Hope as a Service (HaaS™): Is this the next big thing?

We like to think we buy products for what they do. In reality, we often buy them for what they might do. Investments sell the promise of wealth. Dating apps sell the dream of love. Even something as simple as a gym membership sells a vision of a healthier, more confident future self.

This is not a side effect of modern commerce - it’s  the core business model – and it raises an uncomfortable, fascinating question: If we’re already buying hope, why not formalise it? Why not sell Hope as a Service - an all-seeing, all-knowing AI system that injects fervent optimism into everything we do?

How HaaS could work

Let’s face it, entire industries exist not around outcomes, but around imagined futures. When people buy skincare, they’re buying confidence. When they buy a holiday, they’re buying escape. When they buy a lottery ticket they’re buying a life of financial freedom.

This works because of predictable psychological patterns: We overestimate our chances of success, we emotionally attach to who we could become, and we get more pleasure from anticipation than achievement. We’re not just customers. We’re investors in hypothetical versions of our own lives.

HaaS would turn this invisible system into something explicit, measurable, and automated. Imagine an AI that sits across your shopping, self-improvement, and lifestyle decisions, actively engineering optimism.

It might do things like:

• Calculate your “statistical chance” of success for any product or goal

• Generate optimistic narratives about your progress

• Create visual simulations of your future self

  
  

Applied in real life, this could look strangely seamless. A hair product purchase comes with AI-generated projections of how you might look in six weeks. A slimming aid includes a personalised storyline about your transformation. A gym membership doesn’t just offer fitness. It offers a data-driven “destiny” you can subscribe to.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s the next logical step from the recommendation engines, tracking apps, and algorithmic motivation tools we already use.

The dark pattern: When hope becomes blame

Of course, the real danger appears when the hope doesn’t materialise. Because many times, it won’t. However, there’s already a well-established answer to this problem:

When results fail to show up, the system doesn’t apologise, it simply reframes the story. You didn’t commit hard enough. You weren’t consistent. You didn’t invest enough time, money, or emotional energy. The solution is never “this didn’t work,” but “try harder, buy more, go deeper.”

Effectively:

• The product is never at fault

• The user absorbs the failure as personal weakness

• The only path forward is greater sacrifice

Don’t tut-tut this logic. It already exists in multi-level marketing cultures, in toxic hustle environments, and in certain corners of the self-help world. HaaS would simply make it automatic, personalised, and relentless.

Why marketers would love HaaS

From a business perspective, HaaS is almost perfect. Instead of selling products, companies sell belief. Instead of one-time purchases, they sell ongoing emotional commitment. Instead of meeting promises, they manage expectations through carefully engineered optimism.

Unlike traditional marketing, HaaS would operate continuously. It wouldn’t just appear in ads, it would live inside the customer’s daily habits, decisions, and self-image. Hope wouldn’t be a vague feeling. It would be a lifetime subscription that nobody would ever cancel.

Ethical crossroads: Is HaaS innovation or exploitation?

This is where the idea stops being clever and starts being uncomfortable. Should hope be engineered? When does motivation become manipulation? Who is responsible when the promised outcome never arrives - the system, the seller, or the person who believed?

HaaS doesn’t invent these questions. It exposes them. It pulls into the open what much of the market already relies on, but prefers not to name.

Final word: The price of belief

Hope matters. It's essential for progress, resilience, and change. But when hope becomes infrastructure - designed, optimised, cold and sold - it begins to look a lot less like inspiration and more like a trap.

Ultimately, in a world where hope becomes a service, the goal would no longer be success. It would simply be keeping people hopeful enough to pay to stay inside the system.

Sadly, I’m sure someone, somewhere, is already building this horrifying future.

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