A while ago I was at a dinner where the future came up. It always comes up now. Someone says the word — the climate, the election, the machines, whatever the table is most afraid of that month — and the room divides, predictably, the way it always does. Half the table takes the hopeful side. It isn't too late, people are moving, don't write it off. The other half takes the opposite side. Look at it honestly; we both know where this goes. And I sat there doing what I always do, which is getting ready to pick one side or the other, lining up my reasons — because those seemed to be the only two responses available, and you have to take one.
Except one person at the table took neither.
She wasn't silent for lack of anything to say. She had clearly thought about it more than the rest of us. She simply wasn't in the argument. When the hopeful side looked to her for support, she didn't give it. When the other side looked to her to confirm the worst, she didn't give them that either. Later, when I'd had enough wine to be blunt, I asked her directly — well, which is it, do you think we're going to be all right, or do you think we're finished — and she said, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, that she had stopped hoping about any of it a long time ago.
And I braced, because I thought I knew what that was. That is the doomer — the word the internet has settled on. That is: it's over. I had just spent two episodes, with you, taking that position apart. So I looked for the despair in her — the heaviness, the contempt, the flatness of someone who has excused themselves from the work, all of which I know from the inside. It wasn't there. She wasn't grim. She wasn't cheerful either; she wasn't pretending. She was something I had no category for. She had given up hope deliberately, and she was, I'm fairly sure, the steadiest person at the table.
This is Philosophy for Us.
This is the fifth of nine episodes on how to face a future that looks likely to go badly. Last time I removed the last reassuring idea you came in with — that there is a correct amount to feel, and that a careful person finds it. There is no such amount. The evidence will grade your odds, but it does not hand you a feeling; two honest people with the same odds can feel opposite things, and neither has made a mistake. That left you apparently forced to choose, as it left me. If the facts won't decide it, then it seems you simply have to pick — am I a hoper, or a doomer? Choose a mood and live in it. Two options; take one. Tonight is about the woman at the dinner, because she shows that the choice you think you are trapped in has more than two options — and at least one of them is not despair, and has been available all along, held by serious people for over two thousand years, the whole time you believed there were only two.
Let me say plainly where the last four weeks have left you, because the difficulty is real and I'm the one who created it.
You came in already sorted — hopeful, or a doomer — and whichever you were, it felt like clear sight rather than a mood. That was the first week. Then I showed that it comes apart: two people, the same forecast, opposite feelings, which means your stance was never simply the facts speaking through you. So you reached for a repair — very well, I'll feel the accurate amount, the level the evidence warrants. And last week I took that away too. There is no accurate amount. The forecast arrives, and it does not contain a feeling; you are already standing somewhere, and where you stand is your own doing.
So here you are, and I can guess what you're thinking, because I thought it myself. You've taken away hope as a default, and despair as a default, and the idea that the evidence settles it. So now I simply have to choose one. Hope, or give up. Those are my two options, and I have to pick the better mood and learn to live in it.
But there is an assumption hidden in that, and it is quiet enough that you will pass straight over it.
Why two?
Consider what the argument has actually been, from the first night. It has been a contest between two positions — the hopeful and the doomers. I built each of them up as strongly as I could and set them against each other, and you have lived inside that contest for a month. So of course, when the contest turns out to have no winner, you assume the only thing left to do is pick one of the two contestants. That is what a two-sided argument trains you to think. There are two sides; one of them must be mine; if it isn't obvious which, then my job is to work out which.
But those two positions were never the whole set of options. They were only the two loudest — the two that showed up to argue. Hope and the doomer's despair feel like the complete list, as though the question were a single scale running from bright at one end to dark at the other, with every possible stance somewhere along it. Choose your point on the scale. That is the assumption: one scale, two ends, and you slide between them.
It is not a single scale. Hope and despair are the two ends of one line, and there are places to stand that are not on that line at all — that the argument between hope and despair simply never mentioned.
The woman at the dinner is standing in one of them. She is not at the hopeful end. She is plainly not at the doomer's end — I looked for the despair and it wasn't there. She has stepped off the line entirely, into a position the line has no name for, and she is, whatever else she is, steady. So either she is confused — she has found some incoherent middle, a lukewarm I-don't-really-think-about-it that serious people have rightly ruled out — or the set of options is larger than the line, and there are stances the hope-versus-despair argument never told you about, because neither side had any use for them.
