Name: Hope in the Dark
ISBN: 9781847676832

Hope in the Dark

A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book.

What Hacker News says

adriandJul 2022

I really appreciate your optimistic perspective — thank you for posting it. I think it's very easy to be cynical and just assume that things will get worse than they are now, and when you do that, you get to be a wise, world-weary and jaded commentator.

It's actually a lot more work to imagine a better society, because that requires actual ideas for what could be different and how we might get there. Saying, "things will be the same but worse" is a lot easier than saying, "things could be different and better, and here's how". (Full disclosure: I'm stealing this idea from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, which I'm currently reading and thoroughly enjoying.)

Notwithstanding its potential to become (or current reality as) a propaganda tool of the Chinese government, based on my very limited experience with it, TikTok actually feels both healthier and stupider (in a vapid entertainment sense) than Facebook and Twitter. I have yet to be outraged by anything I've encountered on TikTok, whereas if I so much as glance at a tweet on Twitter on its web interface, while not logged in, I'm almost guaranteed to be presented with other tweets from people who infuriate or disgust me. Discord also feels healthier than either of those platforms, it's really just a much better version of IRC. As such, perhaps we are already seeing a more healthy ecosystem emerge.

But setting aside the platform side of things, this discussion [1] on the Ezra Klein show calls the current disruptive era "transitory" in the same way that the dawn of other communication media were disruptive and transitory. Eventually, people adjust. Perhaps we are on our way to becoming immune to attention hijacking, outrage politics and FOMO. Speaking for myself, I've certainly become far better at resisting the pull of those phenomena.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

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human_personMay 2022

Hope in the dark by Rebecca Solnit[0] is helpful for thinking about your own actions in a larger context

The mindful self compassion workbook[1] is a cbt like guidebook to treating yourself well (mentally/emotionally)

Brene Brown’s books [2] help mentally reframe shame and give you an added awareness to how your past experiences/mental patterns influence your current experience/interpretation of events. She also has a ted talk on Netflix for a short intro to her overall approach.

Braiding Sweetgrass[3] by Robin Wall Kimmerer is currently one of my favorite books. Some aspects are depressing particularly around our current culture but I found it also gave me hope by laying out an alternative and healthier way of interacting with the world.

[0] - https://bookshop.org/books/hope-in-the-dark-untold-histories...

[1] - https://bookshop.org/books/the-mindful-self-compassion-workb...

[2] - https://bookshop.org/books/daring-greatly-how-the-courage-to...

[3] - https://bookshop.org/books/braiding-sweetgrass-3e12996d-ea04...

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mandmandamNov 2024

> The only times we've managed to even remotely approach such policy is after terrible, long wars

Or during/after natural disasters. Any time things get real tough, we tend to default to helping each other out mutual aid style - even in America [0]. Seems worth keeping in mind.

0 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28048.Hope_in_the_Dark

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