On Hope

This column will change your life: The Case Against Hope

Oliver Burkeman         

On 12/04/14, The Guardian    

Scratch the surface of our hope-fixated culture and you discover The Shawshank Redemption lied to us: sometimes, giving up hope sets you free

Extracts:

“Being against hope is like being in favour of pushing baby pandas off cliff tops. Isn't hope what motivates the oppressed to fight tyrants, what keeps people going in the most desperate deprivation? (…) So it's striking to encounter recent research, published in the Economic Journal, suggesting that hope makes people feel worse.

The researchers' starting point was what happens to the long-term unemployed when they reach retirement age. According to 25 years of German data, "retiring from unemployment" delivers a significant increase in life satisfaction. (…) When you're unemployed, there's always the hope of finding a job, and people "thus feel the permanent pressure to fulfil the norms of their social category… Ironically, it is hope that keeps them unhappy while unemployed, and it is only when hope fades that they will recover." Retirement means the end of hoping for a job, which feels like a release. (…)

John Ptacek, a US author, writes of finding meaning through hopelessness after his wife's terminal cancer diagnosis: "Time spent hoping for happier days is time spent turning away from life." Derrick Jensen, an environmental campaigner, believes hope makes activism less effective since it involves placing faith in someone or something else to make things better, instead of doing what's needed yourself: "A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realise you never needed it in the first place… you become very dangerous indeed to those in power." The Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön proposes a new fridge magnet: "Abandon hope". It sounds like a grim joke. After all, if you don't have hope, what's left? I suspect she'd answer: reality. In other words, everything.”