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Hope is fed to us as something we're told we'll always need if we're to make it, if we're to survive and thrive. I've evaluated hope and its usefulness and I've surmised it's little more than baseless want. The idea, the arrogant notion, the sense of bizarre entitlement that we, as humans, are owed something good, and good is a relative term, because we're good people.

The universe doesn't owe you s**t. It doesn't even owe you explanation.

And in bad times we cite hope as the one thing we have left, the difference-maker, the reason we're holding on. It's so sad that when we've got nothing, the one thing that keeps us going is something made-up. What's worse is that when it's gone, when we lose hope, we sink into despair and the void left by that hope leaves us miserable. So miserable that nothing matters, food loses flavor, melodies lose their rhythm, the days lose their light. All we want is for it to end and we grow numb.

It's so awful, depression is, that we idealize thees amorphous, intangible notions of "happiness" as the cures to every curse. Ill-defined, blanketed, all-encompassing happiness. We'll say it's what we miss and all we want and not remember what it's like or know what it is, but we want. We want it so bad we'll exchange our misery for it. We'll exchange what know for what we were promised by hope. We get to go nowhere for nothing and lament that exchange.

I challenge that the opposite of hope is not despair, but hopelessness and that hopelessness isn't a sorrowful state. To be without hope is to be in possession of drive, motivation, and the belief that you are in control. I challenge that, instead of expecting good things for goods, morality is separate from what you think you're owed and you get what you think you deserve through force of will and action.