Cynicism and Hope
As a late bloomer, I didn’t really have much experience or understanding of darkness, pain, evil, and suffering in the world until I started having flashbacks and memory recall. I literally thought the wolves den of abuse and neglect I was born into was normal because I had zero context for anything outside of this. I didn’t even know that I was abused until a woman loved me truly when I was 27. I cried for like 3 months when we split up, and a friend at the time pulled me aside and told me I did not feel worthy of love because I was severely abused as a child. He was right.
I started becoming cynical and paranoid after that point in my life. I drank, pill popped, and pornoed myself into a gluttonous hell of pleasure seeking, instant gratification, and becoming a wanker as the British call it. It all came crashing down for me when I rented from a shady landlord in a toxic black mold infested apartment that brought me close to death.
It has only been more recently since I got on the road to recovery, that my hope has returned. I know what Nick says below is true, and how hard-earned real hopefulness is. His following quote is one I felt moved to share because it is so bloody good and spot on.
“You are right to be worried about your growing feelings of cynicism and you need to take action to protect yourself and those around you. … Cynicism is not a neutral position—and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.
I know this because much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line. I lacked the knowledge, the foresight, the self-awareness. I just didn’t know. It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help. It took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope.
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like … keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.”
— Nick Cave, songwriter and frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
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