Why Humans Are Wired to Hope
I can’t categorically give you the answers to your problem. What I can tell you instead is that it isn’t your fault or some cooked-up philosophical phenomenon that makes you keep hoping in the face of daunting situations. Don’t get me wrong, you can become depressed or feel hopeless. However, what am trying to discuss here is the fact that as humans we naturally hope for the best in any situation we find ourselves in.
Let’s take a walk down memory lane and talk about some of the most difficult situations you have been in. Can you remember what you truly felt when a catastrophe occurred? Did you actually feel completely hopeless or desperately hoped that it wasn’t as bad as it looked? This didn’t just happen it was due to the fact that as humans we are naturally wired to hope for the best.
Paint me black but isn’t life abstract art? The fact that hope as a mechanism makes it easier to live- is something many never truly appreciate; I would like to change that by explaining some facts that would totally wow you.
Have you ever noticed how optimistic young children are?
If you think about how children behave, as infants you will notice that from the moment they learn to talk and walk they begin to dream. Even as young children you remember telling your parents that you want to grow to be like them or some favourite character in animation you love.
Children have an optimistic view of their future and the way their world will be; this is largely due to the fact hope is in our DNA. Even though the odds that any of these exotic dreams of theirs will become reality are low, it helps to develop a happy and determined youth who thinks the world is theirs for the taking.
Everyone has a moment of optimism per day.
Even the most dogged “realist” will agree that there is at least a moment when optimism seeps into their thoughts each day. Many of them, tend to ignore it but that doesn’t remove the fact that in the roots of our being ‘hope’ seeps into our personality. I will attribute this to the fact that every morning we rise to the feeling of a new day, let’s just say an empty canvas of sorts. Our brain processes this like a computer on reboot, looking for the best possible way to maximize the day which equals hope.
Our natural search for satisfaction — ‘The Better Life.’
Who doesn’t want a better life? Even some normally negative people give themselves the luxury of a little optimism each year. The reality is that even those who argue that they don’t want anything better still crave something new. We envision ourselves achieving more than our peers and overestimate our likely lifespan. Fast forward and rewind the history of the world and we realize that the only reason we ever left the stone age is that our search for something better drives us to strive for the satisfaction we hope we could achieve. Well, won’t you agree with me that in truth we mostly can’t help ourselves because we are wired to hope in our innermost being?
Science supports ‘Hope’
Research made by both neuroscience and social science suggests that humans tend to be more optimistic than realistic. A few may argue that people hugely underestimate their chances of attaining success as a form of realism but I disagree completely. I think it is because we hope for something better and wish for something greater, but fear of our capability most times forces us to say downgrading words to lower people’s expectations.
Alena Slezackova and Andreas Krafft recently studied the role of hope in subjective well-being in a large sample of 1,400 respondents from the Czech Republic, aged between 15 and 80 years. The result found proved that more hopeful people were more satisfied with life, maintained high-quality interpersonal relationships, and were also healthier.
In fact, a growing body of scientific evidence points to the conclusion that optimism may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain.
Reaffirmation from Psychologists
In the early ’90s, 1991 to be exact an eminent positive psychologist Charles R. Snyder and his colleagues came up with a theory called ‘Hope Theory’. According to their theory, hope consists of agency and pathways. They deduced that a human who has hope has the will and determination to achieve goals and a set of different strategies at their disposal to reach their goals.
Dr James Gottfurcht is a specialist in the psychology of money. When asked about why most serious lotto players who know the numbers, and the odds against winning a mega millions jackpot are close to one in 176 million still play. He explained that humans are wired for hope and that hope of being the “one” is definitely present in the hearts and minds of lotto players.
In parting, I will put it simply,
‘hope involves not only the will to get there, and different ways to get there but also keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health.’
That said, you can see now that hope isn’t just a feel-good emotion, but a dynamic cognitive motivational system. That is, hope helps build a private optimism about our personal future and remains incredibly resilient in making life on earth a whole lot better.
