Does Austrian Economics Fill Me With Hope and Optimism?

No, Austrian Economics does not. It depresses me to the point of despair. The saving grace is that it cannot provide hope anyway. Economics does not do that and it only provides despair when combined with other cognitive faculties such as value judgment.

Austrian Economics is a school of thought that professes a value-neutral approach to economic learning. This means that the study of economics has nothing to do with a "good" or "bad" outlook for society. It is simply the study of what is logically possible given conditions of scarcity, the type of money system, the presence/lack of market distortions, etc.

There is nothing in the Austrian School that says there should (or should not) be any hope for the future. If it is the case that the central bank is rapidly inflating money supply, which pushes us closer to disaster, the Austrian School will have predicted it without elaborating what exactly is meant by disaster, or what kind of human misery it entails. This is perfectly acceptable too since misery is not at all an economic concept.

Nevertheless, the writing is on the wall. A purely economic lens will surely not allow us to decipher it, but any understanding of the real terms (socially and politically) provides us some insight into the horror. It's not hard to see that runaway inflation might lead to a lot of nasty things: starvation, homelessness, crime like you've never seen it before, perhaps genocide, perhaps sex slavery. Economics of any sort cannot predict these things (it might come close with starvation, maybe). However, after we figure out the inevitable consequences of certain policies, all we have to do is use our knowledge of the past as well as our imaginations to figure out that there is a very grim future.

Learning Austrian Economics is a good thing. It is unlikely that it will be applied soon enough to avert "shit from hitting the fan," but you can at least have the gratification of knowing that you "called it" and that you did not die economically illiterate like most other bozos. Beyond that, I would not count on an expertise of Mises's Human Action to bring about personal prosperity (other than intellectual enlightenment). They can only hire so many people to work at the Mises Institute, after all.