Hope and strategy in the face of despair

You may have noticed that I have not written in a few weeks.

The main cause has been a slowly unfolding family crisis. The short version is that my father has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and my siblings and I have had to take responsibility for many aspects of his life. On top of that, the past few weeks brought some kind of cough-cold-flu that was worse than anything I’ve ever had in my life (though it wasn't covid, apparently). Anyway, I’m feeling a lot closer to normal now, but it was touch and go there for a bit.

There’s something going on beyond my individual problems, though. It’s something you’re probably feeling too: a struggle to find hope about the issues facing our world.

This is unusual for me. Normally when I am having a hard day personally or feeling down about myself, working on social change strategy reinvigorates me. Even when contemplating incredibly vexing problems like climate change, I can convert the problem into a puzzle that engages my brain and makes me feel alive.

But I couldn’t do that after Uvalde. It’s not just the brain’s refusal to intellectualize the murder of children — that, on its own, is healthy and proper. I would worry for myself if I could not sit with the facts of these tragedies and say, “Stop Andrew, this is the time to feel, not to think,” as hard as those feelings may be.

No, what disrupts my sense of hope is the aftermath — our pathological need to rehash the same narrow talking points, policy proposals, and culture war exchanges that have surrounded this issue my whole adult life.

I feel feeble when our nation’s unrepresentative political system forces the foes of gun violence to focus on closing a collection of loopholes while its enablers fearlessly seek to introduce more guns in more places regardless of consequence.

I feel defeated when the complex issue of mental health is raised up as a scapegoat to distract from gun violence, when ten minutes of research would reveal that the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of crimes than to commit them.

I feel numb in the face of millions of Americans who seem to believe there is no better balance of freedom and responsibility than the one we have, despite the fact that no other society on the planet allows so many preventable gun deaths.

But despite these all-too-familiar feelings, I know that the kind work I do can restore my hope. Sometimes I just need a little reminding.

This time around the reminder came from Jane Goodall. Specifically, I was helped by listening to The Book of Hope, which is essentially a long interview with the mother of primatology. It was conducted by Doug Abrams, who I know from his participation in an Insight Lab on inspiring collective action about a decade ago. The book also touches upon the findings of Chan Hellman, a leading researcher on the psychology of hope who I met through my former student Stacy Phillips.

What all these sources reminded me of is that hope is not a vague wish for things to be better. It is grounded in our belief in specific, achievable future goals, even if those goals may be difficult. This focus on the concrete reminded me of the many times in which doing this work has helped me connect people with those same kind of real, specific hopes for the future.

It makes me remember one of my favorite meetings of all time, which occurred in the first few weeks of my time as an Innovator in Residence at the University of Southern California’s social work school. The school’s leaders knew they wanted to capture some of the spirit of Insight Labs for their faculty, but nobody was quite sure what that meant. So we held a meeting with some of the faculty to capture the most important similarities and differences between their work and ours.

The differences aren’t important, but there was one crucial similarity. We realized that our methodology and social work were both systematic approaches to generate new options for social change, especially in situations where it seems as if no new options are possible. This helped us conceptualize our work together as a catalyst for hope.

I still pursue that spirit in all of the work I do. Even though the exercises shared in this newsletter can sometimes seem a little abstract or silly, they are ultimately all designed to achieve that goal of bringing hope where there is none. What’s more, in writing this to all of you, I realize that I’ve been lucky enough to design my whole life around providing people with new options and new hope.

I’d say that’s a pretty darn good reason to keep on going. I’ll see you next week.