Philosophy on Facebook # 44 – Hope

Hope you guys enjoyed my last philosophy post and I hope you enjoy this post too. I also hope that you will sign up to become a member of my podcast network that I am forming. I can only hold a limited slot of future hosts and it is nearing that mark so fill out an application as soon as you can. I’ve been really busy will work and personal ventures that I haven’t had much time to work on the other projects but I will start constructing the new site and YouTube channel as soon as I can. Get in on this opportunity while you still can! One way that will definitely get you approved to become a part of the network is to sign up to do a comedy show with funny sketches and videos! I am looking to do something funny and I know I have some funny friends out there so sign up if you think you are!

Now back to this note which is about… you guessed it… hope! Hope is in essence an abstract feeling that you get when you feel like your wants or needs will be satisfied in the future. It might not necessarily ever happen but the feeling you have just believing that it will happen, can motivate people to the greatest extremes of actions. Just the hope of being free from the British caused the Revolution that made this country what it is today. Hope is one of the most important emotions one can feel, next to happiness that will possess people to try and strive to achieve anything, even when matched against unthinkable odds. It is the best way to view the future in my opinion because it is the optimistic point of view that no matter what happens, better days will come and through that belief, any of your dreams or wishes can become possible. On the other end of the spectrum, despair is the complete opposite of hope. Just like cold is a lack of heat, despair is a lack of hope.

One of the most popular examples that I view as being a form of hope is wishing. Wishing is an act of hope because by wishing to make something possible means that you have some belief that it is achievable. You may be wishing because you believe that you can’t personally achieve it but through the help of things like divine powers or outside forces it will be possible that your wishes will come true.

The thing with hope is that it isn’t in the present tense. This means that it doesn’t relate really to anything that you are doing now. While your current actions can contribute to the magnitude of the amount of hope you feel, hope is more or less independent from the here and now. If you are in a slump or things just never go your way, your hope will probably be crippled but if you don’t allow your hope to directly correlate with the amount of success or failure you have now, then what you’re doing now won’t matter when it comes to hope. I guess it is a kind of mentality you have based on your personality. If you are one of those people who have a negative view on life then you will most likely not hold the future in such high regards. If you are one of those people who get motivated more the less things go your way then your current predicament is inversely proportional to your hope. You believe that no matter how many times you get knocked down you will just get right back up and come back more stronger learning from the mistakes and misfortunes you have had in the past. It all depends on who you are and factors like your upbringing and your environment that all contribute to what your views on hope are and how likely you are to attain it.

Hope does one very important thing to those that have it. It provides a sense of comfort. I believe that one of hope’s main purposes is to soothe and inspire the minds of people. While you can’t just sit back and expect things to get better without trying hard to make things better yourself, it does still make it seem like your fate will be in good hands no matter what happens. This then brings me to some of the reactions you have to hope. One could be the reaction that you are personally responsible for your fate and with hope you will push your body and mind to the limits in order to achieve your goals. The other perspective could be the thought that if you have hope no matter what you do things will be good so you might not necessarily need to work to have the future you optimistically believe will happen. This in a sense relates to the chance vs. fate debate that I explained in the very first podcast I did.

Hope can also be viewed as being the last bastion of security. It represents the last place you can fall back on whenever you are in need. For this reasons you need to hold on to it at all times. When things are going great, you may not even recognize you have it or even think you need it. Regardless of the situations you are currently in never give up your faith that things will turn out for the best. Losing it is probably one of the worst things that you can do. Hope directly impacts your willpower and your want to continue on with life and your ventures even if things aren’t going your way. Holding on to it against all odds will overtime provide you will the strength and power to continue on even when you think you can’t. If you do happen to lose it though, it isn’t always hard to find it. While you may seem like all hope is lost and you will never make it out of your terrible situation, you can always find the light at the end of the tunnel if you look hard enough. The best way to find it is to try to see all the great things going on now and all the great things that will happen in the future. You need to envision a time in the future where everything will be ok and, while not completely necessary, it helps to see all the good things in life that make you want to preserve on in life. Detaching yourself from the negative situation allows you to better see that your life is going towards a positive direction. This viewpoint is the very definition of hope and I hope you enjoyed this note! Thanks and don’t forget to comment with your thoughts on hope as well!

-Allan Nicholas