Hope is, therefore, destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what currently is. Because hope requires that something be broken. Hope requires that we renounce a part of ourselves and/or a part of the world. It requires us to be anti-something. This paints an unbelievably bleak picture of the human condition. It means that our psychological makeup is such that our only choices in life are either perpetual conflict or nihilism—tribalism or isolation, religious war or the Uncomfortable Truth. — *location: 1750* ^ref-1222 --- Nietzsche instead believed that we must look beyond hope. We must look beyond values. We must evolve into something “beyond good and evil.” For him, this morality of the future had to begin with something he called amor fati, or “love of one’s fate”: “My formula for greatness in a human being,” he wrote, “is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”20 — *location: 1758* ^ref-17377 --- This is our challenge, our calling: To act without hope. To not hope for better. To be better. In this moment and the next. And the next. And the next. Everything is fucked. And hope is both the cause and the effect of that fuckedness. — *location: 1770* ^ref-4533 --- But the only thing that frees us is that truth: You and I and everyone we know will die, and little to nothing that we do will ever matter on a cosmic scale. And while some people fear that this truth will liberate them from all responsibility, that they’ll go snort an eight ball of cocaine and play in traffic, the reality is that this truth scares them because it liberates them to responsibility. It means that there’s no reason to not love ourselves and one another. That there’s no reason to not treat ourselves and our planet with respect. That there’s no reason to not live every moment of our lives as though it were to be lived in eternal recurrence.21 — *location: 1775* ^ref-60835 --- “Man is a rope, tied between beast and Superman—a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture [to something greater.]” — *location: 1817* ^ref-37474 --- No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference.3 It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all? — *location: 160* ^ref-45224 --- The avoidance of hopelessness—that is, the construction of hope—then becomes our mind’s primary project. All meaning, everything we understand about ourselves and the world, is constructed for the purpose of maintaining hope. Therefore, hope is the only thing any of us willingly dies for. Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves. Without it, we believe we are nothing. — *location: 168* ^ref-29518 --- The constant desire to change yourself then becomes its own sort of addiction: each cycle of “changing yourself” results in similar failures of self-control, therefore making you feel as though you need to “change yourself” all over again. Each cycle refuels you with the hope you’re looking for. — *location: 419* ^ref-48340 --- >Was Pilecki a hero by creating hope when there is none or a fool for hoping in a hopeless situation? “I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.” --- >January resolutions give you the sense of control that you need to create more hope. It becomes an addictive cycle. --- >You can tell what you’re insecure about because you will swing back and forth between narcissism and imposter syndrome. The downside of both is that it makes you separate from the world, which is a source of unhappiness. --- >Children know nothing but pain avoidance. Adolescents develop principles to help them delay or mitigate pain. Adults understand that unconditional love is the only love worth giving. --- >Blue Dot effect and shifting “windows”