Hope (?) in the Anthropocene

This essay requires a brief prelude to explain why it was written, when it was written, and why something that I first started keeping track of my edits on the 30 of March 2026 is being released months later, in late July.
This essay, began like most of them do; wildly off track. I talked for 2,000 words about Suzanne Collins pre-Hunger Games series Gregor the Overlander. This essay, began unlike most of them do; with a frantic desperation to get it out of me. That’s partly why it’s taken so long to finalize it, because the malady that this essay describes was cured by the very process of writing that malady down. Now that it’s written, I feel much better, to the point where the past few days have been filled with a reticence regarding sharing it at all.
At the end of the day, this essay has served the purpose I needed it to, whether I post it or not. I am sharing it because perhaps someone else out there also needs to read them.
The words here are deeply personal as only politics can be, that means that these words are also totally subjective, if you find yourself disagreeing I urge reaching out to me, whether in the comment section or my dms, I’d love to hear more. While politics do not happen on the internet, especially on Substack, it does not mean that it is not worth discussing politics on the internet which I do here at length.
Please enjoy.

“If you dare to struggle, you dare to win! If you dare not struggle, then, God damn it, you don’t deserve to win!”
Fred Hampton

For the Americans in Generation Z, activism is a thing that goes nowhere. My peers and I entered elementary school during the 2008 Financial Crisis. From the ruins of that collapse came Occupy Wall Street, a faint imprint only felt in retrospect. My generation’s first tangible experience with activism, one that included actual initiative from the youth themselves, was likely within the Climate Change movement.
For many I attended school with, their weather-vanes pointed them towards climate organizing. It was our common cause, middle schoolers, high schoolers; all out and about, pleading with the powers that be to be merciful to the world we hoped we would one day get the chance to grow old in. While the conscience surrounding our slowly impending doom grew, our actions went nowhere; all those walk-outs out of class ended in the rain, on a roundabout with no outlet. We were hopeful that one day soon, the blind would see. How could they not? Each new summer was the hottest summer on record, each new forest fire the largest one since the one past; for my friends more involved in organizing than I was, it felt as if the apocalypse was now. Then it really was.

While Covid may not have ended the world, it certainly put it on hold; everyone went inside, and the climate seemed to thank us for it, as if nature had started to heal in our absence. Consciences were placated, “look how easy that was, all it took was a global pandemic!”When we emerged from quarantine, surely we’d build back better.

In the spring of 2020 George Floyd died with a cop’s knee on his neck. The pandemic’s first summer erupted in protest. While Black Lives Matter as a movement and as a formal organization have diverged greatly in retrospect and reputation, the actions that it stemmed made one thing clear: in the summer of ‘20, the youth were the people with the most to lose. They emerged in force. In that summer’s heat, it seemed like things were changing, policing was under the microscope across the country and while defunding was a long shot, for many, it felt almost plausible. The momentum didn’t last; the progress didn’t either. The only lasting change was a nominal increase in awareness of systematic forces of police brutality within this country. We still have police brutality, and some research is saying that police homicides have risen, not fallen.

Things simmered, then in the Spring following October 7th, 2023, they exploded. The encampments formed for Palestine were the largest youth movement since the 1960s. The response to this overwhelming activation of university activism? Mass, needlessly violent arrests, suspensions, and revocations of degrees. While Republicans spoke with open hatred about these protesters, it was their Democratic counterparts who were more enthusiastic in sending in law enforcement for arrests.1 The number of universities that actually divested can be counted on one hand. I knew folks who returned to campus Fall of ‘24 with a new mindset. Put your nose down, get good grades, and get a good job. That would be all.

When I speak to strangers; to the woman who interviewed me about my involvement in those Palestine encampments, I tell her that the only thing I can allow is hope, despair is nothing to me, the world has too much grief, too much powerlessness to keep anything within myself but hope.
But to close friends; to rambling Modelo vulnerable Signal voice memos I gnaw, and in blank documents I melodramatically scrawl: I fear I’ve been lying to them, that I have been lying to myself. That the only thing we can do is hold onto each other as the world grows more blatantly cruel, the weather grows increasingly erratic, the misery more impressive in its dimensions. Like ostriches, overjoyed that the sand is growing higher than their head, it is piling up, covering necks, shoulders, and when they feel it pile above their waistline it will be too late. I too fear I will not be able to run anymore. Soon I fear I will lose my last lint covered crumb of hope.

It was Occam’s Razor that got me into political organizing. But beyond shaving implements, the reason I began organizing, the reason I have devoted so much free time to building politically actionable community at a university that is so hostile to both politics and action is because one must believe the world can change before they can change it. I want others to have a chance to feel the seismic shift I felt when I, a Jew, sat in a lawn chair talking to a Muslim from midnight till sunrise blinded us as it bounced off the reflection of the windshield of a cop car sent to monitor our encampment. A shift I’ve felt a thousand times since and failed to recognize a thousand times before. A shift that while could be construed as change in the long run, is so obvious and clear in the moment itself that it is accepted as a fact, just one kept from us by ourselves. Hopelessness cannot be a pit of despair, it must be a mountain of inspiration. While the active can climb there is nothing for the inactive to do but fall.

The world has hope because we give it hope. I want to shake every person who I cross paths with, grab them, tell them they need to spend as much time as I do agonizing over how to build tomorrow, telling them that if they did, if they started grabbing all the people they cross with, if they grab and shake and push then we might all come loose from this web.

In shaking one of my few high school friends Aengus on the topic of direct action, he tells me that morality is what separates us from animals. I disagree, saying; mortality is what defines us. We humans are conscious that we will one day die and that is why we feel such a need to make something of ourselves. Then I tell him why I feel so awful; it feels like our American generation is fully aware that we will die for no reason at all, fat and supplicated. For many, I imagine the line in the sand has been crossed so long ago that it is only a faint memory.

What then is the nature of hope? What is the means for holding hope within oneself and protecting that hope? Even when wearing the full-plate of idealism, there is a knowledge within me that that hope, while resting narrowly on the knife’s edge, is at risk of slipping, gashing deep into the arm of action. The wishy-washiness of my conviction makes me ask what the use of an admonishing scowl to stay one’s course is worth when one can just as easily renege and consider that hope itself could be foolhardy. What if we really are, well and truly fucked?

If my worst fears are the case, then extending hope for the assuredly damned, in a Calvinist sense, would be a lost cause. This notion of the assuredly damned, if damnation can be assured, would disavow the last four years of my life; all acts of activism, acts of kindness, of asking what number others want in the elevator. The checks picked up, books borrowed, money lent, so much money lent.

I have a friend I met online a couple of years ago. I love him. Occasionally, he’ll text me asking me for money for snacks because he is high and then he will apologize to me. He’s broke for circumstantial reasons, so I’ll sign into PayPal because he doesn’t have Venmo and I’ll send him fifteen bucks to buy something at the Speedway, or if his younger brother will drive him, at the Raising Canes. I forbade him from using my money to buy McDonalds. My Paypal contribution comes with a little blurb in the textbox telling him: eat good! this’ll be something we’ll giggle about when we’ve made it. Dude, remember when you were broke?

One day this friend texted me, apologizing for his next sentence, $10 dollars JUST for gas so he can get around and he’d pay me back the day after. It was the most reasonable request he’d ever made of me and it pissed me off. He was always relaxed when he asked me for food money, for movie ticket money. Yet when he’s asking for gas money so he can fill his Texan tank I didn’t even text him back, I just sent a PayPal with a two word message attached: last time. He texted me thanks and explained the situation, i didn’t account for the current and active war in iran. I responded with an album I’ve been listening to recently. A day later I apologized to him. I tell him as long as I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford my own gas I can send him money for his. He asked if I used Zelle so he could pay me back. All we have is the kindness of strangers, I hope that my generosity is not foolish, I hope that it is not alone, if it can exist in the smallest scarcity, it can exist in other ways, perhaps with enough kindness in enough hearts the world could give peace a chance, no?

There is a reason MLK is taught in American schools and Fred Hampton or Huey P. Newton is not. For the sake of expedience, I will be brief; kindness and generosity will not get us a better world. Not on their own at least. King understood this and positioned himself as a moderate option in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963). King warned that if his voice of nonviolence did not win out, the African-American community would have no choice but to turn from King’s movement to the Black Nationalism movement; if change did not happen, the whole country could turn into Birmingham. It was the fear of simmering violence heating to a boil that changed the minds of the Johnson administration, not the prior pleas for peace. The existence of a radical, militant flank gave the Johnson administration no option other than capitulation to moderation. The existence of such radical flanks have long been a strategy for creating systemic change, making conceding to moderation palatable to those in power. It is that same moderation that allowed King to be whitewashed in the decades following his death, homogenizing his tactics into a monochrome “nonviolence” without any interest in examining the context within and behind it.
Kwame Ture found issue with King’s approach to nonviolence, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” he’s not wrong. Yet the roots stretch deeper. King may have moved the legislative needle but at the end of the day, it was a needle on a clock that only counts the Dollar.

