Hope and hopelessness

I was at the Oakridge SFU philosopher's cafe last night where the discussion was around hope and hoplessness.

Some interesting points:

1.  What is hope?  It involves the imagination to visualize a positive outcome in the future and also the believe that it is likely, or at least more than possible. By contrast, hopelessness is feeling that the current situation will not improve.

2.  While the western culture thinks of hope as good and hopelessness as something to be avoided,  is there anything good about hopelessness and bad about hope?  Someone offered that she had never thought she had any hope of being good at basketball so her hopelessness in playing basketball is a good thing in that it keeps her expectations realistic.  By the same token, hope implies some dissatisfaction with the current situation.

3.  What about contentment. Can one be hopeful and content?  In other cultures where people are suppose to be content with their birth status and station in life, is hope interfering with their contentment?  How do we have acceptance of our situation and still harbor hope for the better?

4.  Hope can be nurtured through the visualizing of the goals, breaking this long term goal into intermediate small achievable steps towards this goal.  Making progress in these small steps reinforce the viability of the long term goal and strengthen the believe that the goal is realistic and support the hope.

5.  Edison was mentioned as having looked at every failure along the way to inventing the light bulb as just another way not to make the light bulb.  Someone mentioned that years ago, she had laughed when her then young husband decided to get a PhD and be the head of an institute.  He is there now and he was never upset with the "failures" but saw them as an indicator on how not to do something and improve.  These are all "learning opportunities" towards our long term goal if we can just put aside our short term pride.

6.  I mentioned the example of a dog tied to a leash off a bicycle. The dog has to follow the leash and go where the cyclist is going.  It may be inspirational to say that we should have hope against all odds but for this dog, hoping to get off that leash and the roaming cyclist is impractical.  Therefore, the differentiation between determination and being stubborn is the good judgment of what is feasible versus what is not practical.  Edison had a long term vision that the light bulb is possible while he is dealing with the setbacks along the way.  The leader of the scientific institute as a young man sees that these leaders are human, that it is achievable and he has the qualities to get there.  The dog behind the bicycle should examine the integrity of the leash before deciding whether it is practical to try to break away from the leash.

7. According to the Greek mythology and Homer,  the gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. However, that is what a lot of us do everyday in our daily routines.  We accept progressing our careers and raising our children as a given and go through the daily grind of pushing the stone uphill.  While we may complain about the hard work, we may suffer a sense of loss upon retirement when there is no reason to push the rock up the hill any more.  So are we enjoying our daily grind? Are we liking the hopeful feeling that some day the rock will eventually get to the top of the mountain?  Or is it the endless circle of life to keep changing?

8.  Someone asked if anyone believe in the afterlife. It stands to reason that if there is an afterlife that there should be a previous life. If there is a previous life and we do not know what it is, is it relevant? A lot of people who believed that they had a previous life thought they were a princess or Napoleon.  Is this an indication of the concept of parallel universes for there to be so many princesses and Napoleons?

9.  Hopelessness is a condition that depressed people often have. Since antidepressant drugs can help in this situation through chemical changes to our neural synapses, our body chemistry is implicated in our sense of hope and hopelessness.  While hope and hopelessness is a mental feeling,  our brain is supported by our physical body that is influenced by the food we eat, the amount of sleep we have and whether we are under the influence of some disease. The computer analogy here is that our feelings are like computer software running on computer hardware.  The well being of the hardware affects the integrity of the software.  The analogy breaks down here in that computers are digital and software failures are usually catastrophic; either the computer works or it doesn't, there is no middle ground where the computer hardware works but give you the wrong answers in software.  For the human brain, it can be affected by lack of sleep and other factors without us knowing that these physical factors are at play on our thoughts.

So, should we aim for being hopeful? content? striving like Sisyphus? go with the flow like the dog on a leash? Edison with learning opportunity at every turn?