Hope Is a Complicated Little Bastard
Sometimes the mind underlines things before you know why.
You jot down a quote, a song lyric, something someone said, something that strikes you as important, then another, then another, and before you realize it you’re keeping a private census of whatever’s been rattling around inside your mind.
Ding-ding-ding. Something inside you is trying to tell you something.
Over the last few weeks, a series of such utterances caught my attention enough that I wrote them down. Nothing unusual there. I've been doing that for decades. A few of these I’ve loved for years; the rest were new. I didn’t think much past that.
But when I looked at them today, as a group, I noticed something. This collection of quotes had a mood to them, an unmissable, if still inscrutable, gravitational pull I wasn’t expecting. And that got my attention.
Once I saw the pattern, I wanted to understand it. Not intellectually, but psychologically. Why these? Why now?
Lacking a seasoned sage at the ready, I thought it would be an interesting challenge to the robots to make sense of it for me. Not to analyze the quotes, but to try and understand the what and why parts of me that had chosen them, the way an experienced psychologist might.
First, the quotes:
Stakes Is High.
-De La Soul, 1996 album "Stakes Is High"
This is not war anymore. This is nuclear war.
-Mobland (Paramount+)
I don't have time for things that have no soul.
-Charles Bukowski
Truth is like a lion. You don't have to defend it.
Let it loose and it will defend itself.
-St. Augustine
Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
-Benjamin Franklin.
It's not the hope that kills you,
It's knowing it's the hope that kills you, that kills you.
-Slow Horses (AppleTV)
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
-Virginia Woolf
Don't become the people you despise — or what's the point.
-Tucker Carlson
It's not adversity that destroys men, it's comfort and flattery that destroys men.
-Tucker Carlson
Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that I've always demanded more from the sunset.
-Nymphomaniac (Vol 2)
Next, I asked the AI a simple question: What does this cluster of quotes say about my state of mind over these last few weeks? The summary I got back was... interesting. The bolded headings below are the AI’s high-level takes; the paragraphs that follow are my attempt to make sense of them.
1. You're feeling the stakes rising.
One, no shit. Two, aren’t I always feeling stakes? I’m a feeling guy and a stakes guy. And Stakes Is High. No doubt about that. De La and J Dilla told us so. I’ve lived through enough to know when even small things have taken on heightened significance.
Look at the quotes again. Key into the themes: War, soul, stakes, hope that kills, hidden truths — not exactly casual subjects. No pastel virtue signaling or ‘live, love, laugh’ nonsense here. These are words that grab your attention when you can feel it deep inside your bones that whatever’s coming matters, even if it only matters to me.
2. You're wrestling with being seen.
The giveaway here is the Woolf quote, which I recently used to open my latest piece, Holy Shame. That line, especially coming from someone like Virginia Woolf, feels like a fire-roasted needle to the eyeball when you’re tired of being judged and misunderstood, especially knowing that most people’s opinions are, at best, spurious, and at worst nothing more than their own transparent projections masquerading as insight.
A lot of people struggle with feeling seen. And for what it’s worth, I want you to know: I see you. I know it feels like no one is listening but I am; like no one understands, but I do. I see you. I hear you. I promise.
(Funny side note: even though the people who know me best know I'm being completely sincere here — and I hope you do too — when I wrote the line above, I couldn't stop hearing George W. Bush on the rubble of the Twin Towers, bullhorn in hand, assuring us that "the rest of the world hears you." That rousing, even unifying and inspiring speech, was, in hindsight, a strangely perfect prelude to everything that followed.)
Anyway, beware what you ask for. Being seen — the thing we think we want — has a way of waking up the thing we sometimes work very hard to bury: hope.
3. You're afraid of hope, but you're hoping anyway.
I’ve written about depression before, but I still have much more to say on the topic. Like many of you, I’ve faced off with Churchill’s "black dog" — that centuries-old English slang for melancholy popularized by the late, great wartime Prime Minister, that thing that follows you around, sits beside you, and is loyal in the most horrific way imaginable. I have the scars to prove it. But this one really isn’t about depression or melancholy. It’s about hope, which in many ways is more precarious.
Hope is a complicated little bastard. It asks you to step forward again after the floor has dropped out from under you. It’s that moment when life starts to open back up and instead of leaping, you flinch because you remember what hope cost you last time. It doesn’t just ask you to imagine a future. It drags out the whole goddamned archive — all your past futures. Every version you dreamed, abandoned, detonated. The ones you won, the ones you left aside, the ones where life creamed you. And then it asks you to try again with the very same heart that got cracked open before.