We are past the point of moderation, we are past the point of concessions. The point of reformism is to reform. Reforming capitalism is impossible when capitalism’s bottom line is the top dollar. To get more than reformism, than concessions and moderation, to get change, militant ideology will be necessary. Huey P. Newton said “The oppressor has no rights that the oppressed are bound to respect”. Today, militant enthusiasm feels infectious, yet militant action is always easier to talk about than to do. Who among us will?

Part of my struggle is dispersing my idealization of kindness into this radical framework for the future. I am doing my best to tackle the contradiction between these two truths: first, where freedom is involved one cannot risk civility, second, where kindness is involved one cannot risk prejudice. Can there be reconciliation between these two poles? Can I know every human is alive and still want some of them dead? The greatest lesson of Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966) is that a fight for freedom is built on the notion that while the enemy may be human, their complicity is as much sin as it is support for the structures that oppress. One can empathize with an enemy but it is important to remember that those who breathe clean air can only do so because they are sitting atop the backs of those for whom every breath chokes. The opposition to the future that must be built is not always black and white, some of the greatest challenges I’ve encountered have come in shades of grey, from within the movement.

One of the people who I used to organize with on my college campus was a pig; for much of the development of this essay I was using present tenses but they’ve since seen their own way out meaning I had to fix all of the following tenses. They were a seemingly effective pig, posturing themselves as adept at the material and theoretical side of what they do, yet when it came to putting that theory to practice and putting those materials to use; the importance of the people that they were organizing with was often a tertiary concern for them; therein lies the problem. I saw them make all manner of faux pas, ranging from obliquely dismissive to acutely misogynistic. When I called them out on these faults, they hid behind a confident shield of institutional and theoretical knowledge, when I went for more jugular approaches they bulwarked themselves behind denial: You are the only person who feels this way they said: why don’t the people with actual issues tell me they have issues with me? Power dynamics are easily ignored by those who already hold structural power. This person was someone whom I was once proud to call one of my best friends. No longer.

When someone is an anticapitalist but still adheres to capitalist modes of thought; regarding ownership, lineage, and entitlement, one can only go so far. As much as it hurt to see someone whom I had been historically chummy with become deplorable in character, in action, the entire situation has been formative in educating my understanding of what exactly I am fighting for. To deal with a person so insistently ignorant of their own failings while still being aware that their relationships with other organizers and the community as a whole had shifted, was bewildering; the cognitive dissonance was inspiring. At the end of the year, before we broke for summer, they did a workshop on how to be a “good organizer” before our general body meeting. The room filled up as I entered at the end of their workshop, They closed their presentation with a slide on how self-critique is the most important part of being an organizer, but when I ask them for exactly that? No such luck.

It causes me great despair. Recently the world learned that Cesar Chavez systematically groomed and sexually abused girls within the labor movement. I cannot know why Chavez did such things, yet I can imagine that the system of misogyny and patriarchal violence that we are socialized under allowed Chavez’s crimes to run parallel to his ideals regarding labor rights, never disrupting one another despite the inherent contradictions between exploitation of workers and sexual exploitation of young girls.

Now let me be clear, the person I am speaking of is not Chavez and has not committed any such crimes. Despite the lack of abjectly reprehensible connection to the things that Chavez did, a pattern worth recognizing emerges. This pattern lies in the issue of “possession” or “entitlement” that runs rampant in every mind that lives under capitalism. Even the most fervent, well-read, Marxist-Leninist may be entangled in viewing their radical thought as articles of possession no matter how incongruent that is with the radical ideas that they hold, turning their material knowledge into an object of entitlement rather than enrichment. In the capitalist system, everything can be bought, sold, put to market, and aspiring radicals often fail to properly disengage with the capitalist systems of thought for a multitude of reasons, seeing their educations or identities as entitling them to the very struggle they are undermining. A spectre haunting the minds of even the most fervent in their radical beliefs; as much as these ardents may reject the notion: the capitalist system becomes a subconscious superstructure that acts as a foundation for how we approach the world: for all of us living under capitalism, even those fighting against it. We are taught from youth to think in terms of ownership, value, capital, and transaction as if they are facts of life rather than facts of life: under capitalism. It is not surprising that even those in opposition to this foundational superstructure may find it hard to notice its perpetuation in their struggles against it.

