This world sucks! There are a group of people out there selling “hope,” instead of letting us face reality that this is no bed of roses. Even if there are a few patches of roses, we must remember that even roses have thorns. One finds a few who are sincere (albeit naively) about the hope for living, but this doesn’t usually last too long, because sooner or later experience has to trump assumption.

There are those who have taken it upon themselves to make a living by trying to deceive people by selling them hope as a drug. It turns out that the height of hope gets reversed into the depth of depression when people realize that the world is a rough place. We need to stop teaching people about “happy endings” that come to you just because you “have a good heart.”

That fairy tale mentality is very crippling. Careful planning, shrewdness, and sometimes luck are the factors that lead to success (even though successful people don’t have perfect lives). It is not enough to be sincere; there has to be some foresight and planning. It’s is not enough to “be a good person” because even good people, if they are careless about protecting themselves, will get knocked to the ground and be left laying in the dirt.

The reality is that hope is only meant to cover the part of the equation that relates to luck. You plan your success and happiness to the best of your ability, and only after that, should you begin to hope for good things. How can you hope to harvest food when you planted nothing. First you till the soil, plant your seeds, water them, control weeds and pests, and then you can hope that no natural disaster wipes out your crop. Human advancement to this stage did not not come through hope, but through the dedication to study and planning by the great minds and generations past.

No one is going to achieve any greatness simply by being sincere. Our culture lets us tell the opposite to kids, then they are later shocked hard by reality. Kids need to be cushioned and shielded, but it should not be a total bubble of naivety.

Hope is not to be abused as a drug to give people delusions. Imagine how much better off we would be if we spent more time plotting to succeed and less time day-dreaming about success. Just because you can think it, believe it, or “hope for it” doesn’t mean it will come to be. Imagine how unsafe our houses would be if we chose to hope no one would break in, instead of getting good alarm systems and having our locks and windows reinforced. Imagine if we were at war and we chose to spend our time fantasizing amongst ourselves about victory, rather than going to fight against our enemies. Also imagine how many wars we’ve won because our enemies were not practical enough to reinforce their defenses properly.

Life is not a Disney movie. Sometimes the bad guys do win, no matter how much us “good people” believe that we deserve to win. That’s just the reality of the matter. Dreams are meant for sleep and not for reality. Reality is to plan, work, and do all you can, and then afterwards, hope. It is not the other way around, and the role of hope needs to be diminished from our collective psyches.

This isn’t anything new to some of you, but the evidence shows me that a lot of us live in dreamworlds. This is the reason why we buy products based on who has the most entertaining commercial. We choose to reward the company that can give us the most social confidence in their product, rather than do a little research to see who makes the most durable and reliable product.

This is also why we would rather slander our boss behind his back, than file formal complaints with his bosses or the HR department when we believe he is overstepping our personal boundaries. We sometimes take it a notch higher and make negative online comments about them (which for some strange reason makes us feel vindicated). It seems that the solution to our problems has been reduced to finding people who can fantasize about the solutions with us, instead of consulting to find an actual way out.

It would be nice if all our enemies could be that delusional, to where their war against us comes down to making fun of us, or “talking smack” to us. Instead, they are bombing us. Thank God that we don’t have the same attitude towards security as we do towards other endeavors such as financial security and health.

Let no one get me wrong; hope is a good thing. We must ensure that we take some time out from the stress of daily endeavors. Hope is a perfect way for us to step outside the difficulty and remind ourselves of what we are working for in the first place, just like the builders always keep the scale model of the building in full view. The disaster would be if they dropped their tools and decided to be content with imagining and dreaming about the building, rather than getting down to complete the actual building. The purpose of hope is to encourage us to continue our real efforts in life, and not to take our minds away from reality.