Hope's Uninvited Guest

If you’re here for some crypto or markets blog, feel free to stop reading. This is not that. This is just some fiction I felt compelled to write today. Regularly scheduled writing will be back shortly.

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Scene: A nearly empty pub, just past midnight. A lone streetlight flickers outside rain-streaked windows. Two friends sit at a corner booth, each clutching a cup of hot water, lemon, honey and a hint of bourbon. A faint tune burps from an old jukebox.

---

“You know, sometimes I feel like I’m stuck in this loop,” Silas says softly, eyes unfocused on the rim of his teacup. “Every day, it’s the same worries, the same feeling that nothing’s ever going to change.”

Rowan nods, tilting his kettle to top off his own. “That sense of being trapped...yeah, I get it.” He pauses, choosing his words intentionally. “It’s like you’re wading through quicksand. The more you struggle, the more it feels like you’re sinking.”

Silas lets out a half-chuckle. “I guess. Not to be dramatic, and it’s a heavy word but…hopeless. That’s how it feels sometimes.” He drags a fingertip across an imperfection in the wooden table. “I scroll through the news or look at my own life sometimes, and I just…I don’t see a way out. It’s like we’re all collectively treading water, waiting for something to give.”

Rowan leans forward, an earnest look on his face though he stares not directly at Silas, but instead past him. “It’s funny,” he says gently. “Not ha-ha funny, but strange funny. Hopelessness has this paradoxical effect. It can paralyze us, sure. And more often than not it probably does…but in some ways it can be freeing or even galvanizing.”

Silas lifts his gaze. “You mean like motivating?”

Rowan shrugs sheepishly. “In a weird way, yeah. Not to be THAT guy but think about history.”

Silas tilts his head, a skeptical smile tugging at his lips. “Enlighten me, monsieur.” he teases with a hint of genuine curiosity.

Rowan grins and takes the cue. “When people feel truly hopeless and their backs are against the wall, that’s often when drastic change happens. It’s almost evolutionary in a sense. Think of the French Revolution. Or the Arab Spring. Ordinary people who felt stuck in utterly hopeless situations: they were starving under an indifferent regime, suffocating under corruption and economic despair. Eventually that hopelessness reaches a breaking point.”

Silas interrupts shaking his head. “You make it sound almost...inevitable, like hopelessness had to bubble to the surface.”

Rowan’s eyes light up at this opening. He gestures mildly as he speaks, the pub’s low light animating his subtle movement. “Let’s take the French Revolution. By 1789, France’s common folk had been ground down by years of hardship. The harvests were so horrible people literally couldn’t afford to buy bread. The poorest people were spending more than half their income on that alone. A third of the population were unemployed. Imagine one in every three people with no job, nothing to keep their families fed. Meanwhile today we’re all up in arms about 5% unemployment.”

Silas whistles under his breath. “A third of the population is pretty brutal...”

Rowan continues, starting to build momentum now. “It was dire. Some villages were literally writing to the king a list of grievances saying things like ‘the number of children we have plunges us into despair’. They had so little food and money that even having kids felt like a curse. That’s desperation. And when people are pushed that far…I mean so far that they feel completely unheard and cornered…BOOM!” he slaps the table lightly for emphasis, causing Silas’s cup to tremble, “something snaps. They loot a public office, or riot in the streets or do something even more drastic. The storming of the Bastille, the bread riots... it all came from that overwhelming hopelessness turning into anger and action.”

Silas is quiet for a moment, letting this last image slowly wash over him. He knows the story but hearing it framed like this with real people at the end of their rope, it just makes it more visceral. “I guess when you have nothing to lose...” he murmurs.

“Exactly,” Rowan says, nodding. “When you’ve lost everything, even hope, you sometimes find a sort of freedom in that. The French peasants had been hoping their king or the nobles or the elites might fix things, but hope just kept them waiting, year after year. When that hope finally burnt out, they realized nobody was coming to save them. They had to do something themselves. And they did.”

