Awareness Culture, and Our Collective Waning Will to Live

my case against instagram story activism // i’m about to mass unfollow some bitches

I open Instagram and start tapping.

Nostalgic Barbie meme. Cucumber salad. Hair wrap I’ll never master.

Book I’ve seen a hundred times. Friend I haven’t seen in years.

Book rec. Starving Arab child. Pop psych think piece. News.

Good book rec. Save. Bloody Arab child. Scroll.

Mother screaming over a zipped body bag. Sigh.

Another cucumber salad. Another book rec.

I keep tapping, fingers on autopilot.

My brain tries to block the horror until the third child. Maybe the fourth.

I don't cry this time. I barely even pause. I keep tapping.

A skincare ad. A concert announcement.

I am not heartless. I am just online.

The all-mighty algorithm doesn’t really give a damn if it’s serving me grief or promises of glowing skin. It just wants to keep me latched. Any interaction is a good interaction. Any provoked emotion is a good provoked emotion.

Cute elephant. Happy. Skincare. Self loathing. Politics. Anger. Cucumber salad. Hungry but a little self-hatred too. Genocided populations. Grief? Guilt maybe?

I was an annoying pink-haired feminist in middle-school, which is made more embarrassing by the fact that I had to bleach my hair to hell to get it pink. I used to repost it all. Maps. Flags. Vox videos. Poems in bold sans-serif. An embarrassing amount of Hillary Clinton propaganda. Planned Parenthood announcements and “If you’re silent, you’re complicit”, over and over. Graphics I didn’t google, and think-pieces I hadn’t thought through.

I learned eventually that it didn’t do anything. Not really. Not in the real world. And slowly, I stopped. Not because I didn’t care. But because I did.

I started to care about new things. Like history. Like Unilever and AIPAC. Like who funds what and why I’d never learned it. Like supply chains and sanctions and the non-profit industrial complex. Like who gets called a terrorist and how they pick Times People of the Year. Who gets to be remembered as an activist. I learned about blood behind branding. And pipeline construction. And pipelines in schools. And pipelines between companies and the government. Pipelines to bombs.

At sixteen I read Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa and also had to be put on anti-depressants. I don’t think the two weren’t related.

I was sixteen and suddenly I couldn’t unsee it. Occupations. Profiteering. Lobbying. Land grabs. Blockades. Surveillance. People disappearing. People getting killed. Sweatshops. Arms deals. “Humanitarian aid”. Injustice. More injustice. So much injustice. The way the world kept spinning like it didn’t matter. And still people posting about peace, and negotiation, and compromise. I didn’t want peace. I had long stopped wanting peace. I wanted accountability. I wanted names. I wanted someone to pay. I wanted a hit list. I wanted to unsee it.

I wanted to be happy. I wanted pills. I wanted the numbness I should’ve gotten to experience a little bit longer. I wanted to blow something up. I wanted people to stop dying, and I wanted the people responsible dead.

I’ve acted on that fury once or twice. Mood stabilizers keep me from torching cop cars. Antidepressants help me carry the weight of the world. Anti-anxiety pills because we all should be panicking. Stimulants to get me out of bed, and keep me trying. Antipsychotics because living in the core of the empire is enough to drive anyone with a conscience insane. And maybe that’s the point, to sedate the ones still screaming. As someone who has lived in it for as long as they can remember, the fury never leaves. It just calcifies somewhere between your heart and ribs.

I’m about to be twenty-two now, and I’ve been sad for a long time. I’ve been angry since I can remember. I haven’t felt much hope since high school. Because awareness actually does steal something from you, especially when it seeps in too early or seeps down too deeply. It stole the innocence I was supposed to waste on dumb crushes and the freedom to believe my government wasn’t lying. It robbed me of the years I should’ve been allowed to be mediocre, oblivious, obnoxiously happy. It opens your eyes, and changes your perspective. The world’s cruelty showed up to my door early and it banged loud. It came in the form of photos that still resurface in my dreams, headlines haunt me, and the impossible weight of knowing that you can’t un-see the matrix.

