the.com/hopelessness
the feeling that the tunnel has no end, drawn by a brain that's drastically wrong
means The state of believing that things will not improve and that no effort can change them — a heavy certainty that the future holds nothing better.
from Built straightforwardly in English from 'hope' plus the suffix '-less' (meaning 'without,' a cousin of 'loose') plus '-ness' (which turns a quality into a thing you can name). 'Hope' itself is an old Germanic word, related to Dutch 'hoop' and German 'Hoffnung,' though its deeper roots are murky. So the word is literally 'the condition of being without hope' — assembled, brick by honest brick, from three modest parts.
- learned trait
- Dogs given inescapable shocks stopped trying, even when escape opened
- clinical flag
- Hopelessness predicts suicide risk better than depression itself
- bad forecaster
- Humans routinely overestimate how long pain will last
- the irony
- It feels like truth but functions as a symptom
the lost generation — american writers like hemingway and fitzgerald who felt disillusioned after world war i, 1920s paris
the great depression — 1929-1939 economic collapse that devastated millions with unemployment reaching 25% in the us
silent spring era — rachel carson's 1962 book documenting environmental collapse that sparked despair before the modern green movement