In the new paperback edition of Hunting Magic Eels there are four new chapters. One of those chapters is entitled "Live Your Beautiful Life." In that chapter I describe a new ailment facing our modern world: hopesickness:
We live in a hope sick world. We see this hope sickness everywhere. Hope is hard to come by, rare and diminishing. And has hope wanes, human flourishing wanes. Personally and collectively. Our emotional, social, and political lives are visibly sick, and much of our suffering is due to a loss of hope.
Consider how, in 2020, a new category of death was introduced by the economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton. In their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Case and Deaton analyzed why life expectancies in the United States had begun to fall, for three years successively for the first time since 1918. The cause was traced to a sharp uptick in what Case and Deaton have named “deaths of despair,” deaths due to suicide, drug overdose, and liver disease due to alcoholism. In the US, deaths of despair have been increasing over the last decade by 50% to over 300%, depending upon demographic group.
I go on to describe how our pervasive hopesickness creates a teleological vacuum in our lives. That is to say, we need to live toward something, for something. With the fading of the Christian eschatological imagination in our world a transcendent telos, purpose, goal and end for our lives has evaporated. Beyond deaths of despair, we also sense this vacuum in the pervasive listlessness, shallowness, and boredom of modern life. We don't know what life is for anymore. As I describe in the new chapter in Hunting Magic Eels, this is exactly where capitalism wants you--godless and bored. For the godless and bored are perfect marks for the pseudo-teleology created by an economy of craving. Lacking a sacred telos, we crave, and that craving creates a "for" that satisfies our teleological minds. That the cravings created by capitalism are shallow and fleeting, and fail to fully satisfy our teleological hunger, is precisely the point. There are other products and experiences you must buy. You are pulled forward in time, creating the illusion of teleology, as you hop from desire to desire, craving to craving. Restless dissatisfaction, a perpetual teleological jonesing, is how our economy of craving sustains itself. Teleological addicts are created to keep us clicking, scrolling and buying.
All that to say, when the Scripture tells us to "hope in God" we're not talking about wishful thinking or playing harps in heaven. We are talking how the human mind works. We're talking about mental health. The brain is teleologically oriented, pulled forward into life by its desires. Those desires can be tethered to transcendent, sacred ends or left vulnerable being hijacked by consumptive patterns of craving and addiction. The teleological hole in your life is experienced as either transcendent fullness or the itching insatiability of restless cravings.
That's the choice, the fork in the road. You enter the day vulnerable to powers hell bent on hijacking your dopamine reward pathways to turn you into a teleological addict, or you can hope in God.
