Hope Is A Chemical Trick

You wake up every morning. You get your boots on. And you get on with the belief that today is a down payment on some distant, comfortable afternoon where everything finally balances out.

That is a lie.

You tolerate a job that makes your skin crawl. Your relationships are nothing but quiet warfare, and a bone-deep exhaustion because you bought into the myth of the horizon.

You treat your own life like a waiting room, staring at the door, convinced that something real is about to walk through it.

It is a sucker’s game. Hope is not a virtue. It is a chemical trick designed to keep a beast pulling a cart until its heart bursts.

Animals do not do this. A wolf does not spend its life miserable because it thinks next winter will be warmer. It hunts, it eats, or it starves in the cold.

Only humans have the specific, and pathetic, capacity to invent a second, imaginary world to avoid looking at the rot of the real one.

Look at the things you wanted five years ago. You thought if you just reached that specific income, that specific room, or that specific person, the weight would lift from your chest. You got those things, or versions of them. And the relief lasted about forty-eight hours.

Then the old itch came back, sharper than before.

The human mind is wired for survival, which means it is an engine fuelled entirely by lack. There is no wire for satisfaction. You are a biological machine that manufactures hunger. If you ever actually reached a state of permanent peace, the machine would stall out. So you immediately project a new mirage onto the wall and start running toward it again. You are walking on a tread-mill, sweating and bleeding, cursing the belt beneath your feet, while staring at a painted picture of a meadow taped to the wall in front of you.

The entire social order relies on you remaining blind to this mechanism.

The people who hold the whip - the banks, the bosses, the moralists - they do not want you satisfied. They want you desperate for next year. They trade in the currency of tomorrow because it costs them absolutely nothing to print. They promise you a promotion, a retirement, a salvation, or a legacy, and in exchange, you give them your actual, breathing flesh today.

You become your own jailer, using the promise of the future to lock yourself in a cell every single morning. You tell yourself that this current misery is just a necessary stage.

A tax you have to pay before the real life begins.

When you finally arrive at that future you have been bleeding for, you will open the door and find nothing but a bare floor and an old mirror.

You will be older, your body will be more broken, and the dark space inside you will be exactly as empty as it is right now.

The future has no gifts to give you.

It does not possess some secret store of meaning that will retroactively justify the years you spent eating dirt. There is no grand payout at the end of the line, no ledger where your endurance is being recorded for a prize.

There is only the immediate, raw fact of your existence.

The cold air in your lungs. And the hunger that will follow you all the way into the ground.