Hope Is The Prison Of Time

Friday, 28 March 2025, 8:39 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

In a tour de force of resignation and misanthropy, a natural history writer nominates tardigrades, a phylum of eight-segmented micro-animals that measure less than a millimeter long, for invertebrate of the year. Why?

Because “when Homo sapiens self-destructs and takes much of the world with it, the tardigrades will shrug it off and continue their plodding long after we are just a thin layer of plastic in the soil.”

If that inspires hope, I’d hate to see what instigates despair for the writer.

It’s often said, “hope dies last.” And it’s generally believed that if you lose hope, you lose everything, even the will to live.

But that’s only true if hope is the last true thing to perish in a person before they quit on life. The end of hope is then synonymous with hopelessness, and identical with despair. However, ending hope is a completely different thing than hopelessness.

I essentially lost my 20’s to undiagnosed depression. The black hole cycles of hopelessness and despair only ended through diligent meditation, daily journaling and running track.

Though a psychiatrist said, “You need to be on meds man,” I didn’t want to go on anti-depressants unless I had to. Even at 30, I saw they were powerful brain-altering drugs that were over-prescribed. (I’m not against psychotropics as a temporary last resort, but they should be treated on par with the new low-level electro-shock treatments, instead of being prescribed like aspirin.)

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It’s clear that the more one lives in hope, the more one is prone to despair. And despair is the fetid soil for the pandemic of depression that’s infecting people all over the world.

What is hope? Hope is the prospect of gradual improvement, or of attaining a cherished ideal or goal. Thus the loss of any prospect engenders feelings of hopelessness and despair.

Ideals give rise to hope, as do goals. But while goals have their place, ideals, like hope, is a false thing.

A goal, like mastering something one loves doing, or getting a degree in a subject one loves studying, is fitting and right when we make the means more important than the ends.

However when we make the ends – attaining our goals – more important than the means – doing something for its own sake – we’re living in terms of hope and setting ourselves up for despair.

Living in terms of time and living in terms of hope is the same thing. It’s as difficult to end time, as it is to end hope. Psychological time is the universal human prison, and true freedom lies in ending time within.

“Shawshank Redemption” is the quintessential American dick flick, the story of a young banker in his prime wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life for murdering his wife and her lover.

Essentially, Shawshank is an idolisation of hope. It takes the view that hope doesn’t just die last, but must be put first. And it compels one to ask: Is hope essential to life, or does it prevent us from truly living?

A pivotal scene comes after the protagonist, Andy, has been in solitary confinement for two weeks for blaring a Mozart aria over the prison loudspeakers from the warden’s office where he worked.

On his return Andy says to his fellow inmates, “Easiest time I ever did.” Pointing to his head and heart, “I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company.”

“That’s the beauty of music, they can’t get that from you…you need it so don’t forget there are places that aren’t made out of stone. So there’s something inside they can’t get to, they can’t touch, it’s yours.”

His friend Red, played by Morgan Freeman, replies, “What are you talking about?”

“Hope.” To which Red responds: “Let me tell you something my friend, hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane; it’s got no use on the inside.”

But that’s the truth that the movie tries to refute, and the reason the film ends in syrupy sentimentality. For like the people of Gaza, we’re all on the inside of this open-air prison of a world now.

Like countless people in these dark days, I’ve been grappling with feelings of hopelessness. I’m learning that to look for hopeful signs only further entraps one in the cycle of hope and despair.

A much more accurate cinematic insight into hope is contained in “Cast Away,” starring Tom Hanks (though a sentimental thread runs through that film as well).

In the closing dialogue, the Hanks character, Chuck Noland, reflects on his four years stranded alone on a small island in the Pacific. After describing how he had tried to kill himself and failed, he gives a pretty good initial prescription for living in dreadful times:

“That’s when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket. I knew that I had to stay alive. Somehow, I had to keep breathing, even though there was no reason to hope, and all my logic said I’d never see this place again. So that’s what I did, I stayed alive. I kept breathing, and one day that logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in and gave me a sail.”

Noland wasn’t waiting for a sail, and he had stopped hoping for rescue. He was just breathing. But he didn’t go all the way and end time on that island either. Sardonically he says, “We live and die by time, and must not commit the sin of turning our back on time.”

Time is identical to the continuity of thought as ‘me’ and the insidiousness of hope as ‘eventually.’ If I don’t end the movement of time every day by passively attending in the mirror of nature to what is occurring inwardly, I feel I’ve wasted the day.

Red was right, not because one has to give up “on the inside.” But because, contrary to the madman Musk and his misanthropic dreams of colonizing Mars, there is no escape from this beautiful island of the Earth that man has made into a hell. Freedom lies in ending time and hope.

Martin LeFevre

Theme from Cast Away:

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail