on hope 1

You think that after something horrible happens, and life just can't go on, that something must happen, something must save you. You start crying, you grow hysterical, you pray (although you don't even know what you're praying to eventually), everything around you breaks down. The only thing that matters is the question of what could possibly happen next. In this mess, there is somehow hope. Something in you somehow proposes that you deserve something better, to be reconciled, to be saved. Whether this situation was your fault or not, suddenly you're thinking about all the suffering you've ever gone through, and you think it's either I die right now, or something must save me. A subtle imperative grows that impresses the idea that now life must do this for you now, and if it doesn't, then the meaning of your whole life is lost or worse it means that you don't really deserve anything better, it means that it was all your fault the whole time, it means life is pointless. Something must save you right now.

But in fact, nothing happens and nothing saves you. You wake up and in fact all meaning becomes questionable, self worth becomes questionable, purpose in life becomes questionable. You get angry. All we ever need is hope, they say. And yet here there was nothing ever to really hope for, even though you hoped. Is hope too pointless, or is it only that you do not deserve to be saved?

This is where religion inserts itself. If a believer is saved, then it is because of divine will. If believer is not then they can continue on, go through how much more suffering, how much more failings, with the hope that one day they will be saved. Either way, the believer continues in terms of their hope, regardless of empirical evidence. On the other hand, if one is a believer and is not saved, then there could be where the lasting impression that they were not to be saved by divine will, that they were purposefully denied saving. All is lost. But the all that is lost was never located in the empirical reality

But being a believer when it comes to hope doesn't just refer to the religious. Even those that simply believe in fate, that ambiguous thing that is perhaps of the easiest of the ignorant (of which even the most educated and well-intentioned of us fall to become) to relie on reveals our tendency towards the irrationality of the terms of hope. Hope is traumatic. The symbolic imperative, the meaning of it almost always separates us inside. If you are saved, you not only feel the relief, but your very being is affirmed, legitimated. When you are not, your very meaning becomes suspect, and nothing makes sense, you confront pointlessness directly, or worse you see yourself unworthy of beauty, of goodness, of a future with happiness. It separates us from very meanings of our being, our soul, and our empirical actual real selves.
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Things either happen or they don't. Does it ultimately matter if we think positively, if we hope? Does it ultimately make a difference if we are pessimistic, negative, self-destructive? Even rationalists or empiricists may not have it right. Doing all you can may not amount to much, conditions and climate considered. Sometimes the things that are “your fault” may have little to do with your predicament or getting out of it.

Whether rejected once again from a possible job prospect, and it's been years, find that we are so broke that we may not have a home, learn that the one guy we feel we could ever love, and it's been years, will never love us back the same way, or find that we have a disease or illness and have just a matter of months to live... it is difficult to accept that the predicament is due to a long set of painful coincidences. It is also difficult to accept that the only thing that can save you is yourself...

Yet somehow the platitude of “life goes on” becomes what is worth reflecting, particularly in that this platitude may not be necessarily referring to your own life going on. It could be every other life but your own. In other words it may mean that regardless your life will go on despite the traumatic event, or that every other life with sweep around your mess slowing eroding it away till you vanish into the very world culture adage of the river of life, yours being but a drop in this vast body of motion... either way, it renders the very significance of the traumatic event as insignificant.

Whereas despair has been considered the very antithesis to hope, it proves itself to really be hope itself in its inverse: despair is structured as hope in its negation. Where hope can be loosely described simply as a desire for the becoming of something finite, despair is in negation a fear of a becoming of something finite. This platitude of “life goes on” reveals itself as the true antithesis to hope. It identifies indefinite movement, “going on” as truth. Through this, hope then reveals itself as an excess of significance, an overload of meaning that in its excess dislocates any idea of truth, rendering any significance completely meaningless.
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I rather like the idea of pointlessness, and not because of its usual annihialistic guise as really despair. Pointlessness, like the absolute pointlessness of “life going on” ( where is it going? Can life actually not go on? Even death isn't really an end? Et al.), isn't essentially a lack of meaning as it is a setting free of meaning. It's not that if you didn't get the job, then you freely can find positive meaning in that perhaps it was “meant to be” and therefore it could potentially mean that it isnt the “right” job for you and the better one is right around the corner... in pointlessness, getting the job or not getting the job are both pointless. Or rather, on the other side of the coin: both getting the job and not getting the job have point to it. So either way is rendered equal, as equal as whether or not you actually get to brushing your teeth tonite or not or whether it will be rain tomorrow or not. This is why in due part after some traumatic situation happens we can move on, because we have the ability to switch gears in order to find (create) meaning in the undesired outcome and render it having a point anyway. (Not that everyone excercies that ability.) Pointlessness actually assumes in a most positive stance that things, happenings, choices, all exist: that all thing ultimately all things have point, in-the-end. i.e.:

“When my relationship ended, I thought it was the end of the world, but thereafter I learned to take care of myself, I got to explore other lovers. In the end, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me...”

Or in what's really going on... whether you get what you want or not, being pointless, either becomes in one way or another the same in causing joy or suffering... and equally so anything we feel has point to it can just the same cause joy and suffering. Either way whatever happens, however life goes on, becomes the single truth itself. We can only either roll with it or not.
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I cannot trust hope these days because I've known far to many that have hoped their hearts out and still not gotten what they have hoped for. Meanwhile, it is always to be questioned whether people should even be getting what they hope for. Afterall, do we really know what's better for ourselves? In the true concerns of epistemology is where perhaps God and religion most properly inserts itself in our being...
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There's really no one who can argue against the fact that life does go on regardless. When asked. Yet, when it comes down to wondering whether life will end, it comes down to nothing more than arguments upon arguments on hopes as well as dreams and beliefs.