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Personal Perspectives
My Life as a Hope Junkie
A Personal Perspective: My name is Maggie and I'm a hope addict.
Posted September 13, 2023 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Key points
- Hope has a dark side.
- Hope can be an objection to reality.
- Hope is sneaky and adorns itself in finery.
It seems we generally regard hope as a salutary emotion. It is a boon, we agree, a blessing. Everyone loves it.
Even Pandora, she of the Tzetse fly, war, crime, illness, and bankruptcy, yet in the end can say, “Look how wonderful. I give you hope!”
Where there’s life, et cetera.
Keep it alive, and so on, because even a person trapped in the irrefutable certainty of a miserable death can imagine the possibility of something amazing coming after it.
Never give it up!
I don’t know, though. I’m probably not such a fan of hope. I’m not gonna be shouting cheers or waving any pom poms on the sidelines for the sunny trickster. Hope, in my view, appears to be nothing more than an unsettled, misguided, and disruptive mind worm.
I know others disagree. They attest to hope as helpful, encouraging, gracious. They describe a calm expectation that the sun will emerge after rain and spring will arrive after even the worst of winters. They celebrate abiding confidence that—whatever mayhem may be happening right now—“This too shall pass.”
That type of hope does deserve the grand press it receives, I suppose, but I encounter it seldom in others and in myself, pretty much, like, never. I observe a more common type of hope, however, all over the place.
Hope can be a sneaky way to say "no" to reality.
Every purchase I make on Amazon, for example, is fueled by the stuff. I can scarcely admit the warm anticipation with which I await the capri leggings or the cargo pants, the heavy-duty pillows or the light weight-comforter, the memoir by the poet, the novel by the comic, the pack of sixteen Eveready batteries for an amazingly low price, I have recently summoned. I unselfconsciously believe that one of those magical, blue-and-black boxes, dropped at our front door by one of those magical men and women in blue-and-black shirts will finally, finally deliver the happiness for which I long.
I am not ordering products online so much as putting money down on cosmic lottery tickets. Is this absurd? Of course. Does that matter? No.
“At last,” hope pants, “that thing you ordered and is soon to be delivered will fix everything! The big problem of you—the constant conviction that this life you are living right is, just, not good enough—will resolve into sparkling satisfaction.”
Hope sews seeds of discontent in fields anyone halfway normal would describe as just great.
“Entirely sufficient,” they would say.
“Count yourself lucky.”
“Say ‘Thank you!’ and forget about it.”
Hope, in all its smallness, drowns out such reasonable observations. An emotional crook in fine garments, perfumed with optimism, it provokes a disrupted state of internal affairs in which one wishes for things to be other than they are.
Insistently, incessantly, hope objects, “Not this. Not this. Not this.”
And if you politely ask, “Well, then, what?” it will answer, only, “More.”
This hope is nothing more than desire undisciplined by decency or proportion. It’s greed with better press agents and a superior marketing campaign.
“Maybe you’re hoping for the wrong things,” a bystander might observe. “Maybe that’s your problem.”
I don’t think so, however. Even if I’m hoping for the noblest of prizes—peace, resignation, compassion, the well-being of all sentient beings everywhere—the endeavor remains essentially a scheme.
“Please,” it says, beginning in meekness, “if it’s not too much to ask, let this meditation class or yoga seminar or chant or mantra be the thing…”
The voice trails off as if in embarrassment while a magnificent presence leans forward, “Yes, my child, ‘be the thing’ that what? Don’t be afraid to ask.”
“The thing that, you know,” embarrassment has its limits, “solves it all, rights the wrongs, smooths the edges, unloops the looping, unknots the knots—the thing that, you know, finally makes good triumph over bad!”
Hope amounts to an egoic wish to strong-arm the universe: “Dear God or Universe or Whatever-May-Be, thy will be done, of course, but do, please, let thy will bend to mine!”
So what if I gave it up? Lived without my drug of choice? My driving peppy stimulant? What if I could break my addiction to the jolt of imagining a rosy future? Wean off my daily, insistent “it will be better when”? What if I could break the chains that enslave me to the future, always pulling and tugging and yanking me away from the reality of the present, and instead… settle and stay and sway in the breezy hammock of the present moment?
Oh, that sounds nice.
One day I will get there… I hope.
