Within the academic field of futures in education there has been concern that pupils' negative and pessimistic future scenarios could be deleterious to their minds. Eckersley ("Futures" 31:73-90, 1999) argues that pessimism among young people can produce cynicism, mistrust, anger, apathy and an approach to life based on instant gratification. This article suggests that we need to discuss negative and pessimistic future visions in a more profound and complex way since these contain both hope and hopelessness. A pessimistic view of the future does not have to be negative in itself: it can also illustrate a critical awareness of contemporary social order. This article therefore aims to explore hope and hopelessness in young people's dystopias about the future. Adopting dystopias may open up possibilities, whereas adopting disutopias will only lead one to believe that there are no alternatives to the current dominant model of global capitalism. Even a dystopia that predicts the end of the world as we know it might be the beginning of a world that we have not seen yet.