Let me be clear from the outset: I am against it. Hope, I mean. The word itself has the phonetic quality of something expiring softly in a corner—hohp—a breath, a surrender, the sound a man makes when he realizes the map he has been following was drawn by a child. We have made hope into a virtue, which is the most suspicious thing you can do to an emotion. Virtue is simply desire wearing its father's clothes.
I am fifty-three years old and I have spent thirty of those years in what is generously called "the helping professions," though I have never helped anyone who did not first help me into a state of exhausted despair. The addicts, the abandoned, the merely unlucky—they all arrive with the same luggage: hope, neatly folded, smelling of detergent and delusion. They hope the marriage will improve. They hope the tumor is benign. They hope the check arrives before the eviction. And I, professionally obligated, sit across from them and nod, emitting small sympathetic noises like a refrigerator in a power surge.
But here is what I have learned, and what I am here to tell you: hope is not the opposite of despair. Despair is honest. Despair looks at the tumor and the marriage and the eviction and says, without sentiment, This is what is. Hope looks at the same facts and says, This is not what is; this is what might be, if the universe were run by a just and attentive God, which it manifestly is not. Hope is a kind of theological fraud, a Ponzi scheme sold by people who profit from your continued subscription.
The Greeks had a better word: thumos. Spiritedness. Anger. The refusal to accept. When Achilles dragged Hector around the walls of Troy, he was not hoping for anything. He was expressing something. The expression itself was the point. The Greeks understood that the noble response to catastrophe is not optimism but rage, beautifully articulated, terrifying to behold.
My patients who recovered—and I will grant you there were some, mostly through statistical accident rather than my therapeutic genius—did not recover because they hoped. They recovered because they got angry. Angry at the spouse, the dealer, the disease, the father who left, the mother who stayed too long. Anger is directional. It has an object, a target, a place to put the energy that hope merely diffuses into prayer and platitude. Hope is anger with nowhere to go, masturbation for the morally squeamish.
I am aware that this makes me sound like a cynic. I prefer the term "realist," though I acknowledge that every cynic is a disappointed idealist who got tired of the disappointment. What I am proposing is not despair. Despair, as I have said, is merely accurate. What I am proposing is expectation without sentiment: the expectation that things will be difficult, that people will be unreliable, that love will erode, that health will fail, and that the appropriate response to all of this is not a clenched-teeth optimism but a full-throated, operatic, magnificent resistance.
The man who built the diner where I am writing this essay—I know, because I asked him, because I am professionally nosy—built it after his first diner burned down. He did not hope the second diner would be better. He simply built it, with better fire extinguishers and a more defensible insurance policy. When I asked him if he was happy, he looked at me as if I had asked him if he was a prime number. "I'm busy," he said. "Happy is for people with time."
There is your philosophy. Not hope. Not happiness. Busyness. The continuous, unglamorous, un-Instagrammable practice of building the next thing because the last thing burned, and refusing to pretend that the burning was a test from God or a lesson in disguise. The burning was simply a burning. The next thing will probably burn too. Build it anyway. That is not hope. That is architecture against entropy, and it is the only virtue worth having.
So I leave you with this: abandon hope. All ye who enter here, abandon it like a heavy coat in summer. Travel lighter. Expect the worst, not because the worst is inevitable, but because expecting it frees you from the exhausting theater of disappointment. And when the worst does not arrive—and it sometimes does not, through no merit of your own—you will experience something better than hope. You will experience surprise, which is hope's adult cousin, the one who stopped sending Christmas cards and started sending whiskey.
— D.A.