Is Hope the Path to Despair?

If you have a foot in secular Buddhism, this is not a new topic. Yet, I have this discussion with people on a fairly regular  basis. We all experience a sense of hope in various ways, and it is often framed with the notion that something about your current state is not as you desire it, and that you imagine a future scenario where the current state changes to a desired state and form an emotional attachment to that desired state. If I don't have chocolate ice cream right now, I might hope for chocolate ice cream to manifest itself in my freezer at a later date. Hope is pinning your emotions an idea that isn't currently real. That's not to say that ideas are bad or that trying to envision better realities is somehow wrong. 

Buddhism teaches that suffering arises when we want things to be other than they are. When we want something to change or something to be different about ourselves, we hope that things could be another way. So, having no hope is a  affirmation of acceptance.  You truly accept the way things are in the here and the now.  And if you have ever been around people in psychotherapy, they will likely tell you that this notion of acceptance sounds oddly similar to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. 

So, when I am at community events and people talk of hope , I can't help but feel that they are setting themselves up.  The odd thing about dreaming up future scenarios and putting "hope" in their fruition is that the consequences of failure manifest immediately in the current space.  Hope generates fear, fear that the desired state may not pass while absorbing bandwidth  in our frontal lobes. If you hope for something, you are thinking about something that isn't happening right now. Hence, hope robs us of the present moment experiences and can even inject emotional states that aren't related to anything happening in the here and now.