When I was 22 I gave up hope.
It was necessary, a way to keep myself alive, but I don’t know that it was a conscious decision so much as a fait accompli.
Almost 30 years late, and I’m still snagged on that word, hope: hope you’re feeling better; hope it goes well; etc. I didn’t use it at all, for years, but sometimes there’s no good way to avoid the word without drawing attention to its avoidance. So, I use it, sparingly, and always with a mental reservation.
I gave it up because I was broken, as a person. I may or may not still be broken, and perhaps I won’t ever get past those breaks without at least a handshake with hope, but I have managed to put together a life without it.
It’s hard, and I wouldn’t particularly recommend it to anyone, but if you have to abandon hope, you can, and live.
The loss of hope is, or can be, less a tossing-away than an uncovering: you’ll see things, in this hope-less life, that you wouldn’t otherwise. I can’t say if this new sight is worth it, relatively speaking, but, again, there is a kind of clarity, here.
This is how I’m coming to see my response to the 2016 elections. Something broke inside of me, and I couldn’t get a handle on it. Now, I’m thinking that I had a kind of hope in American politics, a hope I never really considered, never really recognized, and that now that’s gone.
Again, a hard thing, but not the worst thing. Again, I gain a sight, a sense of the meanness of this country, which, however maddening, is useful to have.
The differences between the personal and the political hope-loss are that I didn’t know I had any left to lose, and that I thought I already knew how the US could be; that’s what made election night so unbelievably painful.
A more significant difference is that I ended up in a place where there are already a hell of a lot of people—mostly, people of color—who had discarded hope long ago. They haven’t given up; they just don’t expect that everything will somehow turn out right. No, there is work to be done.
This work would be easier, I’d think, if there were hope; or maybe it would just be easier to avoid the work. (I have evidence from my personal life to support both possibilities.) Regardless, there is work to be done.
AbsurdBeats 
In some ways my own coming to terms with the general mindlessness even brutishness of the vast majority of human-doings was a kind of mournful and often angry pruning down of my sense of what’s actually possible to a very small and close at hand realm, my own little cut, weathered, and twisted bonsai umwelt if you will, I tend to it as best I can day to day.
http://www.counterfire.org/video/video/19133-rosa-luxemburg-reform-and-revolution-video
Yeah, I’m still trying to figure this out.
I think that’s a big part of the struggle the needing to figure it out and not having the kind of unthinking/herd-instinct/participation-mystique by which most folks are able to go with the flow of socialization as they are never quite seeing what a big pile of cut&pastes the whole thing really is, as for those of us mutant fringers facing the cracks, gaps and rough edges we are left with the extra work of conscious bricolage.