The books I read don’t leave a lot of space in my mind for the reckless hope that makes life bearable. I carry questions no one around me is asking, and grief no one ever wants to sit with. Awareness made me wiser, and much more tired. Awareness isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes it’s a slow erosion of what little hope we get to keep as adults. And sometimes it leaves you wondering if you’ll ever be able to reclaim a moment of peace that wasn’t shadowed by the weight of the world.

My bipolar disorder isn’t chemical, it’s situational. It’s triggered by living in the core of the empire. It’s triggered by waking every day to the knowledge that my existence is entangled with systems built on violence and exploitation, and that the comfort I have is paid for in the blood of others, far away and yet too familial to ignore. It’s the weight of knowing I’m complicit whether I like it or not — through what I consume, what I ignore. Choices I have no choice but to make. It’s triggered by the exhaustion of trying to hold so much injustice in my head and heart at once. It’s a symptom of bearing witness in a world that wants to distract me with ads for glowing skin and Instagram stories telling me to “stay woke” without giving me space to actually process what that means.

My mental health isn’t a medical mystery divorced from reality. It’s a symptom of the trauma inflicted by empire. When I say my bipolar disorder is situational, it’s not a metaphor. It’s recognition that mental illness can be the body and mind’s way of screaming about the unbearable weight of living in a loveless world.

Awareness Culture

This essay is above all else an indictment of performative activism and a call to question what the fuck we actually think we are doing. But please enjoy a brief play by me as an interlude to me getting to the point.

A Series of Events that has Never Actually Happened: A Play

Person A, a Marxist-Leninist who has never actually read modern Marxist theory or critique, scrolls social media, soaking in their daily latte art and news via un-fact-checked Instagram accounts. They start to get frustrated at the state of the world and feel the need to really do something.

It’s a Wednesday. They have work in a few hours at a sit-down chain restaurant in a suburb within their small to medium-sized American city. They have to get there early to stop at the vape shop in their work plaza to buy a vape to make it through their shift.

They get more and more heated, but there’s nowhere for that heat to go. They can’t rally the neighbors and start a protest. They don’t know their neighbors. They don’t know what to protest. And protests need to be permitted in their city anyway.

Their roommate just asked if they finished the Brita filter again.

They don’t have the time or tools or teeth to build a party. No comrades, no community center. Standing outside with a sign alone feels pointless. Besides, they have the digital version of it right at their fingertips.

They repost the next political video they see to their Instagram story. They read the graphic—not the article it’s linked to, or even the caption. They call it praxis.

They repost the next one, and the one after that.

Soon, there are 20+ stories for their friends—and barely acquaintances—to click through. They’re educating the masses (their 400 Instagram followers). They’re doing the work.

Person B, a politically uninvolved moderate who votes Democrat because they feel pretty bad about voting for politicians that are openly and blatantly racist, taps through their friend’s Instagram stories when suddenly they are berated with a never-ending tap-through of bombings, starving children, videos of parents being ripped away from their children, more starving children that look ethnically different, videos from a war zone, and memes about how much J.K. Rowling sucks as a human being. These stories were posted by an old coworker from two restaurants ago.

Person B slows down. They really soak it in.

They have heard absolutely nothing of these atrocities—not a peep. They had no idea trans rights were under attack. They had never heard that children on this incredibly resource-dense planet starved. Homelessness? They thought everyone had a home. ICE raids? They thought you could just walk onto American soil. Their world is absolutely rocked. They’re shaken. They have no idea what to do. How did they miss this? How could they have been so oblivious?

Person B, immediately drops everything to craft a thoughtful message to Person A, typing through tears.

Person B:

hey, thank you so much for posting all this. i didn’t know about most of it and i’m honestly feeling kind of overwhelmed but grateful. if you have any resources or places i can donate or like… do something real, pls let me know!!!

Person A:

omg thank u sm for saying that, it means a lot that ur willing to learn. there’s a highlight on my page called “free palestine” that has some stuff!! and i just started following this account that breaks it all down super well.

Person A: (copy-pastes a carousel made by someone named @leftisthealing69)

start here, also honestly we need more ppl like u.

Person B: (donates $5 to the Planned Parenthood abortion fund and the Democratic Party)

It feels good for a moment, but the relief quickly subsides, as there is no tangible effect they can look at.

Person B:

i’m sorry to bother you more, but i see a lot of things on your story about free palestine. could you explain to me what this means, and how to maybe help the cause?

