Is Hope Sus? Why Letting Go Might Just Set You Free
In this episode, I explore the idea of hope and how, in some contexts, it can be "sus"—a term I learned from my nieces, used to describe something sketchy or untrustworthy. Hope, especially as it relates to dying, can sometimes act as a form of avoidance or false comfort. This theme is inspired by various personal experiences, Buddhist teachings, and insights from Stephen Jenkinson's book Die Wise.
Key Points:
The Origins of "Sus":
The term "sus" became popular through the game Among Us to describe suspicious behavior, and it has now entered mainstream language to call out anything untrustworthy or sketchy. I use this to reflect on how hope can sometimes feel suspicious when applied in certain life situations, especially around illness and death.
Hope as a Trap:
Hope can sometimes lead to future expectations that trap us, pulling us away from the present moment. It sets up specific outcomes that may never happen, leading to disappointment or self-sabotage.
Pema Chödrön’s teachings encourage us to embrace the present and relinquish hope for a better future, as it often distracts from the groundlessness of our current situation.
Personal Reflections on Hope:
I reflect on my HIV diagnosis in 2003, where I hoped for a false positive, holding on to the possibility that the diagnosis was a mistake. It took years to accept the reality, and hope, in this case, prolonged my denial.
Similarly, in watching loved ones suffer from dementia or terminal illness, I've observed how hope can sometimes prevent acceptance of the reality of disease and death.
Hope at Life’s End:
Drawing from Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise, hope can act as anesthesia at the end of life, masking the reality of dying. It often serves as a way to manage the discomfort of death rather than allowing for conscious acceptance.
Jenkinson critiques how our death-phobic culture uses hope as a strategy to avoid facing the inevitability of death, which can traumatize both the dying and their loved ones.
Letting Go of Hope for Presence:
Letting go of hope allows us to fully engage with the present moment, bringing peace and freedom. Rather than waiting for things to get better, accepting the reality of the present moment can be liberating.
This doesn’t mean giving up, but rather finding life in the acceptance of what is.
Conclusion:
Jenkinson’s concept of living and dying “hope-free” offers a revolution in how we approach life and death. Abandoning hope is not about despair but about opening ourselves to what is real right now. This practice brings more freedom and depth to how we live.
This episode invites you to consider the idea of abandoning hope and reflecting on where hope might be acting as a trap in your life. Instead of being caught up in future expectations, what might happen if you embraced the present more fully?
TRANSCRIPT
A play within a play, a title within a podcast episode. So the term sus, today's title, I have just been hearing people use us specifically my 2 of my nieces and mind you. I don't think I've ever said this out loud. I have 11 nieces and nephews, 10 by blood birth of my siblings. And one of those, 11th, is a human who was adopted in with my brother and his wife and joined 4 of those nieces and nephews and is the 5th.
So Christian is the oldest and the youngest is Sloan, and she belongs to my younger brother, the youngest of us siblings. So there's 11 of these beautiful humans, and there's so much I learned from them, and I'm really excited to continue to build relationships with them. Many of them held the name Smith, the same last name I have. So number 23, Mackenzie and Madison, they have been using the word sus in front of me. And so I didn't know.
So if you don't know, sus became wildly popular in gaming and online culture through the game among us, which skyrocketed in popularity and became a huge hit in 2020. The game is all about teamwork, but with a twist. Some players are secretly imposters trying to sabotage the rest of the group. Everyone's goal is to figure out who's faking it and boot them off the spaceship. In those tense moments, players start saying things like, you're acting suspicious, but they quickly shortened it to sus to keep the conversation moving fast.
It was quick, snappy, snappy way to call someone out without wasting time. From there, sus went viral. Gamers, streamers, and influencers on TikTok and YouTube picked it up. And before you knew it, the word was all over the Internet. Now it's used to describe anything or anyone that seems a little sketchy or untrustworthy.
Fun. Right? How something like this goes from game slang to everyday language, but that's the Internet for you. And now here today on Viral Mindfulness, the podcast, hope is sus people. Yeah.
A little sketchy and a little untrustworthy. I've been thinking about this one for a long time. In fact, one of the moments where I really had an opening with this idea about abandon all hope was a moment in Palm Springs in the desert in around 2018 when I was hiking up a mountain in the desert with the sunrise, looking at the the bare beauty of the desert, which mind you, I love learning from the desert. I was born in a desert mountain in mountain Salt Lake City, Utah. The desert is a great teacher.
And I also saw mountain goats that time hurt, like, half a dozen of them on the side of the mountain. And I was listening to a podcast, not a podcast. I was listening to a Dharma talk from Pema Chodron, abandon hope. So I'm really excited to share this episode with you today. How hope is sus, why letting go of hope might just set you free, you know?
Welcome to Viral Mindfulness, the podcast. We're sitting on Autumn's Edge. I'm wrapping up my 2nd summer wise circle. I'm full of love and my heart is open and I'm practicing and I have a lot of things on my heart. So I thought, let me share them with you.
I'd love to encourage you to try and just open your mind and entertain this idea. I'm not saying you need to do this or this is the answer. Just try it on like a hat or listen to these ideas. Like you'd listen to the rain where you don't chase each raindrop and try to catch them. I know.
I do try to catch raindrops sometimes. By the way, I just placed an order for my rainwater paintings that sold this summer, I'm creating prints of the first four paintings that sold and one of my favorites. And I just ordered them, so they'll be here soon, and they'll be available very soon for you all if you're interested in not spending as much money and purchasing a print of one of my rainwater paintings. They're gorgeous. So on today's episode, we're looking at hope, abandoned hope.
So I don't know how I got to this, but this is where I live. It's not saying that you don't have a positive attitude in my opinion. It's not saying that you don't believe or pray or, you know, hope for the best, there is this very potent attitude that I'm going to discuss. And I have several different places to read from you, including Pema Chodron. So I remember when I first got my HIV diagnosis in 2003.
And at the time, you would go in and they would do a a swab in your mouth, and they would test your saliva. And they were looking for not the virus. They weren't testing your blood. They were looking for the antibodies that one starts building once they have the virus in them. And then they would send that swab off, and it would take a couple weeks, you know, before you had results, which is so different than where it is now.
You can have an HIV result within, like, 10 minutes. So when I got my HIV diagnosis, I had been waiting 2 weeks, and I came in to get those results. And I was just shocked. I did not think that I was living a risky sexual situation, although I was. It wasn't one of the most risky ones.
There were sexual behaviors of a higher risk that I was not participating in. And there was this false positive. It was this really interesting play in that beginning moment for me where they'd already tested again. Once you get a reactive result according to that swab, they would test it again against another test called the Western blot. And so they already knew I was HIV positive and that I had reactive results to the antibodies in my system.
But in that moment, they then set you up then in 2003 to go get a blood test just to finally confirm through a blood test. And I just thought, well, maybe I just maybe this is a mistake. You know, hoping that there was some error in the lab and false positive. And for weeks, after even after the blood confirmation, and I just kept having this recurring hopeful it it it could still be a mistake. It could still be.
Maybe I'm one of those miracles. And, of course, that ties into a whole another world of magical thinking, surrender to the reality that I was living with HIV, and this was my reality. And I very quickly got tied up in drugs and alcohol as a way to move away from so many of these things, including the bigger painful traumatic issues underneath much of my life. And so taking antiretrovirals to keep me healthy and to keep the virus from replicating in my system, I did not make peace with that reality for a good 9 years. So there was this element of hope or the flip side of hope or the repercussion of holding hope in a way that was crazy.
And another example for you, I often struggle with people around me who get a disease. So for example, I remember when someone close to me got a diagnosis of dementia, and I felt like the people I felt like they were in denial for several years about the reality, which is understandable. I was in denial for, like, 9 years. So watching it, I find it difficult when people do that same thing I did, where they don't surrender to the reality of disease. And you can take it a step further, which is towards death.
I remember sitting very intimately with my friend Vanessa for several years listening to her talk about death and dying. And she had a lot of money and a lot of hope and was pairing those 2 together. And I saw her the week before she died in her house alone with her for a short period. And it was a very, very intense situation, and I've had a lot of time to think about it. And part of what I saw her doing in those last 12 hours I spent with her was seeing her surrender to hospice and to really finally accept.
And this isn't just me. This is her one sister telling me this, that she thinks that she just finally, the few days before I got there, came into acceptance that she was dying. And she'd been already dying for a couple years. Yet, where do you where do we make the die the diagnosis that one is dying? In fact, another person right now in my life, her father is dying.
And I asked her recently, does he feel like he's dying? And she said, no. He said that as soon as so so he has a terminal cancer diagnosis, and he's not choosing treatment. He's close to 80 or a little over, and is going to just naturally move and allow for, you know, the end with the cancer to be here without taking treatment. And for him, he starts dying when the pain kicks in, and he's not in pain right now.
And so I asked my friend, when is he dying for you? And so it's an interesting conversation. When is one dying? So I'm gonna share some of that with you. So let me get right into the main discussion points for today.
We're gonna, 1, talk about how hope can be a trap. And I'm gonna share with you the second point is, Pema Chodron's words, tell you a little bit more about that. The third point in today's discussion on the podcast is abandoning hope and instead embracing presence. And finally, the 4th discussion point is the false comfort of hope at life's end. So, up first, sometimes wishful thinking can trap us into future expectations that distract us from the present moment.
And in this attitude, we place too much hope on specific outcomes, and it can feel like a setup for disappointment or even self sabotage. Do you, in your life, see how there might be something where you're in hope and hope could be a trap for you? Why don't you take a minute and just kind of think about that? Where in my life am I holding on to hope? And it's actually a trap for me because it is putting me into a place of future expectation.
It's taking me away from here, right now, the moment, today, placing way too much pressure and on specific outcomes. And this can often set you up for disappointment or self sabotage. So Pema Chodron. I love what she has to say. So I I I'm in my book, in my world, doing my readings, and here I am.
And this morning, I open up to where I'm reading, and it's called hopelessness and death. I'm like, of course, I love the synchronicity of Autumn's Edge right now. So let me just read her words. She says, if we're willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path.
So Pema says that in Tibetan Buddhism, there's an interesting word, Yi Teng Chi. The Yi part means totally, completely. And then the rest of it, tangji means exhausted. So altogether, yi tangji means totally tired out. We might say totally fed up.
Going on, Pema says it describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope that there's somewhere better to be, that there's someone better to be, we will never relax with where we are or who we are. And I'll add one from my life.
When I get here, I'll be more happy. When I have a podcast that has 10,000,000 downloads, then I'll be successful. There's so much invitation across the board in my life for a continual daily commitment to be here as I am right now. Pema Chodron's teachings on abandoning hope explain how this concept isn't about despair, but it's rather about releasing our grip on expectations. Hope can be sus because it keeps us stuck in a cycle of always waiting for things to change.
And it's understandable when people are dying, when people have a very difficult diagnosis. So the 3rd talking point today is abandoning hope so that we can embrace being present. Presence, I love it. Did you know that Viral Mindfulness was started with the idea that I'm spreading presence and cheer? One of the initial intentions of Viral Mindfulness was to spread presence and cheer.
And yes, that was very much a play on HIV and AIDS. Viral mindfulness was very much about the virus, how it invited me to be present to my life and the preciousness of life, the impermanence. If we dive into how abandoning hope doesn't mean giving up, it offers to us that instead, it means opening us to fully experience the present. If we let go of hope, we create space for true acceptance and a deeper connection to what's happening right now. So I would love to take a moment again for you just to take it a breath or 2.
In fact, let's do it together. I recently learned from Valerie Kaur. Valerie Kaur, k a u r, Valerie Kaur. I don't know how she pronounce it. I saw her live up in LA and, oh, she's on the revolutionary love tour in a bus spreading beauty.
And she taught me about the breath. Let it come. Let it go. Let it come. Let it go.
Let it come. Let it go. So take a moment and reflect where hope in your life, where hope might be sus in your life. Where are you waiting for things to get better? And how might letting go bring more peace and freedom to you right now?
And that includes you getting better. You know, what if you were to let go of that and bring peace and freedom to you as you are today? And in that, yes, you can make a choice to adjust your daily routine today for sure. Now, the final discussion point for today's episode is something that is just, it's a whole book and idea that Vanessa, my friend who passed, after I left the day I was leaving her house, she was setting up with hospice that she was turning her treatment over to the care of hospice, and a very beautiful referral from her sister who is a social who is a social worker. And in that, I said goodbye to her that night.
And the next day was a Friday, and she had hospice there. And her daughter had arrived, and her other children started to make their way to her. And she had some event. This is at least what I was told. She had an event that took her down like an aneurysm.
She had already had one and was still conscious and then moved into pain management and under the supervision of hospice and never woke up and passed on Wednesday. And all of her kids, her other 2 kids were able to travel to her, and her ex husband and their dog was there. And one of the books she introduced to me during those couple years, it's the last year that I was interacting with her as a friend. As a friend who she said there were 2 people who were really walking with her outside of, of course, her partner at the time. I was one of those 2, and I learned so much.
And the book is called Die Wise, d I so Die Wise, w I s e. A manifesto for sanity and soul by Steven Jenkinson. A indigenous man has almost died twice. There's a really beautiful documentary called Grief Walker on YouTube. It's about 1 hour and 10 minutes that you could find.
