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No, being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none. To strike a match to light up the void. To show us a possibility for a better world—not a better world we want to exist, but a better world we didn’t know could exist. To take a situation where everything seems to be absolutely fucked and still somehow make it good.
One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing. Enjoy your fucking coffee.
You care. You care, and you desperately convince yourself that because you care, it all must have some great cosmic meaning behind it. You care because, deep down, you need to feel that sense of importance in order to avoid
the Uncomfortable Truth, to avoid the incomprehensibility of your existence, to avoid being crushed by the weight of your own material insignificance.
No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference.3 It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all?
Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction.
Hope doesn’t care about the problems that have already been solved. Hope cares only about the problems that still need to be solved. Because the better the world gets, the more we have to lose. And the more we have to lose, the less we feel we have to hope for. To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community.32
The Classic Assumption says that if a person is undisciplined, unruly, or malicious, it’s because he
lacks the ability to subjugate his feelings, that he is weak-willed or just plain fucked up.