Person A, getting ready for their eight-hour waitressing shift, looks down at the message and feels heartwarmed—then panicked.

How do they explain the Israel-Palestine conflict to this person? What should they tell them to do? What books could they recommend from a non-apartheid perspective? Was doing any of this even worth it?If they really cared, they could do the work like Person A had.

They respond.

Person A:

yeah, it’s kinda complicated, and it’s not really my job to explain it to you. you should do your research and like, educate yourself. it’s not marginalized people’s job to do the work for you.

Person B, feeling as if they’ve done something wrong and crossed a line, looks at the text, then jumps into action.

of course. srry. xoxo.

They google Free Palestine. Articles from news sources they’ve known all their life pop up.

Terrorist Group Hamas Holds Israeli Children Captive in Demand of Governmental Control

Israeli Forces Bomb Hamas-Owned Hospital in Hopes of Terrorist Capture

Surely their coworker wasn’t advocating publicly for a terrorist group. But the more Person B scrolled, the more the evidence piled up. They closed the Google tab. They said a prayer.

Person B unfollows Person A on Instagram.

The cycle resets.

Tomorrow, Person B will post a reel of their dog doing a trick.

Person A will repost a quote from Che Guevara.

Neither will feel better.

END SCENE

Do we all collectively get what it is that I’m saying? Can that be the essay? Am I done now? Can I go lie down?

Unfortunately no, I have that yap in me.

I was probably eleven when I posted my first political infographic. It was probably pink, probably written in Comic Sans, and probably said something like Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. I have long since scrubbed the internet of my early social media usage so good luck searching. I didn’t really know the meaning of radical. I also didn’t know that Susan B Anthony was a raging racist that didn’t consider black women to be people, let alone women. I didn’t know that Hillary Clinton was pro-Iraq war. I didn’t know shit. I knew pink was my favorite color. I didn’t like that boys could do whatever they wanted and I couldn’t, and I unfortunately knew how to screenshot and post things.

That was enough.

Instagram has never once, and I mean not once, actually taught me something. Awareness culture doesn’t teach you to understand anything. It teaches you to perform that you do. It teaches you to believe that sharing equals caring, that feeling bad is morally superior to asking hard questions actually learning and doing something with that education. Awareness culture wants you to believe that the way to save the world is to repost a carousel you didn’t read from someone named @justiceforshawn. If you feel overwhelmed, take a breath. If you don’t know what a two-state solution is, just repost the meme and move on. The algorithm likes that.

We are not taught how to really see the things we are seeing. We are not taught to process them. We are not taught how to engage with them. We are taught how to repost them. We are not taught how to organize based on them. We are taught how to virtue signal with them.

In middle school, feminism was a hair color, a tote bag, and maybe a women’s march. Rebelling was purchasing tacky cricut produced things with slogans. Activism was a mood board (I still have an activism mood board but you know what I mean). I knew about “rape culture” from law in order before I knew about capitalism. I knew I was supposed to “use my voice” but had no idea what I was supposed to say, and the natural answer was not to say anything. Just to share.

Awareness culture rewards you for staying woke, but not for staying with it. It does not reward study, or follow-through, or complexity. It rewards being early, being loud, and being angry in aesthetically pleasing ways. It’s moral superiority in bite-sized pieces, with none of the labor and all of the dopamine. It’s staying “informed” just enough to feel like a good person and “engaged” just enough to avoid guilt.
No one ever taught us how to grow up politically. They just taught us how to post with the flow.

Stay with me.

A lot of us are political middle schoolers cosplaying as revolutionaries on Instagram.

Repeat for emphasis:

A lot of us are political middle schoolers cosplaying as revolutionaries on Instagram.
And I don’t even necessarily mean that with judgment. I mean it with grief. like “good grief”. I mean it with a little exasperation.

I work with middle schoolers and the thing is, they’re trying. They’re trying so hard. Too hard. They are ALL, every single one of them, a bunch of little try-hards. They are loud and awkward, and messy, and unpredictable, and wildly impressionable, and desperate for understanding.

They want to understand who they are, and their place within the world. They want to be good. They want to be liked. They want to matter. They want to know things. And at the end of the day so do we.

