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‘Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper’. – Francis Bacon

“Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.” Miller, Henry

‘Hope is just the desire for things to go the way you would like them to. Hope is never necessary, although ‘hoping’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You could say that ‘hoping’ is bad as it can give illusions of fulfilling your desire, while hope itself cannot change the outcome of a situation itself’. – Random Internet user

‘I believe that I am an optimist rooted in reality. While I agree with you that realism is important, I fear that it might prevent people from visualizing a better world and discourage people from trying to influence positive changes in the world. This is why I struggle to understand why optimism, by itself, is bad.
‘Finally, I think the argument here is about unrealistic optimism and what most people can handle and in that I agree with you that rosy eyed optimism is bad but I thnk that most people do need optimism bias as they can’t handle realism without slipping into depression’. – Justuju

After arguing for months with Unawoken that optimism bias is a good thing and that most everyone needs optimism to keep going in life, I am slowly changing my mind. I was pretty convinced that average people cannot handle reality in all its starkness, whether it is a boring job, a failing marriage, dysfunctional kids, not meeting one’s own expectations or any such number of things. I used to think that they need to convince themselves that the picture is rosier than it really is to keep on living, to get through each day. Just a little bit of squinting of the eye, selective hearing and careful exclusion of negative thoughts should do the trick, I thought. Well, I ‘m not so sure of it any more.

Even though there are research papers that say that positive illusions promote psychological well being, I’m wondering if they studied more young people than middle to older aged people. It’s possible that for older people, mental well being just means that it keeps them from going into depression. I can believe that younger people are more optimistic about their future and a little set back with a dose of realism will not stop them from keeping their hopes up and trying new things and thus achieving mental well being. As we get older, and as doses of reality come at a more frequent rate, we might decide that just day-to-day survival is more important than achieving something big so we might start glorifying our current lot in life more than what it really is and thus are optimistically biased because of necessity.

But, I am starting to think that in a lot of case, optimism bias or ‘hope’ (When I use the term ‘hope’ here, I mean ‘hope that is not based on reality’, to keep things simple) could actually be bad. A positive illusion might keep people tied to a given situation (thinking that the situation is better than it really is) and an unrealistic optimism that somehow things will improve by itself might prevent them from trying something new. Yes, I realize that my previous statement looks to be contradicting itself but let me explain. I think even a person with positive illusions has moments of clarity or attack of reality and they see the situation for what it really is, but then they may either pretend that situation is not so bad or convince themselves that things will improve miraculously. If one is in a mediocre boring job, they might just stick around hoping that one day things will get better instead of seeing the realistic track record and searching for a new job. They might be even telling themselves that their job is actually better than it really is. If one is in a non-working relationship, he/she might refuse to see the fact that the other person is not as committed to the relationship as they are and might keep hoping that things will somehow magically improve. When a woman puts up with an abusive husband, I’m quite sure that she is ‘hoping’ the husband will somehow see that he’s being bad and improve himself. She might be telling herself that her situation is not so bad after all. (“Oh well, even though George doesn’t help around the house and orders me around and beats me when he gets angry, look at Mrs. Adams next door, her husband beats her up every day, so my life is so much better” kind of thinking). I’m sure there are more examples of inaction due to false hopes such as keeping stocks in a bad company, hoping that someone else will take care of the environment etc. that I don’t’ need to go into.

Of course, we could be using our optimism bias to feel better about our own laziness. For example, I keep hoping that the answer to what my passion in life is will fall into my lap one day and that it will give me major satisfaction and that will make me feel better about myself. I keep this hope up, day in day out, while doing the same sort of things I do all the time only because I’m too lazy to go searching for it and put effort into that search. I don’t know if I ever will face the reality that nothing will just miraculously appear to me and that I have to work hard for it, but then, I have hope that I’ll be able to face that reality and it will free me from my optimism bias 😉