“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” is a famous line from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, referring to an inscription above the Gates of Hell. This makes it sound like hope is a good thing, as it offers some relief to those in a troublesome situation. Such as being thrust into Hell.
On the other hand, today I came across this passage in a New Yorker article by Nick Paumgarten, “Summit and Shadow: How Jim Morrison surmounted tragedy to achieve his mountain feats.”
Since losing his wife and kids, he’d been expecting that they would somehow reveal themselves. At the seaside, in the woods, up in the high alpine, he searched for a sign. Fishing a river, he waited for his kids to come out of the water. He imagined returning home from work to flowers on the table, or to a light mysteriously switched on.
“This was a dream, a hope, and a desire, and because it never happened it caused me incredible grief,” he told me recently. “I concocted my own beliefs about life and death, and — energy. Their energy, who they really were, isn’t, or wasn’t, their body, their physical form.”
They had died when Jim’s wife, Katie Morrison, like him a pilot, was flying a single-engine turboprop Cessna, with the kids aboard — Wyatt, six, and Hannah, five — from Long Beach, California, to Henderson, Nevada, to visit a friend. A bad pocket of air over the desert caused the plane to plummet and crash.
Following the death of his wife and children, apparently it made Morrison feel better to imagine that they still existed in some sort of non-physical form. But when there was no sign of this, he suffered from an extra dose of grief, since his hope caused him to expect something that never happened.
This fits with what behavioral economist George Loewenstein speaks of in his book, The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us. Here are excerpts from the “Because Hope Refuses to Die” chapter.
Countless adages like “The darkest hour is just before the dawn” reinforce the notion that hope is essential, especially during hard times. Meanwhile, the opposite of hope — hopelessness — is a synonym for extreme despair. From an evolutionary perspective, hope likely emerged as an adaptive response to uncertainty, helping our ancestors persevere through adversity and motivating them to pursue long-term goals.
Decades of empirical research has consistently affirmed the value of hope, linking it to improved mental and physical health. Hopeful people manage pain and stress better, face lower risks of suicide, depression, and early death , and experience fewer chronic illnesses and even higher survival rates from certain cancers. Few emotions enjoy such a sterling reputation. And yet, if you look into the deep literary origins of hope, a more ambiguous — and troubling — portrait emerges.
…In each of these cases — the families of the disappeared, a hostage waiting for a release that might never come, women clinging to the last possibility of motherhood — hope itself becomes a source of suffering. The idea yields a kind of irony: people who are objectively better off, because there remains a real, if remote, chance that their situation might improve, are often subjectively worse off, because that.very chance prevents them from adjusting to their present circumstances.
They are essentially unable to reap the rewards of hedonic adaptation that we discussed in the last chapter. Unable to fully accept the loss, they are trapped in the misery of their own hope.
…Obviously hope isn’t always a bad thing, but instead of valorizing hope in all contexts it’s worth considering when it is helpful and when it might be harmful. I acquired one of my favorite adages about this from a fortune cookie: “Hope makes a good breakfast but a bad supper.” The obvious interpretation is that hope is beneficial when you are young, but perhaps foolish or unsatisfying when old.
Now, well into the “supper” (or perhaps dessert) phase of life, I’m not as taken with the adage as I was when I was young. I still find things to hope for (and, alas, even more things to worry about). At my stage in life, an even more popular adage springs to mind: “hope springs eternal.” After conducting this research, my own view is that hope is still a good thing — except in very bleak situations that are not likely to improve. In such situations, hope impedes the relief arising from adaptation, and people are, if not “happily hopeless,” then at the very least “happier hopeless.”
At the beginning of the chapter, Loewenstein relates an example of this from his own life. When his daughter, Rosa, was in middle school and they were at the beach, he had the idea that it would be fun to revisit something they used to do when she was younger: give Rosa a ride on his shoulders.
They got her up there successfully, but then she started to fall forward and Lowenstein used the full strength of his neck muscles to break her fall. The sound of a loud crack coming from his neck kicked off a lengthy process of trying to find relief from the neck pain and excruciating headaches he suffered from.
I like his one sentence description of this, because it sort of fits with my own experience with medical specialists: “Every doctor I visited seemed to believe that my problem emanated from whatever part of the body they specialized in, and that whatever procedure they specialized in was the cure.”
After years of fruitless searching for relief from a succession of doctors, Loewenstein found a neurosurgeon that he trusted, because the doctor didn’t want to operate on him. Instead, Loewenstein was told that he had a nerve tear and nothing could be done about it. He’d just have to live with it. Loewenstein writes:
That might seem like bad news, but it was actually liberating. It gave me license to stop searching for a solution to a problem that didn’t have one, and I set about finding ways to live with my disability, both physicaly and psychologically. Paradoxically, it was only when I abandoned all hope of recovery that I experienced genuine relief — an insight that made me question whether hope is truly the ally our culture insists it is.
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