Hope

Hope is a desire for a most wanted event to come true. It’s where the heart has invested in something. Hope relates to internal representations of the future. Typically, the temporal closeness of a hope will be moving towards the person who holds it as he or she fulfils objectives.

Hopes are plans that become subconsciously organised goals for life. The imagination is an interface between the conscious and subconscious appreciation of reality. The five senses, memories, conscious, and unconscious data can all merge within the imagination. In this theatre, plays can be created from any sources of information. Theories, hypotheses, plans, decisions and convictions are formed on what is shown in the sublime skeletal hall.
Subconscious activity uses the data from the imagination for the concerns of making sense of the outer world. When information comes in through the senses and passes through the imagination, additional meaning can be embedded onto the data that the subconscious takes as fact. When ideas in the imagination are imprinted with the deepest desire that they come true, hopes are created.
Hopes are built by what people imagine could be possible. This concerns how a visceral view of the world is constructed. The organisation of people’s highest priorities – hopes – is submitted through the imagination to the unconscious for processing. The processing power of the unconscious is mighty. Raw unconscious processing of hopes creates a psychological architecture from which motivations, inclinations, and disinclinations are issued. Interests and passions are subconscious guides aimed at making hopes come true.
Hope is concerned with priorities and possibilities. The range of possibilities is usually related to what people can imagine – including the most fantastical of all possibilities. Even if an imagined state is completely unrealistic, people can still hope for it to come true. This shows how varied hopes can be. People may see that something is not possible in their lifetime, or for hundreds of years, but they can still hope it will come to pass. They can even pass their hopes on to their children for them to pass on to their children, so each consecutive generation becomes the embodiment of their parent’s hopes and dreams. Thus showing how infinite hope can be.

So hopes can be timeless. As long as people do not expect them to come true in their lifetimes, they can imagine that they will come true at some point. As despair is the loss of hope, this enables people to avoid despair for generations upon generations. For as long as people think a remote possibility exists that the desired thing could still come true, hope is alive. In this way, people can hope and work towards things for thousands of years. Besides having the ability to be completely fantastical whilst delivering no despair, these infinite hopes are rare compared to everyday normal hopes.
The hopes that could come true tomorrow, or next year, are the most consequential as their effect is guaranteed to influence mood. These are hopes people cannot avoid seeing, without delusion, whether they come true or not. If a hope does not come true, people experience despair upon the realisation that a dreamed scenario is lost. If the hope is lost, how significant the dream is will determine how much despair is felt. Despair, losses and failures do not nourish people. An opposite effect occurs. Psychological and neuro-biological systems are affected with equivalent depressive episodes. This affect induces people to ruminate analytically on the causes of their defeat, so similar sad memories are instinctively recalled to mind for comparison purposes.¹ One lost hope can recall numerous other losses into memory. A hope being lost is felt as the most serious of failures. Losing one hope after another is especially unhealthy. The loss of consecutive hopes can lead to serious episodes of depression.

Unrealistic hopes are a troubling prospect as they have despair encapsulated within them. Nonetheless, everyone has hopes that are unrealistic to some degree. People have to work through the despair as they persevere – adjusting hopes to be more realistic along the way. Hopes have to be tailored to personal circumstances as there is no one size fits all. In this sense, realistic represents what is appropriate for the individual in question. How realistic people’s hopes and dreams are is a very reliable indicator of how stable they are psychologically and emotionally. Tests have been designed to gauge how realistic people’s expectations and hopes are as an assessment before therapy.
Realistic and achievable hopes offer stable psychological health. Each achieved objective on the way towards a hoped-for situation will create gladness. Each achieved hope is felt as a psychological and neuro-biological success that releases positive neurotransmitters and hormones. The results are deeply satisfying feelings, such as joy and elation. These positive emotions disengage the mind from ruminating analytical thinking, and in so doing they release psychological, neural and physical tension.² This is accompanied with a boost in optimism which also contributes positively to immune system functioning.³
Successes also build an internal sense of control over the world. They develop a sense of self-control, self-belief and security that helps people overcome feelings of helplessness. They make confident individuals who are not afraid to be assertive when they need to be. High self-esteem and self-confidence inoculates people against the negative experiences which everyone inevitably feels from time-to-time. The deep sense of satisfaction that arises from hopes coming true acts to buffer any negative experiences (such as frustration, disappointment and despair).⁴

Because despair is caused when hope is lost, it’s sensible to manage the amount of hopes being worked towards. Focusing on a few hopes that all come true is much more healthy and stable than having a dozen hopes of which only a few come true.
Hopes give direction and purpose to life, for they drive people to their desired destinations. They are personalised destinies. Having realistic hopes does not mean the hopes are dull. The achievement of hopes makes people joyous; it also leads to the creation of new hopes that form as an extension of the hopes already achieved. A hope that was once unattainable will become a realistic goal in time. Hopes are built on hopes. People can reach for the stars and be filled with joy along the way.
If hopes are unrealistic, they can be the ruin of people. If hopes are realistic and achieved, they can be the making of people. If people have no hopes, they will spare themselves the possible despair and pain that goes with them, yet they will also deprive themselves of chances to become more healthy, secure, confident, assertive and driven individuals. The defining point is how realistic people can keep their dreams. How many hopes can any one person realistically achieve at any one point in time?

Maintaining realistic dreams may not initially be as exciting as keeping high hopes, but achieving hopes is a joyous experience that can lead to higher hopes in time. Achieving hopes is the way people build their ability to predict and control the world. Understanding one’s self gives people the psychological, emotional, and physical confidence to enjoy their lives as they succeed.

Hope