Keep Hopepunk Alive
"There’s good reason to anticipate a future that’s <insert not awful>."
Welcome to The Experiment, not the bothersome knockoff podcast of the same name but the original Substack samizdat weekly. This week we’re all about the hopepunk. Except for Jack Hughes, whose on another crazy rant about the Royals and a cartoon.
As always, we offer recommendations on what to do (making TikTok pasta), read (Jon Acuff’s Soundtracks, watch (Kajillionaire), and listen to (Yola’s new album, Stand For Myself).
But first, I got a text from a friend last Sunday that set my week on fire.
On a text thread with friends from New Mexico, New Jersey, Texas, New York, and Boston, the one from Boston lobbed this one over the wall:
Favor to ask: If anyone’s got recs for hope punk, pls share. Go-to song, podcast, that thing that makes you think “there’s good reason to anticipate a future that’s <insert not awful>.” Someone you read (or once read) who’s been through worse? (I’m trying to not re-read Weisel’s “Night”.)
My psychiatrist asked the other day if I need to try new meds. I countered that they wouldn’t shift the observable reality of the world being on fire, so what would change? So that’s the place I’m in.
Longtime readers of The Experiment know that this is a safe place for hopepunk, which began as a literary movement on Tumblr. “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk,” wrote Alexandra Roland. “Pass it on.”
Hopepunk defines a genre of people fighting for the good against the overwhelming bad and never giving up. Sense8 was hopepunk. Pacific Rim? Absolute crap, but still hopepunk. Mad Max: Fury Road. Hell yeah, hopepunk. Antecedents include Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Martian, and, as much as I don’t particularly care for them, The Lord of the Rings series in which we find the hopepunk manifesto.
“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.”
But do these stories, to borrow my friend’s sad phrase, “shift the observable reality of the world being on fire”? In fact, I have spent the last couple years working on a book about how a mythos built upon a story of people fighting to the death against overwhelming odds can profoundly mess with a society’s foundations. People like my friend are Lear’s Fool, proof manifest of depressive realism, the sad fact that deeply depressed people see the world most accurately. There are studies. You could look them up.
Or you could read poetry. “The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children.” That line comes from “Good Bones,” the poem that made an obscure Ohio poet named Maggie Smith famous and successful, so successful in fact that it upset the apple cart of her marriage. Next came divorce, Trump, the plague, the rise of … /gestures vaguely at the mainstreaming of QAnon in the Republican Party/… all this. In retrospect, fifty percent was an extremely conservative estimate.
Bullocks to all that. The great thing about bad news is that you can burn the paper it’s printed on and dance in the dark, because all is not lost, and I have proof. Ho, what fun!
My friend is Lear’s Fool, proof manifest of depressive realism, the sad fact that deeply depressed people see the world most accurately.
Let’s review the assignment, shall we? My friend, whom we shall call Boston, asked for hopepunk evidence that “there’s good reason to anticipate a future that’s <insert not awful>.” The great thing about observable reality, as Boston called it, is that it only exists because it is observable. There’s plenty of reality that isn’t, which is fine as far as reality is concerned, but we’re focused on what we can observe, and therein lies tremendous hopepunk power and leads to the first of three recommendations:
First, read Soundtracks by Jon Acuff, who writes wildly successful and surprisingly practical self-help books.
Wait! Come back! Did I say “self-help”? Sorry. I should have anticipated that. Think of Acuff as a guy who gives DIY advice for your brain. Let me translate this into Bostonese: Jon Acuff tells you how to get over your f****** self and how to fix your sh** so sit the f*** down why don’t you. F***.
Besides, Boston: You asked for hopepunk. This is on you. Sometimes hopepunk is a nice man in khakis from Nashville.
Soundtracks is about what your brain is doing to you all the time, not just Boston, but all of us: overthinking, which he says “isn't a personality trait. It's the sneakiest form of fear.” The good news here is that while you might be stuck with your brain, you can teach it to flip overthinking into a superpower. I know, Acuff is relentlessly positive. He makes Ted Lasso look moody, but he backs it up with science.
Sometimes hopepunk is a nice man in khakis from Nashville.
In fact, what he recommends is exactly what Boston asked for, a redirection of thoughts to take advantage of something called neuroplasticity, which is your brain’s power to change itself by changing your thoughts. Add to that neurogenesis, which is the fresh supply of baby nerve cells you wake up to every day, innocent of yesterday’s bad thoughts, green troops awaiting your orders, and you have the makings of something powerful between your ears.
Go read Soundtracks. This isn’t a book report. Do your own work. But until you do, steal these two ideas:
Say Good: You probably have a negative mantra running on a subroutine in your brain, talking you down, telling you that everything is horrible. And what happens? You see evidence of that everywhere. So flip it. Acuff adopted the mantra “Things usually work out for me” and started seeing evidence everywhere. Did the reality of the world change? No. But his observable reality did. Just now, I realized my unconscious mantra for years has been “Everyone is taking things way too seriously.” People, I see evidence of this all the time.
