“Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope … and you will cease to fear.’ … Widely different [as fear and hope] are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope … both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Hope is important in most cultures. ‘Faith, hope and charity’ as Christians would have you believe or even ‘thoughts and prayers’ (as prayers are just basically ‘hopes’ either verbalised or said through an internal dialogue). Hope is the idea that we predict that something good is going to happen in the future for us and/or for close others (it can also be to hope for ill for people we do not like). It is something to look forward to with the ‘hope’ that it will happen. Conversely, ‘fear’ is the prediction that something ‘bad’ is going to happen for ourself or others and we ‘hope’ it will not happen (also fearing people we hate will do well or succeed over us or loved ones). ‘Hope’ and ‘fear’ are two sides of the same coin: the idea of something happening in the future which is hypothetical.
Let me agree with Seneca, that if you have no hope then you have no fear. ‘That may be the case but, how can you live without hope?’, I hear you proclaim. Well if hope comes as a package with fear, then maybe it is not such a useful mental mechanism?
In cognitive behavioural therapy there is the idea of ‘catastrophizing’: where people predict future catastrophes which usually never happen and this can lead to much distress. Maybe there is, by logical inference, ‘fabulousizing’ where people are just too hopeful for events to happen that don’t anyway? They suffer disappointment as a result? This is usually self-regulating with hope as we learn but not with fear as we are very fearful creatures and do not appreciate just how unlikely our fears are. We can assume that fear makes us aware of the dangers in life and is, therefore, essential. And likewise ‘hope’ motivates us to move forward and improve ourselves by taking actions we predict will produce beneficial outcomes. But how realistic are these hypothetical constructs? Critics will say that hope and fear are great motivators. Motivators for what..for achieving ‘greatness’, the ultimate ‘hope’? We have to make the most of what we have, realistically and to assure our own contentment. Marketing, advertising and capitalism sell us a dream which is bubbling full of hope but how many achieve this and how many without stepping on the faces of others?
If one is fearful or hopeful, then one is living in the future. Many eastern religions are concerned with us living in the present and appreciating this very moment. But how can you do this if you are thinking about the dangers and opportunities of some hypothetical future? ‘Attachment’ is frowned upon in Buddhism and surely ‘hope’ is just an attachment in itself? Do Buddhists have a more realistic understanding or hope, if this is the case?
‘Learned hopelessness’ was something big in the 70s which was about how people learned that there was no hope in their lives and this was the basis of their depression. But one has to have hopes to be hopeless! One needs a yardstick to measure against to realise you are not measuring up. It’s like optimism is hamstringing the person through disappointment that things did not work out as they should. Scientists even get mice to ‘give in’ by torturing them and stuff them full of drugs in development to see if they will start swimming again after being in a water tank thanks to the concept of ‘learned hopelessness’. This, by the way, is a test for finding anti-depressant drugs. Like how much of antidepressants work through a placebo effect, anyway, which is a form of hope in itself when unipolar depression usually passes off by itself after a time? Could depression be a syndrome driven by hope? In addition, by deduction, is there ‘learned fearlessness’? Is this the very privileged politician who thinks he can do no wrong and gives no Fs about anything even when caught committing major crimes of corruption of letting the killings of so many via proxy wars which he created? Like does excessive hope lead to excessive hutzpah?
So what is the alternative to being hopeful and thereby, fearful? What about being rational? Live in the present and stop projecting your hopes and fears into the future. Deal with the present but if something comes along that gives us a risk or an opportunity then plan for the correct course of action and follow it in the present or put it off till you need to do it if it is not a priority in the present. To-do/tasks lists are just hopes in themselves and many will make big lists and just procrastinate and ignore the list as opposed to doing something about it by simply carrying out the required tasks in the present. If your house is a mess, it does not need planning, it starts by picking up one thing and putting it away or throwing it away and doing the next thing that is under your nose that needs doing. Like if we live in the rational present it does not need a lot of thinking about which is comforting. Like you may have to formulate a few strategies but that is just organisational skills which are rational and not big hopes and conversely fears if we do not get it done.
The ‘stick and the carrot’, but does this really work? Can we motivate ourselves through the use of fear and hope or by rationally deciding what needs to be done in our lives and just do it? Is hope and fear the basis of procrastination at the end of the day?
