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In Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, Shelley describes hope and despair as torturers:
This is the correct perspective. Hope and despair are the same thing, a feeling about the future. Regardless of whether your feelings are positive or negative, they are just as rational and just as worthwhile as praying about the future.
Hoping that the future will be better than the present is a waste of time, and emotional energy. Despairing that the future will not be better than the present is also a waste of time. Expending any effort on either has the same value as having a prayer meeting about the future with your local tribe of soccer moms.
Determining that you will make the future better, in any way that you can, for as many people as you can, and then making some practical plans to actually do that, is not a waste of time.
Don't hope. Don't despair. Do something useful.
Or, hope and fear/despair are two sides of the same coin.
It can be difficult to explain why you don't orient your life around something like hope though.
Yes, and both only produce anxiety - either in despairing over what might happen, or hoping over what might not.
If I understand what you mean, I disagree. Orient your life around something rational. Planning will do you better than hoping, any day of the week.
Typo in my second sentence made it harder to understand.
All I meant was hope is often considered a universal good. Trying to explain why that isn't the case goes against years of programming for most people.
It’s important to identify that prayer in the traditional sense is still useful. Giving in just a little bit to your universe, if only for a short while, to let your guard down and express your innermost thoughts to an outside entity is incredibly helpful to the brain in reframing the challenges in life. Even if you don’t believe in a “higher power”, expressing these thoughts to the universe can help process things in ways that pure action or meditation can’t.
I suppose, but only if you consciously recognize it as a form of self-therapy (which I would still just categorize as meditation) and don't expect anything practical to come from the prayer session (which is what most people mean by the term prayer - asking a higher power for help - and which I would categorize as delusional).