Despair is a Goddamn Luxury
Your daily doomscrolling is a luxury most folks can’t afford.
The single mother working three jobs doesn’t have time for despair. The refugee rebuilding their life doesn’t indulge in it. The activist on the ground organizing their community isn’t wallowing in it.
They’re too busy doing the work.
Every moment lamenting what might be is a moment wasted. A moment thrown away instead of creating what could be. Every hour invested in sharing our anxieties on social media is an hour not invested in building solutions.
Despair is comfortable. It’s the cozy blanket of ‘nothing can be done’ wrapped around ‘I don’t want to try.’
But comfort isn’t what creates change.
The suffragettes didn’t despair — they marched. The white rose didn’t despair. They stood up to Hitler and paid the ultimate price. The civil rights leaders didn’t despair — they organized. The dissidents behind the Iron Curtain didn’t despair — they wrote, spoke, acted, and when the moment called for it, died for the freedoms we still take for granted. MLK, whose Day will be marked alongside the inauguration of a white supremacist grifter, didn’t despair — he fought the fuck back.
They understood, all of them, something we’ve forgotten: Hope isn’t an emotion. It’s nothing so weak as a feeling. It’s a practice.
Like any practice, it requires showing up every day when you don’t feel like it. When the headlines are grim. When everyone else in your social circle is competing in the misery Olympics.
When you feel that familiar pull toward despair, even if you have the space to wallow, even if you have the freedom to sit in it...
Ask yourself: is that really how you want to spend your emotional energy?
