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This is FiveMinuteFriday, Abandon Hope.
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Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast, everybody. Super excited to have you back here on the show. Yesterday, I was speaking with Hadelin over, of course, Zoom. We’re in different countries right now, but I was speaking with Hadelin and we were talking about fear. And he mentioned a very interesting quote, which reads, “The desire for freedom comes from fear.” And this has to do mostly, or as an example, with relationships, right? So if you’re in an intimate relationship, sometimes people have fear of commitment and that fear or that desire, so the desire for freedom of not commitment actually comes from a fear. A fear of things not working out and a fear of things not going the way you ideally want them in your life to go. And things like that.
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And a relationship is just one example. Wherever we look for freedom, it’s often a good idea to ask ourselves, why do we need that freedom? Is it the case that it’s a fundamental right that we need here and we want, which is totally justified, or is it just coming from a place of fear? Anything that’s coming from a place of fear, shouldn’t have a place in your life, in our lives. And that’s kind of one of the big learnings through life is to remove these fears from your life and live a fear-free life.
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And it was interesting because I knew a quote, which I added to his comment. This comment that the desire for freedom comes from fear. I knew another quote, which is abandon hope, which is a quote as far as I know from Buddhist teachings. And what it’s all about is that hope is the source of fear. So desire for freedom comes from fear, but fear itself in many cases, maybe in all cases, I’m not a philosopher to be able to answer the question, but in many cases, at least fear comes from hope. And why is that?
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Well, when we hope for things, we have expectations. And what is an expectation? It’s an anticipation of how the future will look like. And we see the future in a certain way. We want it to be in a certain way. That is our hope. And thereby we have fears that if it’s not like that, then we’re not going to be satisfied or things will go wrong, or it’ll be the end of the world. There’ll be a crisis situation. We don’t know how to deal with it. Our plans will be ruined and all these things, all these fears, right? They actually originate from something seemingly as innocent and beautiful as hope.
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Well, turns out that hope is actually the source of our fears, because if you don’t have hope, if you don’t hope for something or for something to be a certain way or someone to be a certain way, that’s something to think about as well. If you don’t hope for someone to be a certain way or things to play out or certain events to take place, if you don’t hope for that, if you don’t have no hopes for the future, if you just take the future, what does that mean? That means you’re taking future just the way it is, the way it comes. Yes, it’s okay to have ambition and to work towards certain things and to put in effort. It doesn’t mean you just need to sit under a tree and accept the future. You can do that as well, but it’s okay to have ambition and do things. But as soon as you start adding hope to equation, it is a very kind of soft line. It’s not very clear, what is the difference between ambition and hope.
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But the point is it’s okay, it’s good to work and things, to develop yourself and prove yourself and things like that. But as soon as you start adding hope to the equation, then all of a sudden you start experiencing fears. And as soon as you start experiencing fears, you start acting on those fears and it’s like a vicious circle. Now they’re influencing how you are, the things that you do in the present, even though they have nothing to do with the present, they are actually about the future.
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Yeah, so something to think about and something that often amazes me, because I forget this all the time and I just start having hopes, whereas I shouldn’t, right? So I forget this and I fall into this trap and then I realize, I’m having hopes here or expectations and that’s causing me to be fearful. And as soon as things don’t go my way, which is often the case, which is more often than not things don’t go the way we want them to go. Right? What control do we have over life? Not much. We can just influence events, but oftentimes events just happen. And that’s it. There’s not much you can do about it. So yeah, I often find myself in a situation where having those hopes, I find I have fears. But then just remembering that if I abandon my hope and I just do work towards what I have set myself out to accomplish, but if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. But if I do that then it really helps with the fears.
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So something to think about, like more of, I guess, a philosophical notion. Maybe try to discover this weekend or tonight, if you have time, what do you have hopes about in the future? What do you hope for, really hope for? When was the last time you said something like, to a friend, “Oh, I hope this happens,” or, “I hope I get this scholarship,” or, “I hope I get a promotion,” or, “I hope my partner is a certain way.” It may be noble things. Like, “I hope I have good health,” or, “I hope they have good health,” or I hope this and that. What kind of hopes do you have and just try to discover for yourself, what kind of fears are they linked to in your life and what would happen if you, as the Buddhists say, abandoned that hope? Would those fears go away?
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That was something to ponder on. Definitely a worthwhile topic to discover. And I hope, I was about to say, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I wish you a fantastic weekend. And I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then happy analyzing.
