Combating hopelessness

[friendofdorothy]

I can understand this.

I've been feeling the same.

More so recently as local community stuff seems full of , to me, a lot of personal disagreements and unpleasantness. Some of which I can't deal with because it's stressful and not that rational. Which has led me to dropping out of one meeting I go to. Which I feel guilty about.

( To add I find this on urban to)

I find dealing with Lambeth council over the years depressing. At best Council/ Labour party here regard one as just being difficult. A problem.

I have been feeling depressed recently without wanting to be. And trying not to allow myself to wallow in it.

Various things. But some I think connected with local volunteering.

Always done a bit in my years in Lambeth. But feel I have little to show for it.

I'm going to pm you. thanks

 

[frogwoman]

Also i highly recommend if you've ever felt that you're shit at your job or that you struggle in dealing with people, to read The Art of The Deal by a certain Donald J. Trump. It's very good at reassuring the Project 2025 worries as well. The guy is batshit. Utterly unhinged.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

A lot to think about there. Like the ' fetish for the present moment' phrase - perfectly describes the adoption of "mindfulness' in vogue with employers, or use by advertising to sell crap.

Not Buddhist but I've come to terms with acceptance in recent years. Accepting mostly myself, ageing, my grief, anxiety, sadness. And the shit state of the world that I can do little about. And forgiveness. It's difficult though.

as i think i've said elsewhere on here, i have a bit of a with the mindfulness stuff i have seen - seems to be very much 'stay in your lane, accept your station in life, put up with the shit the establishment throws at you, don't make waves'

although it's possible it's random platitude generator like the 'astrology' in the tabloids and may not bear any resemblance to what mindfulness was meant to be.

having said that, yes, there's a limit to just how many battles any individual can fight.

 

[redsquirrel]

as i think i've said elsewhere on here, i have a bit of a with the mindfulness stuff i have seen - seems to be very much 'stay in your lane, accept your station in life, put up with the shit the establishment throws at you, don't make waves'

IMO that certainly is how employers increasingly use it.
There's a mental health and safety issue in this area - take a stress risk assessment and do some wellbeing exercises.
Rather than the responsibility being on the employer to fix the root cause of the problem, the responsibility of looking after mental health becomes that of individual employees.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

and in general, i'm not doing all that well with the hopelessness thing.

(conscious this isn't in k+s) so on a personal level will just say that national / local political circumstances means redundancy may be coming next year

bits of social media from the US consist of a mix of people frightened about the next 4 years (or longer) and trying to come up with options for moving to a (hopefully) better state, or leaving the country altogether, or wanting to rush to sort out medical or legal situations, e.g. entering in to same sex marriages before they are banned (although i have an idea that s-s marriages in some states got annulled once before) and noticing that people are taking rainbow (etc) flags down from being visible on their homes and so on.

and other people offering what help they can to people in those situations. i'm not convinced it's going to be enough.

and the idea that if it's not a complete disaster (from the view of the republicans' polling, rather than for people on the receiving end of it) can see the tories / refuck going for the same sort of line in 2028 / 29 when it comes to challenging an uninspiring centrist incumbent party that hasn't delivered much at ground level.

at the moment, i don't feel like i've got the energy to join the resistance movement...

 

[BigMoaner]

and in general, i'm not doing all that well with the hopelessness thing.

(conscious this isn't in k+s) so on a personal level will just say that national / local political circumstances means redundancy may be coming next year

bits of social media from the US consist of a mix of people frightened about the next 4 years (or longer) and trying to come up with options for moving to a (hopefully) better state, or leaving the country altogether, or wanting to rush to sort out medical or legal situations, e.g. entering in to same sex marriages before they are banned (although i have an idea that s-s marriages in some states got annulled once before) and noticing that people are taking rainbow (etc) flags down from being visible on their homes and so on.

and other people offering what help they can to people in those situations. i'm not convinced it's going to be enough.

and the idea that if it's not a complete disaster (from the view of the republicans' polling, rather than for people on the receiving end of it) can see the tories / refuck going for the same sort of line in 2028 / 29 when it comes to challenging an uninspiring centrist incumbent party that hasn't delivered much at ground level.

at the moment, i don't feel like i've got the energy to join the resistance movement...

Stopping social media can help i find. of course it;s not the only solution. but if you're largely powerless to affect things, then what's the point in reading about things you are powerless over? for all that i want to help people, i cannot do that without looking out for myself, managing my own mental and emotional life. thing is, what iwth the average human spending about 5 hours a day on their phone, we are so immeshed, so pulled around by this stuff. it's not just tut tut social media rolls eyes, this stuff kind of is reality now. we buy into so many narratives. exhausting.

