This essay was written over a two day period, and inspired by a conversation with a good friend. He is inspired by the philosophy from the book ‘The Secret.’ Hope is, now more than ever, an important pillar in his life.  However, hope is a pillar in the lives of most people I know. But I wonder if hope can actually lead to more pain than peace?

Hope: The religious need it for refuge, because they cannot cope with death; the weak depend on it because they lack the strength to look at suffering in the eye; the fearful beg for it because a fantasy is better than now;  but it’s the courageous who live without it.  – Wes Fornès

I wrote this essay to show that if we want to understand life and ourselves more clearly, we ought to abandon hope and cultivate self-awareness, acceptance and optimism into our lives.

What do we tend to think of hope?

Hope tends to be a looked upon as a virtue held in high esteem. I’m reminded of Jesse Jackson’s 1992 speech on which he encouraged the public to “keep hope alive.” Psychologist and researcher, Dr. Anthony Scioli, describes hope as not just the belief that a better future is possible, but that we have the power to make it so. Hope inspires us to do better. When you’re hopeful, you take action to create something better because you believe that you have the capability to do so. There is always a path to healing. We need to believe that healing is possible. The alternative is to quit, to stand still, to believe that we’re doomed. Hope is viewed as good and needed in life. After all, when caught in despair and tragedy, hope is what frees us from the muck and mire of life. Hope serves as an oasis in the distance that provides the destination of where we ought to go for refuge.

To be honest, I think this picture of hope is misleading and leads to more disillusionment than happiness. I believe that hope is more about creating a fictitious future world in order to get one unstuck from their present misery. Hope is a refuge for the timid. I believe we can take action and have optimism about the future; without hope.

Hopelessness

My argument is for hopelessness. I contend that if we want to understand life and ourselves more clearly, we ought to abandon hope and cultivate self-awareness, acceptance and optimism. Hope is simply an escape from our present experience as we create a future of how our life ought to be. The problem is that the future is an illusion of our own creation, of which, we simply have such limited control. Furthermore, hope often serves as a mechanism for denial. By keeping our present dissatisfaction and suffering at bay, we deny it, while creating “the perfect” future which never leads to fulfillment. My point is this: hope is often the obstacle to people experiencing peace and happiness. Let’s get down to the bare bones of hope.

Hope arises out of a desire or need for a better future. Hope is a kind of wanting, wishing, and frustration with our present situation. It is a desire for our life to be different or better somehow. It is wanting to be there instead of here. It is the old “grass is greener on the other side” in action. Think about it like this, if you were truly happy and satisfied, would you really need to lean on hope? Well, you might say, “I would hope that this satisfaction I feel now continues for much longer!” Okay, but even that is rooted in a dissatisfaction of the way things were before. Hope provides the escape plan for our present misery and unhappiness.

Because hope is rooted in our dissatisfaction with the present, we can rightly say hope is an emotionally generated desire. It’s an emotionally generated desire by which we wish for something in the future, because we are dissatisfied with the present. Imagine a child just about to undo the wrapping paper on his birthday present. He might close his eyes really tightly and say, “I hope, I hope, I hope.” It is a kind of magic incantation which is consistent with a child’s mind. When we invest our well-being in the very hope we create, we are doing just what the child does.

Deconstructing Hope

First, hope distorts reality. Many who hope, implicitly believe their thoughts or feelings can directly impact reality; as if, they, and external reality are one. To paraphrase from the best-selling book ‘The Secret’, if you think it you can be it. This is similar to the above statement of the child unwrapping his present all the while hoping for a particular item – as if his hoping will make his expectation come true. What’s the problem with making up our reality? Well, it’s just that: made up. Thus, we set ourselves up for dashed hopes and disillusionment when we soon realize our own false reality. Even if we get to the hoped-for destination, we realize that ultimate happiness isn’t waiting for us. Discontentment remains, or we simply want more.

Second, hope is intertwined with fear. We hope because we fear. If it weren’t for fear, there wouldn’t be a need for hope. This was encapsulated long ago by the well-known Stoic named Seneca (4 BCE-65 ACE) when he wrote,

“[t]hey [hope and fear] are bound up with one another, unconnected as they may seem. Widely different though they are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope. Nor does their so moving together surprise me; both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”

A good alternative to hope is to cultivate courage for the present, rather than escaping the present with a future fantasy rooted in hope. It’s important to cross-examine hope because fear is the subtle nuance that gets lost. Perhaps when we feel like hope is creeping in, we should examine what fear is accompanying the hope.

Second, hope causes us to mistake our inner (hopeful) feeling for an action-producing energy or medium. Hope is a mind-based future reality that we’ve created, it has absolutely nothing to do with action. One can hope that they can escape their abusive relationship, but hope has nothing to do with the steps needed to take right now in order to get to a safer environment. Instead, the abused should ask themselves, “What can I do right now to improve my environment?” This way, we remain in the present, and begin taking action towards a better tomorrow. Keep in mind, you don’t need hope to take action, or improve your future.

Third, hope involves certainty. And with certainty comes dashed hopes and disillusionment. To borrow from Vaclav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It [hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Hope involves the belief that whatever that’s hoped for, is the way it ought to be. In other words, our dissatisfied desire propels us to construct and concretize a future world. The problem with certainty is that nothing is certain, and nothing is guaranteed. When we begin making demands from the universe, we will be in for a rude awakening. The world simply doesn’t care about your demands.

