I agree - if you hope you are bound to be disappointed, so hoping is a mug's game.

Hang on a minute. Isn't life about having the temerity to hope, which is the same as taking the risks to make something of your life - consider Laura Riding below*. Taking risks means failure from time to time, perhaps a lot of the time, but that is life, fail again, keep failing, fail better, become an expert in failing. It really doesn't matter.

*The Tillaquils

Dancing lamely on a lacquered plain,
Never a Tillaquil murmurs for legs.
Embrace rustles a windy wistfulness,
But feels for no hands.
Scant stir of being, yet rather they
Unfulfilled unborn than failing alive,
Escaping the public shame of history.

Once only two Tillaquils nearly a man and woman
Violated a hopeless code with hope,
Slept a single dream seeming in time.
`Come,’ he cried, coaxing her,
`Stairs stream upward not for rest at every step
But to reach the top always before Death.’
`Softly,’ she whispered,
‘Or two Tillaquils will wake.’

Death they passed always over and over,
Life grew always sooner and sooner.
But love like a grimace
Too real on Life’s face
Smiled two terrified dreams of Tillaquils
Tremblingly down the falling flights;
Who saved themselves in waking
The waste of being something
And danced traditionally
To nothingness and never;
With only a lost memory
Punishing this foolish pair
That nearly lived and loved
In one nightmare.

Laura Riding: Full poems of mythical occasion