Silas frowns, tracing a crack in the ceramic of his cup. “True, but the French Revolution also spiraled into terror. Didn’t like a ton of innocent people get guillotined? Like what are we talking about here, it wasn’t exactly a clean, happy ending.”

Rowan raises a finger, a bit smugly for Silas’ liking. “You’re right that it got pretty horrific. Hopelessness can fuel rage, and once that fire is lit, it can burn out of control. I’m not saying ‘yay hopelessness, it’s great.’ But think of what came after that chaos. Feudalism was dismantled, the absolute monarchy was gone, ideas of rights and liberty spread. Long term, it changed France for sure and in many ways reshaped the world. It was messy and tragic and brutal, but it did break a cycle that had kept people miserable for centuries.”

Silas leans back, considering. The hushed murmur of other patrons and the humming of the wait staff moving about the pub fill a brief silence between them. “So you’re basically saying hopelessness is a catalyst. It’s a giant powder keg of history?”

Rowan chuckles. “In a way, sure. I mean not the only one, but certainly a big one. And not just history on grand scales. Think of it at the individual level. Sometimes hitting rock bottom forces a person to finally make a change they were scared of. It’s like, when you feel you have no future, you become willing to risk everything to find one.”

Silas nods instinctively but Rowan can sense he’s still chewing on whether or not he agrees.

Rowan offers a warm grin. “It’s kind of like that old saying: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’ When you’re in the gutter, you either give up, or you decide to look up and claw your way out.”

Silas cuts the tension with a chuckle, “Leave it to you to slip in a pretentious Wilde quote.”

“Guilty.” Rowan takes a sip of his tea, then sets the tiny cup down. “Maybe the French Revolution is too distant to really grasp, you know. It’s kind of like huge numbers like a trillion. What does that even mean, how do we wrap our heads around it. Let me offer another example then. The Arab Spring?”

Silas shifts in his seat. “Yeah I mean, I’m not going to pretend I have a lot of context here to be honest”

“Well it really started in Tunisia” Rowan continues, “Young people were all unemployed, they had zero voice and if you think our government doesn’t care you can’t imagine the one they lived under. I think something like half of young college graduates were unemployed. And then at the same time prices for normal stuff were literally skyrocketing and it’s like – you have all of these educated, young people who should be the backbone of your economy and they’re getting completely shut out of a real future.”

Silas cradles his cup, which is starting to go cold. “Ok yes I remember reading about this...there was rampant corruption too, right?”

Rowan nods emphatically. “Yes. The regime was this entrenched kleptocracy. Corruption was everywhere. So you’ve got this poisonous cocktail of joblessness, rising costs and some sense of humiliation. It’s a bit embarrassing to feel powerless and patronized in your own country, and so what you end up with is this breeding ground for hopelessness. A lot of people felt completely stuck: they worked hard, got an education and came out on the other side completely fucked anyway.”

Silas interjects softly, “And then the hawker”

Rowan’s lips turn down. “Yeah. Bouazizi. A fruit vendor who ended up being the straw that broke the camel’s back. Pardon the cliche but it’s apt. The authorities were just harassing this guy, demanded bribes he couldn’t pay, confiscated his cart. Truly deranged stuff. One day some officer slaps him and basically just humiliates him in public. And this guy was what, twenty-five, twenty-six? About our age.”

Rowan continues, voice lowered now: “He went to the governor’s office to complain, but nobody listened. And in a kind of act of complete despair, he douses himself in gasoline in front of that government building and lit a match. And that fire spread. The people who had felt just like him saw themselves in those flames. Almost immediately, protests erupted. It was like all that bottled-up frustration finally burst out into the open.” Rowan gestures as if something is exploding from his chest. “His self-immolation became this incredibly powerful symbol that ignited protests across the Arab world. And it was really born of economic desperation and humiliation.”