Fourth, hope can paralyze. It’s common to hope for something to happen, yet do nothing in the present to actualize anything in our lives. It’s the person hoping for financial bliss in the future, but doing little now to save. It’s the person hoping for a job promotion, but not taking action now to make it happen. It’s the religious who hope for an afterlife because they’re too scared to make the most out of their current life. This is the danger of hope: we make so many investments for the future, that we remain paralyzed in the present.

Fifth, hope cultivates self-belief rather than self-awareness.  Self-belief has to do with what we believe we deserve and what we think should be intrinsically ours. Unlike other countries, Americans have enculturated the term “American Dream” to serve as a belief in the intrinsic rightness of our cause. As author Karen Krett puts it, “to grow up in America today is to be inculcated with the sensibility that we are innately smarter, more able, and somehow fated to be more successful than people who grow up in other countries. The American Dream has become corrupted and recalibrated to measure superficial and valueless excesses or material acquisitions.” Thus, hope is seen through the filter of what we think should be our reality – because we deserve it.

Where self-belief solidifies expectations of the outside world, self-awareness looks inside and seeks “to know thyself.” Self-awareness cultivates our emotional intelligence in which we seek to understand our internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions. Self-awareness keeps one present, so we can see and understand our surroundings more clearly. With self-awareness, we are not focused on the future, rather, we look inward to so we can more accurately understand ourselves in the present.

Why is this important? Because self-awareness (1) helps us to be mindful of ourselves and others, (2) it helps us to have healthy (and realistic!) perspectives on life, (3) we pay closer attention to the feelings and desires that arise in ourselves so that we can notice when we are unbalanced or craving things that are not good for our well-being, and (4) when we look to the future, we don’t see it as what we deserve, rather, we cultivate acceptance and adapt to whatever comes our way.

Self-Awareness, Acceptance and Optimism

In arguing against hope, it begs the question: what’s the alternative to hope? Hopelessness sounds bad enough to most people. It conjures thoughts of a life of disillusionment and meaninglessness. It’s like the Greek myth of Sisyphus eternally pushing his boulder up a mountain, only to have it fall back down the mountain just before he reaches the summit. How can hopelessness be good?! The good news is that there is a realistic alternative to hope that make happiness and peace more attainable. In doing away with hope, I am advocating for self-awareness, acceptance and optimism. What does this look like?

First, we abandon hope because self-awareness grounds us in the present. Self–awareness is having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. When your mind starts dreaming and scheming of an illuminated future world, self-awareness interjects and says, “time-out, what is it that I am needing right now?” “what is it that I am not getting in life right now?” “What is the root cause of my dissatisfaction right now?” “What changes can I make right now for my personal well-being?” This approach brings you to the present moment, and it gets you thinking of what nourishment you need in the present. No future fantasies needed here.

I am willing to argue that every time we begin creating a future hope, peace can actually be found in the present. There’s nothing wrong with looking to the future, but we need to make our investments in the here and now. That being said, we hold the future very lightly, knowing we possess so little control and nothing is guaranteed.

Next, we abandon hope and begin accepting what our present realities are. Repressing, denying and keeping our present sufferings at bay are only temporary solutions that eventually come back to haunt us. So, we ought to cultivate acceptance. Why?

First, acceptance means we can give up never relaxing with where we are or who we are. With acceptance, there no need to get angst about the fictitious ‘you’ you’ve created. Second, acceptance means you can relax in the ambiguity and uncertainty of life. When you accept the fact that everyone’s footing is on marshy soil, you begin cultivating courage in your life. Abandoning hope means that you can integrate the virtue of courage in order to face present misery and chaos with a strong spine. Third, without the illusory life-preserver that hope gives, abandoning hope means you can stand up to suffering and grow from it. Hope often provides an escape option from our present misery because we can dampen the misery with a nugget of hope. This, however, is wishful thinking. Abandoning hope means we can see that there is wisdom and maturation through suffering and disillusionment. Lastly, giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones of the problem, no matter what’s going on.

Optimism

Finally, optimism is the lens from which we view life. Even though I embrace hopelessness, what keeps me striving is optimism. While hope describes [unreasonably and irrationally] what the world should be, optimism is merely an attitude. Optimism is a positive attitude that welcomes whatever happiness or misery comes knocking on the door. Optimism says that things are pretty good right now, at least if you are willing to see the silver linings, make lemonade out of lemons, etc. Optimism is much different than hope. Hope is an emotion and optimism is an attitude. Hope is wishful thinking that involves false beliefs, whereas optimism is an attitude that does necessarily involve beliefs. Hope tries to move mountains, and optimism merely brightens the picture.

Final Reflections

Peace resides in cultivating self-awareness so we become comfortable with ourselves. Peace resides in accepting life as it comes. And peace resides in an optimistic outlook that sees the good or a lesson to be learned in whatever circumstance we find ourselves in. Hope, on the other hand, is a way to self-medicate ourselves from our present distress.

It was Nikos Kazantzakis who said,

“leave the heart and the mind behind you, go forward … Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena. Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things. Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all: Hope.”

Conquering hope is the first step toward courage. Courage to seek and strive, even if our efforts are in vain. We abandon hope for good outcomes, or understanding, or meaning, but ascend and move forward. We are tempted by hope, but the courageous live without it, carrying on in its absence.

It’s the courageous who live without hope.

~ Wes Fornes