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Unlearning Hopelessness
by C.A. Matthews
Seen on X: https://x.com/aashisjo/status/1947314052016824491
@DrNeenaJha Seriously what do we do?? We’ve protested, boycotted, campaigned, donated, written articles, pressured our government & institutions
@aashisjo What do we do? We organize real action, not performances. We disrupt the empire by refusing to work. We do not ask them to stop, we force them to stop.
While I was pruning back the dying raspberry canes in our organic garden, I contemplated just how hopeless the task was. The monsoon rains dumps this season had encouraged more raspberry canes and briers to grow than usual, then further rains drowned half of them with the excessive water around their roots. The out-of-control new brier growth was choking some of the older fruit bearing ones.
Why bother? I thought. I should give up now and avoid any more scrapes and scratches.
But I didn’t give up. I kept on until the task was finished. Why? Because I happen to like eating raspberries. I helped plant the first small canes in our garden, and they’d graciously had fed me (and others) over the years. So, I gritted my teeth and kept pruning. I vowed not to give up on them, especially when they needed my help the most.
Gardening is very much like fighting the unjust system we live in. Sometimes things go well, but most of the time it’s chaos and all hands-to-the-pumps—or pruning shears. Raspberries and other living things can be as unpredictable as the powers-that-be who control and punish us whenever we deviate from their plans. But we can’t give up on fighting back against the oligarchs no matter how tough things get. We’ve got to keep on hacking through the jungle and prune those briers. We’ve got fruit to harvest.
There’s been a lot of talk among psychologists and therapists about learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is when we believe we cannot change painful circumstances, so we stop trying and just endure what’s happening.
This “just enduring” behavior describes the actions of the majority of humankind in the year 2025, in my opinion. We are enduring, but we’re not growing and producing fruit that will feed ourselves and others now and in the future. We’ve thrown in the towel along with our gardening secateurs, and because of that choice to give up, our circumstances will not change for the better.
Some psychologists believe that it’s actually learned hopelessness or a hopeless depression that keeps us from fighting back against painful circumstances. It’s easy to understand why and how depression sets in. Have you ever scrolled through your social media stream to check out the headlines or look at the memes?
While the odds of us succeeding in our goals to make the world a better place for all may be astronomical, we can at least try to fight the corrupt system and make some things better, right? The challenge is that we’ve heard too many horror stories and learned from others how hopeless the fight has become for them. We start to believe that it’s hopeless to even try and change things...
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