 

[Puddy_Tat]

Stopping social media can help i find

i'm not on social media a lot (i regard urban as more anti-social media ) but it's the only way of keeping contact with some people / circles

 

[Eivets Rednow]

My take on combating hopelessness is that for me, becoming a truer version of myself is helping. I try to take intentional actions wherever I go, and connect with people. I can’t say that it is easy as sometimes we all feel hopeless, however I think I have found a path to walk through to make the changes to the world around me. Education and career combined, leading to better, more complex decision making and strategies.

 

[friendofdorothy]

My take on combating hopelessness is that for me, becoming a truer version of myself is helping. I try to take intentional actions wherever I go, and connect with people. I can’t say that it is easy as sometimes we all feel hopeless, however I think I have found a path to walk through to make the changes to the world around me. Education and career combined, leading to better, more complex decision making and strategies.

Welcome. Thanks for your reply. I have a few questions:

What do you mean by a truer version of yourself?

How do you find your path to walk through the changes?

Tell me more about your complex decision making.

 

[Eivets Rednow]

Welcome. Thanks for your reply. I have a few questions:

What do you mean by a truer version of yourself?

How do you find your path to walk through the changes?

Tell me more about your complex decision making.

Hello, thank you for your interest.

I spent a long time hiding away, pretending to be someone else. This morphed into pretending to be someone’s wife. I wasn’t happy. I also wasn’t aware of how much I was faking it until it started to slip out in tells when I was out and about talking to people in certain contexts. To my own surprise, I ended things really quickly when I couldn’t ignore the flood of feelings that had overwhelmed me. I’ve decided to follow my feelings now, and see what that brings. I had already started the process of following my feelings and not pretending in my professional life, so my personal life just needed to catch up. And thankfully it has.

The path is a fantasy. It exists in my mind. I’ve built alternative universes which are a shadow world of reality which have been helping me to understand reality differently. These fantasy paths could take me anywhere, even outer space. It means I look at the mundane world with its tarmac and kerbs with a renewed sense of wonder. Magic in the everyday… I also like to follow trails, that’s fun. Like trying to catch pixies or trolls, except these are people doing weird things. Then I make changes along these paths, wherever I spot an opportunity.

My decision making has improved over time. Learning about project management helped. I read a lot of different things in non-judgemental way. I’m trying to understand how things work. The more I learn, and connect that learning to my previous learning, I’m able to make better decisions. Some of the things I do might look like they defy logic, but that is just another thing that I find hilarious.

 

[brixtonscot]

this is link is good - only ten mins. “”Be happy” is the new form of rule.” A reading from the allusive mysterious philosopher Byung Chul Han. First few mins are a bit stodgy and complex but stick with it - there’s few writing as profoundly as him on anxiety and happiness in neoliberal society.

I haven’t been out here for a while , so just catching up with some posts now.
I think that video on The Compulsion of Happiness and the uses and abuses of “pain” is intriguing and has a lot of good points, if a bit “deep”…..
Here is another video , The Burnout Society from Tony Chamas at 1Dime , which also based partly on the work of Byung Chul Han , which I find a bit more accessible and pragmatic.

- A Documentary about how Hustle Culture, Workaholism, Toxic Productivity, Self Improvement, and Self-Help gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk function as a form of Social Control, which the Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls Psychopolitics.
Psychopolitics is a form of smart power that governs our Neoliberal Society of Control.
Hustle Culture and Positive Psychology (Toxic Positivity) are just some of its many manifestations.
It is leading to burnout, depression, and anxiety.
35 mins

 

[BigMoaner]

I haven’t been out here for a while , so just catching up with some posts now.
I think that video on The Compulsion of Happiness and the uses and abuses of “pain” is intriguing and has a lot of good points, if a bit “deep”…..
Here is another video , The Burnout Society from Tony Chamas at 1Dime , which also based partly on the work of Byung Chul Han , which I find a bit more accessible and pragmatic.

- A Documentary about how Hustle Culture, Workaholism, Toxic Productivity, Self Improvement, and Self-Help gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk function as a form of Social Control, which the Philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls Psychopolitics.
Psychopolitics is a form of smart power that governs our Neoliberal Society of Control.
Hustle Culture and Positive Psychology (Toxic Positivity) are just some of its many manifestations.
It is leading to burnout, depression, and anxiety.
35 mins

Did you listen to the second half of hte Compulsion one - that's the half where he really heats up. He's incredible. There's a sort of cult like following around him, but by some seriously clever people too in the philosophy world - he's rose to a giant in philosophy. There are some simple key concepts in his work - that we have, since the 80s, moved from external-punishment, to internal ones. that we have moved from "Must" to "Can" and that "can" exhausts the human, cuts him off, makes him believe that he is just a atomised dot floating around making right and wrong decisions - forget society. He takes the modern internal monologue, to an almost comphrehensive degree, stretching out to love, ambition, fear, dread, hopelessness, and links it so effortlessly to neoliberalism, and, as a kind of angry reaction, the solution he proposes is a kind of powerful nihilism. A retreat by way of Heidegger and Zen buddhism. A refusal of compulsive achievement, whether it be in the realm of politics, progress, sex, relationships. The power of negative thinking. Instead of I can, I can't. Because, well, we quite often can't. A giving up. And then seeing what happens.

