What's Changing? - Hope

Please see below selected recent hope-related change.

See also:

April 2023

In Hope, Trust, and Forgiveness: Essays in Finitude, John Lysakeris argued that hope is vitalising. When it pulses, we aspire toward better futures and conspire with what we have and have been. In its absence, we often grow listless, even court despair.

March 2024

In his clinical practice, psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott often met with parents who felt like failures: He understood was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequences of a counterproductive perfectionism, so to help them reduce this, Winnicott developed the idea of what he called ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK, pretty decent, usually well intentioned one. Winnicott knew the toll exacted by perfectionism - and realised than in order to remain more or less sane we have to learn not to hate ourselves for failing to be what no ordinary human being ever really is anyway.

January 2024

The School of Life noted that our dips in confidence can have an unlikely-sounding source: hope. We become hopeful that things can turn out well and that we will get through events without setback and frustration - but then, when life turns out to be trickier than we’d budgeted for, fall prey to grave panic, despair and anger.

February 2023

Otto Friedrich Bollnow rejected Martin Heidegger’s angst, Bollnow believed that a rather different inner orientation and frame of mind was important. This is hope, which Bollnow saw as the touchstone of human emotion and existence: "Hope thus points to the deeper ground in which the feelings of patience and security are rooted, and without which [we] would never be able to relax [our] attention or go to sleep tranquilly." It is a frame of mind that connects us to the future, not as the inevitability of our own death, but as an infinite source of new possibilities. Hope can provide firm ground as crises batter, challenge and change us. What is needed is neither a new universalism nor perpetual satisfaction or self-actualisation, but the openness that only hope can give.

December 2022

Further reading:
- Households across the rich world have never been so gloomy - The Economist
- Hope's complex role in the workplacev - LinkedIn

November 2021

The Atlantic noted that People tend to use hope and optimism as synonyms, but that isn’t accurate. In one 2004 paper in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, two psychologists used survey data to parse the two concepts. They determined that “hope focuses more directly on the personal attainment of specific goals, whereas optimism focuses more broadly on the expected quality of future outcomes in general.” In other words, optimism is the belief that things will turn out all right; hope makes no such assumption but is a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way.
Cognitive behavioural therapy for suicide prevention (CBT-SP) prioritises hope through conversations about reasons for living, including loved ones and other sources of meaning. It also includes instructions for creating a ‘Hope Kit’ that one can access when suicidal thoughts arise. Hope kits or boxes can be virtual or physical, and typically include quotes, pictures, and other contents that evoke fond memories (eg, a vacation souvenir), instil a sense of purpose or meaning (eg, pictures of family and friends, spiritual scripture) or have soothing effects (eg, nature pictures, a music playlist). A hope kit is meant to decrease distress and plant seeds of optimism for a better future. (See also: What's Changing? - Therapy.)

April 2021

For The School of Life, it is hope – with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians and our planet – that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the scale of our aspirations and the reality of life generates the anxious disappointments which spoil so many days.

November 2020

Hope arises when someone identifies paths to approach their goals, alongside a willingness to persevere despite obstacles, according to psychologist Jenny Taitz, citing the research of psychology professor Charles Snyder, adding that when one equates hope with empowering behaviours, it doesn’t feel optimistic so much as realistic.

October 2020

A study found that money alone doesn't make people happy - they need some hope for the future too. The study adds to the increasing pile of literature on the subject of how hope influences our wellbeing. The study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies surveyed hundreds of Americans to determine whether hope can buy the things money can't. Higher levels of income tied to higher levels of hope. Increases in hope were strongly and directly linked to improved levels of satisfaction, and the ability of statistical models to predict how happy a participant was more than doubled by adding in their levels of hope.

March 2020

Research suggests that during times of illness, hope has an impact on the nervous system that makes improvement and recovery more likely. This goes some way to explaining the “placebo effect” - a tangible physical improvement created by hope alone. Hope is not the same as optimism - it is active rather than passive. Hope motivates us into taking positive actions that can lead to positive results. Feeling hopeful allows us to approach problems and challenges with a strategy for success, increasing the chances of us actually achieving our goals. Author of The Anatomy of Hope, Jerome Groopman, states how though “false hope can lead to intemperate choices and flawed decision making. True hope takes into account the real threats that exist and seeks to navigate the best path around them.”

January-December 2019

It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment, warned Christopher Hitchens.
Professor of Psychology Barbara Fredrickson argued that hope comes into its own when crisis looms, opening us to new creative possibilities. Frederickson argues that with great need comes an unusually wide range of ideas, as well as such positive emotions as happiness and joy, courage, and empowerment, drawn from four different areas of one's self: from a cognitive, psychological, social, or physical perspective. Hopeful people are "like the little engine that could, [because] they keep telling themselves "I think I can, I think I can". Such positive thinking bears fruit when based on a realistic sense of optimism, not on a naive "false hope".
A theory developed by Charles R. Snyder argued that hope should be viewed as a cognitive skill that demonstrates an individual's ability to maintain drive in the pursuit of a particular goal. This model reasons that an individual's ability to be hopeful depends on two types of thinking: agency thinking and pathway thinking. Agency thinking refers to an individual's determination to achieve their goals despite possible obstacles, while pathway thinking refers to the ways in which an individual believes they can achieve these personal goals.
In chaotic environments hope is transcended without cultural boundaries, Syrian refugee children are supported by UNESCO's education project through creative education and psycho-social assistance. Other inter-cultural support for instilling hope involve food culture, disengaging refugees from trauma through immersing them in their rich cultural past.
Robert Mattox, a social activist and futurist proposed in 2012 a social change theory based on the hope phenomenon in relation to leadership, which argues that certain conditions must exist before even the most talented leaders can lead change.Given such conditions, Mattox proposesd a change management theory around hope, suggesting that a leader can lead change and shape culture within a community or organisation by creating a "hopescape".

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