Fear tomorrow

Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the
source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness

-The Architect. The Matrix Reloaded (2003).


To call it a delusion would be like calling our entire life a
delusion. Which probably is true, but not for the usual reasons.

Not that every one of us lives our lives on a hope (or on multiple
hopes). The architect, however, fails to notice the generalization
that is an imminent and a natural consequence. Hope might be our
quintessential madness, but both hope and fear stem from the same
stream. Two sides of the same coin they are not. More like two points
on the surface of a sphere. Just different in their location. They are
beasts of the same kind. Scalars of different magnitudes. Asking about
their direction is futile. Without a sourcec of reference external to
the sphere, they share the same blood. They are like confidence and
denial. Confidence is not the opposite of denial. Confidence is
denial. They are classifications of beleifs. But that is for another
day.

The generalization the architect should've known is uncertainty. An
unknown future. Unknown future . A tautology. Redundant
words. It is the source of our hope, and our fear. It is what keeps us
going. It is what prevents a healthy overdose of muscle relaxants. It
is what drowns us in panic attacks. It is what keeps us alive till
graduation.

Not knowing the future, then should be our greatest asset. But is it
really? Is the warm hope of a better day worth the horror of being in
a miserable one? "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." A
philosophy guaranteed to make life miserable. Fearing fear is living
in hell.

The delusion then is the constant contemplation of the future. It is,
however unavoidable. None but the simplest of minds can really live in
the moment. For most of the rest of us, we live neither here nor
there, temporally. We don't live here because we worry about
there, and when we get there, there is more to come, more to
worry about. Fear. Hope. That's all we do. And not for no reason. One
cannot really live in the moment. A moment is static. A moment
is smaller than we can imagine. Nothing happens in a moment. Nothing
can. We are not alive. We can never be alive in a moment. Life is just
an abstraction of fluidity we construct on a bed of cold hard
rock. Life is hope and life is fear.