We inherit slogans without systems. We inherit aesthetics without accountability. We inherit the illusion of power. The illusion of meaningful discourse. Without the tools to build anything lasting with it. And when it starts to feel hollow, we either double down or tap out. We get tired. We get bitter. We call each other out until there’s no one left to sit beside. We name and shame with the precision of trained prosecutors, but we have no real theory of change beyond don’t be like them. And we forget that real revolution isn’t just about being right, it’s about building something better.

Most of us were handed performance before we were handed purpose. We were handed an algorithm before we were handed analysis. And so we mistook attention for impact, and awareness for action. But there is a difference between knowing of injustice and knowing how to fight it.

The reason awareness culture feels so shallow is because it keeps us emotionally dependent on the approval of the feed. It rewards shame cycles, not study. Emotional reactions, not material interventions. It gives us just enough validation to feel important, and just enough powerlessness to keep us coming back.

We are not stupid. We are not helpless. We collectively are not powerless. But we have been raised to confuse visibility with liberation.

We are political middle schoolers because we’ve never been taught to grow up in our politics. We only to get louder, prettier, faster. We’re posting over and over again like kids screaming in the dark, hoping someone will flip the fucking light on. Maybe we need to stop screaming and start reading. Start building. Start connecting offline. Start making choices with consequence instead of content.

We need real political education. We need study groups and skill shares and co-ops and community defense and tenant unions and strike funds and repair networks and local coalitions and restorative practices and radical literacy and spaces where it is safe to not know yet. Spaces where maturity isn’t measured by how many infographics you’ve posted, but by how many people you’re willing to sit beside, teach with, and be changed by.

Awareness is not the end goal. It’s just the beginning. But only if you grow the fuck up.

The Role of Desensitization in Manufactured Consent

Who benefits from you seeing blown-up south west asian and north african (middle eastern and Arab here-forth referred to as Arab for readability purposes) bodies on your feed?

Here’s a hint: it’s not Arab people.

The media doesn’t show you Arab joy. It doesn’t show Arab resistance unless it’s distorted into terror. It doesn’t show Arab families laughing, building, dreaming, surviving. What it does show, over and over and over and over, is Arab bodies, broken. Bloodied. Lifeless. It shows you grief, but only when it’s distant. It shows you destruction. It teaches you that Arabs are always dying, always suffering, always just on the edge of being erased. It teaches you the natural state of Arab life is destruction.

And that’s not accidental.

This is a media landscape designed to soften the blow when the U.S. decides to bomb another city, fund another occupation. If you’re already numb, if you already believe that death is the natural state of Arab life, then the violence will not shock you in the ways it should. It will not outrage you. It will just makes sense.

That’s how consent is manufactured. Not just through lies, but through repetition. Through curated numbness. Through the slow, deliberate erasure of humanity until all that’s left is a statistic, a photo you scroll past, a people you’ve never really seen.

I can’t help but feel that the American left is playing directly into the empire’s hands every time we repost video after traumatic video of Arab people dying in Palestine. We tell ourselves it’s awareness. We call it solidarity. But what we’re really doing—what the algorithm is rewarding—is repetition without resistance. Grief without context. Death without dignity.

When all we show is suffering, we flatten an entire people into their pain. We strip them of complexity, joy, and resistance until they are just bodies. Bodies to scroll past, bodies to be used as evidence. But evidence for who? To convince who? And to what end?

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t look. We should look. But staring at carnage isn’t the same as understanding it. And reposting it without analysis, without strategy, without even asking whether the families consented is part of the problem.

The empire doesn’t fear your grief. It counts on it. It counts on you being so overwhelmed, so desensitized, that you confuse watching for witnessing and witnessing for action.

Yes, people should know about Palestinian suffering. But not solely through the lens of Palestinian murder. When death is the only doorway people walk through to learn about a people, they don’t learn love. They don’t learn culture. They don’t learn struggle. They learn to associate Palestinians with loss and they learn to expect it.

There’s a deep violence in only being seen once you’re dead.

Palestinians are poets, architects, students, theologians, fighters, singers, dancers, parents, bakers. They are living, breathing, imagining. They are resisting not just through protest or armed struggle, but through surviving, through laughing, through insisting on presence in a world that keeps trying to erase them.

