Hope Is Anything You Want It To Be
On 8 March 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared from air traffic control radar. The passenger jet, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board, was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and slated to arrive at 6:30am local time. Less than eight hours after its takeoff, the plane crashed in a remote part of the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia.
Today, almost eight years later, many have given up hope. Despite strong evidence pointing to the crash site in and around the Andaman Sea, only 27 pieces of wreckage were recovered in 2015 and 2016 across several African shores. In the years following, nothing else came up. In July 2018, the Malaysian government released its final report on flight 370’s disappearance, drawing the curtains on the most expensive search in aviation history.*
*The massive search operation covered 120,000 square kilometres at an estimated cost of about AUD 200 million, before it was suspended in January 2017 after 1,046 days. A second search launched in January 2018 by the private contractor Ocean Infinity on a ‘no-find, no-fee’ basis also ended without success after six months.
Sloppy official investigations conducted by Malaysian authorities over the years did nothing to quash growing speculations surrounding the jet’s disappearance. On the Internet, some hypothesised that the plane was hijacked by Russians and landed in Kazakhstan. Others claimed to have found the landed plane deep in the jungles of Cambodia on Google Earth. Still others have reported that the flight Captain has been admitted to a hospital in Taiwan and is suffering from severe dehydration and mild amnesia. This last theory gained so much support on the Internet that the Malaysian government had to step out to refute it. In truth, evidence from satellite data, radar tracks, aircraft systems, air traffic control record, and simple physics of flight all point to the airplane’s unfortunate demise in the Indian Ocean. Despite solid evidence of this, some families of the victims continue to hang onto a sliver of hope — hope that these conspiracies might actually be true, and that someone or something is preventing their loved ones from coming home.
Hope is everything and nothing
Hope is a loaded term.* The dictionary meaning of hope is “to want something to happen or be true and think that it could happen or be true”. To hope is to subconsciously know that the probability of that something happening is low, and yet still choose to believe in it with confidence. This suggests that there might be a layer of delusion underlying statements of hope that draw upon our personal desire for something to come true, even when there’s proof that indicate otherwise. When someone laments that “the only thing we can do now is hope”, there is a foreboding sense that the situation may actually be its opposite — hopeless beyond salvation.
Of course, not all statements of hope contain such sinister undertones. You’re not being insincere when you hope that someone gets that job they have been fighting hard for. Most of the time, statements of hope are simply that — well-meaning wishes that we confer onto others with good intentions. In such situations, we are not making assumptions about the likelihood of that something happening, we simply want to convey our well wishes and offer some moral support.
In any case, we can see how hope can subconsciously reflect our attitudes. Be it good or bad, our hope is an extension of our personal overt desire (sometimes covert) for a certain something. For example, saying “I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow” conveys a personal wish for good weather tomorrow. This is different from saying “I expect it to be sunny tomorrow”, which merely expresses a neutral statement about the anticipated weather. The overall effect of hope statements is similar to a Freudian slip, where an error in speech reveals one’s subconscious feelings or thoughts, except that in the case of hope, people are generally well aware of what exactly it is they truly desire.
*The concept of hope is tied to many similar words including expectation, optimism, wish, dream, and desire. For this essay, I focus only on the layman understanding of hope and its most frequent usages. You may read up on the nuances between these words to derive a more robust understanding of hope across various fields — psychology, philosophy, religious studies.
Hope is three minutes, fifty-nine and four-tenths of a second
In psychology, hope is classified as a positive cognitive state. The Hope Theory defines hope as “the perceived ability to produce pathways to achieve desired goals and to motivate oneself to use those pathways”. In other words, hope can push one to actively pursue their desires with laser-focused determination. Associated benefits backed by research include reduced stress and anxiety, greater happiness, as well as the increased ability to cope with adversity.
Most of us are no strangers to this idea of hope, thanks to the folklores and popular culture we were brought up on. As a society, we hang onto this collective belief that nothing is impossible so long as we put in the necessary effort. Rather than being blind to negative possibilities, hope simply requires us to not ignore positive possibilities. Against all odds, we tell ourselves that miracles do happen.
And they really do. In 1954, Roger Bannister broke the world record by running a mile using three minutes, fifty-nine and four-tenths of a second. Before this, the prospect of completing a mile under four minutes was deemed not only dangerous but impossible. By having unwavering confidence and belief in his own abilities to achieve this miraculous feat, Bannister defied all odds to become the beacon of hope that others were searching for. Today, more than a thousand runners have achieved the same feat. All because Bannister gave them proof of what is possible.
