Hope is Why You're Alive

Hello Dreamers,

The following deals with suicide and depression

Photo by Filipe Delgado: https://www.pexels.com/photo/worms-eyeview-of-well-1601495/

I started reading the Satanic Bible, cus why not? It's one of those books that people own for the sake of owning it, and in one of my goals to do more reading, it came up. In it, the nilhist-objectivist-edgelord Anton LeVay had a passage stating that hope and prayer are useless. As a direct quote:

The Satanist shuns terms such as "hope" and "prayer" as they are indicative of apprehension. If we hope and pray for something to come about, we will not act in a positive way which will make it happen.

While I will agree that 'prayer' is useless, as it's nothing more than talking to yourself, hope actually serves a survival function.

Hope is why you haven't:

• Slit your wrists.

• Downed a bottle of pills

• Put a gun to your head or in your mouth

• Pumped a car exhaust into your vehicle with you in it

• Leapt:

  • Off a tall building

  • Off a bridge with weights on your feet

  • In front of a train, tram, subway, or in heavy traffic

Among other means of killing oneself. The point is:

Hope is why you are not dead.

Hope is the light at the end of the tunnel. It's the reason to persevere. Why we keep going when the going gets tough and not give up. It fuels bravery, creativity, and ingenuity.

Unlike what LeVay suggests, Hope motivates action: you can see the light at the top of the chasm, but you still need to climb. Hope will be why you make your fingers bleed climbing upwards and not lay down and wait for death.

I once asked a therapist "What is the difference between someone who is depressed and someone whose situation was genuinely hopeless?" Several moments of debate on what constituted hopelessness later and we came to the consensus that not only is there no situation truly hopeless, but that lacking hope is a sign of mental illness.

The hope for better times keeps you alive. The hope that your course of action will bear fruit eventually is why you keep going. Without it, you will do nothing as you wait for death, or worse, perform actions to hasten the process.

Hang in there. Fight. Work hard. Outlast. Hope fuels it all!

Hope is why you are alive.