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Doug's ColumnsOpinion

Seven Habits of a Government Sponge: Embrace Hoplessness!

One great way to take the sizzle off your fajita is to cuddle despair. I’m talking about getting so gloomy that you make Eeyore, Vincent Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and Sylvia Plath look like Taylor Swift compared to you.

Think about it.

The bulk of the hapless people you have met in life were hopeless, right? Thus, to carve out a crappy crevice for your life you must stop thinking and believing that good will ever, ever come your way.

Yes, hope is dangerous to your desires for failure. Reminisce a little bit regarding the people who have made it and you’ll remember how positive and faith-filled they were no matter what difficulties they faced. Some successful people have had hope against hope. I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of at-risk kids, broken families and bankrupt businessmen who were up serious creeks without paddles get out of the messes they were in and dramatically turn their lives around. And what was the progenitor of their metamorphosis? You guessed it. Hope. Stupid and stinking, pain in the butt, pie in the sky hope. You must beware of this encouraging force.

Listen to me: Whatever it takes and whatever price you have to pay, you must purposely drain yourself of any vestige of hope if, that is if, you are truly serious about courting disaster. Don’t even think about getting your expectations up for positive change. Hope is too promising, too provisional and too transformative to be entertained even for a moment if failure is what you’re pursuing. Understand the following, or you will not move down the dead end road to disaster:

1. Hope brings faith.

2. Faith spawns an indomitable spirit.

3. This indomitable spirit is the precursor to the prosperity you’re trying to avoid.

Therefore, to evade any possible blessing, you must create an atmosphere of anxiety which will birth defeat, which in turn will crush your spirit, which will in turn ensure tragedy. And that’s what you want, right? Tragedy?

Lastly, one of the cool things about hopelessness is the spin off fruit of sloth that it yields. Classically, slothfulness was defined as the by-product of despondency. It was not simply someone being lazy for laziness’ sake, but a sign, a manifestation, that despair was ruling that someone’s roost and that’s why he moved like a manatee on Xanax.

Yeah, as optimism is drained from your heart and mind, all your desires to get up off your butt and get busy are snuffed. Sloth is awesome in how it extinguishes viability once you have decided to give up. Think about it. How many dejected and lazy, miserable and apathetic, depressed and passive people do you know who are full of verve [which is a must for success]? Once you embrace hopelessness, it will begin to quench all the necessary, positive attitudes and actions that achievers demand, and it will set you free to be the train wreck we all know you can be.

Doug Giles

Doug Giles is Pastor of Liberty Fellowship in Wimberley, TX, and is the founder of ClashDaily.com (290M+ page views). Giles is also the author of the NEW book, The Wildman Devotional: A 50 Day Devotional For Men. Follow Doug on Instagram and Truth Social at @thegilesway and on Twitter @TheArtOfDoug.