When I consider this organizer, when I tried to grapple with how I could have helped this person whom I once called my friend, I must also consider all of the times I’ve placed myself out on a limb only to be met with dismissive derision, interventions ignored, conversations castrated, and arguments ending vacant of any meaningful resolution. The problems I and others have brought to them were met with disbelief that these issues could have had any grounding in reality. Even before their split with us, I had given up on them; in the few interactions I had with them before the semester ended, I drifted past them in passive anger, only speaking when necessary. Shamefully, I had given up on them long before they had seen themselves out.
Do all the good people die before the day they long for comes? There are too many names to list, too many lives cut short. How many good people never get the chance to be cut down, not realizing they are still bound to the concepts of Capital while standing in its opposition, fomenting dissent in all the wrong places? Lumpen not in praxis but in approach to that praxis.

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The most viral moment of season one of Andor (2022) is a scene of of Stellan Skarsgård’s character Luthen Rael talking about the sacrifices made for building the Rebellion; about the barbarity Luthen has embraced only so that the future will have an opportunity to reclaim the humanity that Luthen had to discard. Despite discarding his humanity for barbarity, Luthen ostensibly succeeds, his sacrifices allow the dominoes line up in the direction of the Death Star’s weak point, allowing it to be destroyed, the Empire defeated. Months ago, when I rewatched Andor in preparation for its second season, Luthen’s monologue struck me from a different angle. Leftists when there’s Star Wars at the function2.

This time around, Luthen’s monologue bothered me; it’s so out of place. Here in America we are so far removed from the very concept of progress as a tangible, constructable thing. I believe that Andor’s popularity stems from this idea that in a surveillance state, what can one really say on the internet? In the years following its release, Andor became a momentary shorthand for some revolutionary hopefuls looking to obfuscate their politics from their digital footprints. In the digital fog, people shouted about taking up arms, stockpiling essentials, building community power, mutual aid, Stormtroopers, Gestapo, Narkina 5, ICE facilities, Cassian Andor, Luigi Mangione. Akin to the ways that chagrined grade schoolers at the lunch tables might say they want to blow school up with the winking caveat of “in Minecraft” their peers outside the carceral institution that is grade school were quick to do the same, ending sentences and tweets alike with “in Andor”.
The issue is, politics do not happen on the internet. One cannot foment dissent in the channels constructed to diffuse those exact sentiments. While Andor may have great politics, art can only show politics, not enact them. I feel no anger towards the caveat crowd, the world is watching, the internet is forever.

I hazard another word of advice for everyone using the internet; You are watching yourself. Self censorship does not just stay on the internet. The most common method of communication today is on platforms with strict Terms of Service regarding what you can say. Unconsciously you will bring that self-censorship to your IRL day- to-day. Our digital infrastructure has become an unconscious barrier to the ways in which we think. For example: Let’s say your landlord puts a great big ugly statue in your front yard and points to the bottom of your lease, where, in the smallest print lays a line that sneers “tenants will not remove statues placed by the landlord.” In a fit of rage you race to your laptop and type a diatribe about crafting a doohickey that will rid you of that statue and hover your finger over the cursor hovering over post. You know you shouldn’t, that if you post online about building a “potentially harmful doohickey or whatschamacallit”, you risk being banned. So you don’t post about building a “potentially harmful doohickey”. Time passes and the statue is still ugly, you don’t think about posting anything or messaging anyone because what if someone else blows it up and it’s traced to you, your message logs, your posting history. At some point, passing it doesn’t spark anger anymore, just resentment. You see it all the time, you don’t think of posting it anymore, let alone building it and not posting it, you talk to friends, have them over for supper and they comment “that statue is ugly” and you agree and don’t tell them about the plan you had so long ago, the phones might be listening to you speak, even if they weren’t something else might be, your fridge, or toaster, or Peloton. Nothing changes, the statue stands ugly, then you die, and the statue is still ugly, a new tenant moves in and signs the same lease, “sure is one ugly statue outside”, they frown.

For those within the heart of imperialism, be it in the West or ensconced by the safety that wealth affords across the globe, complacency has been the singular most prevailing lesson taught to the youth. Don’t worry, there’s always tomorrow!

What I toss and turn about is whether the next ten years in the West will finally be the ones where complacency will outpace outrage. After the day is done, will we be slapping our tummies in contentment? Satisfied, swallowing the current thing as long as the next one is placed before us in a timely manner? Wallowing in our inability to change? How much longer can this go on, I ask? How long has it been since something changed?