For those who've really been through it, those who've lived through reckonings and true darkness, that invitation can feel dangerous, even cruel, like reaching for razor-sharp glass in the dark of night, knowing it will cut you, just not where or how deep, and still reaching anyway despite having no idea how because wanting anything again demands the wobbly, still-seeing-stars, scraped-knuckle kind of unheroic courage nobody applauds, but every one of us eventually needs.
The truth is, you never stop hoping. You just stop admitting you are. You hide it under realism, cynicism, sarcasm, low expectations. You tell yourself you don’t care. But if that were true, the line wouldn’t land. The words wouldn't matter. That they do is all the proof you need that there’s still something inside you, however small, burned, bruised, that wants to trust the future again. That needs to trust the future again. And that’s the part that matters.
The hard part — and I’m talking here to you as much as myself — is learning to let hope back in without handing it the deed to your whole life. To hope in smaller, saner ways. To let yourself want things again, knowing the outcome isn’t guaranteed. It never was; it never will be. To stop letting past implosions berate and bully you into a frenzy of emotional bankruptcy. And to understand that hope doesn’t ask you to trust the future blindly (that’s faith) just that you stop allowing yesterday’s broken futures dictate the ones still trying to be born.
Once hope returns, quietly, inevitably, the next thing to consider is who you’re going to be this time around.
4. You're guarding against becoming someone you won't recognize.
Tucker Carlson is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of modern media. A one-man cleaver with a surgeon's touch, he can bisect a room cleanly without so much as disturbing the air. He's adored, despised, and impossible to tune out. For years, I didn't get it. The bow tie, the prep-school khakis, the passive-aggressive smirk all grated on me. I couldn't stand him. Still, personal revulsion isn't an argument. At least, not a logical one. Carlson didn't just succeed; he anchored the biggest news show on the planet.
Then he was fired from Fox News. Then he built TCN. And now he’s arguably more influential than ever. Freed from the constraints of oligarchic interests, he turned his attention to the machinery of power itself, government and the media ecosystem that sustains it on both sides of the aisle. Somewhere in that shift, from prime-time power player to indie voice-of-the-people, I started listening to his long-form conversations, as I suspect many of you did. Slowly, over time, I became a fan.
Out there beyond his typical bluster and theatrics, I started to hear the depth of Carlson's lived experience. Say what you will, the guy has lived a substantial life. He's also far more reflective and wiser than I expected. For our purposes here, that's what matters. Neither of his quotes above are political. They're about self-respect. About holding on to yourself. About keeping the promise to stop twisting your life into painful contortions just to keep all the wrong people satisfied.
About refusing to become the flattering version of yourself just to earn approval at the expense of truth. I’ve done my time in those costumes. Them days are over.
5. You're beginning to trust the truth of your own experience again.
The obvious tell here is the St. Augustine quote about truth being like a lion. That’s not one that resonates with anyone still bargaining with the facts of their life. It resonates when you’re done equivocating, renegotiating, and entertaining other people’s watered-down takes, misremembered versions of the past, or distance-warped opinions about experiences they didn’t have but you did.
Let’s stop pretending this is complicated. You have your hell, I have mine. Leave mine alone. I know what happened. I was there. I know what I felt. I know what I lost. I know what I suffered. I don’t need your pity, your judgement, your self-flattering version of events, or your co-sign.
And while we’re on truth, that quote also resonates when you’re done carrying water for those generational fictions still floating around poisoning the air. All those historical distortions, base revisions, and story-shaped pretenses we’re expected to keep polished and camera-ready lest we trigger some kind of social avalanche that makes everyone uncomfortable. Some of us have paid too high a price to keep propping up other people's house-of-mirrors version of events. At some point, you need to put the weight down. Or maybe, you just drop it on their heads.
STOP! Be nice.
OK, that came out way hotter than I expected. Sounds like maybe I need some additional ponderosa time to better understand why, but please, don't hold your breath because I won't be walking it back.
There’s something freeing and cleansing about this kind of growling defiance. It takes the edge off without dulling the blade, leaving the whole thing piping hot (but not fully boiling) with a settled (but not fully settled) wrath. My point: I’m done with the old gymnastics. No more shrinking down past experiences for the sake of other people’s comfort. No more rewriting history so others can feel virtuous. No more scoring pain like suffering needs an official judge. It is what it was, and what it was doesn’t need defending. It never has.
That I ever defended it, cowered in the face of it, and lost my way in its midst — that's on me. No more. For the rest of time it’ll stand on its own. It already has. My only job now is to stop stepping in front of it.
