![]() Indeed, it is a theological virtue in Christianity: It implies voluntary action, not just happy prediction. Whether hope has a genetic link or not (I have not seen any measure of this), most philosophical and religious traditions regard it as an active choice, and even a commandment. This might be partially true for optimism: One study finds it is 36 percent genetic. S ome might argue that having hope is mostly a matter of luck-you are born with it. In a 2001 study of older Mexican and European Americans who took a survey between 19, 29 percent of those whom researchers classified as “hopeless” based on their survey answers had died by 1999, versus 11 percent of those who were hopeful-even after correcting for age and self-rated health status. Hope is more than a “nice to have” for well-being lacking it is disastrous. A multiyear study of students from two universities in the United Kingdom found that hope, measured in response to self-rated measures such as “I energetically pursue my goals,” predicted academic achievement better than intelligence, personality, or even prior achievement. In a report in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2013, researchers defining hope as “having the will and finding the way” found that high-hope employees are 28 percent more likely to be successful at work and 44 percent more likely to enjoy good health and well-being. Given that hope involves personal agency, its links to individual success shouldn’t come as a surprise. One study in the journal Psychological Reports showed that although both optimism and hope drive down the likelihood of illness, hope has more power than optimism in doing so. But netting out the two concepts tends to show different levels of benefit. Much of the research that has linked optimism and human thriving collapses the distinctions between optimism and hope. You can be a hopeful pessimist who makes negative predictions about the future but has confidence that you can improve things in your life and others’.Ĭheck out Arthur Brooks’s new podcast on all things happiness, How To Build A Happy Life. You can be a hopeless optimist who feels personally helpless but assumes that everything will turn out all right. Hope and optimism can go together, but they don’t have to. 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. In one 2004 paper in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, two psychologists used survey data to parse the two concepts. P eople tend to use hope and optimism as synonyms, but that isn’t accurate. Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. We can all get better at it as we work toward recovering from the pandemic, and benefit from our improved skill for the rest of our lives. The research shows that hope is a far more potent force. Just as Stockdale found-and I’ve found in a less dramatic way during the pandemic-optimism often isn’t the best way to improve your well-being. ![]() There’s a word for believing you can make things better without distorting reality: not optimism, but hope. Some of the people who have done the best have been downright pessimistic about the outside world, but they’ve paid less attention to external circumstances and focused more on what they could do to persevere. Those who have struggled the most have been the optimists always predicting a return to normality, only to be disappointed as the pandemic drags on. And they died of a broken heart.”Īmong my circle of acquaintances, I have noticed a less dire version of this pattern over the past year and a half, as COVID-19 has slowly transformed from a temporary inconvenience into a new way of life. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. As the vice admiral, James Stockdale, later told the business author Jim Collins, “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go … And Easter would come, and Easter would go. Those who didn’t tended to be the most optimistic of the group. Some of them survived the appalling conditions others didn’t. Navy vice admiral who was held for more than seven years in a North Vietnamese prison noticed a surprising trend among his fellow inmates. “ How to Build a Life ” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.ĭ uring the Vietnam War, a U.S.
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