Hope

“I hope” is a predecessor of numerous statements in our daily lives, specially in the corporate communications we undertake everyday. “I hope you are well”, “I hope you received my email”, “I hope this will be done in time”, amongst others are sentences typed, spoken and wished regularly.

Now, why is hope such a frequently used term? Well, let’s dive into the intricacies of hope, and decipher this facet of life.

“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”
– Seamus Heaney

I’m sure everyone remembers Avengers: Endgame? Classic cinema, am I right? Everything in that movie was perfect. The build to it had been 11 years in the making. The previous movie had left us in a hell of a cliffhanger, and the action and storytelling in this one left everyone teary eyed..

.. and hopeful of some more great, upcoming cinema.

There is one scene in particular, which found immense mainstream attention. The scene portrays a dialogue between Ronin, FKA Hawkeye, and Black Widow. Coming off the back of Ronin losing his family to Thanos’ snap, Ronin went on a killing spree in an attempt to make sense of the loss he had faced.

Black Widow tracks down Ronin to inform him of the Avengers’ Vision (not to be confused with Paul Bettany’s character in the movie, Vision). They had planned to reverse Thanos’ snap, and bring back all the people who turned to dust because of it. Everything would make sense again for Ronin!

But Ronin, instead of being ecstatic, responds with a somber face, saying:

Credits to: https://memepedia.ru/don-t-give-me-hope/ or respective owner.

The big question is, why did Ronin instantly not become happy and start working with the Avengers? He was going to get everything he had been fighting for (or to avoid thinking about). And yet, the man, who lost his family, decided to respond in a way which would have kept him in that state of despair and hopelessness.

Social media used this scene to further its cause, which is to capture our attention for hours on end. You might have seen a form of the following meme in your Instagram feed for sure.

So, a lot of people were relating to this dialogue, and more often than not in situations where there was an element of sadness involved.

I became captivated with the underlying question, is hope more hurtful than real sadness?

As it turns out, yes. Hope can be a big detriment to the depressed. It sounds counter intuitive, am I right? When someone is sad, the perceived potential of something positive happening would induce a sense of happiness, right?

Well, does it? Not really.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that hope isn’t positive. It sure is. Hope has the chances to turn negative emotions into positive, as long as it inspires constructive action, because the constructive action, whether conscious or unconscious would lead to positive outcomes.

The catch here is that the these positive actions can only be induced and continued if there are controllable factors in play. If the factors are uncontrollable, the story becomes completely different.

The thing with hope is that it is usually based on arbitrary parameters.

Unless those parameters are controllable, it becomes arduous to substantiate it.

If that hope doesn’t get substantiated, the strength that has been developed till that point collapses with the chances of that hope.

Let’s come back to the Ronin example we have been working with so far, and the question I have been asking so far. Why did Ronin not accept the incoming hope from Black Widow’s confession of the Avengers’ ambitions?

Ronin realised that the parameters for this approaching anticipation of his family coming back appeared to be a pipe dream, because it hinged on a sequence of next to impossible events.

If things were not to go his way, the mental reconciliation he had reached till then would have been completely reversed, and lord knows what else he would have done.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