If all we share are images of their death, we are helping finish them off.

It is not enough to say “look what they’ve done to these people.” We must also say: “look who these people are.” Not because it makes them more worthy of life, but because they are worthy of life. They deserve to be seen in life.

And this is when I start to get pissed off. Because if I only knew of Blackness through the lens of police killings and slavery, through state violence and generational trauma, what kind of image would that leave me with? What would that strip away from my desire for black liberation?

That’s the same erasure Palestinians are up against. You don’t humanize people by showing them dying. You humanize people by showing that they live. That they create. That they dream, that they fall in love, and raise kids, and mess up, and try again, and are normal fucking human beings. Culturally rich, and resistant human beings.

When I think about how many people only learned the word “Palestine” from a bloodied infographic or a story repost of a child’s body, I feel sick to my fucking stomach. Because I know what it feels like to have your people flattened into a body and a caption. I know what it means to have your history summarized only in pain.

It’s not education. It’s propaganda. It’s a guilty liberal’s instagram post. And it does nothing to stop the bombs.

Being Driven Mad

I suffer from treatment resistant bipolar depression, but I’ve always been partial to saying that I’m mad.

Not mentally ill. Not crazy.

Mad.

Not sick. Not unstable. Not struggling.

Mad.

Unhinged in a way that feels spiritual, ancestral, and politically appropriate. I am mad the way people who know too much have always been mad. I am mad in the way prophets were mad. In the way enslaved people who jumped ship were called mad. The way colonized people, century after century, have made eye contact with empire and decided they’d rather burn than kneel, mad. The kind of mad that sees the whole system for what it is and refuses to make peace with it.

I’ve been dropped by three therapists because they don’t know what to do with me.

Because when chemical imbalance isn’t the core issue, the drugs don’t fix shit. And when the trauma is systemic you can’t talk through shit. Or you can but you run the risk of making your therapist depressed.

Because It’s not chemical. It’s not a serotonin imbalance or bad genetics or a missed dose. Or maybe it is—but it’s also the slow rot of living in a country where people scroll past slaughter. Where your insurance only covers six therapy sessions, and your therapist tells you to practice gratitude when you cry about inequity. Where a diagnosis becomes another way to be managed, controlled, and explained away. Where healing is sold back to you through influencer sponsorships and the wellness-industrial complex.

When I say I’m mad, I mean it literally and politically. I mean I live on the edge of something unspeakable. I mean I have hit, burned and screamed. I mean I have prayed to gods I don’t believe in, just to ask them to do SOMETHING.

I hate how many people are comfortable.

Madness is not a disorder in this context. It’s clarity. It’s what happens when your spirit refuses to be anesthetized. It’s what happens when you still want justice in a world begging you to settle for a pacifier.

It is evidence. It is my body insisting that something is wrong.

I’m mad because I’ve seen too much, read far too much, and been asked to act like it’s normal. I am mad because I’ve been told to care but not too much. To speak but not too loudly.

I watch the world teach children how to repost genocide before it teaching them how to recognize propaganda.

I am mad because I know what’s behind the algorithm. I know what it costs to live inside the empire and pretend I’m not implicated. I know how violence gets rebranded as “humanitarian aid”.

And I refuse to call that knowledge depression.

This country wants to pathologize resistance. It wants to sedate the ones still screaming. It calls us unstable when we break down, but never asks what we’re breaking under. It says we’re sick for panicking, but not for adjusting. It offers mindfulness apps while Black and brown bodies pile up. It prescribes pills so we can keep going to jobs that make us want to die.

I do not want peace if it means silence. I do not want recovery if it means forgetting. I do not want stability if it means assimilation. I want a world where this kind of madness is no longer necessary. Until then, I will remain unwell. I will scream when they tell me to stay calm. I will mourn when they tell me to move on.

I am not just sad. I am not just tired.
I am mad.

Hope Within the System: A Privilege

There is a kind of hope that masquerades as morality. It shows up in voting booths. On “left” leaning news sources, and well-meaning social media campaigns. In calls for “civility”, “respectability” and “moral high ground” when the world is on fire. It shows up when people say “change takes time” as though time itself isn’t a weapon the system uses to wear people down. It shows up in incrementalist politics. In the fantasy of reform. It is not radical hope. It is not liberatory hope. It is hope within the system. Belief in the system. And it is a form of privilege.

