive group of candidates for president this past year and within months it became clear that none of them stood a chance. There is no “movement.” The majority has no interest in changing the status quo, even when it’s in their best interest to do so. We will end up with another 4 years of the most inept, unqualified president we’ve ever had, and after that, the real fascists will come. At this point, I truly believe we’ve seen the last democratic president we’ll ever have. When the ruling party openly says that they can’t win without suppressing votes, and the highest court in the nation lets them get away with doing it, there is no more reason to hope.
Things will not get better. We can’t keep telling ourselves that we can change things by utilizing conventional means. The system is broken for anyone trying to change things. But it’s working exactly the way the people in power want it to. I imagine everyone who lived to witness their empire fall felt this way. They probably grasped at the same straws we’re grasping at. But it’s time to get real.
Things are bad and they’re going to get worse. People are dying and will continue to die. Unless you’re financially in the top 20% (maybe 10% even), your life is going to get harder and more uncomfortable until you find yourself begging for the same scraps as the people who you currently look down your nose at. But by then, it’ll be too late. There won’t be enough scraps to go around. Maybe then they’ll be a movement. But it’ll be poor, starving bodies up against a well supplied, fully stocked military that has complete authority to fire on its own people. We might win eventually. Revolutions often succeed, but revolutions are a bloody business and we will suffer losses so terrible I can’t bring myself to fully imagine them just yet. Or maybe we won’t bother with revolution at all and just settle into a grim existence where we’re all just waiting to die. Fighting takes energy, and we’re kept so busy trying to be as productive as possible so that the billionaires can keep hoarding their wealth that we’d rather Netflix our lives away then change anything. (That’s not a judgement, it’s an admission of guilt.)
So what do you tell yourself when you know it won’t get better? How do you wake up every morning with the knowledge that each day the world will be just a little bit worse than it was the day before? I’m asking because I don’t know. I’m asking because, on the outer edges of my mind, a little voice that I’ve ignored for years is waking up and whispering to me that perhaps it would be better to give up. I need to stop that voice before it gets louder. I need to figure out a way to keep going for my son and my husband. But I don’t know how to move forward towards a hopeless future. I’m sure my child will have questions for me one day about why the world is so awful and I don’t know how I’ll answer them in a way that won’t make him feel hopeless too. I don’t know how to lie to myself or him about something so massive. I feel like I should never have brought a child into a world like this, but it’s too late for that now. Now, not only do I have to go on living through this unending parade of shit, but I have to live with the guilt of seeing him live through it too. I may never forgive myself.
So tell me, how does one cope with this? How can I find joy without immediately being reminded of the futility of my situation? How can I hope to be happy when everything seems fleeting, everything seems trivial, and everything seems temporary? I really don’t know. I guess I’ll just keep plugging along, doing what I need to do to survive, and pretending to be okay for the benefit of others. Maybe if I pretend for long enough, it’ll feel real. I guess that’s all I can hope for. Because it won’t get better and I’m done trying to convince myself that it will.
Eff That S! 