She is not confused. The position she occupies is older than this whole argument — older than the show, older than your country, older than the printing press. People worked it out carefully, wrote it down, and built whole lives on it, long before anyone was reading a climate graph over breakfast. And the reason you have never counted it is that both of the positions you've been listening to need you not to count it, because it costs each of them something. So here it is — the third position.
Here is the position, in a single sentence, before I say whose it is. The problem was never that you hoped too little or despaired too much. The problem is hope itself, and the remedy is to give it up.
I'll say that again, because it is strange enough to slip past the first time. Not hope more. Not hope less. Not despair instead. Stop hoping — deliberately, as a discipline, the way you would break a habit you had decided was bad for you — and stop fearing in the same movement, because the two come out together. That is the third position. And the people who have held it are not lightweights.
Begin with the Stoics, because they put it most bluntly. Seneca, in the fifth of his letters to Lucilius, passes on a line he had from an older philosopher, Hecato: cease to hope, and you will cease to fear. He then explains why the two are inseparable. Hope and fear, he says, keep step; they move together. They look like opposites — one reaches toward a good thing coming, the other flinches from a bad thing coming — but underneath they are the same movement, because each is a mind that has left the present and gone out to stand in a future it does not control, depending on it, waiting on it, at its mercy. The hopeful person and the frightened person are doing the same thing: both have made their peace conditional on something that has not yet happened. Seneca's phrase is a mind in suspense, left hanging on a future that has not arrived. And his claim is that you can stop — not by getting better news, but by ceasing to depend on the news at all. Remove the hope, and the fear comes away with it, because a single attachment held both.
Spinoza, some fifteen hundred years later, turns this into a system. Hope and fear — in his Latin, spes and metus — are, he argues, exactly paired: each is an unsteady joy or sorrow about an outcome one is unsure of, and neither is something a free mind would choose to run on, because both are ways of being passive, of being moved about by what happens to you rather than acting from your own understanding. So the person who lives by reason — the free person — works their way out of both. Not into despair, which is only fear that has given up, the same dependence in a different posture. Out of it altogether, into a steadiness that does not rise and fall with the forecast, because it is not fixed to the forecast. Spinoza's well-known formulation is that the free person hopes for nothing and fears nothing. Such a person has taken their peace back from the future and kept it in the only place it was ever secure — the present, in what they actually understand and can actually do.
And then, the most severe of the three, Nietzsche. In Human, All Too Human, he looks at the Greek story of Pandora — the jar containing all the evils that are loosed on the world — and notices the detail everyone passes over. When the lid comes off, every evil escapes except one. Hope stays in the jar. The comforting reading is that at least hope was kept back for us. Nietzsche says we have it backwards. Hope was left in the jar with the evils because hope is one of them — and the worst, he says, the most cruel, precisely because it is the one that keeps a person in the game. The other evils at least finish you off. Hope only prolongs the torment: it keeps you on your feet, keeps you reaching, keeps you taking one blow after another, because perhaps this time the thing you are reaching for will arrive. On this reading, hope is not the consolation left to us. It is what keeps us coming back to be hurt.
Now notice how little this has to do with the doomer, because your first instinct will be to file it under giving up, and it is not giving up.
The doomer is weighed down. The doomer is full of dread — dread is the whole content of the doomer's day. The doomer has lost the argument with the future and is sitting among the ruins of it. This is the opposite of that. This is a person who has refused to have the argument with the future in the first place. There is no dread here, because dread is only fear calling itself realism, and the fear was removed along with the hope. There are no ruins, because this person never staked their peace on the structure holding up. The woman at the dinner was not grim — that is the point. A doomer would have been grim. She had done something a doomer never does: she had stopped waiting on the world, in either direction, and the weight that lifts when you stop waiting on the world is considerable, and from the outside it looks like calm. Which is what it is.
Some of you have met this before, on this show, without recognising it as the same thing. A while ago we spent a series recovering the real Stoicism from the version sold as a productivity technique — optimise your life, control what you can. This is the real one, the substantial one, turned now on the thing you came in caring about: not your inbox, but your future. Hope as the attachment; serenity as its release.