Hope within the system is the belief that the current structures, whether that be policing, prisons, borders, capitalism, electoral democracy etc., can be modified enough to work fairly for all people. It is the belief that, if we pass the right laws, vote for the right people, or diversify the right institutions, we can live in a world that is just. This belief is not just naive, it is inaccessible.

It is a luxury that depends on you having had some measure of protection from the system’s violence. Because once you’ve been crushed by it, you can no longer bear to hope for its reform. You must instead fight for its end.

This kind of institutional hope is disproportionately held by those who still experience some kind of benefit or buffer within the system. White people who see racism as an aberration rather than the foundation of western civilization. Wealthy liberals who believe philanthropy, policy, and the nonprofit industrial complex are adequate responses to generational poverty. Citizens who believe in border security only because the borders are not built to keep them out. People who trust in police reform because they have never had to face a police officer high on power. If you still believe the system can work, it most likely hasn’t destroyed your life.

For the rest of us, those who have been surveilled, detained, excluded, evicted, criminalized, denied care, or left to die, this hope is not just foolish and naive. It is violent. It serves onlu to delay real change. It acts as a roadblock. This hope is delusion, that people live in while other people suffer. It tells the marginalized to be patient while the privileged sit at a table and negotiate the terms of our collective survival. And it feeds the lie that the system is broken, rather than functioning exactly as it was designed to.

Even worse, institutional hope is presented as virtue. The person who “believes in the system” is seen as calm, reasonable, mature. The radical, who demands abolition of the system, whether that be through redistribution, land back, reparation, refusal to participate etc., is seen as angry, extreme, hostile and unrealistic.

Real hope does not look like waiting. It does not look like voting for neoliberal politicians bought out by wealthy companies through lobbying and calling it activism. It is not digestible. Real hope looks like mutual aid. It looks like organizers who feed people while the state lets them starve or actively starves them. It looks like resistance that is messy and imperfect and relentless. It looks like people building new systems, not begging for old ones to change.

Hope in the system is a privilege. But there are other kinds of hope—hope in each other, in solidarity, in collective survival, and our ability to thrive. There is hope that doesn’t come from institutions, and that’s the only kind worth having.

Radical Hope as Discipline: World-Building and the Politics of Imagination

Radical hope is not a mood. It is not optimism. It is not a feeling you happen upon while watching the news or scrolling through disasters. It is not naive. In a world structured by violence, surveillance, extraction, and premature death, radical hope is not something that arrives, it is something you build piece by piece. It is a discipline. A daily practice. A political commitment. It is work.

Radical hope refuses to center what is likely and instead insists on what is necessary. It is the active belief that another world is possible, not because history guarantees it, but because we are willing to fight for it. It is the refusal to let our imaginations be colonized by the state or the algorithm. It is defiance and blueprint. A belief in the possibility of transformation. The insistence that we participate in creating it.

This kind of hope is world-building. It doesn’t settle for the “lesser evil.” It doesn’t look to what is, to what already exists, to determine what is viable. “How do we make this system more tolerable?”, wouldn’t know, not my goal. Instead focus on what systems must be dismantled so that all of us can live. Radical hope is not hope in patching up the world as it is. It focuses on demanding the world we should have, knowing damn well it is not something anyone will give to us.

Radical hope lives in the abolitionist who designs communities without police. It lives in the organizer who envisions housing as a right. It lives in the Indigenous futurist who sees land not as property, but as person. It lives in the disabled artist who imagines a world not built around productivity, but care. These people are not dreamers in the pejorative sense. They are not delusional. They are strategic architects of what we are told is impossible. They know that the work of liberation is creative and imaginative.

The state does not want you to imagine this. Capitalism does not want you to imagine this. Capitalism wants your dreams small. Your demands moderate. Your sense of reality confined to what already exists. This is why the radical imagination is dangerous. This is why it must be trained and practiced as disipline.

