Angry Hour: Inside a happy hour for ‘pissed-off optimists’ in the age of Trump

A few weeks ago, walking out of a bar in Chicago, George Aye felt a sense of hope for the first time since Donald Trump took office.

Aye and his partner Sara Cantor are cofounders of Greater Good Studio, a design studio focused on social impact. Like everyone else working in the space in the U.S. in 2025—whether at nonprofits or impact-driven businesses or government agencies—they’ve spent the last two months stunned by the Trump administration’s barrage of actions aligned with Project 2025.

Trump’s chaotic approach was deliberately designed to overwhelm opponents, with announcements timed to happen so quickly that they’re hard to track and difficult to know how to respond. Aye and Cantor wanted to avoid despair and paralysis—and they knew others were feeling the same way. That led to an event they dubbed Angry Hour: the Happy Hour for Pissed-Off Optimists.

More than 80 people showed up. “I think either that’s a sign of how bad things are, or how much I think we might all need this,” says Aye. This week, they partnered with AIGA, the professional design organization, to host the same event in Brooklyn, bringing together dozens more people. Other cities will follow, beginning with Philadelphia and Austin.

The concept is simple: People meet in person, get a drink, and talk freely about the current challenges and what it will take to keep going. There’s no specific agenda, just a space to connect. (In the case of Brooklyn, that space was a distillery in an old industrial complex on the waterfront.)

Part of the inspiration came from the fact that people are increasingly isolated. “As a culture, we’ve been moving towards less and less contact with other humans,” says Cantor, who’d recently read an Atlantic article called The Anti-Social Century. “There’s a million drivers of that. But I feel that in the course of my life, and see that with my children. Just feeling like, wow, I really miss people. And it’s not healthy for me or anyone to be in antisocial mode.”

Connection is even more important as the political landscape shifts. “I feel like a lot of the good guidance in the days and weeks after the election was to hold your people close, and stay in community,” she says. “That is how historically groups on the wrong side of oppression have been able to maintain—hold your people close.”

I went to the Angry Hour in Brooklyn, and it was clearly cathartic for people to vent. Everyone I spoke with had stories about how their work had already been affected. One freelance designer told me that new projects started disappearing in November after the election. An industrial designer working on medical devices said her company recently had to lay off half of its staff because of a loss in funding. A designer working on environmental justice projects said that her team had been told to reapply for grants without using words like “equity,” and that they were now trying to figure out whether state and local funding could keep the projects alive. Someone else told me that his nonprofit was seeing fewer donations because the Trump era had led donors to focus more on their own problems.

Some of the people I spoke to said they felt powerless, and one person told me that he planned to pivot to a different type of project. But others were angry and motivated to double down on the work that they believe is critically important, whether related to healthcare or climate or education.

They fit the mold of what Aye and Cantor call “pissed-off optimists”—people who are both righteously angry about society’s problems and simultaneously hopeful (without being naively optimistic). As Aye explained in a recent blog post:

A Pissed-Off Optimist is someone who sees the world’s injustices with clear eyes but views an equitable future as both necessary and possible. They’re keenly aware of systemic problems but remain undeterred by the difficult work ahead. They take the long view on social change, channeling their rage into community rather than despair or cynicism. They are someone who can hold two contradictory truths simultaneously: that human suffering is real and deep, and that we possess the collective power to create something better.

At the event, nametags came with spaces to fill in what made you pessimistic and/or optimistic. “Once you get that anger out, it was good to be like, OK, what’s bringing you hope?” Cantor says.

Because AIGA had partnered on the Brooklyn event, most of the people who showed up were designers. But Greater Good aims in its work to bring together people in the social sector and design world who might not normally interact. And the team takes a broad view of who a “pissed-off optimist” might be. “You could be someone who professionally identifies as an activist or organizer, a profit leader, etcetera,” Cantor says. “Or you could just work at a corporate job and be pissed.”

Unlike a meeting of activists designed to organize a specific strategic response, the purpose of Angry Hour is just to help build connections—relationships that are crucial for moving work forward later. “We often work on designing new systems, and something that I’ve seen over many, many years is that systems are just made of people,” Cantor says. “And the relationships between people in the system are how the systems are made, broken, and changed.”

Like Aye, the first meetup made her more hopeful, though it’s a long-term hope. “I do believe that we will come out of this time,” she says. “And when we do come out on that other side, we’re going to need the infrastructure that we’re building now. We’re going to need the relationships. We’re going to need the connections. That building of infrastructure is an act of hope that there will be another side. And that when we get there, we’ll know who to call and bring them along.”