Silas begins to scratch at his memory of those events. “And the president there ended up fleeing, right? It happened fast.”

“A week or two after Bouazizi died, the regime fell,” Rowan confirms. “Years of stagnation overturned in, what, less than a month of fury? Then similar uprisings swept into Egypt, Libya, Syria...I mean obviously not all of them ended well, but that daisy chain came from people feeling they had nothing left to lose. They chose to fight rather than continue in quiet despair.”

Silas interlocks his fingers on the table, thoughtful. “It’s kind of scary. I mean, yeah it’s obviously inspiring in the sense of people rising up and pushing back. But it makes you realize how many people around the world live in situations so bad that burning everything down seems better than going on.”

Rowan’s eyes drift for a moment, staring past Silas into some indeterminate distance. He sighs. “You’re also not wrong. Not all these revolutions end happy. Tunisia is sometimes called the ‘sole success’ of the Arab Spring but even a decade later, a lot of folks are disillusioned, struggling to pay bills, still facing corruption. In other places...Syria descended into a nightmare war. So, it’s not some magic fix. Hopelessness can tear things apart, and it’s not guaranteed something better replaces the old order right away. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, etc”

Silas looks at Rowan with a curious softness. “So why are you telling me this? Here I am whining about my life and you’re bringing up entire revolutions and wars. Cool, others have had it worse and maybe I should be less self-centered about my own shit.”

Rowan shakes his head, brow furrowing. “That’s not it at all. I’m not trying to say ‘others have it worse, so stop complaining.’ It’s more...I’m trying to understand the broader idea of hopelessness. What it does to people, what it could do to us. I mean, on a societal level it can go either way. You can get positive change that destroys old antiquated structures, or forces some change. That probably means some pain along the way. On a personal level though…” He trails off.

Silas finishes the thought quietly. “you either let go of the rope or you do something about it.”

Rowan smiles faintly. “Yeah.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I don’t know man. Humans are really good at creating problems for themselves and then figuring out ways to solve those problems. And then creating new problems. We have plenty of problems today, and I’ll admit it doesn’t exactly feel like there’s a clear path to fixing the things that lead down the path we’re talking about. But it’s pretty clear from history that this idea of hopelessness we’re talking about isn’t the end of the story. It can be the start of something new. It can push people to see truths they ignored and to act in ways they never thought they could.”

Silas’s lips twist into a half-smile. “You almost make it sound like hope and hopelessness are two sides of the same coin.”

Rowan considers this, smirking. “In a weird way, yeah maybe they are. Too much hope for too long can make you complacent, you know? Like false hope that keeps you hanging on to a bad status quo. There’s a Nietzsche quote for this somewhere…’hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.’ Pretty sure this was a Pandora’s Box reference.”

Silas raises an eyebrow, proudly remembering this one. “Pandora’s Box... all the evils of the world get unleashed, and the last thing left in the box is hope.”

Rowan nods. “Yupp. The ancient Greeks put hope in a box full of evils. Some say hope was trapped in the box so humans could hold onto it as a comfort. The cynic in me can appreciate Nietzsche’s lean that hope itself is actually evil because it could delude you into waiting for help that isn’t coming. It’s kind of a twisted thought but you can argue hope actually could prolong suffering, like a carrot dangled in front of a mule to keep it plodding along.”

Silas taps the table with a finger, catching a bit of the rhythm of a song playing faintly in the background. “That’s a depressing take. But I guess it makes sense – hope is not a strategy. If those French peasants had just kept hoping year after year instead of finally saying ‘enough,’ who knows how long that goes on.”

“Exactly,” Rowan says. “At some point hope becomes a drug, keeping you sedated. Only when it’s lost do you realize you have to change things yourself.” He shrugs, a slight sadness in his smile. “It’s a bit ironic. Hope is this universally positive word that can actually be a trap that keeps us from acting.”

