On Giving Up
Hope isn’t a feeling I understand all that well. This is possibly due to my naturally pessimistic temperament. However, it seems to me that blind hope in the face of everything often makes us that worst kind of arrogant naive, blindly upbeat and strangely unperceptive of the significance of the full spectrum of experience. This naivety completely ignores the fact that our meaningful triumphs and joys are only made so in contrast to our abdications to sorrow.
This said, there is one sort of finite pessimism which should at all times of hopelessness be avoided. Right up until we are finally dragged into that opaque metaphysical beyond the greatest catastrophe of human action is giving up.
Giving up leaves us prostrate passivity as our grasp lets go of our potential. Forever. Potential which could have been fashioned by us in spite of the inevitable anguish and malaise of hopelessness given the inherent unfairness reflected onto us. Giving up makes us forever passive.
We all have a virile potential to keep going by virtue of us all being manifestations of the surviving human animal. The history of which is primarily scratching out an existence in a violent dirt. As long as we can keep going we should keep going, passivity is an ultimate failure in response to the cosmic miracle that is you reading this right now.
In the face of the abstract uncertainty of the ultimate question, which is philosophy, the only suggestion I can make is a manifesto of keep going.
I say this for two central reasons.
Firstly, to avoid naive optimism and look at anguish and failure starkly for what they are. Only then are we able to appreciate those rare experiences of meaning. These aren’t those moments of base pleasure or excitement, but are those moments of responsibility which give us purpose despite the apparent purposeless in our existence along with the cosmic enjoyment which makes us helpless in losing awareness of time.
Secondly, to be active and keep going in contrast to the passivity of giving up. Through this we show an undying willingness to keep searching for the former reason. Dreams often don’t come true. But, what we actually want, what we should be doing or where we should be often aren’t clear to even ourselves until the results are actualized.
Besides, if you give up how will you ever know.