On Hope: Dangle the right carrot!

I haven’t made any money off of Medium in so many months I lost count. Time and time again, I thought about deleting my Medium account or at least deactivating it. Only to let it linger and suck $5 from my bank account monthly. Boo! Hope sells a tonne of things. And hope is the carrot Medium dangled before me.

I didn’t subscribe to Medium to read. Medium is a platform where writers can upload stories and make money if their stories were read widely. They make money through a $5 subscription fee that both writers and readers have to pay.

I thought it’s a fair system. So I gave it a try. I published stories, got curated, and sought out publications to publish my stories so I can have a better reach.

For a year or so, I broke even. Unfortunately, like the majority of writers on Medium, I never made much. Between the competition and the logarithm, I fell through the cracks. Still, I harbored the hope that one day, I’ll write a story that goes viral. Or maybe I’ll finally remember the stories that come to me in the shower and dissipate with the steam the moment I step out. Maybe they’ll finally read those stories!

Of course, no story went viral, and the shower stories never got written. But I’m still on Medium, hanging on to the hope that one day I’ll work harder on the platform. One day, maybe I’ll finally make thousands from it!

One day.

A few weeks ago, I realized the membership fee I’m paying monthly but don’t make use of is exactly like the gym membership others hang on to but don’t use.

We all hope that someday, we’ll get our butt moving again and go to the gym regularly — or write on Medium regularly. Heh.

Hope is the carrot we dangle before ourselves

Now $60 a year is a fair price to pay for a hope carrot, but I can’t help feeling it’s unhealthy for my brain. Knowing that I have this unfulfilled ambition on Medium secretly sucks attention, cash, and what little confidence I have from me.

Worse, the longer I let it hang in limbo, the more concrete the “failure” feels.

In my opinion, having a gym membership you don’t use is worse than not having a gym membership. Because having a gym membership you don’t use is always going to make you feel like you failed to work out and you’re bleeding money!

So I deactivated it. If all goes well and it doesn’t affect my blog, I’ll delete it soon. If for some reason, I started getting a tonne of writing ideas and really do start writing. I’ll reactivate it.

Hope is everywhere, it’s not always useful or inspirational.

This experience made me more aware of how we’re sold hope more often than we may realize.

Aside from gym and Medium memberships, beauty products, inspirational podcasts, bloggers selling blogging courses, politicians, and a million others sell hope too. Hope is often what makes us buy things. We buy gym membership hoping to get in shape, beauty products hoping to become prettier, blogging courses hoping to make money blogging.

Marketers know we respond to hope. So they dangle hope to sell their shit.

Take a look at how people sell slimming products. They always play on our hope that we can exert the minimum effort to get the perfect body. We know it doesn’t work that way, but we always hope it does.

But sometimes it is helpful

Why do I blog? Some people blog hoping to get rich. Some to get famous. I once blogged hoping I can make a little money off of it while I tried to improve awareness of the climate crisis – yet another hope. Now I write because I’ve always written in one way or another. Still, in the back of my mind, I hope to be read someday.

Without hope, most of us wouldn’t do what we’re doing. YouTubers wouldn’t spend hours making videos if they weren’t hoping that someone would watch them. Writers wouldn’t write stories if they didn’t hope that it’ll turn out well. No one would start a business if they didn’t hope that they can make a living with it.

Decluttering hope

It amuses to no end that my tendency toward minimalism rears its head in everything. I naturally thought about which hopes should be decluttered. We have so many hopes. Some are good, inspiring hopes, and then there are downright wishful thinking.

You may ask, why do I need to declutter hope? Isn’t hope like happiness, the more the merrier?

It depends.

Hope is useless without actions. Having too many hopes is like having too many goals, it causes unfocused action, or worse, no action. Imagine having a dozen different skills you’d like to learn, you’ll likely get nowhere chasing all of them.

On the other hand, narrowing it down to one or two allows you to focus your time and energy on them. Practice makes perfect, they say, and they’re right. Good things take time. Skill needs to be honed. Hope doesn’t bring success. Action does. So you simply can’t succeed in something if you’re trying to work on everything.

And then there are hopes that are wishful thinking. These are hopes that have lost their inspirational value and sunk into the “I remind you of something you’ve yet (failed) to do” category.

I once tried to learn the guitar. It didn’t work. I was too self-conscious to practice, not musically inclined, and ultimately, not interested enough. After a while, the guitar sat forlornly in my closet. Looking back now, it’s obvious to me it was wishful thinking – but for a long time, I kept it hoping I’ll pick it up again. Someday.

The dusty guitar, forgotten knitting needles, or even a neglected blog… Ask yourself if they are wishful thinking or if you should give it another go. Be honest. And if you do decide to give it another go, make it soon. Someday isn’t good enough.

So yes, hopes need to be decluttered too.

Besides, if you declutter hope, you’ll know how to screen out silly ones. It’ll become harder to sell you bullshit.

Finally, there are good hopes. Hopes that keep us alive and keep us pursuing things that matter to us. This is the type of hope you want to isolate and hold on to.

Medium, for me, has gone into the wishful thinking pile. I’ve given it too many somedays. Even as I’m writing now, part of me wishes to publish this on a Medium publication. I know better, though. I think I’m better off focusing on other projects and maintaining this blog, a space that’s truly mine.

We declutter hopes, so we’re left with the ones that truly matter.