Yeah, I've heard evangelicals make the same type of arguments about "faith".

I agree with Shelley's description of hope and despair as the torturers of the living:

[...] Hope and despair,
The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear 640
Marred his repose; the influxes of sense,
And his own being unalloyed by pain,
Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed
The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there
At peace, and faintly smiling [...]

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Poetical_Works_of_Percy_Bysshe_Shelley_(ed._Hutchinson,_1914)/Alastor;_or,_the_Spirit_of_Solitude

Hope and despair are two sides of the same coin. Both are illusions, or delusions. We don't hope for the future to be better, we plan to make it better. Hope is ephemeral, and as useful as prayer for actually getting anything worthwhile done.

Without hope, we'd give up.

Why would you give up?
Because you didn't get what you hoped for? That's childish. Try again, or admit to yourself that the goal isn't that important to you.
Because getting what you wanted turned out to be more difficult than you hoped? Again, childish. Reassess whether your goal is worth the effort, then keep going or do something else.
Because you despair that you won't get what you wanted? You have defeated yourself before you've even begun. Perhaps the world is better off with you doing nothing anyway.

Chasing hope is like chasing fairy lights in a swamp - a good way to wind up lost and drowning. Hoping shifts the burden of improving your circumstances off of yourself and onto the world around you, and distracts you from doing something practical. The only reason that it's not generally considered superstitious is that it's so common, and yet superstition it is. Hope belongs in the same bin with your fears of black cats, spilled salt, and the number 13.

Don't hope. Plan, then execute, then deal with the consequences, then plan again.

Don't hope, don't despair. Get started.