Everything we know now, every system that chews people up and spits them out, every structure that’s designed to keep some folks safe and everyone else disposable, started as somebody’s little daydream. Somebody’s sick little fantasy. Gerrymandering? That was the radical wet dream of a jackass who figured out that if he drew the lines just right, he could hold power forever without ever having to earn it. The prison industrial complex? The favorite bedtime story of generations of white supremacist capitalists who get off on punishment, control, and free labor. The slow auctioning off of our national parks to oil companies and timber barons? That didn’t just happen. Somebody imagined that. Somebody sat down and said: what if we turned public land into profit?

We like to talk about “the system” like it’s this inevitable thing. Like it just emerged from the ground fully formed. But systems don’t appear out of nowhere. Systems are made. Built. And before they were built, they were dreamed up. By people. Powerful people. Mostly white men. Men who owned other human beings. Men who believed land was theirs to steal and profit from. Men who saw indigenous life as an obstacle. Men who legalized rape and genocide and called it democracy.

Black people love to say, “We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” and yeah. Yes. Period. But we’re also living in somebody else’s dream, too. A nightmare dressed up as a functioning society. Because while our ancestors were dreaming up freedom, the people who owned or exploited them were dreaming up laws to stop them. For every visionary who imagined liberation, there was a monster sketching out the logistics of oppression. And those monsters had money, had armies, and had too much fucking time on their hands since they didn’t have to actually work.

So here we are. Navigating systems that were designed to kill us slowly or cage us fast. Trying to survive institutions that were never meant to include us, only to exploit, contain, and erase us. And we still survive. We still create. We still imagine. But survival alone can’t be the goal.

If all this, the redlining, the policing, the schools that feel like prisons, the actual prisons, the polluted neighborhoods, the voter suppression, the billionaires playing God, if all of this came from someone’s imagination, then that means imagination is a weapon. A tool. Powerful. And it’s time to consider what is possible when we use it. What happens when we start dreaming with the same intensity, but from a place of love, and rage, and community?

What if the future doesn’t come from their systems at all?

Radical hope is not passive. It does not come from waiting for justice to trickle down. It comes from participating in the struggle for a world you may never live to see. This is the hardest kind of hope to hold. It is not rewarded. It is not romantic. It is built in quiet moments: in community meetings, in blockades, in school curriculum rewritten from below, in mutual aid fridges, in prison visits, in poetry and art and diverse sci-fi movements which you should definitely be reading from.

Hope, in this sense, is a discipline because it requires doing, again and again, even when nothing changes. It is choosing to build anyway. Choosing to imagine anyway. Choosing to fight anyway. Even if you are tired. Even if you are grieving. Even if you are alone. It is the practice of looking at what is and refusing to accept it as all there is.

This kind of hope doesn’t demand certainty. It demands presence. Participation. Practice. Courage. Creativity. It says: I will keep dreaming beyond what is considered possible. I will keep reaching for a world that can hold all of us.

That is the promise, and the burden, of radical hope. Not that we believe things will be better soon. But that we build better things, even now.

When We Don’t Practice Hope

Hope is not a given. It doesn’t arrive naturally in times of crisis. It does not simply bubble up in the hearts of the oppressed, nor does it trickle down from public policy or presidential inauguration speeches. Hope must be practiced—or it disappears. And when we stop practicing hope. We become cynical. We become culturally, politically, and ethically numb.

We start scrolling past children under rubble. We watch mass death with the same attention we give a weather report. We start saying “That’s so sad,” and moving on, instead of “That’s disgusting, grab the guns.” We hear of genocide and check our notifications. We read headlines that should break us and feel... nothing. Or worse, feel annoyed. Feel inconvenienced. Helpless in a way that turns quickly into apathy.

This is not an accident.
This is not natural.
This is learned and intentional.

We live in a world designed to sever us from feeling. The endless news cycle, the performative politics, the rapid pace of consumer culture. The rapid pace of everything really. These things train us to dissociate. To tap out. To shrink emotionally. When everything is urgent, nothing is worth your time.

And yet, the consequences of this numbness are not neutral.
When we stop practicing hope, we stop believing people can change.
When we stop practicing hope, we stop organizing for a future we want.
When we stop practicing hope, we stop grieving.

When we stop grieving we stop caring. When we stop caring we stop protecting.

