There is much to be optimistic about once you realize that the West is just 13% of the human population, and what happens here is not representative of what’s happening in the rest of the world. In fact, I’d argue this is one of the most optimistic times because Western hegemony is now crumbling, and neoliberalism is becoming a discredited ideology. Meanwhile, China is going from strength to strength, and the global majority is aligning with a socialist state that has emerged as a global superpower. I’d go as far as to argue that we may witness the reverse of the 1991 moment when the USSR collapsed and ushered in the unipolar era of US dominance. This time, it is the capitalist world that is crumbling, and a socialist power is poised to become a global leader.

These are turbulent times to be sure, and we will face monumental challenges like the climate crisis ahead of us. However, these may also force us to become more cooperative and abandon Western individualist ideologies. Watching the developments in China has been a huge source of optimism for me.

My recommendation is to actively follow the news outside the imperial core, and you’ll see that there is a lot of human progress happening in the developing world.

Revolutionary optimism. Realistically, does falling to despair hurt or help revolutionary cause? Historically, doomerism has been a tool of the bourgeoisie to suppress activism. Why agitate for the climate if we can only mitigate the coming impact, not prevent it? Why fight for socialism if it will result in imperialist aggression? There’s a very deliberate movement to suppress revolutionary fervor on the left, longing for the old USSR instead of looking to the future, etc, and the counter is revolutionary optimism.

What we are seeing right now is the undeniable advancement of the socialist cause worldwide, alongside the downfall of imperialism. The PRC is successfully charting a new course, and the global south is breaking free of the shackles placed on it by the west. Every day, there’s new scientific advancement, new revolutionary advances, all if you seek it out. The western media has to run on doomscrolling and only showing you the worst.

Don’t be unrealistic, of course, temper expectations and be resolutely optimistic.

Lean heavily into the Scientific aspect of the Immortal Science of Communism. Marx didn’t just preach about people sharing with each other and ending racism and sexism because that would be nice. He explained in detail how and why the arc of history moves us towards a classless society of equals. Communism is an inevitability like gravity.

Remember, The coldest moment is the one just before the sun starts to rise. The “things going on in the world” the suffering and brutality are the birth pains of the new world being born.

Don’t let the suffering make you sad, get angry. talk about it. Tell people how fucked it all is and who is to blame. The suffering is already making everyone angry but they need to be angry at the right people. Don’t let others pretend it’s the immigrants when it is so obvious billionaires and capitalists are the ones to blame.

The only thing that keeps me from despair is organizing. Go outside and get with a group that does mutual aid, stands against ICE, helps educate people, etc.

The answer to your problem isn’t to read another book or article, its other comrades in real life!

Before reading any comments, I’ll give you my uninfluenced answer:

What helped me out of being a doomer was getting out of bourgois leftist circles. This has had a huge impact on my mental health.

Because of the fact that all liberally minded citizens in general lack theoretical and material understanding of literally anything, i was constantly feeling like i must jump out of some window. Since I abandoned lefties, I feel sensationally better.

I still run a neighborhood help center, participate in a soup kitchen (german equivalent with saved food, not soup) and manage to keep both educating people, myself and stay motivated. Friends of mine who have stayed in the lefty circles are constantly moaning that all is lost because they cant change anything while I’m changing shit for people every fucking day.

One other thing that really helps is reading stalin. The foundations and questions of leninism are some of the most inspiring things I have ever heard. Its insane, really.

Honestly? Sometimes being ground and mentally healthy requires a bit of fatalism.

Some things are very much out of your control and once you learn to accept that it becomes much easier to get through bad circumstances. It’s basically a survival mechanism for a lot of people.

I could lose my job tomorrow but I’m not gonna lose sleep over that because it’s simply out of my hands. If it happens, it happens. All I can do is figure out how to move forward if it does. So I don’t worry about it.

Sometimes all you can do is react to things as they impact you and that’s fine. Not everything can be fixed, avoided, or prevented. Sometimes you step in dog shit and just need to worry about washing it out.

Sometimes there really is nothing I can do and learning to live with that has helped my mental state immensely.

positive leftist news, the deprogram podcast, comrades, and memes are a great escape from the doom and despair we usually focus on

For me it’s knowing that these things must get worse before they will ever get better. We only see revolutionary fervor from the west when material conditions worsen. Long have we been content on keeping the rest of the world under our boot while we enjoy their extracted wealth.

Despair only comes when we fail at prolonging the inevitable and necessary via attempts at electoral socialism.

Don’t hope or despair, just know that what must happen is happening, and we’re in a perfect point in time to plant seeds that will sprout out of the futures societal rubble.

The fact that we’re in a multitude of crises should be, from a distant perspective, reassuring. The worst case scenario would be the opposite: for business as usual to continue while everyone is ground into fine dust by capital. Think about how liberals and fascists like to conceive of history as a neverending, hopeless cycle that is only alleviated by individual heroic figures, doomed to go back into suffering: in this worldview, which is inherently pessimistic, change can never happen. What sets us apart is believing that, even if it comes violently, real change can happen and the world can be radically different. The fact that the machine is currently seizing up means the future is possible. Our challenge is that we’re living through it, but it had to happen; the capitalist world always had its end baked into it by its very structure. The variable part is what follows.

I shoot guns a lot

spite mostly
my enemies want me to give up so i categorically refuse

Spite and defiance. I refuse to give up, and encourage others to find any reason to keep going. Despair is going to happen, just a fact of life.

I gave up on being happy a long time ago, and have even given up on being content. Now I truly do live to spite the world that doesn’t give a fuck about me. I live just to spit in the eyes of death and say “I’m still here asshole.”

And yeah, one day it’ll all come crashing down and I’ll despair again, and I most certainly will die one day, but I’ll be damned if I let despair take all my remaining waking moments on this Earth. I’ve wasted enough time doing that.

Spite may not be a better way to spend your life than love or joy, but it’s still better than despair. And if I can’t find love or joy, then I’ll gladly take spite as a consolation prize. It’s good enough.

Hope is useless. What we need is courage.

You’re fighting a fighting battle. We all are. And yet the future will be secure.

And if it won’t be, would you rather have had courage?

Courage. Courage in the face of it. Not hope. Courage. We will prevail, not through hope, but through courage. We will win, not through hope, but through courage.

The people who create the conditions for winning will never see the winning. They will probably never be close to seeing the winning. They will probably never be close enough to hope.

The people who create the conditions of the future, they will create those conditions through courage without hope.

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