"Hope requires you to exclude life in the present and be anti-something" - Mark Manson
Hope is something which is often looked at as positive, it's the sweet nectar which will save us. Even In this pandemic we struggle with the fact that everything is fucked..it ruined our plans, it restricted hangovers, it's making us face our demons and left us with the hope that everything will get better eventually. And we do need hope to sustain us, to look at the bright future and work towards it. Even if the pandemic ended we would still be hoping for one thing or another if we are honest. Mark Manson in his book, 'Everything is F*cked' questions but what if hope is just a bad way to cope with reality and is not the right way to live? He made an interesting analogy i.e.
In Greek Mythology, it started with only men who were living their life, partying, dancing and having fun…to the extent that it got pretty boring and the Gods decided to spice things up, so they introduced females to add complication and uncertainty to the easy-going life of men lazing around watching footballs and chilling with their beers. So the god introduced a woman with added features of Aphrodite's beauty, Athena's wisdom, Hera's ability to give families, and Hermes's charismatic speech. The Result was Pandora. So god sent Pandora on earth to introduce competitions, sex, babies, and arguments about the toilet seat. God also sent Pandora with a box that was carved in the gold with god-likee designs and told her to give it to men, telling them to never open the box. Spoiler alert… someone opened the box and out came evils into the world: Death, disease, hatred, envy, and bat-eaters... This started men to fight among themselves for the women and the resources that attracted them, thus giving rise to the dumb dick-measuring contest (history). Meanwhile, the war happened, millions of innocents were tortured and slaughtered, slavery started, women were treated as property and traded them among men. But after all the evil coming out of the box, at the end of the box there remained something shiny and illuminating ..there remained hope, the antidote for evil.
Hope saves the world but there is another interpretation of hope, what if hope was not an antidote but another form of evil? Because hope did not just inspire people like Abdul Kalam or Martin king Luther but hope is something that inspired Hitler as well, exterminating Jews to achieve his ideal world. It is also the factor for the communist revolution and Nazi genocides. Like a surgeon scalpel, hope can save a life but also take life, Uplift us but also destroy us. Just like there are unhealthy forms of confidence and love. Even though hope is something essential for our psychology as well as for a group and religion to exist. This further creates contradicting values and views among the groups, leading to formations of cults as well as sub-group. Creating conflicts that give rise to more hope. This is the counter intuitive nature of hope because for hope to exist we need conflict and everything to be a mess. What's fucked up about hope is that it requires rejections of what currently is. Making us realize the Uncomfortable truth about hope is that it requires something to be broken….
"hope requires you to exclude life in the present and be anti-something"
Thus Nietzsche suggested looking beyond hope, to live beyond good and evil,…he called this morality as 'Amor fati' which means 'love of one's fate'. So excluding hope is a mature way of beings and it is not as bad as it seems.. . Because "hope requires you to exclude life in the present and be anti-something"….thus we need to incorporate a non-dualistic way of being (Amor fati) which means that rather than being better in the future be better now, rather than hoping for the possibilities in the future look for the possibility now, it requires you to accept the present moment with the ups (Joy, happiness) and downs (sorrow, misery) that comes with it. To live in the now, accepting it as it is and then acting from there.
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