It is thus not wrong to say that hope is a good thing. In dire situations, hope might even be the only thing that can give people the strength to carry on. Firsthand survival stories frequently stress the importance of keeping faith even while realising that the chances of survival would be extremely slim. Because they believed that they will be rescued, it helped them to push beyond the physical and mental limits of what they thought was humanly possible.
Believing in yourself is a strong impetus for action in any situation. I would even go as far as to say that believing in yourself is the single most important ingredient that motivates us to turn our dreams into reality. (See example of Bannister above.) People who do not trust in their own abilities to improve their current circumstances will eventually spiral into a self-fulfilling prophecy of inevitable doom. Psychologically, the extent of your imagination determines the extent of your abilities.
Aristotle once said this about the relationship between bravery and hope:
“The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything. The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.”
While it might seem like an act of desperation at the start, holding onto a possibility, no matter how small, can give us the mental reassurance we need to not give up just yet. If by remaining confident we can inject some positivity into any dreadful situation, then life may not be so tough to get through after all.
Hope is slavery and suffering
Countless philosophers have long warned against the self-imposed slavery of hope. Nietzsche considered it to be “the worst of all evils”, an illusion that prolonged human suffering by encouraging people’s delusions of a better reality. In private letters to his friends, Stoic philosopher Seneca illuminated the problem with hope:
“Widely different though they are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope. Nor does their so moving together surprise me; both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future.”
Put simply, hope requires a temporary suspension of logic. It requires participants to disregard statistical probabilities and place their expectations in a future far from the present. It requires imagining a reality that is different from the reality that we live in. Hope creates dissatisfaction with the present and a desire for an alternate, better future.
In a way, being dissatisfied with the present can be a good thing. Activists fight for climate action because they believe we can do much more for a greener planet. Last year, millions of protestors flooded the streets because they were tired of tolerating the injustice committed against black lives. Time and again, we continue to surpass previously impossible milestones in our advocacy efforts for women’s rights and racial equality because of the intense dissatisfaction we feel towards our current reality.
Yet, experiencing prolonged intense dissatisfaction can become debilitating. Humanity’s track record has shown that extreme emotions often led to drastic actions, and rarely with good consequences — public support for a cause generally dwindled when protests turned violent. Some may even be pushed to the other extreme, where they feel so helpless to the point they retreat back into the comforts of their homes and shut out the world instead. (Just think back to the times the news bummed you out so much you decided to not read them anymore. Yeah I know, me too.)
The late psychology professor Christopher Peterson left us with a good piece of advice: “People should be optimistic when the future can be changed by positive thinking but not otherwise.” When you indulge in others’ delusions of an impossible reality, you chip away at their presence in this world. So, unless there are actionable steps that one can take to get to that ideal reality, we are better off swallowing that red pill and living in the present.
Hope is neither good nor bad
As hope increases, so do the benefits associated with it. However, when the quantity tips into excess, hope becomes a black hole that feeds itself endlessly.
How should we manage hope then? For starters, we can rethink our treatment of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ as binary concepts. Psychologist Richard Lazarus suggested that we should not deem emotions ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ but instead to consider if they are appropriate or not depending on the context. For example, feeling guilt for the bad things we have done is a motivating emotion for self-improvement and can serve as an empowering tool to guide us towards moral behaviour in future. Similarly, sadness in response to pain is an inherent part of the human condition that can help us to develop greater empathy for others.
Remember these few words: equilibrium; balance; moderation.
Hope is anything you want it to be
Two years after flight MH370’s disappearance, families of 154 Chinese passengers released a joint statement calling official accounts of the missing jet untrue. In the statement, the families offered their forgiveness to whomever is holding their loved ones hostage, adding that there has been “no real proof” that the missing aircraft has crashed. Across four continents, families are still urging government authorities to not give up and #SearchOn.
“My daughter is still alive. The MH370 passengers are still alive. I am just waiting for my children to come home.”
Acknowledgements
I give thanks to the following authors and thinkers whose ideas gave me inspiration to write this piece.
- Jodie Jackson — You Are What You Read (2019)
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca — Letters From A Stoic (AD65)