When we stop protecting, we stop holding the guilty accountable.
And when we stop protecting, we let power do what it wants always to do: destroy, kill, exploit. And without resistance. Without restraint.

Numbness is not safety. It is a surrender.

We confuse numbness with survival because feeling everything might wreck us.

It does wreck us. I have been wrecked. I write to you destroyed, demolished, grieving, deeply wounded, never really in a great place. But the truth is, not feeling will wreck you too, just slower, and quieter. We lose our capacity for awe. For risk. For moral clarity. We start calling injustice too complex to solve and evil too institutional to name. We mistake exhaustion for wisdom and inaction for neutrality.

But hope, radical, practiced, intentional hope, is resistance to all of that.

Hope is not a vibe. I mean it can be, but an important one. It is the discipline of refusing to give up on the idea that people are still worth saving, that solidarity still matters, that it is not too late to act, to grieve, to rage, to build.

Practicing hope means showing up when you’re jaded.
It means being honest about the pain without letting it steal your will to fight.
It means protecting your ability to feel in a culture trying to strip it away.

It means refusing numbness even when it’s easier. Especially when it’s easier.

Because without hope, we are not just passive.
We are pliable.
And pliable people are what power loves most.

So practice hope, not because it’s easy, or good for your mental health.
Practice hope because the alternative is complicity dressed up as detachment.
Practice hope because numbness is the language of empire.
Practice hope because you still can.

It Hurts Less When You Say It Out Loud

There’s a strange kind of pain that grows when it has nowhere to go. When you carry it alone. When you don’t know if you’re the only one feeling it, or if everyone else just got better at pretending. That pain multiplies in silence. It compounds in isolation. But when someone says it, actually says it, something cracks open. It hurts less when you say it out loud.

We have been taught to swallow our fears about the future. To flatten our rage into resignation. To reduce our grief to private burdens. We post, perform, nod in agreement, but we rarely speak with the kind of raw, trembling honesty that changes the air between us. Somewhere along the way, we stopped telling the truth about how bad things feel. We stopped being honest and upfront with each other about how badly we all want something better.

The world is burning. The system is killing. People are suffering. And still there are things worth saving. Still something else is possible. Still, we want to hope, even if we’re afraid to say it out loud.

Honest conversation is not small talk. It is not debate for the sake of discourse. It is what happens when we say: I don’t want this world to be normal anymore. It is what happens when someone says: I didn’t think anyone else felt this way. It is what happens when we stop posturing and start being radically honest.

A few months ago I started pretty blatantly asking people if they were okay, because I am very obviously and deeply not. And the great and horrible thing is no one is fine, no one is good, no one is content, and everyone is tired of this shit.

When we are vocal about our current realities and honest about what we want, when we speak our longings aloud without shame or cynicism, then that hope becomes something bigger than any one of us. It becomes a collective pulse. A shared declaration: We are not okay. We want something better. We want to design it. We are not done imagining. We are not done fighting. We are not done dreaming.

Because if we dream up this future together, then it belongs to all of us. Not just the loudest. Not just the most powerful. Not just the ones who always knew what to say. A future built from shared grief and shared vision is one that can actually hold us. All of us. Even the ones who are tired. Even the ones who are scared. Especially the ones who were never invited to dream before.

We cannot build a world that we are afraid to speak into existence.

So start talking. Actually talking. Not small talking. Not in slogans, don’t piss me off. Not in talking points. But in full sentences, with cracked and shaking voices, if need be. Let’s talk about what we’ve lost. Let’s talk about what we deserve. Let’s talk about what we haven’t given up on yet. Let’s name the things we need. Let’s name the things we love. Let’s name the future we want, not the future we’ve been told is realistic, but the one that is right.

Because I promise this all hurts less when you say it out loud.
And when you say it out loud, someone else might say it too.
And when enough of us say it, honestly, clearly, together, it starts to sound like a plan.

And when we plan for the future. We can create it.
But first we have to imagine it, and before that we must hope for it.

KERINA

Post-Script: This essay was inspired by conversations with quite a few people but main notables are below.

For Maryam, who never fails to embody Palestinian joy.

For Sebastian and Chris, who edit these drafts, actively as I write them and rarely complain.

For Angie, who thanked me for finally saying the quiet part out loud.