Silas looks around the pub, as if noticing his surroundings for the first time in a while. The place is nearly empty now; only a couple in the corner and the bartender wiping down the counter. The outside sky beyond the window is ink-black, a few distant headlights streaking by. “We’ve gotten pretty philosophical here,” he concedes, a little sheepishly.

Rowan laughs. “We always do.” He stretches his arms overhead for a moment. “Speaking of taking action, I need to hit the bathroom.” he says as he slides out of the booth.

---

Left alone at the table, Silas wraps his hands around his now-cold cup, staring into the liquid as if it might reveal some sort of answer. The silence feels heavier now that Rowan’s voice is gone. His thoughts swirl, unchecked:

I envy his perspective, Silas thinks to himself. He makes everything sound...meaningful. He absently runs a finger through the last wet ring on the table. Here I am, drowning in my small-scale despair, and he’s connecting it to something vast and historical.

His mind wanders. He pictures those French peasants Rowan described: gaunt families in ragged clothes, mothers with hungry children tugging at their skirts. He imagines one of them, a young father perhaps, watching his children cry from hunger. Silas can almost feel that man’s helpless rage. Would I have had the courage to storm the Bastille? he wonders. Or would I have just laid down and given up?

His thoughts flit to another image, this time the Tahrir Square in Cairo filled with chanting crowds and that young Tunisian man. He imagines the oppressive heat of that day and how thick with tension the air must have been. He can almost smell the gasoline-soaked shirt Bouazizi was wearing. The thought sends a shiver through Silas. That level of hopelessness...I can’t even fathom it. But that ultimate despair became a spark that spread hope to millions.

He sighs and leans back, rubbing his eyes. Rowan always finds these big pictures, Silas muses. He sees patterns, stories, lessons. I feel like I just see darkness sometimes. Silas isn’t sure whether he finds Rowan’s viewpoint comforting or overwhelming. Where’s the solace in reconciling how small my own problems feel now compared to the suffering of others? he wonders. Maybe the point is that I’m not alone? Or that recognizing it matters? Or that I’m just a thread in some larger human tapestry of suffering? I don’t know.

He recalls Rowan’s words: “When hope finally died, they realized nobody was coming to save them.” Silas frowns, drumming his fingers. Maybe I’ve been sitting around waiting, hoping (lol), for someone or something to save me too, he admits inwardly. A new opportunity, a stroke of luck, some external change. It’s true. He has been passively nursing hope. Too afraid to act and possibly fail. And that passive hope has left him in a rut.

Across the table, Rowan’s phone buzzes where he left it. The screen lights up with a notification that Silas catches a glimpse of: “global markets slide on economic uncertainty” before the screen fades to black again. He smirks at the irony. The whole world seems to be teetering on uncertainty lately, it’s no wonder so many people feel hopeless.

Silas reflects about his friend in the restroom. He means well. Shit he’s the reason I’m even out tonight instead of brooding at home. Rowan had sensed Silas’s mood and dragged him out, knowing Silas tends to isolate when he’s down. It’s something Rowan has done before, showing up with a “let’s talk” invitation at just the right time.

What drives him? Silas wonders, knowing Rowan has had his own rough patches. But he always bounces back with some kind of insight and curiosity that makes it feel like every hardship is just fuel for understanding life more deeply. Is it optimism? Or is it just how he copes with his own demons, by intellectualizing them? Perhaps a bit of both.

Silas’s mind wanders further down this bourbon-soaked path. Hopelessness can paralyze or galvanize, Rowan had said. Silas taps that phrase into the table with his index finger: para-lyze... gal-van-ize...over and over, like a seesaw. Where am I on that scale? he asks himself. Right now, I feel mostly paralyzed. But how hard could it be to slide myself to the other end? Instead of letting this restless despair down him, could he use it to do something?