As an aside, if you book the ‘perfect’ vacation somewhere expensive and exotic, like what is the use of expectation before the holiday? Plan you holiday and see the sites but why get so excited about going away when it is being there and the moments there that matter and the subsequent memories it generates. Like the expectation is a nice feeling but you could be setting yourself up for disappointment instead of being in the moment at the holiday. The fantasies of hope and expectation may not help. If you only see things through your cellphone screen taking pictures to post on social media when there, then what was the purpose of the holiday anyway? Like that is setting stuff up for the ‘future’….bytes of hope. More on this next.
But this takes us onto other things. Like generally, what do humans hope and fear for? In evolutionary psychology, it is mostly about ‘fitness’. So we worry about our status in our society and do thing to gain status and do things to avoid loss of status or fitness. When there is a threat to our status then we can fear losing some and that happening, and it causes us anguish. ‘Status’ could be best described as ‘outward signs of survivability’ as discussed in a previous essay on here (the one with the very rude title!). There are also aspects of survival like fearing loss of health and life, or hoping for good health and a long life. When we interact with other people we can very concerned about how we ‘appear’ and put on a front to show higher levels of outward signs of survivability when it is not necessarily true. This is because humans compete amongst ourselves. Competition is a big part of it and fearing losing to someone or hoping to be ‘the king of the castle’ (as kids like to play). Previous trauma can of course throw gasoline on all of this and make things even worse by making life far far more fearful and distorting our view of our environment and the people within it. However, friends are there to be honest with, and we can admit to our failings to get some support and ‘two minds are greater than one’ and ‘a problem halved is a problem solved’. Friendship is highly advantageous to humans (and probably other animals) as it doubles our processing power and our friends can dissuade us from foolish hopes and fears. Loneliness can lead to more fears in itself as we need connections to be more realistic about our thinking (particularly our hopes and fears), and excessive and unrealistic fears ultimately can kill.
Apart from the loneliness, ask yourself if you were the only person left on the planet (assuming there is shelter, food and water and the environment is basically safe), would you make an effort with how you appear or what your wear or the use of makeup? Like there is nobody left to impress in the world and nobody to criticise how you appear or you think they may be critical (former a hope and latters fear). I would suggest you just would not bother and just slob it!
So this idea of ‘present rationality’, how does it work? People can be more in the past and the future than in the present. Past events can be mulled over to help us gain some insight into past events and their meaning and what we would do in future for events if they reoccur. However, past events hardly ever reoccur in the same way, and we try to predict future events in our mind’s eye with this analysis so we are prepared for totally hypothetical happenings! You can even mull over a past event and then speculate on different outcomes dependent on different actions taken at the time. Hypothetical projection on past events….curious and curiouser!
Hypothetical projections of the future in the minds eye can be dozens or hundreds of times in one day (especially if we are not concentrating on tasks or occupied with work) and then hardly any, if any of these projections, will happen (although this will vary between people). Most people are probably not even aware of these omnipresent projections. They are not all irrational: to rehearse giving a lecture you have been asked to give makes sense but is that ‘hope’?. So it is knowing the difference and the diversity of human thought will vary from very little to a pathological excess in respect to ‘speculative future predictions’ which is basically what hopes and fears are.
This diagram shows how one can take the edge off our thinking in terms of speculative future predictions and past thinking. There is also non-ego related thinking which is more intellectual or problem solving. This is a protocol for more healthy thinking but it requires a high degree of mindfulness to be able to be aware enough to act on it. It is a kind of ‘thought editing’ which, I have to admit, does sound rather Orwellian.
At the end of the day it is about being mindful and knowing what to think instead of wasting your time on pointless ruminations about the past and pointless unrealistic hopes and fears about the future. The practice of meditation can help with this too. It is about being rational about this projective mechanisms in the mind’s eye so not to spend too much time in the past and in the future but making the most of the present. Like ‘shut up and appreciate the view’ as some poet once said. How can you live a long life if you are not here a great deal of the time but just thinking about past events or hypothetical future disasters and hypothetical fabulous happenings which hardly ever happen anyway? You will spend most of your life in hypothetical constructs concerned about how you appear, and compete with society instead of tasting, feeling, loving, hearing, smelling etc. If you think about it, you are in competition with billions of people and capitalism knows this. Best not to bother and just get on with the here and now and joys of life in the present. Like listen to a piece of music and don’t think of some future fantasy or terror, but listen, be at one with this very moment in time and let it lift your soul.