See good. Once you start noticing proof of your mantra, you begin to see the clown that was in your field of vision all along. This is more than Mr. Rogers’ advice to look for the helpers during a school shooting. Even in a world gone objectively mad, there is still provable good. Right now, typing this, I can feel the air-conditioned air brushing the skin and hairs on the top of my hand. That would have been happening whether I noticed it or not, but by noticing it I have made it part of my observable reality.
The second recommendation is how some of us are reacting to COVID-19 in the most hopepunk way of all. It is logical and tempting to succumb to rage at the latest surge fueled by the unvaccinated. I do not like how I feel at reading the obituaries of COVID deniers. Part of my day job is to participate in a weekly conference call in which two things have become constant: We are running out of ICU beds in Texas, and this would all go away if people would just get vaccinated and wear masks. We seem too stupid as a species to survive.
So why is COVID-19 hopepunk? In Texas, a kid faces overwhelming odds. School starts on August 17, and where I live, Austin, is in stage 5. There are no more stages after that. And the governor, facing re-election, is concerned about criticism he received last year when he closed businesses and let schools go virtual. Now he says schools only get funding for in-class instruction, which is obviously the best for children as long as they wear masks, but it’s scary for parents, especially for those with kids under 12 who can’t get vaccinated yet. Oh, also the governor won’t let school districts require masks.
A parent exists between that rock and this hard place: It’s cruel to deny a child a classroom. Even the CDC says classrooms are critical for a child’s development. The best place for a child’s ultimate well-being is also a place where they are exposed to an airborne virus—and the governor is forbidding schools from mandating masks.
Parents are afraid, to be sure, but they’re not backing down, which is where we (finally) get to the hopepunk part of COVID-19. There is nothing in the governor’s order preventing parents from making their kids wear masks, and if it’s the parent’s wish, by gum and by god, then schools are duty-bound to follow the parent’s instruction for their child. It seems by taking away the authority of the school district, he inadvertently made parents more powerful than ever.
Curious about how all this might shake out, the school district sent out a survey to parents asking whether they intended to send their kids to school wearing a mask, and more than 80% said yes. The numbers were surprisingly consistent by age group. Even parents of middle schoolers and high schoolers who are eligible for the vaccine and have been getting jabbed all summer are sending their charges into classrooms with masks. And the more marginalized the community, the higher the support for masks. The people with the least power now have the most.
The people with the least power now have the most.
I don’t know how all this will work out, though I suppose if four out of five kids in elementary school are wearing masks, the fifth is going to put one on without a fuss. There aren’t any anti-maskers in the third grade. They’re a pretty obedient bunch. One of the local teachers unions is also asking its people to mask up, and there’s a school board meeting on Monday when they’re scheduled to talk about all this. Reinforcements are on the way.
I’m struck by the heroism of these parents, contemplating risk and, calmly or not, planning to send their child into a classroom during a COVID spike with a mask on. You can know something is safe and still feel scared. To put fear aside and act on what you know while the governor is doing his thing is hard. We are here, stuck in another surge. We can rage against politicians or we can pick up a mask and do it ourselves. These parents, teachers, and kids down here in Texas are hopepunk.
Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
A world on fire does not burn forever. A divorce decree is not a death warrant. Have you forgotten your Cher, Boston? Do you believe in life after love? Even Maggie Smith got over her shit and followed up the success of “Good Bones” with her biggest seller yet, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity and Change, a magical jumble of a memoir, aphorisms, affirmations, and encouragement. Can you imagine writing the definitive poem of the Trump era and then following it up with a book about becoming happy again? Making yourself happy again after accepting that at least half world is a permanent dumpster fire is so hopepunk I had to stop typing for a while and smile in silent contemplation.
That’s all I’ve got: Look for the good, wear a mask, and keep moving. Actually, I do have one more example of hopepunk, and it’s, you, Boston. To sit with despair and to reach out to friends in search of better places to place her attention is not weakness. Asking friends for help is hopepunk. Congratulations, Boston, you’re the one you’ve been waiting for. You are the good reason to anticipate a future that’s <insert not awful>."
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Más
How we’re getting through this
Making TikTok pasta
Making mayo-marinated chicken with chimichurri
What I’m reading
Goldenrod, by Maggie Smith
Soundtracks, by Jon Acuff
What I’m watching
On the last night my youngest son and I would share an evening at home before he goes off to college, we made TikTok pasta (see “How We’re Getting Through This”) and watched Kajillionaire. His review nailed it: “It started weird and kept getting weirder.” This was a positive review. Debra Winger is unrecognizable. This is still a positive review.
What I’m listening to
You don’t need to be cool to listen to Yola’s Stand for Myself, but listening to it does makes you cooler.
Torres’ “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head” sounds like gold found in a stream and not something made. She started out as a Christian singer, then went Nashville, and now she’s a Pitchforky singer-songwriter.
A bunch of you have expressed umbrage of varying degrees of sincerity that The Atlantic has a podcast called The Experiment, the very same name this newsletter landed on after a few iterations. In an example of either time being a flat circle or God having a sense of humor, this week The Experiment-come-lately featured Forget the Alamo and co-author Bryan Burrough.
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