Social, economic, ecological, cultural collapse is on many people’s minds. With the world tilting. With logic seemingly abandoned. How can one make worthy choices? Indeed, why choose at all? This is a serious question that may impact a great many lives. Expectations of societal collapse can immobilize people and at this moment, in the U.S., young people in particular often seem plunged into depressed passivity.

Put differently, if the four horsemen of the apocalypse are inexorably coming our way, why should we do anything other than seek personal survival? More, if facts aren’t always facts, truths aren’t always truths, and lies aren’t always lies, why try to navigate choices that may not even be options?

I am not young. I’d like to be, but seventy nine is not the new young. I can look at the young, consult the young, even try to communicate with the young. But to do so, it helps to have some idea where the young are at. How about those between eighteen and forty? That huge slice of humanity certainly aren’t all of one mind. On the one hand, they have many different backgrounds and experiences. On the other hand, even with all the variation, I get the impression they also have many commonalities.

I suspect most young people see little to no welcoming future. They expect collapse. Climate catastrophe. Wealth gap cages, AI Armageddon. Wars begetting more wars. Another pandemic. Constant lies. Maniacal manipulations. Many young people would love to be merely alienated. That would be a step up. Many young people look around, prospects appear grim, that is their truth. They see doom and doom alone bearing down. Their eyes tell them: Watch your step. Dodge on-coming horrors. Forget about thriving. Forget about fulfillment. Forget about hope. Remember to survive.

So what can a young person do? Should you get up and think to yourself, let me at the world? I am ready and willing to make it better. I am eager to live fully. To care widely. To do with others what needs doing. Or does it feel wiser to hunker down? I will care for self, family, and maybe a few friends. I will hope to survive and, on the other side, if I am still breathing, I will try to make things better. Is commitment naive delusion?

Not only the young feel thusly. I suspect we elderly do too. But for the young, such feelings stifle the fire and confidence of youthfulness. High school, maybe college or your first job. Living should not be such a downer. It should make sense to look forward. To step up and out. To make what is bad better. To enjoy and expand what is good. It should not make sense to hide your eyes and hunker down. Yet the horrifying dangers are undeniably real. Whether you look through glass half-closed eyes, or  even through wide-open eyes, the future does look savagely grim. Should we resign to that fate?

There is a logic to resignation. I won’t deny it. It isn’t crazy. If you are literally over the cliff and plummeting down, there is not much point flailing about. If you know the rock you are pushing up hill will never reach the top but will instead roll back and crush you, it is not crazy to not push it up. Perhaps more relevant, if there is a lion rushing at you, you might run or perhaps you would play dead hoping it isn’t hungary for you. You won’t buck up, stand tall, and try to beat it off. But to resign to social collapse is a self-fulfilling choice. It loses because it accepts loss without a fight. It is what Trump, his puppet master billionaires, and their jealous millionaires all fervently crave. It is fascism’s fuel. And it is also not crazy, but also not smart.

Suppose, switching gears, you are an organizer. You have reasoned hope that people can collectively hold off collapse, prevent calamity and beyond that change society to remove the causes of injustice and fundamentally alter outcomes from depressingly grim to inspiringly fulfilling. You believe movements can raise costs that can force gains that stave off climate catastrophe, hyperbolic war, economic dissolution, AI apocalypse, and all forms of collapse for long enough to let movements grow and develop sufficient solidarity and commitment to change society’s fundamental features and make another world real. As such an organizer, what do your words, your actions, your organizations, and your life choices need to accomplish?

One thing they need to do, supposing young people’s minds and moods, and indeed most people’s minds and moods are in any significant degree as battered as I have suggested, is to undercut cynicism, conquer defeatism, and eliminate resignation by fostering reasoned hope and ambitious desire among youth, the middle aged, and even octogenarians.

Organizers must overcome widespread lack of hope that what people say and do can matter and that activism can divert collapse long enough for movements to not only win immediately needed gains but also in time eliminate the institutional causes of crises and even win in their place institutional causes of liberation and fulfillment. We must overcome belief that to prevent collapse and win another world is impossible.

But what can do that? To repeat over and over how bad things are—which young people already feel, intuit, and outright know—won’t help. To perpetually pound people with images of hellish collapse—which images already batter young people’s lives into torpor—won’t help.

Organizers need to convey what warding off calamity looks like. What a better world can be. And how individuals can act together to inspire groups into more motion, and how groups in motion can raise costs that compel even psychopathic politicians and coldly rationale oligarchs to change their policies in an escalating process that leads all the way to our removing the institutions that define and empower injustice while we put in their place institutions that liberate and elevate everyone. Enough torpor. Enough resignation. It is time to have reasoned hope. It is time to act on reasoned hope. But how?

We confront a situation. We see what is at stake. We want to navigate the situation. How can we sensibly do that when, at bottom, the context itself is not sensible? It may not be what it claims. It may not even be what it appears. Do this with that result? Do that with this result? How do we choose? What if the former choice may actually have the later result not the former one—and vice versa? Then what? Hunker down? We know society is always full of tumult. But our society is currently ridiculous. How to proceed?

First, is it really ridiculous, meaning is it hard to determine even what is and what isn’t the case, much less what will be the consequences of doing this or that? Two people face the same situation and make virtually opposite choices about how to impact it. Do they have different aims—which could make their opposite choices both sensible despite being so contradictory, because in that case they desire opposite outcomes? Or do they desire similar or even the same outcomes, but perceive the situation that they simultaneously confront dramatically differently? They desire the same ends, but they perceive different facts.

I am not talking about I see the economy failing, you see the economy triumphing, but it is because I desire higher wages, better conditions and lower prices while you desire higher profits. I am talking about you, her, and I are workers who want better for ourselves and if asked, also for all workers. But you vote Republican, smiling. She votes Democrat, smiling. I vote Democrat, holding my nose. And our friend doesn’t vote at all. If we all have the same interests, want the same outcomes, why do we travel such different paths? I am suggesting that “the same interests, different paths situation” is now the frequent situation for many and perhaps even most choices that we all make, political and not political.

Vaccinate or not? Some choose one, some the other. What pill to take? I want this, you want that. What job to prepare for? Me here, you with the same desire, there. What college to apply to? Again, same desires, let’s say same grades, same everything. Me this one, you that one. And so on: What diet to choose? What actor, athlete, or team to root for? And, now more to the point, what economic program to support? To vote or not to vote? Who to vote for? To demonstrate or not, strike or not, occupy or not, organize or not?

If the pill may poison, if the job may evaporate, if the diet may fatten, if the actor, athlete, or team may be corrupt, if the economic program may impoverish, if the vote may carry harm, if the demonstration, strike or occupation may worsen conditions, if to organize may be futile—or in each case if the result might be the opposite, or might look one way but be the opposite way—how can we rationally choose? And how should we relate to others who choose differently?

To choose actions, facts about the context matter. Our capacities and inclinations matter. Our aims matter. We should assess all three case by case. To decide what to say, what to write, what to do, we should determine in each specific case as best we can the relevant facts of the matter, our capacities and inclinations and what we seek, and then we should determine the likely consequences of the available choices until we favor the likely consequences of one choice more than of others.

If we differ with someone else’s choice, then what? Do we differ because we have each chosen rationally but we have different aims/values? Then we should discuss aims and values? Or do we differ because we have pretty much the same aims and values, but we see the facts of the situation differently? Then we should discuss the facts. And then we should act. But to instead do nothing. That is resignation. That is the fifth and most deadly horseman of the apocalypse. It is us sealing our own feared fate. It is Fascism’s fuel. Whatever age we may be.