I always took it to mean “I wish I could believe that this is real, it ignites my hope and dreams, but reality is still ruling it out so I have to accept what facts tell me.”

Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the message that most people took from it, which if you were to boil down to just its essence in America at least, it says “Believing is just as good as anything else. Go ahead if you want it.” and I think it made way, way too many young, impressionable people who never picked up on the irony of the show to go on to accept conspiratorial thinking and self-delusion about utter nonsense.