Couldn’t Be Me: Why there’s still hope in an unjust world

Welcome to Couldn’t Be Me, a weekly advice column where I solicit your personal dilemmas and help out as best as I can. Have something I can help you with? Find me @_Zeets.

Anyone who is conscious of life around them knows we do not live in the best possible world. Far from it. This existence that has been made for us unfairly benefits those who are lucky to have been born at the top.

Knowledge of the state of things can be disheartening. So many obstacles prevent even the smallest change to the status quo that it’s easy to believe it’s pointless to fight for a better life. Everything around us suggests our children will suffer in the same monstrous world we did.

The question is, what’s the point of trying? This week, we address our great existential crisis, and why fighting is so important for future generations.

Anonymous:

How does one fight off feelings of bitterness and futility in our current age? Growing inequality, rampant government ineptitude — as a mother of a Colombian immigrant and an Afro-Cuban, I can’t shake the feeling that my generation isn’t going to do better than generations past. How do we come to terms that the lives our parents envisioned for us aren’t going to be the reality?

CBM:

This feeling that everything is pointless is probably the most persistent problem I’ve encountered in this advice column and on social media. Even those who still have hope see that hope as absurd.

With so much evidence that this world is rigged against regular people — in every social sphere, in almost every country, and for so long — bitterness is understandable. It doesn’t take long into adulthood for the badness of the world to crush the delusions we grew up with, like believing the world is fair, and the biggest factor in our lives is ourselves.

Yet, as the person that I am, someone who does want a better world, I just can’t buy into the futility of it all. I adhere to John Ruskin’s position from “Poverty Makes All Unhappy”:

“For my own part, I will put up with this state of things, passively, not an hour longer. I am not an unselfish person, nor an evangelical one; I have no particular pleasure in doing good; neither do I dislike doing it so much as to expect to be rewarded for it in another world. But I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else I like, and the very light of the morning sky has become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly.”

Maybe the belief of change is a delusion in its own way. But what this bad world, and the people who it benefits, wants is for us to think badness is natural and unchangeable. The most defeating idea that you can believe in, and the most beneficial for the bad actors of the world, is this is just the way things are.

The truth is the future is still to be determined. Borges wrote in “The Garden of Forking Paths”: “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.” And Angela Davis said: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

There are so many factors against us in the fight for a better world, but that fight hasn’t ended, and won’t end no matter how much it seems like it has. The state of the world is a precarious thing; that’s the essence of life. Societal structures maintain certain evils. But those structures are unnatural, and to dismantle them you have to be able to look at the world and see it as malleable. You have to know the reason everything is bad is because it has been made so, and those who shaped it do not have a God-given right to that design.

In this world, we also have protests and revolutions taking place all over. Whether many, or even any, of them will be successful is yet to be seen, and what comes after revolution is always a delicate game. But the feeling behind a revolution is critical and heartening to me. It’s people looking at an absurd and unequal world and saying they no longer want to live in it. That they want a better future. That the lives our parents envisioned for us is still attainable. That we should have a path to make of our lives what we choose. That we shouldn’t exist to be exploited and belittled by those who have wealth and status.

The idea behind the anger is there’s a dignity to existence and to the work we do and have done, and that this world doesn’t belong only to those at the top.

Anger doesn’t always have to manifest in a country-wide movement. Even the recent protest in New York against police physically abusing citizens over subway fare evasion is a fight for a world as regular people believe it should be.

I can’t begrudge anyone who is angry and bitter about the state of the world. I think you should be. Having those feelings signifies you see the world for what it is. But the only way anything has ever gotten better for anyone — at an individual level, up to big fundamental changes in society — is knowing things can change. This world may be full of greedy, cruel, and unforgivable monsters, but you don’t have to settle into the darkness where they are most comfortable.

Fuller:

My question for you is I’m trying to generate even a smallish buzz for my own soccer content on Instagram/Twitter, but I can’t seem to get anything to generate interest. Do you have any advice on how to get clicks?

CBM:

Getting clicks isn’t my area of expertise, to be honest. I can’t think of many things I’ve written that could be described as “popular”. My most highly-trafficked articles are usually comments on timely moral issues.

I would think the best route to gain a following would be to get your work in front of prominent soccer social media accounts and see if they will tweet or retweet your content. The other option, which would get your name out as well as generate some money, would be to pitch content to different outlets.

I owe a lot to places like Eurosport for popularizing some of the work I did when I was younger. Instagram seems a bit easier with hashtags and such. Building a name or brand for yourself is unfortunately a grind. Concentrate on being a part of the conversation in those media spaces. Just don’t save all of your best work for your tweets (I know my editors are rolling their eyes at this).