... and over there's where we'll play the harp and Checkers when we die."

Hope. Hope is a convention. It’s Man’s inside joke, mocking the terrifying notion that his course through time is wholly independent from his wishes. Hope is what tricks you into abandoning your fears and acknowledging  that the odds are always, always against you, and it’s nothing personal. Hope makes you lean on superstition, hollow assumptions and an absurd confidence in the validity of your grasp on what you conclude must be objective reality.

You hope to get to Heaven and you hope there is such a thing. You hope you’ll experience a superior amount of satisfaction as time passes. You hope your age makes a difference. You hope your looks make a difference. You hope your brain makes a difference. You hope your  actions, reactions and ideas make a difference. You hope you make a difference. You hope someone listens, cares and loves you. You hope God made you in his own image. You hope your mind really exists.

Hope is what gives you strength and makes you blind. Hope is what keeps you warm in the Icy Caverns of botched expectations. Hope is God’s flashlight and the devil’s television. Hope is life as simple, quick and comforting as heroin. Hope is death wearing an optimistic mask. Hope is sleeping without dreams.

And yet, where does this flower grow? If you look around you, what does the field hope blooms on look like?

The picture always has a few common elements. It’s always in someone’s mind, and always used as a shield against doubt, unlikeliness or as a desperate response to perceived doom. Where there is misery, improbability, conflict and risk, there is hope. It’s a cheerleader, a morale stimulant, an amphetamine to fight the fatigue of certainty. We are cursed with unwarranted self-importance, we think of ourselves not only as focus points for the Universe’s development, but its owners. We expect life to be crafted for us, we demand to be guided like schoolchildren lurking in the parks with the quirkiest of naive thoughts and a grandparent holding us by the hands.

Well guess what, the law of gravity won’t knit you any sweaters. It won’t change your diapers and won’t tell you bedtime stories. It really doesn’t give a shit about the fact that you’re a sensitive lamb of God who reads poetry, listens to self-help audiobooks and attends self-enlightenment seminaries.Lightning will hit you with the same fury whether you think you have a soul or are a t-shirt forgotten on a pole in the rain.  The Sun doesn’t rise for you any more than it rises for the garden variety frog.

Your environment is not run by an entity with a conscience similar to yours – you were not created in God’s image. You’re a fleshy, frail dummy getting tossed around two insignificant points in time, until your entire species becomes redundant enough to die out one way or another. You’re a biological automaton in an environment so perfectly amoral, apersonal and timeless that ending you isn’t ever a question of worthiness or capability. Rest assured,  nature will kill you. Disease, bacteria, chemical reactions, faulty systems in your organism or plain old kinetics are daily perils that don’t question your faith and don’t punish you for your sins. They just do their job.

"You mean all these beautiful, beautiful groceries weren't made for my personal delight? Well then, FUCK YOU MOTHER NATURE!

It gets worse. The only thing you can be sure of is that your mind exists. Not even that you’re living and certainly not anything your brain concocts. And you know what the worst thing about your mind is? It can be wrong. About anything. About everything. It can morph reality in so many ways and for so many reasons: self-preservation, shock, intoxication, genetics, pop music and psychological trauma. Living in society makes you forget the bigger picture, you amass more and more artificial conventions that provide a calming distraction from the fact that your life, much like anyone or anything else you regard as living tissue, is stupid, meaningless and random. Man made a microsystem of conventions that hides you away from the world as it is. You are promised eternal life by a book and a bunch of people who claim they are hotlinks to your world’s architect, you are told which dreams are worth chasing by fictitious characters you call heroes, role models or protagonists.

You mean these walls LIED TO ME? Well then, FUCK YOU FATHER BRICK!

We are born at a crossroads of customized knowledge, speculation and eclectic forms of entertainment that we follow as if they were roadsigns , informational constructs that stretch like roads in the myst. We don’t really have a roadmap and we’re not really chasing anything, we just like to think our road trip has a set destination. And we forget it doesn’t, so we make one. Then we tell whoever’s in the back to follow us, because we know the way. No, really, we’ve been here before. Alright, we haven’t, but we have a feeling.

Err... Fuck. I think we lost our way to Prospertown somewhere between Vodkaville and San Gamble. Oh well, too late to turn back.

The only thing keeping your brain from exploding is your own ignorance. You do not have the instruments to measure what your power of speculation erects. You feel the need to defend your ideas, and as any other human being, you are always trapped in the prison palace of your mind.

The truth is that despite no mathematically verifiable evidence, we hope there’s a man behind the scenery. We are cursed to always chase a deeper layer. There’s a conflict between our inherent need to find meaning to life and the universal truth that there is none.