He thinks of a memory: a few months back on a particularly bad day, he’d gone out and wandered the city without aim. He ended up at the riverside by evening, staring at the black water. He remembers exactly how he felt that night. It was as if the water was calling him. That was a frightening moment. I really was on the edge of something, Silas realizes. I felt completely hopeless. But he just as viscerally remembers what stopped him – some stubborn spark inside that refused to die. He’d gone home and in a frenzy violently began checking things off his to-do list. Things that for days, months, even years had been weighing on his subconscious in some way. A low-humming of anxiety that had built up and calcified over his mind all this time. It felt freeing.

I did that when I lost hope, he notes internally. I acted almost out of an animalistic need to free myself of this thing that I didn’t even really know existed. There’s truth in what Rowan is saying.

Silas closes his eyes briefly, exhaustion tugging at him. Deep in his chest, alongside the familiar ache of anxiety, there’s something new. A tiny glow of resolve perhaps. Maybe I can twist this feeling to my advantage, he thinks. Instead of letting it hollow me out. He’s not quite sure how but the mere thought is like seeing a pinprick of light in a dark room.

---

Meanwhile in the restroom down the hall, Rowan stands at the sink washing his hands slowly and watching his own reflection in the mirror. The fluorescent light hums quietly above. Rowan studies the face staring back: a thirty-something man with tired eyes, a five o’clock shadow starting to show, a slightly mussed head of hair. He looks a bit world-weary at the moment. I sound like I’m so sure of all this, he thinks, but am I really?

He recalls Silas’s initial question, “Every day, it’s the same worries...” and how painfully familiar that sounded. Rowan has his own flavor of those worries. He recalls many a night he’s laid awake staring at the ceiling, feeling that same dull hopelessness coiled in his stomach. All the history books and philosophy in the world haven’t immunized him against it.

Maybe I needed this pep talk as much as he did, Rowan admits to himself. He shuts off the faucet and leans on the sink. All that stuff I said about hopelessness fueling change is true and I believe it. But a voice in the back of his mind whispers: What about your own hopelessness? Are you using it to ‘motivate’ yourself or are you just pontificating about others?

Rowan runs a hand through his hair, visibly frustrated. It’s always easier to analyze other people’s problems than to face your own. He thinks of something he read recently (of course). Some article about the concept of an “agency gap” in society and how some people feel they have no agency today. It resonated with him because he’s been feeling a bit adrift too lately. Life events feel as if they’re just happening to him rather than being driven by him. He hasn’t told Silas but the firm he works for is downsizing and rumors are his desk might be cut. And while the prospect terrifies him a part of him strangely feels curious or excited by the idea of what he would do if that came to fruition. Would I crumble or would I find a new path?

Staring at himself in the dusted-over mirror Rowan thinks of an old line by Camus about the absurd man and how one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Rolling that cursed rock even though it always rolls back down. It’s hard to imagine a more hopeless situation than the one Sisyphus found himself in. And yet Camus suggests we imagine him content or even defiant in continuing the struggle. There’s something to that, Rowan believes. Maybe it’s that once you accept a hopeless situation fully, it loses its power to break you. You start focusing on the act of pushing the boulder and on living in that singular moment rather than the distant end.

Rowan straightens up and adjusts his shirt. He realizes he’s been gone a little while and Silas might be wondering what’s up. Taking a last deep breath, Rowan resolves to share one more thought with his friend. Something personal. I’ve done enough history lectures, he muses. Maybe I should let him know that I fight these feelings too.

He exits the restroom, the door swinging shut with a soft thud behind him.

---

Rowan slides back into the booth, and Silas sits up a little offering a half-smile. “I was about to send a search party,”

Rowan chuckles, “Should have just skipped out and left me with the bill.” He notices Silas’s empty cup. “Want another? It’s on me.”

Silas waves a hand. “Nah, I’m good.” There’s a brief pause. Silas looks like he’s turning something over in his mind. “You know, I was just thinking while you were gone...”

Rowan interjects softly, “Me too.” They exchange a knowing glance trying to decide who will go first.

