Fundamental Human Personailty Traits?

Hope makes us do strange things. It keeps us going, sure. It gives us something to look forward to, ok. But for as much happiness as it can create, it also leads way to frustration, disappointment, heartache, and tears. It's the reason people scrape together money to buy lottery tickets, or stand there, buying ticket after ticket, or come in every week on the same day at the same time to buy the same amount of tickets they bought the week before. It's the reason we apply for colleges, jobs, internships, even if we don't think we can get in or get it. It's the reason we interact with other people, looking for relationships, friendships or otherwise, hoping to find someone we click with, have similar interests with, can talk to easily.
And when we win the ticket, get in to our dream school, land the job, make a friend, meet someone special, it makes the feeling that much better. That elated feeling, where it feels like your heart is swelling like the Grinch's in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." Where you feel like you are capable of anything, that you just want to bottle up this feeling and save it for a bleak day. When you run (yes, actually run) to tell someone the news because you are so excited you can't contain it, and running is a way to dispel the excess energy you have just obtained.
And eventually, that excitement tones down, you calm down, your heart beats normal, you stop running. And you are ok. You are at normal, ground level. You are still happy, content, satisfied, but you are not overly so.
But when none of that happens, when our promise for something fails, when the anticipation that something will happen is all there is, without getting that moment, it is troubling. It makes us disappointed, sad, frustrated. And when that happens, we still cling to hope. Hope that the next ticket will be a winner, hope that a different college will let us in, hope that another job will call for an interview, hope that someone else will like us. And so the cycle continues.
Hope is why I applied to colleges I didn't think I could get into, or afford if I did.
Hope is why I even left my previous college.
Hope is why I went to Victoria's Secret today (to see if my "secret gift card" was worth more than $10).
Hope is why it's 1 o'clock in the morning and I'm still sitting on my phone waiting for someone to text me back.
Hope makes us to strange things.