The problem for him is not the disciplined, controlled subject (foucoult) but the modern (largely-absent-behind-a load of well-being, theraputic language) but the neoliberal "achievement subject", never ever settled, never drifting in peace, constantly harrased by the master-slave dialectic that is now internalised, often from teh moment we wake to when we sleep. His books are a guidebook in walking in the complete opposite way of capitalism and neoliberalsim. He sees social media as 'capture' of the subject. that there are no real spaces left for emotional and mental experience and processing, even simple thinking, even simple contemplation, both slowly vanishing. that we flit from one distraction to the other, compulsively - hyper attention. To think through something., to be alone and untinterupted with ones thoughts. He uses heideggers "humans are held by thought" for this, and that we should be extemely careful of highly addictive, attention-capturing capitalist machines like tic tok, and the like. if they are not used as tools, they will, and do, use us as tools. there's little free about compulsively doing one thing over. The doom scroll in this regard is fascinating - a sort of search without aim, search without meaning, a shallow and compulsive fix that rarely satisfises, that now is such a massive part of human capitalist consumption.

i'm a total fan boy, i have to admit. each book removes so many veils. people have described his works as more helpful than a 100 self help books, that's why i have had some rants on this thread. people might read him and find him useful - i did.

 

[brixtonscot]

Did you listen to the second half of hte Compulsion one - that's the half where he really heats up. He's incredible. There's a sort of cult like following around him, but by some seriously clever people too in the philosophy world - he's rose to a giant in philosophy. There are some simple key concepts in his work - that we have, since the 80s, moved from external-punishment, to internal ones. that we have moved from "Must" to "Can" and that "can" exhausts the human, cuts him off, makes him believe that he is just a atomised dot floating around making right and wrong decisions - forget society. He takes the modern internal monologue, to an almost comphrehensive degree, stretching out to love, ambition, fear, dread, hopelessness, and links it so effortlessly to neoliberalism, and, as a kind of angry reaction, the solution he proposes is a kind of powerful nihilism. A retreat by way of Heidegger and Zen buddhism. A refusal of compulsive achievement, whether it be in the realm of politics, progress, sex, relationships. The power of negative thinking. Instead of I can, I can't. Because, well, we quite often can't. A giving up. And then seeing what happens.

The problem for him is not the disciplined, controlled subject (foucoult) but the modern (largely-absent-behind-a load of well-being, theraputic language) but the neoliberal "achievement subject", never ever settled, never drifting in peace, constantly harrased by the master-slave dialectic that is now internalised, often from teh moment we wake to when we sleep. His books are a guidebook in walking in the complete opposite way of capitalism and neoliberalsim. He sees social media as 'capture' of the subject. that there are no real spaces left for emotional and mental experience and processing, even simple thinking, even simple contemplation, both slowly vanishing. that we flit from one distraction to the other, compulsively - hyper attention. To think through something., to be alone and untinterupted with ones thoughts. He uses heideggers "humans are held by thought" for this, and that we should be extemely careful of highly addictive, attention-capturing capitalist machines like tic tok, and the like. if they are not used as tools, they will, and do, use us as tools. there's little free about compulsively doing one thing over. The doom scroll in this regard is fascinating - a sort of search without aim, search without meaning, a shallow and compulsive fix that rarely satisfises, that now is such a massive part of human capitalist consumption.

i'm a total fan boy, i have to admit. each book removes so many veils. people have described his works as more helpful than a 100 self help books, that's why i have had some rants on this thread. people might read him and find him useful - i did.

I did watch all of Compulsion of Happiness video , and while agreeing with what I understood of it , I also found it a bit “heavy going” ….particularly with thinking of how to get that over to as many people as possible.
If I remember and understood correctly …..that deep internal ( psychological?) pain within us all is being manipulated and exploited in order to keep us subjugated by means of self-exploitation.
I don’t disagree…..but how can that be exposed and dealt with in a practical way to as many people as possible ?

 

[brixtonscot]

I think this interview with Grace Blakeley , author of Vulture Capitalism , makes a good point about how the liberation movements from the 1960’s ( eg. Black , Women’s , Gays ) which started out with collective aims mainly as part of a wider progressive emancipatory movement , as “means-to-an-end” , got co-opted by the emerging hyper-individualism of neo-liberalist middle classes from the 70’s onwards , as “ends-in-themselves” - alongside major attacks on trade unions.
“As well as the central importance of revitalizing working-class power, Blakeley wraps up the interview by exploring a few other visions for strong, democratic, and worker-led economies”
The Neoliberal Takeover Was More Insidious Than You Realize