6. You're refusing to live a shallow life because it's incomprehensible to you and always has been.
This one draws from an undercurrent running through both the Charles Bukowski quote and the Charlotte Gainsbourg line from Lars Von Trier's catalytic Nymphomaniac (vol 1). These are not aesthetic preferences. They are vows. Vows that say: I've never had time for small — small talk, small minds, small appetites, small versions of myself — and I'm sure as hell not gonna start now.
Small minds being small will call that elitist. They are wrong.
It's not elitist. It's existential.
When you're first stepping into life, with no real sense of what it will ask of you or cost you, or when you're clawing your way back into it after a brutal unraveling, years with weeks and months so thin they barely held your weight, you don't come back asking life for less. You ask for more. You demand more. More color. More soul. More truth from the people around you. More depth in the hours that make up a day. You want a life with weight, consequence, significance — and an ocean of substance. I know I do. My daughter holds this differently — she wants to live an interesting life — but we're talking about the same thing. Anything less feels, well, unlivable.
In a very literal case of be careful what you ask for, I grant you that being a person who "always demanded more from the sunset" comes with its own set of problems and pressures. I know them well. I can't fake enjoyments. I can't nod politely through empty conversations. I can't smile encouragingly at some moron who clearly has no idea what they're talking about. I can't stomach the endless charade of performative sincerity and low-effort irony. I have zero tolerance for soullessness.
Years ago, when I first read the Bukowski line — "I don't have time for things that have no soul" — it burned a hole clean through me. Not as an idea to admire, but as a recognition of something I already knew. Life draws a line between depth and shallowness, between going all the way in and staying where it's safe. Each of us has to choose where to stand, where our inner life aligns with what we're willing to risk for it. For me, that alignment has never been optional. The shallow end doesn't even register as an option. It isn't tempting or inferior or fraught. It's unintelligible. Honestly, I'd rather drown.
Same with the line from Nymphomaniac — "Perhaps the only difference between me and other people is that I've always demanded more from the sunset." When I first heard it, those eighteen words landed with the force of an industrialized-sized hammer. They named a hunger I've carried my entire life. A gut-level insistence that life should be big and bountiful and soulful. That because life can be radiant, we're obliged to rise to it. That because beauty should overwhelm us, we must receive it whole. And that because sunsets are meant to split us open, the least we can do is grant them that grace.
This is a posture I've held my entire life. I still do. It's not something I plan to outgrow or make peace with. It's closer to a vow. And vows, if you're honest about them, eventually ask for something back. Which is why Mary Oliver's piercing, unmistakably rhetorical challenge has always felt less like poetry to me and more like a direct summons:
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
This one give me the freaking chills every time I read it.
Life matters. My life. Your life. Everyone's lives. How you live it, who you live it with, what you do with your one wild and precious life — it all matters. A lot. Like a lot, a lot. So much so that when it’s good, it’s astonishing. And when it’s bad, when you’ve spent years in a desert of nothingness or rocked yourself to sleep night after night after night in a shrieking despair, you’d do anything to never go back.
For what it's worth, here's the deal:
If you're going to live, live with both hands in the fire.
If you're going to shrink, fine — just try not to make a habit of it.
Depth isn't something the world hands you. It doesn't work like that. If you really want substance, resonance, dimensionality, amplitude you need to go out there and dig.
And if there’s a church in that, then let it be this: Don’t you dare stop digging and don’t you dare settle for a life that doesn’t require every square inch of your soul.
Anyway, there it is. The robot’s read of me and my response to it. Apparently these are the neighborhoods my mind’s been wandering through lately.
You know that old line about life working in mysterious ways? Maybe it’s not entirely horseshit. Just last night I fell asleep listening to a compilation of teachings by Alan Watts, whose work I’ve admired for years. The lecture compilation was Watts talking about timing, readiness, and how things from here connect to things from over there at exactly the moment we’re ready to hear them.
The robots didn’t get everything right, but they were close enough. I’m sharing this piece because it reminded me of something important. Something I suspect someone out there may need to hear as much as I did.
We reveal ourselves in the words we save, in the voices and songs we replay, in the people we hang out with and return to. These things are never random. They're the breadcrumb trail of the parts of us trying to surface. They are our future story still in outline form. They reflect the version of us knocking from the inside still waiting to be met on the outside.
I’ve said it many times before — we inevitably become what we pay attention to. It's a simple, irrefutable fact of life and is why I obsess so much about the attention war we’re living through at this moment in history.
Sometimes you don’t have to spell out how you’re doing.
Sometimes the things you reach for spell it out for you.
And if anything deserves your attention, it’s that.