At one end of the spectrum

I was recently grazing through a Youtube’s video comments section and got caught by one listing a range of emotions displayed in the video. The list is: brokenness, wishful, regret, shattered, demand, anger, hope, reality, disbelief, denial, rage, sadness and emotionless.

I like this list. It’s a sum of emotions that I’ve learned are controllable, expectable and manageable when following stoic principles and practices. They are one extreme of the emotional spectrum. The other end is related to feelings such as euphoria, pleasure or involve activities such as daydreaming, or hoping. Stoics aim at the middle. If we practice negative visualization enough we can expect to rarely be impacted by such emotions. Their traits have already been experienced.

In particular, I think much less of the act of hoping. The blind hope we’re taught in childhood, by culture or by movies. A hidden lesson of non-control over life. An opium to soothe an incapacity for action and resolve. An antagonist of fortitude and progress. If seen from a certain perspective, it’s a lie to the mind. A habit of hoping encourages the expectation of resolve from external entities. It assigns solutions to, most likely, uncontrollable sources. Hope sabotages the capacity for creative solutions, for finding alternative paths. It blurs the ’third door’. It means a habit of giving up control before knowing if we never really had it in the first place.