Silas takes the hint. “I was thinking about you saying hopelessness pushes people to act. And I realized I’ve been kind of stuck waiting, hoping things will get better on their own. Like, I’ve been passive. Maybe what I need is to sort of embrace the fact that I’m not happy with how things are. Use that dissatisfaction to actually do something. Instead of letting it weigh me down the way it has. I should be better at using it like a...I don’t know, like wind in a sail or something.”

Rowan’s face breaks into a broad smile. “Wind in a sail is super corny but I get what you mean yeah.” He folds his arms on the table. “I actually had a similar mini-revelation I guess. I was looking at myself in the mirror and I just thought, damn. I shell out all this advice or perspective but I have my own hopeless moments too. Maybe the whole reason I’ve brought this stuff up tonight is because I was subconsciously talking to myself as much as to you. He gives a self-deprecating laugh. “A lot of that ‘nature’ you think I have is probably just me forcing myself to find meaning when things suck. I think there’s some element of self-defense in trying to make meaning out of pain so that it doesn’t swallow me. Reading history and philosophy and then talking about those things is probably a bit of how I cope to try to see the bigger picture. In some ways hopelessness has made me who I am now. It was like a forge. It burned away a lot of the illusions I had and what came out on the other side was someone a bit tougher, I guess. Allegedly.”

Silas considers this quietly. “So you think this is why you’re always drawn to books and weird rabbit holes? Searching for perspective?”

Rowan shrugs. “Partly. I mean, I genuinely love that stuff. But yeah, it helps remind me that even the worst feelings can lead somewhere. They’re not dead ends unless you let them be.”

Rowan’s mind flashes to a painting he once saw in a museum, and he finds himself describing it. “There was this painting that stuck with me, Alms to the Poor or something like that. It shows a destitute mother and her child at the door of a stranger’s house. The mother’s hand is outstretched, begging, and you can just see the exhaustion in her eyes. Her child is clinging to her and looking up with this mix of hope and fear. The stranger is kind of placing a coin into her hand and you can feel how desperate their situation is. Asking for alms is the last resort.” Rowan pauses as he recalls the image. “I just remember thinking about how that mother must have felt. Like you can imagine she had tried everything else and this was the beginning of the end. That kind of hopelessness…it forces you beyond all the human emotions that get in our way. Pride, fear. All that’s left is the instinct to survive or to do whatever it takes for your child. It’s quite tragic, but there’s almost this quiet strength in it, you know? Like she still hasn’t given up.”

Silas imagines his version of the scene vividly as Rowan speaks. A worn dress of the mother with a skinny child peering from behind her skirt. A brutally cold doorstep. “It’s powerful,” Silas says softly, “Hopelessness strips her of almost everything except the drive to keep her child alive. There’s no pride left but that frees her to do what she has to. In a way yeah, that’s strength born from despair.”

Rowan sighs, the intensity of the memory fading. “I guess what I’m just trying to say is that when things feel hopeless, maybe that’s when we discover our strongest resolve. Like, all the superficial motivations fall away and you find out what you really care about. What matters to you. And there’s some real, but maybe painful beauty in that.”

They sit with that thought, the quiet hum of the nearly-empty room around them. The barback has begun flipping chairs up onto tables on the other side of the room, a polite signal that closing time is near.

Almost instinctively, they both reach for their coats. Rowan puts a generous tip on the table beside the bill and both men slide out of either end of the booth.

As they walk toward the door, the cool air of the night seeps in through the glass. They step out into the night where the buzz of distant traffic and hum of a nearby streetlamp envelopes them.

Outside they feel the lingering drops of a light rain speckling the pavement around them. They part without a word, nodding knowingly as they head in separate directions. Both carry an unspoken understanding from their conversation that evening. Silas lifts his face to the sky letting the cool rain mingle with the warmth of an unexpected tear. He glances back at the pub’s sign being switched off as it plunges into darkness. It strikes him that even though the lights went out there now, the dawn will come in a few hours and it will open again for a new day.