And to be fair: it is one of the most serious answers available, and it bears on you in a way the doomer never could. The doomer only ever accuses your hope of being stupid — you're not reading the evidence, you're coping — and you can defend yourself against that; you can say, no, I have read the evidence, I simply choose to keep facing the part that could still go right. The Stoic does not call your hope stupid. The Stoic calls it a confinement, and a comfortable one, and says that the very thing you have been defending as your last dignity — at least I still hope — is exactly the mechanism keeping you suspended between expectation and fear. Your hope and your dread, the Stoic says, were never enemies. They were the same condition. And you could set both down this afternoon, and nothing would collapse, and you would be lighter than you have been in years.
That is the position. It is real, it is calm, it has been lived in by some of the most serious people who ever wrote, and it is not despair. So you should want to know what is wrong with it — whether you can simply move across to it.
There is a question sitting on it that I am not going to answer tonight, but it belongs here. When you remove the hope, does anything else come away with it? The Stoic says you lose the fear and keep the action — you still do the right thing, you simply don't lean on it succeeding. Perhaps. But there is a worry, and it is there without my naming anyone: that a person who has genuinely stopped reaching toward any outcome may also have stopped working toward it — that the same calm which frees you from dread might quietly free you from the effort, that I've given up hope can be a discipline and can also be a dignified name for going numb. Is the woman at the dinner serene, or is she simply numb? I could not tell across the table, and I suspect she could not tell either. We will come back to whether calm can go too far. But don't let the worry cheat you out of the position itself: it is a real place to stand, it is not despair, and that you had never once counted it should tell you how narrow the range of options had become.
The third position steps off the line by going quieter than both camps. The fourth steps off it by going larger — and it does so by telling you that the question you have been turning over for a month is the wrong size.
Here is the charge, and it is aimed at me as much as at you, because I set the question up. For four weeks I have had you looking at one thing: your own feeling. Is my dread honest? Is my hope clear sight, or only a mood? What is my stance doing to me? In front of my child, in my driveway. And there is a whole tradition that would hear all of that and say, more or less gently, that this is a very small place to be looking. You are sitting alone at dawn taking the measure of your own private mood, as though that were the serious philosophical work — while the thing that actually determines whether the future is bearable is happening somewhere you keep forgetting to look: between people, not inside one.
This is hope understood as a shared thing, and its major theorist is Ernst Bloch, who devoted three large volumes to it. Bloch's term is docta spes — educated hope, learned hope, hope that has been to school. He draws a firm distinction between two things that look alike and are not. There is the private wish, the fingers crossed, the I hope it works out said into your coffee — and Bloch has no patience for that; it is exactly the sentimental hope the doomer is right to despise. And then there is the other thing, which he takes to be one of the most powerful forces in human history: the forward-looking striving that does not merely want a better world but reads the present for the places where a better world is already pressing to emerge. He calls that possible future the Not-Yet — not a fantasy attached to reality, but a real tendency present in how things actually are, the way an oak is present as a possibility in an acorn and not in a stone. Hope, for Bloch, is the discipline of seeing the Not-Yet that is really there and putting your effort behind it, alongside everyone else doing the same. It is not a mood. It is a practice, and it is a collective one.
Rorty offers the same shape with the metaphysics removed, for anyone who balked at a real tendency latent in history — and you were right to balk; that phrase does a lot of work. Rorty, following Dewey, says: drop it. Drop the demand for any guarantee, cosmic or historical, that things will come out right. There is no such guarantee, and you do not need one. What remains, once you stop asking the universe to promise anything, is what he calls social hope — simply the wager that human beings, working together, have made things better before and could do so again, justified by nothing grander than solidarity and the work itself. No God underwriting it, no arc of history bending on its own. Only us, and what we might do for one another, and the willingness to bet on that without a guarantee.
Now hear what this does to the two camps you have been trapped between, because it undercuts both at once. The doomer and the hopeful are arguing about forecasting — about whose private reading of the odds is more honest. And the social-hope tradition says: you are both reading an instrument. You are both treating the future as something that will simply happen to you, that you can only predict, more or less bravely. But the future this tradition cares about is not something that merely happens. It is something people make; and the conditions the doomer treats as fixed — the ones that make it obviously over — are exactly the things that people acting together have, more than once, walked up to and changed. Your private despair has quietly assumed that the world is finished being acted on — that nothing you and others do together will move the actual conditions. And that assumption is not clear sight. It is the loneliness of treating a collective question as a feeling you have by yourself.
