How to tell if you’ve lost hope

The short answer is, you know it. Put aside whether or not you are being honest with yourself and others, deep inside, you really know the answer. You can tell that in a matter of seconds.

Excitement is something very important. And your hope has a lot to do with excitement, although not all excitements are the same. There’s excitement when you are getting pleasure, which is short-lived. And then there’s a kind of excitement that’s deeper and broader, can be experienced in all sorts of circumstances, on different levels, and in different ways. It is not necessarily attributed to sunshine, roses and rainbows. Some experience it in concentration camps, some in the middle of nowhere and some in a metropolis. And may not even be perceived as “exciting”, cause they may sound uncool, modest, or otherwise cliched.

But it’s also important to note that you can have hopes in different sets of things. Career/skill-level, interpersonal relationships, physical, spiritual, personal… these are not the same in everyone.