Hope, Addiction and Oprah

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Hope is, obviously, what keeps us going when things are bad. Hope is what allows us to get out of bed in the graceless shallows of the morning when the job that's waiting impatiently for us is an affront to our very sense of self. Hope is what sends us back out into the social fray even though we haven't had a decent date in six months. Hope is what motivates us when everything else is empty, and it can come from a thousand sources. Hope lies in lottery tickets. Hope lies in letters mailed to unlikely recipients, buying weeks, maybe even months of hope that a ray of light might come back in a sealed envelope. Hope distils like potent alcohol in midnight projects that fight for the scarce hours outside of work and flourish despite the boundless disbelief of friends and family.

Hope is an anaesthetic. It won't heal the wound, but it will stop it from hurting for a while so you can get out there and do the things that have to be done.

Of course, almost everything has its dark side, and the fact of the matter is you can abuse an anaesthetic. This is why the hospital keeps all the good ones locked up - you can't just buy them at Shoppers Drug Mart. But hope, ooo, you can get that over the counter. There's no shortage of people willing to sell you a little something to fix you up, ease the pain, get you out of that rut. If hope can come from a thousand sources, then false hope has a thousand snares (just like Hell, but that's probably only a coincidence). False hope is always in striking distance. It lies in the charismatic buoyancy of deep glasses filled with oily social lubricants; it lives in online IQ tests that always seem to confirm that the theory of relativity was really your idea, not Einstein's. It thrives in the hothouses of as-advertised-on-TV correspondence diplomas, quick fix diet plans and most issues of Oprah magazine.

Topical anaesthetics have their place.

False hopes are a dime a dozen, but you'll usually pay much more.

So how do you tell the two types apart, make sure you aren't just getting hooked on expensive painkillers? How do you avoid frittering your life away on false messiahs and topical creams that will ultimately just empty your bank account but leave you none the better? Well, I'm no expert, but here are a few guidelines that I try to remember myself:

Just something to keep in mind the next time you see something that makes logic leave you and your heart spin with dizzy optimism. It's a tricky world - keep your head up.