You're very kind. I hate to do this, but I have to call you out on total bullshit. It's never too late for hope as long as you have air in your lungs and the will to fight for what you value. You may have had your time in one or many aspects of your life, but you're still alive, aren't you? You still have air in your lungs, and a whole multitude of fine things on this earth worth clinging to. So find something new to hope for. Find another purpose in life or two or three. I don't see what could possibly be stopping you besides this idiotic cultural stigma we have that only young people can do something useful.
I could be wrong, so
@entpIdeas please correct me if I am, But I think that "hope" may not be the word you're looking for in this situation. I'm not sure what the right one is, but I completely understand what you're saying. I'm even in an astoundingly similar place in my life. I think devoid has a point with this statement about never giving up hope though.
Maybe it's just that our personal definitions of the word hope evolves with life experiences. I know that blind hope is almost an impossibility for me at this stage in my life, but for me to say that I never expect something seemingly impossible/improbable to happen would be a lie. I've had to many things happen to me that were spectacularly against the odds to think that something else couldn't .... and that's kinda like hope isn't it?
I'm not quite as keen on the concept of actively seeking something to hope for though. I've found that having expectations that anything other than SOMETHING unexpected happening is a sure way of getting let down. It's much more functional to just do a quick probability of events evaluation and have a general idea of the likely coarse of events. I'd rather rely on my Ne>Ti than a classic "hope" definition any day.
I don't know ... I guess I'm a bit torn on this subject ... but one thing that I do know is that you are BOTH right ... and I'm not sure if you are taking each other's perspectives into account (maybe you are, who knows). entpIdeas, do you remember what it was like when we were still young and unjaded enough to have the type of hope that devoid is describing? It's been a while, but I seem to remember it allowing for quite a bit more comfort in negative situations (back when I believed that there was such a thing as a negative situation). On the flip side though devoid, you gotta understand that there are things inside you that will die WELL before your body gives out. Sometimes you just grow out of any use for them. A hard, long life has a way of trimming the fat if you know what I mean.
