How to Deal With Disappointment

To hope well is to be realistic about probabilities, not to succumb to wishful thinking or be cowed by fear; it is to hold possibilities open when you should. The point of clinging to possibility is not to feel good – hope may be more painful than despair – but to keep the flicker of potential agency alive.

To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment

We must surrender our hopes and expectations, as well as our fears, and march directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it, and make it our way of life, which is a very hard thing to do. Disappointment is a good sign of basic intelligence. It cannot be compared to anything else: it is so sharp, precise, obvious, and direct. If

Epictetus is showing us not only how to perform better but also how to circumscribe bad feelings when things don’t go as well as would have been ideal. This is a far more delicate approach to ‘no failure’ than we would expect from the roaring motivators of modern times. These, as we have seen, tend to presume that by self-belief and goal-setting (v