Ahmed begins by questioning the wisdom of pinning all hopes on the future, using a quote from French sociologist Émile Durkheim. She engages with queer theory, particularly Lee Edelman’s argument in No Future that queer politics should reject hope and futurism. Ahmed then considers Michael Snediker’s call for a “queer optimism.” She connects this debate to the concept of “revolutionary consciousness,” drawing on Marxist theorist Georg Lukács, philosopher Karl Marx, and anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon to examine how alienation from existing social conditions can generate political awareness. She also draws on philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s concept of “happy consciousness,” in which acceptance of existing conditions can conceal injustice and limit the desire for social change. 

Ahmed next considers what optimism and pessimism mean for how people imagine the future. Drawing on philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, she shows that expecting happiness can leave people vulnerable to disappointment, while expecting the worst can offer protection from it. Hope carries its own uncertainty because the future being hoped for may never arrive. This uncertainty also produces anxiety about what might be lost, revealing how hope can involve care for a future that is not guaranteed.

To explore these ideas, Ahmed turns to dystopian films, which she argues express what cultural theorist Fredric Jameson described as a necessary “anxiety about losing the future” (163).