3 Ways You Can Make Hope Part of Your Everyday Life
It’s hard to be hopeful right now. With a pandemic raging on for almost two years, natural disasters, social injustice, and so on, a bright future often seems unattainable. As humans, we use our surrounding evidence to frame our worldview. Sensationalized news and our collective disappointment of powerful people only add to this hopelessness.
Since I felt hopeless after reading depressing headlines, seeing good news (few and far between) made me feel hopeful. I approached hope reactively and, my hopelessness was characterized by “this sucks and, I can’t do anything about it.”
At the beginning of quarantine, I was scrolling through Instagram and looked at the Q&A highlight on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC’s) profile. One of the questions was “Advice for dealing with somebody who feels hopeless in this day and age?” and her answer was along the lines of hope is not something that you wait for in the news, you have to BE hope by taking small but meaningful action for the future you want.
Her response reminded me of the quote “Be the change you wish to see in the world” by Mahatma Gandhi, a quote that I was familiar with for most of my life. At the time, I just brushed it off as a nice thought that I was momentarily inspired by but didn’t do anything with it.
Until it hit me like a brick wall. What solidified my understanding of hope is thinking about it in the same vein as happiness. Happiness is not given to you, but something that takes effort. We feel happy while doing things for our short-term or long-term satisfaction. What we do when, depends on the circumstances, some days creating a budget will help us feel happier and calmer about our financial future while other days the only thing that can cure the blues is eating ice cream … from the container.
Here’s How You Can Be More Hopeful In Your Daily Life
Like cultivating happiness, hope is something that takes work on our part. Here are three things you can do to make hope part of your everyday life.
Take Small and Consistent Action
By physically and mentally engaging with the causes you are most passionate about, you will start to take a more active role in increasing your levels of hope. In an article titled “How to Be More Hopeful”, Arthur C. Brooks discusses a simple framework to do this. He shares a three-step process inspired by the Catholic nun Teresa of Avila, who believed hope comes from will and commitment.
- Imagine a better future, with specific details about what makes it better. Shifting your outlook to focus on what the world could be instead of what it is can catalyze your desire to take action. Creating a more detailed picture of this future makes it easier to figure out how you can be helpful.
- Create a plan for how you can take action. Simply envisioning a better future will not create it. To ensure that you can do your part, choose volunteering activities, donations, and/or lifestyle changes that are maintainable to prevent burnout. Instead of vowing to volunteer five times a week, or transition to a fully plant-based diet today, try to start with one hour of volunteering per week or adopting Meatless Mondays. While we all want to make big changes and see our impact instantaneously, change takes time, so small and consistent actions are better for the long run.
- Act! Follow through on your plan from step 2. Try volunteering and/or adopting the lifestyle changes you outlined for a few weeks and change gears if you have to. Once you have found a way to meaningfully take action for a better future, keep going! Like any other good habit, make sure your changes aren’t short-lived and if you can, invite your family and friends to join you.
Cultivate Patient Hope
Climate activists like Mary Annaïse Heglar and Greta Thunberg have explained that for many people, hope is a privileged feeling. In the context of climate change, some of us can simply hope for a more environmentally conscious future without much change to our daily life. On the other hand, many people around the world already have their lives upended by the consequences of climate change, so they can’t hope for a better future. The future is here and, it’s not pretty.
Patient hope offers an equitable solution to this dilemma. It entails holding onto a vision of a valuable, positive future that doesn’t detract from the work needed to make this a reality. Instead of feeling discouraged by our fears and anxiety, patient hope uses them as fuel to take action.
Don’t Be A Savior
If you aren’t a politician, C-suite executive, or celebrity, you likely won’t be able to create rapid systemic change on your own. Even the most influential people in the world can not create change to the extent they would like to. While this may sound depressing, it relieves you of the burden of becoming a savior and makes being an activist a lot less overwhelming. When we want to help everybody, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and help nobody in the end. Remember that your actions, no matter how big or small have value.
Final Thoughts
You have probably heard cliches along the lines of “small actions make a big difference” and rolled your eyes afterward. I have hundreds of times, but I am consistently surprised by how much of an impact small, consistent action has in making the bright future of our dreams a reality.
There are countless examples of this but, for the sake of space, I will leave you with one of my favorites.
“Money talks. The largest investors in America aren’t Warren Buffett and Bill Gates; they are retirement funds like CalSTRS, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System pension fund with over $110 billion invested in the stock market. That $110 billion is all schoolteacher retirement money. Little-guy money. If all of us small investors took our money away from the control of Wall Street pension funds like CalSTRS and invested it individually in what we want to support in the world, those companies without good Missions would either change or die. The long-awaited ethics revolution in corporate America would happen quickly because the stock price follows the money. Take the money out of that stock, the stock price goes down, the CEO gets fired, and the board gets replaced. We’re talking months, not years. That thought gave me a little shiver.” ~Danielle Town (from the book Invested)
