Want vs. Do, Hope vs. Know

Want vs. Do

I've been thinking a lot lately, it seems, about the difference between wanting something and actually doing something. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of us want a lot really, but in many cases aren't really willing to do anything.

I visited my parents this last week. My mother owns the apartment she lives in, and almost all of her neighbors also own theirs. As such, there is a board that essentially makes all the decisions and handles the day-to-day affairs of the apartment building, and my mother is the Chairman of that board. It pains me to visit her, because just about every time I do, there is always one issue or another that practically eats her up. My siblings and I have told her we're tired of seeing her like that (and quite frankly, also of always hearing her complain about it) and we keep telling her to give up the position for someone else, that it's not worth it, let someone else do it for a change, because she has had the position for a great many years already. But she says she can't, that she must remain Chairman because no-one else will do it. And she is probably right. My mother is closer to 70 than to 60, yet everyone is perfectly content to let her do all the work and handle everything that needs to be taken care of. Everyone wants those things taken care of, but no-one wants to do them.

Here's a really small yet recent observation: The coffee at the place I work. Every day I brew far more pots than I consume myself. That is not something I lose sleep over exactly, yet I know that there are several of us that will regularly pour out the bottom sludge and put on two fresh pots whenever we pass by the coffee maker. And since the pots are regularly almost empty, that pretty much means that there are those of us that rarely, if ever, will put on a new pot. I've seen the same half-inch of sludge remain at the bottom of a pot for several hours once. Sometimes there is a set of coffee mugs present, their owners evidently waiting for someone to brew a pot so they can get their caffeine fix. Don't get me wrong, I like everyone I work with, but really, how <adjective/expletive> is that that someone will rather go without coffee instead of putting on a new pot themselves? A goddamn pot of coffee?

Hope vs. Know

Another thing that I've been thinking about is the difference between hoping and knowing. I think the same thing is true there: we hope for a lot, although (at some level) we often know that whatever we hope for will not come to be. I guess there's a more fundamental difference right there, too: Once we know we'll actually get something, we can no longer hope for it.

But that is all pretty elementary. What I've been thinking about is how Want vs. Do and Hope vs. Know connect. When we want something but don't want to do it ourselves, what is the actual reason? Is it just laziness? Is lazy a good word to fill out the <adjective/expletive> blank above? How about selfish? No? Do we have some weird need to see other people do things for us, some odd domination game? Are some of us unable to do even simple things for ourselves? Do we just want to be taken care of? Or have decisions made for us? Something else? Is it some combination of some or all of the above?

I can't say, of course. Probably everyone will claim their own motivations. But I think that one thing that a lot of those motivations will have in common is, indeed, hope. We know that something should be done, or even must be done... but we hope that someone else will take care of it, or it will take care of itself, or that it eventually won't matter. For instance, we know that our planet's resources are being consumed at a rate that will screw us all, perhaps even our particular generation, and of course we want something to be done about it... but we hope that someone else will take care of it, someone that actually has the ability to do so, so that we, ourselves, don't have to make an effort. Heck, it doesn't even have to be something that someone else has to do (or can do). How often do we put off doing something that we don't want to do, in the hope that the problem will somehow go away by itself?

I think that in general, people see what the want to see, and put a blind eye to the rest. That way, we can hope in spite of actually knowing better, and in hoping we can want without actually having to do.