Chronic anxiety is a crisis of hope. It is the fear of a failed future. Depression is a crisis of hope. It is the belief in a meaningless future. Delusion, addiction, obsession — these are all the mind’s desperate and compulsive attempts at generating hope one neurotic tic or obsessive craving at a time.
The avoidance of hopelessness — that is, the construction of hope — then becomes our mind’s primary project. All meaning, everything we understand about ourselves and the world, is constructed for the purpose of maintaining hope. Therefore, hope is the only thing any of us willingly dies for. Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves. Without it, we believe we are nothing.
Mark Manson from Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope
How can we nourish hope within when we have lost, been disappointed, hurt or rejected? This is what the same author suggests,
Don’t hope.
Don’t despair either.
In fact don’t deign to believe you know anything. It’s that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place.
Don’t hope for better. Just be better.
Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.
– Mark Manson from Everything is F*cked: A Book about Hope
Wishing the few of you reading this a holiday season being better,
Hungryphil
The Hungry Philosopher 