The Science of Hope
Some days I’m tired of doing everything I do. I balance blogging 3 hours a day with working full time and finding time to apply for grants and Blockchain Botany. Exhausting is a word that applied over six months ago. Today it feels more like my bones are almost hallow. Still though, I keep going. Like persistence or grit, hope is one of those things I’ve found comfort and obsession with.
For centuries, hope has been treated more like a feeling thank anything else, you know, something fleeting, soft, maybe even a little naïve. But what if it isn’t a feeling at all? What if it’s a kind of infrastructure shaping every decision, every heartbeat, every single person that’s ever chosen to try again after collapse?
That’s the question led by Carol Graham and Redzo Mujcica, a group of researchers in Australia, quietly answered. Over fourteen years, they followed 25,000 lives. People grew older, lost jobs, fell in love, watched parents die, saw children grow, I mean a ton of milestones happen over the span of fourteen years. What they found was pretty magical in how measurable it was.
The people who carried hope, the ones who believed their actions could still change something, didn’t just feel better, they lived better.
They were healthier, wealthier, and more resilient when life came knocking. And when life broke them, as life always does, they healed faster.
The gravity of hope
When scientists charted the data, they learned something new: hope wasn’t just a passive emotion. It pulled people forward like a black hole in space, or Earth in orbit around the sun.
Those who scored higher on hope years ago were more likely to have jobs later, to earn more money, to finish school, to avoid chronic illness, the list goes on and on. They stayed connected to others too, which is a protection against loneliness that numbers pretty much never show, but hearts understand on a deeper level. I’ve read other studies claiming loneliness can effect everything from your mental health to your physical health as well.
It’s as if hope, while unseen and constant, is drawing you toward motion even when you think you’re standing still.
And when shit got hard (because it always does unfortunately), hopeful people bent instead of breaking. Their happiness dipped less dramatically and they bounced back faster. Even though it seems like magic, it’s neurological.
The difference between wishing and building
This isn’t about blind optimism, let me make that clear now. I’m not saying everything will be fine if you just think hard enough, although that would be nice.
Hope, in the way these researchers describe it, is more architectural. It’s belief with a blueprint, the idea that the future is editable. That your choices still matter even when the world feels so random around you and things are spinning out of your control.
Faith with calluses is how I personally like to think about it. I have a friend who dreams about her future and tells me all the grand plans she has, but then never tries anything with them. She doesn’t go out and try to dating apps to find her perfect future husband, doesn’t stalk Zillow to find her dream home, doesn’t use any action and her hope stays inside of her mind. Hope is only helpful if you use it as motivation instead of delusion.
Whatever name you give it, it does change the way people live. Hopeful people seem to save more, plan farther, and recover faster because they still see a line between cause and effect. When you believe your effort counts for something, you’re more likely to actually use that effort for something.
If we want to get all biological, hope triggers the same reward pathways as anticipation, and the brain releases dopamine when you believe success might happen, not when it does. To me, that means hope has chemical effects that can cause steadier blood pressure, lower inflammation, or even better immune function, just by being hopeful.
You ever feel hopelessness? It’s almost a physical feeling, the heaviness in your body, the shallow breathing, the sense of how much extra effort it takes to do anything. I think it’s one of the worst feelings in the world when despair comes knocking at my door, and I’ve always had to find ways to dispel it fast so it doesn’t move in for long.
What happens when we stop believing
The study spanned 2007 to 2021, which were years when economies crashed, fires burned, viruses spread, and optimism grew expensive. But still, the pattern held. When people lost jobs or loved ones, those who had hope lost less of themselves in their hardships. Their life satisfaction fell, yeah of course, but it came back. It always came back.
Those without hope didn’t bounce back in the same way. It’s as if despair carries inertia in that the longer it stays, the harder it is to leave.
That’s what makes this study so important and worth sharing (in my opinion). Civilizations fall when they lose belief in the future. People stumble when they lose hope.
There’s tons of stuff online telling you how to build hope if you need it. I won’t go into it too deeply here, but a little overview would be setting a goal that you’re passionate about, thinking about all the ways you can get there (don’t shove yourself in one box or you can get discouraged when it doesn’t work out the one way you want it to), and then believe you have power to make it happen. That’s it, that’s all you need.
It might sound a little delusional, but maybe you need a little bit of delusion to believe in the dreams you have, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Become the kind of person who expects tomorrow to open opportunities for you instead of slamming the door in your face.
There’s also quiet rebellion in hope, a refusal to accept the crap that life hands you and think that what is in this moment in time doesn’t always have to be that way. I’ve always had a thing for grit, and to me, hope is the spark that becomes grit behind the scenes.
When a city rebuilds after flood, that’s hope in the shape of construction materials and an opportunity to create better infrastructure.
Or when you decide to plant something again, knowing winter is coming eventually, that’s hope too. Don’t miss out on all your spring and summer seasons because you know that eventually winter will come. That’s how people without hope choose to live. Ignoring the spring and summer sunlight and refusing to plant those tomato seeds because eventually they’ll die is asinine. I grow tomatoes all year round, as the weather is changing right now my hydroponic system already has over 50 flowers growing on it. That’s hope.
This study proves what I’ve always believed deep down, that kind of hope pays you back over time. Across the long arc of years, the hopeful didn’t just weather the storms that came rumbling their way, they rerouted the rivers of their lives.
They built among the ruins.
So what do we do with this?
If hope predicts everything from earnings to endurance, then maybe our institutions should be built around growing it. Teach students not just to memorize facts, but to envision futures they want to be a part of. Let them use their minds and learn critical thinking skills instead of having someone else’s beliefs shoved down their throats. I can’t tell you how many people seem to take what they saw on social media as the truth these days. There is no truth, you build it. Don’t let anyone ever tell you your dreams are too crazy to follow, your path is too hard, and you’ll never get there.
Because despair is absolutely contagious (if you don’t believe me just watch the news for five minutes), but so is hope.
If my work never reaches the people I hope it does, and my stories on new technology and wine stay buried in the abyss that is the internet, but you’re reading this right now, then everything was worth it. If I can have one legacy from this blog I think I’d like it to be spreading hope.
In every dataset, every life trajectory, every slow comeback from loss, there’s a common denominator, and you deserve to have a little more of it in your life. Hope doesn’t erase suffering, nothing ever will, winter will come no matter what, but it makes it survivable.
It doesn’t deny reality, it rearranges it to be more of what you want.
And after fourteen years of data, we finally have proof that the most powerful force on Earth isn’t money, or status, or even love, it’s the decision to keep going.