In high school my friends and I had this inside joke we gathered from the worksheet that accompanied historian and writer Jared Diamond’s 1987 essay; The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. On the first day of Freshman Year AP World History our teacher posed the questions Diamond asks in his essay; whether the Agricultural Revolution was a net positive that we consider it to be. Could it be that since we started farming, humanity’s trajectory has been a downhill one? The end of the world is taking forever, how much longer? Kali Yuga, Jared Diamond. For the next four years of high school, every brief inconvenience was blamed on agriculture. If only we had never tilled! Our class never came to an agreement on whether Diamond was right. In the end it doesn’t matter, it’s quite literally ancient history. For all the intrigue that finding the date where humanity “went wrong” provides, it obfuscates the more important question; when will humanity “go right”?

The question of hope, and what to do with it, is harrowing. It is not the first time I have asked whether what I hold within me is truly hope, or just plain naivety. It is not the second time nor the third. I have had this fear and quelled it time and time again, I have persevered by leaning on friendship, love, and on an all consuming idea that the world can be better, will be better. I have kept my rudder steady by telling my tiller that if one wants to change the world, first they must believe it can change. Over and over, I say: I am sick of being afraid.

I am sick of being afraid. Being hopeless, helpless, and miserable. Sick with the feeling that my fear is visible. Feeling the turn of my stomach, knowing I will always find hope after each successive spiral, that I am still able to convince myself of better. I fear, most of all, that even as I win the battle, one day I will wake up and lose the war. I am nauseous with the thought that next time I fight may be the last; that one day I will grow old and weary and not have the energy to win this argument with myself, that at some point I may do what I feel today is impossible; I’ll grow tired of believing in better. That I will grow complacent with the world, with myself, with our collective future. In this outcome, youth is not into a question of age but of heart, of courage. I do not want to mistake hope for naivety. I do not want to grow old while I am still young. To combat this I take my doubt not as an admission of truth but a sign of just how important my hope is.

What I have wrestled into submission is the idea that better can exist regardless of the apparent naivety of hope. The truth is, hope cannot survive alone. It needs the warmth and reflection of another; whether the future I seek will come to fruition will be decided by the number of people who realize that if they did not hope, there would one day be a day where no one did.

For better or worse, who will it hurt to hope? If the world is truly fated to the misery that it stumbles into with each passing day, drunken with an intentioned negligence of humanity’s collective future then one cannot fault the stupor of hope; a stagger towards an impossible future will mean nothing if the future is set in stone. Yet if no one hopes, nothing will change. Hope in theory is good thing, but hope in practice is better; hope cannot be an idle thing, only existing in our minds—hope will not change the world, but hope will enable us to believe that it can be changed and begin to angle ourselves, and our lives, towards the positions of change.

To confine oneself to a Calvinist perspective towards hope is not to admit defeat but admit that defeat does not exist, that victory does not exist, predetermination is largely ambivalent. The disillusionment of my generation is not surprising; it is sensible. Gen Z is the most propagandized a generation has ever been. In unprecedented times, there are only two approaches; ignorance or intentioned organization. Outrage alone is not enough, one voice can only reach so far. A voice in chorus, however, is a voice that can be heard round the globe, a voice saying that we must move past words, we must move to action.

Someday soon I hope for a great moment of mobilization, after enough of the disenfranchised have matriculated from wrath to wrathful work. When hope is in short supply, cowering in the corner, at the bottom of the box, small as it’s ever been, I will feel no shame in stooping to find it. When we hold hope, we hold ourselves. When we hold ourselves, we hold the world.

One last thing. This essay has seen more editors than anything I’ve ever written before and I want to take an elongated moment to thank them.
To Dylan Steer and Josephine whom none of this would exist without, thank you.
To ملاك who approached her edits with empathy and a bookmarked list of Frantz Fanon quotes; which were all dead on.
To J.W. Yablonsky, main man, big dog, objective eye, editor supreme, with a Marlowe approach to getting it done or getting out of the way. I needed the nudge, thanks boss.
And finally, and most heavily, to dovecot who not only went above and beyond combing through every sentence, finding every fault, and throwing ideas how to rectify them at me but also reminded me of what I so desperately needed to remember: that no matter how agonizing and tactless it feels to write about something I care about, there is someone out there who cares about them too. Thank you Dove.