Author’s Note: There’s an ad at the end of this newsletter. I’m testing out including them when I come across ones that don’t give me the ick. Let me know what you think.

Hi, friends! Long time, no see. I’ve been uninspired lately, and it’s affected every area of my life. I haven’t felt like going to my favorite coffee shop, going for walks, or writing much. These newsletters usually flow out of me like water, but despite all of my efforts, I couldn’t think of a topic for last week’s post. I decided to skip a week and focus on gathering my thoughts and feeling like a person again. I hope you didn’t miss me too much (that’s a lie, I love attention).

After much consideration, I realized that my lack of inspiration stems from my belief that life has no inherent meaning.

Before you worry or get your underwear in a twist, have no fear: I’m not suicidal. I do think I have less will to live than most people (and always have). Still, I have no desire to die just yet. Rather, the more I look at society and see what people do — for school, for work, for leisure, for survival — the more it feels like nonsense. Harmful nonsense.

I’m currently self-employed, and while I benefit greatly from this setup, one drawback is that I have too much time to think. I am prone to thinking myself into despair on a good day, so having more time than usual has been a double-edged sword for me.

On one hand, I’m reading and listening to more audiobooks than ever. I’ve also written more this year than I did in the previous five. Most importantly, I’ve been able to focus on my true passion: playing The Sims 4. On the other hand, I have paid more attention to politics and global affairs, and I’ve felt a lot of hopelessness and nihilism creeping in.

As you all know, I’m not a religious person, and I don’t think that life was created for a special purpose. I don’t believe in eternal life, and I don’t think that humans have pre-destined futures or that anything on this earth was “meant to be.” Some people find this depressing, but I’ve always found it quite freeing. Because I don’t believe in those things, that means I do (mostly) believe in free(ish) will. I believe that we get to create our own meaning in life, to decide what’s important to us as individuals and communities, and to build our own ethical codes. It’s a belief system that is both freeing and maddening.

The hardest thing about this worldview is that I don’t have a sense of cosmic comfort; I don’t believe that people who do awful things in this life face punishment in the next. I also don’t believe that evil is inevitable. Instead, I have to reckon with the very sad reality that people choose not to care about others in pursuit of things like wealth and power that only matter because we made them up! It’s easy to develop a negative view of humankind when you’re trying to reconcile the fact that there are people who are okay with children dying just so they can have a surplus of stuff.

As I sank deeper into my bottomless pit of pessimism, I came across a video of John Green talking about hope. In the video, John asserts that hope is a decision, not a feeling. He defines hope as “a decision that one has to make over and over again to believe that: 1. The world and those within it matter, and 2. That things can get better for the world and those within it.” While thinking about this definition, I realized I might not be as nihilistic as I thought.

Instead, I concluded that while I don’t believe life has inherent meaning, I do believe that life has inherent value. I also believe that every human life has the same value, regardless of race, gender, nationality, or any other categories we’ve made up to separate ourselves. I actually think that all lives have inherent value, but it’d be hypocritical of me to say that I think non-human lives have equal value as human ones, as someone who eats meat and wears leather.

It’s easy to look at our world — at poverty, war, illness, inequity, and bigotry — and write it off as a lost cause. It’s even easier to write humans specifically off as a lost cause. It’s not like elephants are the ones committing genocide and releasing excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It’s especially easy to do this when you’re spending a lot of time on the algorithmic internet, where the loudest and most extreme voices get the most attention. The harder, braver choice is to acknowledge that human suffering is widespread, often avoidable, and sometimes intentional. Despite this, we should remain hopeful that things can improve and believe in our ability to make a difference, even when faced with leaders who want to take all the power for themselves.

The truth is, we’re all tired. Life is hard, and the past several decades of policy decisions on the local, state, national, and international levels haven’t made it any easier. When people are tired and having a hard time, it’s easy for us to fall back on instinctual habits like blaming out-groups for our problems. It’s much harder to do the work of identifying the complex root causes. For the past decade, bad-faith leaders have taken advantage of this tendency and ignited a global movement of populism and fear. Still, I choose to hold on to hope that the veil is lifting and that people are starting to see the truth for what it is.

I, like a lot of people who make ‘being smart’ a key part of their identity, have a great fear of being seen as naive, a.k.a. stupid. For a long time, there’s been an invisible consensus that hope is for people who don’t understand how the world works. But, the truth is, the world isn’t only bad things. For every leader declaring war, there are dozens improving their community’s well-being. For every bigot, there’s someone working to make their city a better place. Black-and-white thinking, not hope, is the real naiveté.

I understand people’s hesitation to embrace hope. Some people use hope as a panacea, implying that because good things are happening in the world, we don’t have to address the bad. Others sell people on hope in public only to push harmful, self-serving agendas in private. I get it. I really do.

But, because I don’t believe that some deity is coming to save us, I have to believe that somewhere inside of (most) people lies the desire for all of us to be okay. I refuse to believe that humankind is naturally selfish and evil. I also acknowledge that we’re not all inherently good and cooperative. The world is complex and messy, and so are we.

But we have the tools to choose how we want to live. We can decide if we’ll accept our current trajectory of barreling towards more division, hatred, and apathy, or if we’ll lock in and figure out how to take care of each other and the planet we rely on for survival. I have to believe that it’s at least possible for us to do the right thing, because if not, life is not only meaningless…it’s worthless, too.

I wrote this essay more for myself than for anyone else. Writing is how I talk myself off the ledge when the thoughts in my head start migrating to my chest, weighing down my heart. So, this is a reminder to both of us, dear reader, to choose hope, even when we’re uninspired and disappointed in the way things are. Even when we’re bored and just want to lie in bed all day playing The Sims 4. Yes, things can always get worse. But they can also always get better.

Yours in hope,

Mina

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