What gives you the most hope in life? What drives you the most to get out of those seductive bedsheets in the morning and saunter out into the world with a brave face?

I think many of us do so because we choose to believe there will be some form of reward awaiting us at the end of those hard days. Perhaps we long to be financially stable and persevere in the hopes of never having to persevere again. Perhaps we hope to find a life we think is worth living, making our perseverance worth it for a more pleasurable form of perseverance. Or maybe the hope of a meal at the end of daily labour is enough of a reward for some.

Perhaps you can guess what all of these have in common and why I believe this commonality to effectively illustrate the Frailty of Hope.

Answer– they all hope for a future not yet achieved.

That is really the essence of hope, isn’t it? After all, you need not hope for anything you’re not currently lacking. Conversely, hope is also an imperative aspect of our work to acquire what we long for. If we never hoped for the things we achieved, how can we expect our rewards to bring us any joy? But I propose that obsession with hope is a dangerous mindset if used excessively. The very best way to misuse hope is to use it as either the sole or primary driving force towards our future.

Perhaps this seems obvious, but don’t place all your happiness in the future in favour of the present. We could argue that you are happier in the present when you’re happy with your future. This may be true if the stars align and our way of life becomes better for the future we work towards, but we’ll get to that shortly.

We could also argue that we’re happier with the present when we’re happy with the past. One of my childhood neighbours, who was 95 at the time, gave me one of the wisest perspectives on memories when he told me:

“One day, should you live long enough, memories will be all that you have left that’s worth living for.”

All of this, I believe to be very much true. But I wish to highlight, not what hope gives to you, but what it demands from you. Hope is not a free giver, nor is it generous, but it can rather be likened to a loan shark with unlimited resources. The business of loaning appears simple and mutually beneficial on the surface; receive something on the condition of paying that something back, with a little extra for the loaner’s time. With successful repayments, the lender increases the amount they can loan for next time, with the intention of receiving more interest from those repayments. And so the cycle goes.

But as many of us are well aware, this stops being mutually beneficial if we are unable to pay back a sum in full. We become starved for all the money we’ve had to pay back, which drives us into another loan to survive. Then another. And so it continues, until we find ourselves drowning in a financial sea that seems impossible to escape, with the sharks circling us and vying for blood. One way or another, they will get their sum in full.

Why do I liken this vicious cycle to hope? For one simple reason–hope is not ours. Hope is by its very nature manifested by external factors that must to an extent be beyond our control. And as with all things we obtain rather than create, there is a price for hope. Dependency.

Let’s take the example of one Western society’s most sought-after goals–financial freedom. We will work tirelessly, sacrifice much of our time and energy, even forgoing things in life that make us happy in the moment, all in service to the hope that we will one day be free from those demands. Doesn’t it seem ironic when described this way?

Do you see the costly dependency in this case? We no longer work to make ourselves, or those around us, happy or fulfilled. We work for the chance of happiness and fulfilment in the ambiguous future, meaning we are willing to place happiness itself as something to be obtained rather than experienced.

Hope is greedy for this. It demands exclusive devotion by hanging treasures in our face, constantly assuring us that we’re getting closer to them and we need only serve a little while longer before they’re all ours. Of course, in some cases, this is true. Countless examples exist of people attaining treasures as a reward for their perseverance in service to hope. But it means that while we subscribe to hope’s promises, we are always subservient to its whims, not ours.

Yet, along with being a powerful driving force, hope is an imperative source of happiness, isn’t it? So, the question arises– how do we live with hopefulness, without becoming subservient to it? Balance in this regard is imperative.

To illustrate, have you ever asked or been asked the question, “What would you wish for from a genie”? This is an especially fun question to ask children, as they rarely have any inhibitions in expressing their creative perspective of the world and themselves. Superpowers, toys, something epic like a Willy Wonka-type chocolate town, or something similarly wild would usually be mentioned. Adults are more likely to be generic and wish for world peace or freedom from sickness or something equally vague and all-encompassing.

What was by far the best answer I’ve heard came from a young boy named Rex, whom I met while volunteering as an English teacher in Chiang Mai, Thailand. His English was the best in the class, having learned by watching a ton of cartoons and TV shows. He, in fact, became my assistant in the class because of his proficiency in English. He was especially fascinating to me when I met his parents and realised they could not speak a single word of English between them.

I asked the same question in his class, as a way for them to practice expressing themselves in English. When it came to his turn, his answer was to become a genie.

Simple and brilliant. Note that he didn’t wish for more or unlimited wishes, as some would, because that is important to the balance of living with the hope we’re reflecting on. Rex’s answer could be expanded upon like this– he wished to be free of the genie to obtain what he wanted on his terms and no one else’s. By becoming the genie, he became the key bearer of wishes, for himself and those he cared to give them to.

This is what I believe to be the key to balancing our perspective of hope. Through the very act of hoping, we create a path before us to tread, which could be long or short, arduous or easy. The key is to make this inevitable path one that will make us happy in and of itself to walk, regardless of what lies at the end of it.

This mindset is why many go trekking or ride up long paths to reach mountain peaks. Once at the top, that elation of besting the arduous journey and having an incredible view as a reward is worth it. But if the mountain were stripped away, would a trekker give up trekking? For them, the fulfilment of the trek itself is the biggest reward, regardless of the destination. In the UK, there are often organised treks that end where they start, with nothing but trees and maybe a few streams and hills to see on the way. These events are incredibly popular and still growing.

The point here is that the balance of living with hope is to enjoy the journey toward it and still strive to reach the destination you long for. Yes, having a destination is incredibly important, but we must enjoy the journey so much that if we were assured that we would never reach it, we would still live the journey without reservation.

If you reach this balance for yourself, I believe that you will be giving yourself your own rewards that can never be taken from you or used to manipulate your course. You become the genie and the key bearer for others. Those others see how you live and hope, and are inspired by it.

Even if the future hope you had was to die, you would not regret your journey. And you’d merely replace it with another hope.

That is the frailty of hope– we need not be subservient to it. It needs us more than we need it.