Preying on Hope
December 14, 2025.
❝ The hope we rely on daily is actively being sabotaged. ❞
We’re not here so much to talk about why we hope, or if we ought to hope. The fact is that we do, consciously and subconsciously: “I hope it doesn’t rain today,” “I hope this (food) is good!”
Unfortunately, this familiar tendency to hope has been fortified in ways unseen and unclear to the very people that it affects.
See, hope is a wonderful thing.
By definition, it is “a feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen.” That something could be anything: going outside, meeting someone you haven’t seen in a while, wishing someone well, a new pair of shoes, a callback from a potential employer, or that red dress you saw in the store. It doesn’t matter. So long as there’s hope, we persevere through life with a longing that fuels our deepest and even shallowest desires.
Hope means having something to look forward to.
Some would say that if we had nothing to look forward to, it would be easy to descend into despair. However, there can be no pleasure (which is the ideal outcome of hope) without even a hint of pain.
This hope that we rely on daily demonstrates our undeniable ability to not only feel deeply, but create our own worlds based precisely on how we feel in any given moment. We never know what the outcome will be in the moment when we hope, yet still, we hope anyway.
I reiterate, this is a wonderful thing.
Even so, we currently live in an era fueled by money and power. People are not quite seen as human beings, worthy of basic needs and inherent rights, but as consumers whose role it is to, well, consume.
Imagine the tremendous success for companies and industries that utilize this understanding of hope to ensure widespread product and service distribution.
The Exploitation of an Essential Resource
This is where the wonderful thing turns sour. When hope enters the public square, it quickly becomes a resource. These powerful forces—whether corporations seeking profit or governments seeking mandate—don’t just wait for hope to appear; they actively engineer the conditions for its extraction.
They understand that hope is most vulnerable when we are feeling insecure or inadequate. They quantify and commercialize this sense of lack.
Consider the clearest examples of this mechanism:
The Lottery Market: This is the purest model of selling manufactured hope. The consumer is not buying a commodity; they are buying an infinitesimal chance at transformation. The entire infrastructure of the lottery depends on millions of people accepting a near-certain loss in exchange for a temporary, thrilling, and cheap burst of hope—the promise of escaping economic hardship without effort. The money taken from the many who desperately hope funds the infrastructure that sustains the hope itself.
The Debt Market: The high-interest lending and credit industry weaponises hope in reverse. They offer immediate access to a purchase—the house, the car, the college degree—fulfilling the immediate hope of acquisition, but in exchange for long-term financial dependency. The debt itself becomes the mechanism that ensures the consumer must continually work and hope for the means to pay for the fulfilment they have already consumed. The immediate hope is leveraged to capture the future labour of the hopeful.
The tragedy of this entire system is that it exploits the predictability of human anticipation. It takes the resilient, internal mechanism of hope—the thing that helps us persevere—and converts it into an extrinsic economic input that can be sold, tracked, and renewed.
The Price of an Inner Life
The true, original damage this system inflicts is this: It successfully trains us to mistrust our own inner resources.
The hope we rely on daily is actively being sabotaged.
By consistently linking our most fundamental aspirations to external, temporary, and commercialized solutions, this mechanism not only depletes our wallets; it systematically empties our core reservoir of resilience. We are trained to seek relief from our current suffering externally—through a purchase or a promise of reform—rather than trusting the patient, innate power of our own perseverance.
Hope, the very thing that sustains us, is repackaged and sold back to us as a necessary cost of living, fundamentally perverting its original, profound value as a free and sovereign source of human strength.