Hoping For Failure

Ask yourself this: What are you willing to give up for your dream? Maybe you’re a teenager with great drive and ambition searching for happiness in this big bad world of ours. Our maybe you’re a middle aged person with a stable job and enough to retire and never work another day in your life. What is your dream? While I give you a moment to think about it, here is a dream that was posted on a forum when asked the very same question.

Well? Is it a simpler dream like being able to pay off your mortgage or maybe it’s a spectacular dream like being able to visit every country in the world.  What if I told you that you could do it. That you could be whatever you wanted to be and do whatever you wanted to do. As long as you wanted it bad enough you could do it. This is hope. Hope is to be inspired by something and desiring for it to happen. Now what if I told you that you could do everything right and sacrifice everything for your dream, only for the chance that you could be successful. Mind you, it would be a good chance. But still, would you do it? I sometimes think that this really holds people back when they think; “I would try, but there is no guarantee that I would succeed”. This is fear and anxiety taking over and distracting you from your dream, because you see only the worst case scenario, as described in Murphy’s Law. Murphy's Law states that anything that can happen, will happen.

We typically think of good and bad as two sides of the same coin. Hope, success and goodness occupy heads while fear, failure and pain occupy tails. This is not necessarily true because fear can save your life from doing stupid things and hope may blind your judgement. It is important to realize this before jumping to conclusions.

During military holidays like Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day we salute those who have served in the U.S. military but we treat the dead like they lost at life or that they failed to come home. Most times this isn’t their fault. A gunshot out of nowhere or a random fragment of artillery is all it takes to end a person's life. This leaves life and death to chance most times. This is where Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five gives a prime example of hope and fear. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a skinny little kid drafted into the army and fights at the Battle of the Bulge. Fights is a very broad term because the only thing he did was get lost behind enemy lines. This is where he finds Roland Weary, a decorated war soldier in his own mind, who saves Billy to fulfil his own fantasy. Although it seems sometimes that Billy doesn’t care what happens to him when he walks in front of a live battlefield, he lives while Weary dies of gangrene, cursing Billy’s name. He curses his name because Billy succeeds without even wanting to live while Weary dies, trying his hardest to stay alive. Weary is a war hero who everyone looks up to as an ideal and Billy is the cowardly fearful boy that everyone hates. During a battle, Billy loses the will to live.  Roland then says, "He don't want to live, but he's gonna live anyway. When he gets out of this, by God, he's gonna owe his life to the Three Musketeers." (Vonnegut 2). This quote further illustrates how heroic Weary is in this war. The picture below is from MAUS II. A book set in Nazi Germany during WWII. This comic illustrates the point that I made in the previous paragraph, about how living through a tragedy is seen as winning while dying is seen as losing when it simply isn’t true. There is a large amount of luck involved in surviving and if you die, it is most likely based on bad luck rather than bad choices.

The fear to achieve is truly crippling. Society says that we can be and do whatever we want to be. We could be a policeman, fireman, soldier or teacher, helping society and being the best that we can be. But this is just not true. Our internal struggles and the pressure that we put on ourselves limit us to mediocrity and hopelessness. People who understand that they can’t be perfect and realize that they have all they need to achieve, actually achieve. This reminds me of a quote by Henry Ford that says, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you’re right.”. While the fear to achieve is difficult, achieving doesn’t necessarily bring hope.

The bus ride home after my teacher had us put hope and fear against each other in a duel to the death, I made a chart describing the parts of speech for fear and hope. I was thinking that hope and fear didn’t actually make complete opposites. What I found was that fear had a past, and future term, but hope only had a past and future term. Fear had feared and fearful. You do fear something, you did fear something and you will fear something. Hope had hoped, and hopeful, but it doesn’t really make sense. You hope for something, you did hope for something and you will hope for something. You see, hope is a future term about things that will happen, while fear is a present term about things that are happening now, so you can’t compare them, even if you try. Instead of arguing which is more powerful, it would be better to compare inspire and terrorize. Both are stronger than their counterparts and are stronger antonyms to each other. Now, instead of trying to compare things that are harder to see in today's society, you can see firsthand with inspiration and terrorizing how people create and do amazing things like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, but they can also destroy like ISIS. This lets the battle between light and darkness have meaning, rather than just to argue.