Hope is a dangerous thing.

Aarushi Grover
3 min readMay 8, 2021

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Laying down on my bed, conflicted between two universes, waiting to sleep. The warmth and solace I feel physically isn’t the one I crave. I feel like I’m going further and more profound inside the pit of vulnerability. I promised myself I won’t end up like this, yet I ended up doing exactly that. As people say, hope is something that is very powerful and losing it is the most exceedingly awful thing that could happen. Well, it happened to me. I can’t hope to feel that comfort anymore because hope creates expectations and we all know how that ends. I start to drift off into another world while all this fades away from my mind, only to come back and haunt me the very next night.

“Hope is a Dangerous Thing, it can drive a man insane”
(Image credits: Pinterest)

“Hope? Let me tell you my friend, Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.” — Stephan King (Movie- The Shawshank Redemption)

If you have never seen the film, that is your immeasurable loss. When I heard this dialogue from the movie for the first time, I wasn’t convinced of this at all and thought it’s another some shit movie dialogue. Because as a child I have been always used to hearing “Where there is Hope, there is life.

But now, this dialogue makes all the sense. Hope is the brain’s trap that holds us back from seeing reality. In holding us back from seeing reality, our brain is ‘securing’ us from harm. But, however, the harm is going to come, in any case. So, the protection is close to whitewashing. This is the thing that makes hope a dangerous thing.

Hope is a brain disease. A disease brought into the world of the brain keeping us in a condition of unending ‘illusion.’ What a genuine searcher of reality should, at last, come to acknowledge is that there can be no understandable vision of the reality of the world, and of our own circumstances, if we continue to rely on Hope.

Perhaps, hope will allow you to live, however, would you say you are alive? Things that exist in your fantasy, in your future that you need very badly. Is it safe to say that you aren’t feeling the loss of your present because of this?

The hope of getting a good job, a hope of becoming wealthy, a hope of marrying your loved one, a hope where all your greyness turns into a colourful rainbow. What if, all of that doesn’t exist there in the first place? What is the point of crushing your present in the hope of a better future?

One should definitely try to work as much as they can for their dreams, but one should not keep that hope in their mind that everything in life will go according to their way. Hope limits people, it sets boundaries. People stop thinking beyond those boundaries. This is what makes Hope a dangerous thing and when things don’t happen as people wish for this is where Hope is driving a man insane.

So, one should hope for the best but prepare for the worst!

You may totally disagree with all this or maybe this article is totally unsatisfactory for you. Well, we are humans, all of us have different opinions. Thanks, for reading though! :))

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Aarushi Grover
Aarushi Grover

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