Hope is a prison!
Hollow hope is hopeless and makes us hapless.
We have been taught to not lose hope and sometimes even hopelessly hope against the hope. ‘Lets hope for the best’ is a conversation cliche.
I remember a scene from the movie Dark Knight Raises. Where Bane the antagonist captures Batman and puts him in a prison which basically a open well.
Batman ‘where am I?’
BANE ‘Home. Where I learned the truth about despair. As will you. There’s a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth. Hope. Every man who has rotted here over the centuries has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom. So easy. So simple. And, like shipwrecked men turning to sea water from uncontrollable thirst, many have died trying. I learned here that there can be no true despair without hope.’
There is a famous Hindi poem which roughly translations to this:
'Hope has killed me slowly, painfully….
There! The shore. There! The shore'
Action is binary. Either things happen as we want them to happen or they don’t. If we do the math, there is fifty fifty chance of things happening the way we want. However, fifty percent is too much optimism, as per Murphy’s law that says ‘whatever that can go wrong will go wrong’. There is an inherent crookedness of things. Nature has this dark sense of humor we call negative bias. That’s why when we drop a screw it almost ‘always’ reaches to the extreme corner we can’t reach out.
Hope is antonym of Murphy’s law.
So why things will happen in certain way because we want them so fucking badly to happen this way. And if they don’t happen ‘in a certain way’ what’s the point of our wanting them to happen in a certain way.
Isn’t it selfish to hope ‘favoritism’ from nature just because I am involved?
And why nature would exercise ‘positive bias’ just because I am hoping for it? It’s like hoping to reach home early because someone is waiting for you, and now imagine the impossibility of it if you are not even driving.
Hollow hopes without action is a speed ticket to disappointment.
What too much hope does to us:
- We become too much obsessed with results and often ignore the action.
- We can see the destination close by but can’t achieve it. It makes us frustrated, angry sometimes and full of as Bane said despair.
- We are stuck in this perennial effort loop. We don’t realize when to give up or move on to something or someone else.
- We get superstitious and start believing too much in luck. We hope to get lucky and don’t work more to increase our chances of getting more lucky.
Let’s hope to lose hope and be free!
Check out my 2 minute post about How to manage expectations ‘You didn’t fail! You just over-expected’
