Exercising the Hope Muscle

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about capacity.

We live in a time of constant information. News, stories, images, opinions, suffering, injustice, urgency. It is endless. And from what I witness in myself and in those around me, I believe most human beings don't have the capacity to hold this much at once.

It makes sense when I think about it. For most of human history, our ancestors lived within a relatively small world. They knew a limited circle of people, and news travelled slowly. Life moved at walking pace, or at the speed of animals. Outside of travel, visits, or times of war or invasion, people mostly dealt with what was happening within their family, their neighbours, and the landscape they could actually see and move through.

Our nervous systems evolved around that scale. Responsibility, care, grief, joy, and agency were held in a human-sized way. There were clearer boundaries between what was close and what was distant. Not always fair, not always right, but shaped in a way that made sense to the body.

Then, over just a few hundred years, and especially since the rise of the internet, that scale has expanded beyond anything we were designed for. We are now asked to take in events from the past, present, and imagined future, at speeds and volumes that treat us more like machines than organic beings. We are expected to hold the lives and struggles of people we will never meet, across continents and systems, all at once.

Something has had to give.

I don’t think the problem is that people don’t care. I think many of us care deeply. Perhaps too deeply for bodies and nervous systems that were never designed for this level of awareness.

For some, that overload hardens into judgement, fear, rejection, or hostility towards difference. For others, especially those who want to live with openness and who recognise the harm caused by injustice, it shows up differently. We see what is happening. We want to be part of the change. And yet, faced with the complexity of life and the scale of power structures, we can end up feeling very small, or deluded into some sort of super human complex that we can somehow fix it all if we just try hard enough, a delusion that ends up in collapse or conflict.

Awareness carries its own cost. And when we have paid more than we have to give in terms of capacity, it can show up in so many ways - feeling flooded, angry, numb, or ashamed that we are not doing more. Small in the face of everything that feels broken. Powerless rather than mobilised.

So we can end up caught between two painful options. Either we switch off and feel guilty, or we stay switched on, often driven by a kind of unspoken moral pressure. As if not knowing everything, or not witnessing every harm, somehow makes us complicit. And in staying switched on, we become overwhelmed.

I keep wondering if there is another way.

I know I’m not alone in this. There are many forms of activism, and many ways people have tried to respond to injustice over time. Some activism is highly visible and public, such as marches, protests, strikes, or civil disobedience. Some works within existing systems, through voting, organising, campaigning, or legal action. Some happens quietly and locally, through mutual aid, community care, creative expression, or behind-the-scenes support. All of these matter, and all have played a role in shaping change.

Exploring the diverse facets of activism, this infographic illustrates eight ways to take action: Protest & Demonstration, Organising & Campaigning, Voting & Institutional Change, Mutual Aid & Community Care, Art, Storytelling & Culture, Education & Conversation, Everyday Choices & Relationships, and Hope, Imagination & Visioning.

What we don’t always talk about is the inner fuel that sustains any of this over time.

What if a sustainable, and potentially more organic, less mechanistic form of activism begins not with trying to hold everything, but with noticing what is already here that we want, and building from there. Small pockets of power, goodness, moments of dignity, acts of care, ordinary fairness and the quiet ways people look after one another every day. Not as a denial of what is wrong in the world, but as a way of staying connected to what is alive, what is possible, and then choosing how to extend that into places where it is not yet present.

I think of this as exercising the hope muscle. Hope not as blind optimism, but as a practice. Something we strengthen by paying attention. By naming what we see and letting that take root in our hearts and imaginations.

From that place, action feels different. Less driven by guilt. Less shaped by shame. More rooted in what we can actually offer, where we are, with the lives we are already living.

I’ve been sitting with a few questions, and I’d love to offer them here.

• Where do you already see fairness, kindness, or care, even in small ways?

• Can you think of a recent moment that gave you hope about people, the world, or life itself?

• If there were a little more of that in the world, in very practical terms, what would it look like?

• What feels possible for you, in your own life, to help you exercise your hope muscle more?

• What feels possible for you, even in the smallest way, to help you act from that place of hope?

• Anything else connected to this article that you would like to say?

  
  

I want to offer this writing and questions to you as an invitation to notice, imagine, and respond in a way that feels true to you.

Then, if you would like to, I’m inviting you to share a short voice note in response to one or more of these questions.

There is no right way of responding. You could reject everything I have said and have a different viewpoint, you could agree, or you could share a different angle completely. I only ask for the communication of views to be respectful and by voice note.

Your response can be a sentence, a story, a reflection, or a simple noticing. Whatever comes naturally. Because sometimes hope grows quietly, in the reflecting, and then in the telling.

You can email your voice note to jolene.joyethic@gmail.com, or send it via WhatsApp if you have my number. Deadline: Thursday 5th February. I will then combine extracts of what you send into a short feature to share on the February episode of the Joy Ethic Show, in time for World Day of Social Justice.