I watched. It was really interesting. I'm gonna read you what I recently read in his book. So I was about 1 third into it when Vanessa died. I was reading it actually as I was there with her and then I put it down and hadn't touched it until just the last couple weeks and it's really lovely to reenter and be willing to learn some more.
These ideas are new to me. So, I don't when I when I even today's episode about hope, abandoning hope. I'm in I'm inviting you to consider abandon hope. Let this abandonment bring you so deep into to today. I know that I'm one of those humans where impermanence, where knowing this for myself gives me life and gives me motivation to be alive today and to make this day, to live today as if it's my first day.
Okay. I'm gonna read to you Steven Jenkinson, DieWise. Ready? Put your reading cap on. So a culture that sells hope to dying people is selling them anesthesia and management.
Hope as much as anything else and more than most traumatizes people at the end of their lives. Hope like any good shuck and jive artist, Google that shuck and jive artist, I did, sells itself and its absence is the only two options in town. In our good binary oppositional style of argument and contention, Many of us imagine for dying people and the people who love them only hope or hopelessness, either the faint possibility that things can be otherwise or the withering misery of being pinned by the brute fact that they will not be. Continuing on, in a death phobic culture, dying is not a credible outcome, Dying is giving up, and hope is refusing to give up. In the health care system of a death phobic culture, dying is where the health care ends because dying has no place in any understanding of health.
We have strategies for not dying instead, and hope is a large part of the creed that informs those strategies. It can make you crazy being hopeful, and when you are dying in our part of the world, it often does. Wow. I'm gonna read you a couple more sentences. But in this moment, it reminds me of how hard it is for me to digest this information.
And I do believe I live in a death phobic culture. I believe that there's a lot of death phobic things happening. And in fact, as I'm reading this because of Vanessa, who has been who passed two and a half years ago, was she reading this to try and understand and come to terms? She had stage 4 cancer for several years and had was buying more time with all these with her money and all these treatments that she had access to that were giving her more time. And Steven Jenkinson says that as we treat a fatal disease, it's gonna kill you.
Usually, you're being in treatment, and you're just in more pain. So you're only extending your dying. So you're it's a conundrum. It's really an interesting book. So here are the last few sentences from Steven Jenkinson's DieWise.
One alternative is first to wonder our way out of this false choice that we are offered when we are dying. Hope is not life, and hopeless is not death and depression. Hope is very often a refusal to know what is so, and steadfastly, it is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have. Hopeless is the collapse of that refusal, and it looks a lot like depression. The alternative is to live your life and your dying hope free.
He says, living and dying hope free, that is a revolution. The chance to die that way is what dying people deserve. Wow. Deep, deep stuff. So drawing from Jenkinson's message about how our culture uses hope as a form of anesthesia, particularly for those who are dying.
Hope can become sus in this context by offering false promises or a sense of future resolution that distracts from the profound necessary work of dying consciously. And as Jenkinson teaches, hope can become another way to manage or numb the reality of death rather than facing it fully. I love the, idea, the parallels, the broader theme in this episode that hope can sometimes act as a form of avoidance. And in critical moments, like at the end of life, it might even cause harm by preventing you or your loved one from engaging with the present and the real work of acceptance. So, maybe weaving in Jenkinson's perspective, you, me, we we reflect on how hope, while seemingly positive can sometimes actually deepen trauma when it blinds us to reality.
Wow. Wow. I did it y'all. I wanted to share these ideas with you, and I appreciate you letting me into your ears and your hearts and your mind. And, you know, maybe this is one of those episodes that you'll listen to twice, and just kind of see oh, yeah.
I know that for me, it's been really hard to digest Steven Jenkinson's book. It's new to me. It's as if I'm really learning and considering. So I'll return and report. I'm not convinced of any teaching.
In fact, on my website, if you haven't been to my website for a while, you know, I make changes regularly because I love to update my website. And just yesterday, I added on my home page, a copy of my painting called Borders or Georgia Blue. And there's a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh, and this is what Thich Nhat Hanh says. The teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth. So that's what I mean about, like, teachings or even what I'm sharing with you today.
It's a vehicle to describe the truth. Don't mistake it for the truth itself. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, But if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon. So for me, so much of what I'm learning, I'm trying to let it drop into my body to realize that, here's Pema Chodron, that the teachings disintegrate when we try to grasp them.
So if I try to grab a teaching, they disintegrate. Instead, we have to experience the teachings and experience them without hope. So, may you create an environment to experience the teachings that most deeply resonate with you right now in autumn. All my love to your next mindful step. I'll see you next time here on Viral Mindfulness, the podcast.
