Thirteen days after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished, an American TV survivalist named EJ "Skullcrusher" Snyder went on CNN to make the case for not giving up hope. Why, the host asked him, should the relatives be optimistic? "I'll tell you why –[because] you never give up hope," said Snyder, who makes a living fighting nature's most brutal forces, armed only with his wits and a production crew from the Discovery Channel. Those passengers might still be alive, he explained, so "there's always hope. No one should ever give up hope." He was right, of course, that theoretically the plane could have landed in secret. If you'd known someone on it, you'd probably have clung to that thought. But Snyder's glibness highlighted what a platitude "never give up hope" has become. Being against hope is like being in favour of pushing baby pandas off cliff tops. Isn't hope what motivates the oppressed to fight tyrants, what keeps people going in the most desperate deprivation? What might have become of EJ "Skullcrusher" Snyder, for that matter, if he hadn't had hope (and a production crew)?
So it's striking to encounter recent research, published in the Economic Journal, suggesting that hope makes people feel worse. The researchers' starting point was what happens to the long-term unemployed when they reach retirement age. According to 25 years of German data, "retiring from unemployment" delivers a significant increase in life satisfaction. It isn't explained by other factors, like a change in benefits, and the employed don't get the same boost when they retire. Nor, the authors argue, is it simply that other people judge the jobless more harshly. It's that when you're unemployed, there's always the hope of finding a job, and people "thus feel the permanent pressure to fulfil the norms of their social category… Ironically, it is hope that keeps them unhappy while unemployed, and it is only when hope fades that they will recover." Retirement means the end of hoping for a job, which feels like a release.
This odd notion sheds light on another mysterious but well-supported finding about trauma. As you'd expect, people take it harder when they're widowed than when they lose their jobs – but all else being equal, they actually recover more fully. Is that because widowhood's irreversible? You've got hope of being happy again, certainly, but no hope of altering your widow(er) status. Bereavement is a hope-free zone.
Scratch the surface of our hope-fixated culture and you discover The Shawshank Redemption lied to us: sometimes, giving up hope sets you free. John Ptacek, a US author, writes of finding meaning through hopelessness after his wife's terminal cancer diagnosis: "Time spent hoping for happier days is time spent turning away from life." Derrick Jensen, an environmental campaigner, believes hope makes activism less effective since it involves placing faith in someone or something else to make things better, instead of doing what's needed yourself: "A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realise you never needed it in the first place… you become very dangerous indeed to those in power." The Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön proposes a new fridge magnet: "Abandon hope". It sounds like a grim joke. After all, if you don't have hope, what's left? I suspect she'd answer: reality. In other words, everything.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