Some of you have been waiting for me to connect this back, so here it is. Not long ago we spent a whole series on what we owe the people who come after us, and the conclusion was heavier than anyone wanted: the obligation is real, it is large, and you do not get to set it down. I won't re-argue it. I only want you to notice what that obligation was quietly resting on. You cannot owe the future an action and owe it only your private mood. The duty we agreed on — to act, to hand down something better than we were handed — makes no sense at all unless people working together can genuinely shift the outcome. The climate work, the building, the slow repair of institutions: every part of it presupposes exactly the shared, world-changing hope this tradition describes. So if you accepted the obligation — and I think many of you did, reluctantly, because the argument was good — then you have already committed to what the fourth position offers. You owe the future an action; an action runs on social hope; and social hope is not a feeling you examine alone. It is something people do together.
That is the position, and it grips, and it carries a real charge against this whole show: I have had you looking inward at a question that is at least partly outward, and treating as a private forecast something that is partly public work.
But before you move across to this one either — and some of you are already relieved, already reaching for it, because it sounds like an instruction and a way out: stop examining yourself, go and organise, problem solved — notice the one thing it cannot quite reach. You still wake up in the morning. The private mood did not dissolve because someone correctly pointed out that it was the wrong scale; it is still there at dawn, yours, and you still have to do the work from inside it, hopeful or dreading. And a movement is made of people, and people who have quietly given up, or who are lying to themselves about the odds, are not nothing — they are a movement about to make bad decisions. So make it collective is true, and it is larger than you, and it does not actually release you from the private question of what you, personally, are doing in there. Which is exactly where the fourth position becomes dangerous — because the moment hope becomes something you owe to others, someone is in a position to demand it of you. And that demand, it turns out, is not as clean as it sounds.
Think about the last time someone told you to stay hopeful.
Perhaps it was a particular person. Perhaps it was just the general tone of things — the captions, the talks, the manner everyone agrees to adopt around children. Don't give up. Stay positive. We have to believe, for their sake. And perhaps you have said it yourself, to your own child, in the voice you use when you have decided your job is not to pass on the dread. It's going to be all right. Hold that moment, the real one. The philosopher Katie Stockdale asks a question you cannot get out of your head.
Who is doing the asking, and who is being asked?
Stockdale's book is Hope Under Oppression, and her insight is that we discuss hope as though it were a private virtue equally available to everyone — as though stay hopeful were like stay hydrated, a neutral piece of good advice that costs the same whoever you are. It is nothing of the kind. Hope, and the loss of hope, are distributed. They fall unevenly. The future is not equally bearable to everyone in the room, because the future is not going to do the same thing to everyone in the room. And so the demand to stay hopeful — the social pressure to keep your chin up, not to be the one who lowers the mood, to perform optimism so that the rest do not have to be uncomfortable — that demand has a direction. It tends to be directed downward. It is asked hardest of exactly the people who have the least evidence for it and the most reason to have lost it.
Notice what that does. When you tell someone with every reason to despair that they owe it to everyone else to stay hopeful, you have quietly done something political and presented it as encouragement. You have made their despair a failing — something they are guilty of, letting the side down by feeling it — when they may have less reason to hope than anyone present, and you have turned the absence of hope into a fault. You have made hope into a discipline imposed on the people already carrying the most, so that the people carrying less need not look at what they are carrying. The cheerful demand to keep hoping can be, Stockdale shows, an instrument of power — a way of telling the people getting the worst of it to keep quiet, keep smiling, and not make the comfortable uncomfortable.
Now turn that on yourself, because this part is yours to do, not mine to do for you.
That duty you felt a moment ago — the one the fourth position just handed you, you owe the future an action and the action runs on hope, so you owe hope — put it through Stockdale's question before you accept it. When the pull to stay hopeful for them arrives, ask: who handed me this duty, is it the same duty for everyone, and is it falling hardest on the people with the least reason to feel it? And the harder version, the one that is genuinely about you: when you tell the gloomy one at the dinner to lighten up, when you find the doomer at the table tiresome and want them to stop — is that you defending hope as a virtue? Or is it you, comfortable enough to afford optimism, asking someone less comfortable to stop saying the true thing aloud because it is spoiling the mood? You will not always like the answer. I do not always like mine.
This is the work I keep promising you will do for yourself, and here is a clean run at it. You took the demand to hope as a plain fact — of course we should stay hopeful; what kind of person argues with that? And the moment you ask who is positioned where, who is asking whom, the of course falls apart, and you see that the demand has a standpoint built into it — a place it is issued from and a place it is issued to, and those are not the same place, and the distance between them is doing moral work you had not noticed. The duty to hope is not false. But it is not clean either, and it cannot simply be handed down, because handing it down is exactly how it becomes a means of coercion.
