I’m so scared for the future and it feels hopeless.
I’m afraid to talk to my friends and family about how bad my mental health is right now because I don’t want them to try to hospitalize me or something.
I just feel like I’ve already experienced the best moments in my life and all I have to look forward to is being a wage slave, debt, and dying alone.
I know that I need to have some kind of purpose to dedicate myself to but I don’t want to do anything. I get so drained from work that I spend all my time off playing video games or watching TV just to recharge so I can make it through the work week. It just feels like a pointless cycle where I work so I can afford treats to make it bearable to work.
My job isn’t even difficult, and it’s remote and pays really well. But it’s so pointless. It’s honestly sickening how much harder people work to actually benefit society for not even half as much. I’m aware that I’m extremely privileged in this regard, but that also makes me feel even more hopeless. If living is this uncomfortable for me, so many more people must feel even worse.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how scary it will be to get old. My husband is a little older than me and doesn’t take great care of himself, so most likely he will die first. It’s very unlikely that we will have children, and also I think it’s gross to have kids just so you could have caretakers. My siblings are also older. I’m scared to be senile living alone or being abused in a nursing home. I guess it’s possible that we’ll all die a lot younger due to climate change.
I feel like the only things keeping me going are the fear of pain from dying and how my dogs and husband depend on me. I feel like if there was a button I could press to be instantly painlessly dead, I would push it (maybe I should move to Canada?).
I know that my problems are small compared to a lot of people here, and I’m sorry if this post comes across as insensitive. I feel like I just had to get these thoughts out of my head and I really love and appreciate this community. Thank you for listening.
Find ways to engage with organizing, even the most meager of ways will give you that sense of purpose.
Copypasta that keeps me going and I hope you find some solace in it as well.
Without hope you are lost. Communism is at its heart based on faith: faith that there is an alternative to capitalism, that a better world is possible, that we might someday live without poverty and war, starvation and illiteracy, slavery and artlessness and depression and all the other symptoms of the parasitic infection that is capital.
When Kim Il-Sung watched his country decimated, half its buildings flattened by American bombs, did he lose hope? When Mao was facing down the dual threat of the Kuomintang and the Japanese imperialists, watching his brothers be put to the sword and his sisters sold off as comfort women, did he lose hope? When Fidel Castro was hiding in the jungle with less than a dozen guerillas, did he lose hope? No. Defeatism in the Cuban Revolutionary Army was punishable by death–and they in turn achieved the impossible.
Make no mistake, hope is the most potent weapon against capital that there is. Without it we are nothing. With it, we are everything. We are the indestructible heart of human liberation, steadily beating until the inevitable day that that hope spreads far beyond yourself, to places you never thought possible, to the creation of something so much larger than you that it dwarfs your most wild of communist dreams.
And this day is inevitable comrade, as long as you don’t let your hope dwindle. Feed it like the raging fire that it is; have faith, even when there is no evident reason to do so. Things may look hopeless in the US right now. That’s exactly how the bourgeoisie wants things to look. You lose hope, they win. You don’t, and they will lose. They will fold like paper tigers before the power of your hope. You let hope die and you let down not just yourself but the rest of your species, who are relying on you as one of the scant few to see past the propaganda of the imperialist core to lead them, hope in hand, to liberation.
Never give up hope.