Eh, it’s true but reductionist.
At core, the usual dynamic duo of anxiety and depression aren’t about being scared, or sad.
They’re about hope. The lack of it. And that’s not a matter of attitude at all
The struggle against them is struggle to keep finding hope, every fucking day.
You don’t create it out of nothing. You can’t wish it into being. You have to dig deep and hope you find it before the sides of the hole fall in on you.
Trying to reduce the tools that help keep those sides from sliding faster isn’t useful, even though it’s true. Mindfulness is a tool to find hope, not a replacement for it.
Also doing stuff. Doing stuff is useful.
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That’s advice that will get you a burnout. Hope, especially when sought for with the purpose of maintaining high levels of stress, will break you when it becomes implausible.
It is a promise that can become false, and once your body knows you’re willing to lie to trick it into greater productivity, it’ll just stop listening to you.
It’s dangerous to trust famous people with life advice because of survivorship bias. Even if they are honest about their life stories, they are not representative of everybody that tries a thing.
Dealing with high stress means caring for yourself in the moment, building structures that make it easier for you to care for yourself, and escaping the situation if you can.
It’s debriefing, processing traumas as they happen, touching grass, hugging, and understanding what makes life worth living even now.
It’s solidarity networks, resource pooling, leaning on friends and comrades and letting them lean on you, and forming collectives.
It’s unionizing, demonstration, occupation, and revolution.
I think hope is a great thing, but I also think that for many people, it’s important to recognize the possibility that good things could happen. Sometimes it’s enough to recognize that the odds are low, but they’re definitely not zero.
Hope is great as long as you don’t try to summon it. “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. Hope comes naturally when you’re trying to do things that you can actually believe have a chance of doing something that matters to you. Its absence is a warning, a signal to change your behavior to something that does work.
In hard times, it’s overwhelming to live only in the present.
Incorrect as a general rule. I find the present plenty overwhelming, but it’s precisely because of the overall societal trajectory into the future.
There is some minor to moderate difficulty right now in dealing with high inflation, but that’s not the overwhelming part. What’s overwhelming is the obvious worldwide collective descent into madness and the terrible future in store for billions of people as we blow past old climate goals.
Even if we all somehow manage to rein in the fascism that’s not serving the interests of the majority and is spreading across the world, we’re hurtling towards:
- worsening natural disasters
- collapse of insurance markets
- collapse of mortgage markets
- collapse of food supplies
- dwindling fresh water supplies, both rivers and aquifers
- worldwide refugee crisis from unlivable equatorial regions
- martial law to suppress food riots and refugees
- likely development of autonomous robot soldiers that removes any possible balance for front line morality
- likely accelerating and compounding climate impacts through tipping points
- collapse of the AMOC
- melting permafrost methane release
- sea level rise inundation
That all seems fairly well baked in at this point, but none of it has really come to pass yet. The future bad effects are not yet actually part of the present, but the feelings of overwhelmedness that they induce are very real for anyone paying attention.
Mindfulness in the present is a good escape from the future.
This was my first thought as well. Societies have collapsed in the past, only difference now is that it is global in its nature. I can’t live thinking it is going to get better in the future when it cannot.
I have made my peace though, and enjoy the time still left of relative stability.
I’m not sure if I’ve made my peace with it, but my despair was something of a phase. Everything unfolding is too big for me to stop it, so I’m just along for the ride now. I think a lot of people haven’t really seen it coming yet, so there’s going to be a lot of wailing and public gnashing of teeth (and blaming Democrats) in the relatively near future.
But I don’t think the opposite of hope os necessarily despair. The despair is still present if I want to go looking for it, but I compartmentalize it most of the time, and focus on the things I need to do in the near-term. I still have plenty of responsibilities to execute. One foot in front of the other.
Enjoy what you can when you can. Be thankful for what you have.
Tell me how to find that in present day without delusion
No. Tomorrow is a fiction, a fragment of imagination we cling to., to avoid facing the unfolding reality.
It’s not that you can’t hope for something. Hopes and dreams are, after all, part of our experience. Relying on them for comfort long term does not work.
Read Dogen lineage of texts.
Nope, I’m already stressing today about tomorrow, the less tomorrow I have in my mind the better.
I think it depends on what the hardship is. If I am actively suffering something temporary (e.g. a stomach ache) it helps to think that I will feel better relatively soon. If im dealing with a long-term stress (chronic back pain) I feel better just focusing on whatever good is going on right now. Im probably reducing this beyond simplicity, but I used to be a very future-oriented person. Now i cant think beyond a month ahead. I just want to live with what I have while I have it.
In Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, Shelley describes hope and despair as torturers:
[…] Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear
Marred his repose;This is the correct perspective. Hope and despair are the same thing, a feeling about the future. Regardless of whether your feelings are positive or negative, they are just as rational and just as worthwhile as praying about the future.
Hoping that the future will be better than the present is a waste of time, and emotional energy. Despairing that the future will not be better than the present is also a waste of time. Expending any effort on either has the same value as having a prayer meeting about the future with your local tribe of soccer moms.
Determining that you will make the future better, in any way that you can, for as many people as you can, and then making some practical plans to actually do that, is not a waste of time.
Don’t hope. Don’t despair. Do something useful.
It’s important to identify that prayer in the traditional sense is still useful. Giving in just a little bit to your universe, if only for a short while, to let your guard down and express your innermost thoughts to an outside entity is incredibly helpful to the brain in reframing the challenges in life. Even if you don’t believe in a “higher power”, expressing these thoughts to the universe can help process things in ways that pure action or meditation can’t.
I suppose, but only if you consciously recognize it as a form of self-therapy (which I would still just categorize as meditation) and don’t expect anything practical to come from the prayer session (which is what most people mean by the term prayer - asking a higher power for help - and which I would categorize as delusional).
Or, hope and fear/despair are two sides of the same coin.
It can be difficult to explain why you don’t orient your life around something like hope though.
Or, hope and fear/despair are two sides of the same coin.
Yes, and both only produce anxiety - either in despairing over what might happen, or hoping over what might not.
It can be difficult to explain why you doing orient your life around something like hope though.
If I understand what you mean, I disagree. Orient your life around something rational. Planning will do you better than hoping, any day of the week.
Typo in my second sentence made it harder to understand.
All I meant was hope is often considered a universal good. Trying to explain why that isn’t the case goes against years of programming for most people.
Concentrating on your breathing for two minutes is way easier than creating hope: so no.
Skimming the other responses I seem to be different: yes, it is hope.
For me it never was about mindfulness. But just putting effort in the possibility of hope.
Still hoping for those obituaries in the front page… iykyk 🤫
no. I only run on spite and anger.
Not at all. Nothing calms the mind more than mindfulness and equanimity.