So the fourth position ends where the third did — a real place to stand that you had never counted, and not a key that unlocks the whole problem. Social hope is true, and it is larger than your private dread, and it still leaves you with a private dread; and the duty it generates is real, and it still cannot be demanded without turning into something uglier than a duty. You do not get to move across and stop thinking. You get a larger and stranger set of options than the one you thought you were confined to.
So stand back and count them, because this is a different situation from the one you walked into, and it is a harder one to be in, not an easier one.
An hour ago you had two options: hope, or the doomer's despair, with a single scale between them along which you slid, and your whole problem was choosing your point on the scale. You have at least four now. There is the hope you came in either holding or resenting. There is the despair at the far end. And there are these two you had never counted: the one that gives up hope deliberately and becomes calm — not collapsed, calm, and not a point on the scale at all — and the one that says the question was never private in the first place, that hope is something people build together, and that your solitary dawn audit of your own mood was always the wrong scale. Four serious places to stand, each of them occupied by people who gave their lives to thinking it through, and you had been told there were two.
And here is the part I won't soften: that is not good news. There is a temptation in it — at last, more options, I was tired of choosing between two bad ones — and that relief does not survive inspection either. More options is not more comfort. It is worse. Because there is still nothing that decides for you. The evidence did not choose between hope and despair, and it does not choose among four either; and now the careful, honest person is not choosing between two stances they half understand, but standing among four of them with no instrument that selects. And every one of the new options costs something the moment you try to actually hold it. The calm one — give up hope, go free — I could not tell you, across that dinner table, whether the woman had found serenity or had simply gone quietly numb, whether the calm that frees you from dread also removes the impulse to work. And the collective one leaves you exactly where it found you at dawn, inside your own mood, and turns into a means of coercion the moment anyone tries to demand it of the people already carrying the most. You did not get an answer tonight. You got two more serious questions and a set of options too large to stand among comfortably.
That is the fifth of nine. Here is the plain thing you have now that you did not an hour ago, and notice that it is a loss, the way the gains here always are. You came in certain that the only honest choice was hope or despair — that those were the two options, and that wisdom lay in knowing which to take. You leave knowing that the two-option picture was a story, and a convenient one, told by the only two parties loud enough to be arguing. The future does not actually present you with two stances. It presents you with at least four, and probably more than I have shown you, and not one of them comes with a guarantee, and the size of the choice is now your problem.
So here is what to carry out with you, and as always it is a task, not a comfort. Two parts.
First: somewhere in your life, right now, you are framing a real thing as hope or give up. The cause you are exhausted by — do I keep believing in it, or admit it is lost? The work that outruns the forecast. The bad news you keep half-deciding is final. You have been treating it as a two-option choice — keep the faith, or face facts — and after tonight you should be able to see the other options. Is there a version where you give up the hope, deliberately, and keep doing the work anyway, without leaning on it succeeding? Is there a version where the question stops being can I personally still believe and becomes what do we, together, actually do — and does that change what is even being asked? You do not have to pick one. You have to notice they were there, and that you had ruled them out without looking.
Second, and this one is sharper: catch yourself the next time you demand hope — of anyone, including yourself. The next time you tell someone to stay positive, or tell yourself you owe it to your child not to show the fear, stop and run the question from the fourth position: who is asking, of whom, and is it falling on the person with the least reason to feel it? Sometimes the answer will be fine. Sometimes you will find you have been asking someone to keep quiet about the truth so that you do not have to hear it. I am not going to tell you which it will be. That one is genuinely yours.
And one last thing, because there is a loose end and I don't want you to miss that it is loose. We opened the question wide tonight — but notice which position I never actually went back and examined. The doomer's. The despair. I spent the whole night showing that it is not the only alternative to hope — but I let it sit there, all night, taken at its own word, the one stance that gets to claim it needs no defending because it is only facing facts. The serene position had to earn its calm. The collective one had to answer for its demand. Despair has sat there the entire hour, untouched, still granted the one thing no one has made it argue for: that it is simply honesty. Next time we make it argue for that. Because settled despair — it's over, the brave acceptance — is not new, and it is not nameless. An older world looked at exactly that stance and had a word for it — and it was not a word despair would ever have chosen for itself. That is where we go.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.