Hope is something you do

Hope gets talked about as though it were weather. It arrives, or it does not. You wake up and it is there, or you wake up and the sky is the other colour and there is nothing to be done. On that account, a person without hope is simply unlucky, and the only advice available is to wait for it to come back.

I think that account is wrong in a way that costs people something real, and I want to make the case for a different one. Not because I can prove it. I cannot, and a good part of this article is about how nobody else can either.

The version where it is a feeling

Start with what the feeling account gets right, because it gets something right. There is obviously a felt state here. Hope has a texture. It is lighter in the chest than dread. When people say they have lost hope, they are reporting something true about their experience and it would be insulting to tell them they have not.

The problem is what follows from it. If hope is a feeling, then it is not under your control, because feelings are not, and anybody who tells you to simply feel differently is either lying or has never needed to. The advice collapses. All you can do is endure until the weather changes.

And that does not match how people actually describe the worst stretches of their lives. The accounts I find most credible are not accounts of waiting for a feeling to return. They are accounts of doing particular small things while feeling nothing much at all.

What people describe instead

People in long difficulty often describe something closer to a set of habits than a state of mind. Keeping the appointment. Ringing the person back. Going outside at the same time each day without any expectation that it will help. Continuing to plant things in a garden they are not confident of seeing.

Notice that these are all actions, and that none of them require the feeling. You can post the application while entirely convinced it is pointless. The posting is not evidence that you are optimistic. It is evidence that some part of you is still behaving as though the future is a place you will be, which is a different thing, and a stranger one.

On this reading, hope is something closer to a practice, in the plain sense of the word. A thing you do repeatedly, badly, on days you do not want to, and which is not invalidated by your mood while doing it. A person who does the thing joylessly is still doing the thing.

Where I have to be honest about the evidence

Here is the part that most writing about hope leaves out, and I think leaving it out is close to dishonest.

There is a great deal of confident popular writing on this subject, and much of it overstates what is actually known. You will read that hope measurably improves health outcomes, that it can be reliably trained with a list of exercises, that the mechanism is understood. The confidence of that writing is not matched by the state of the underlying knowledge. Human beings are extremely hard to study on questions like this. What counts as hope has to be defined before it can be measured, and different people define it very differently, so findings that sound like they are about the same thing often are not. People reporting on their own inner states are not reliable narrators, including me. And the direction of cause is rarely clear: someone whose situation is quietly improving will feel more hopeful, which tells you nothing about whether hope does anything on its own.

So I am not going to tell you that this is established. It is not. What I am offering is a reading that fits what people commonly report about their own difficult years, and which has the practical advantage of not requiring you to summon a feeling on demand. That is a weaker claim than the ones you will see elsewhere. I would rather make the weaker claim accurately.

It is also worth saying that the practice framing might be doing something less flattering than it appears. It may be that the actions are simply what is left when the feeling has gone, and that calling them hope is a kindness we extend to ourselves after the fact. I do not think that is right. But I cannot rule it out, and neither can anyone writing more confidently than this.

Why the distinction still earns its keep

Even granting all of that, the practice framing does work that the feeling framing cannot.

It removes the failure. If hope is a feeling, then a person who cannot feel it has failed at hope, on top of everything else that is already happening to them. That is a cruel arrangement and an extremely common one. People arrive at the worst point of their lives and then find themselves blamed, often by themselves, for not being positive about it.

If hope is a direction you keep facing, then the person who feels nothing and rings the number anyway has not failed. They have done the thing. The absence of the feeling is not relevant to whether it counts, which is a considerable relief to anyone in that position.

It also gives you somewhere to put your hands. There is nothing to be done about a feeling. There is always something to be done about an action, even if the something is very small and you are quite sure it will not matter.

The small version of it

A wish is one of the smaller actions available. It commits nothing, promises nothing, and costs a minute. Writing one down is not an assertion that the thing will happen. It is an act carried out by someone still oriented towards a future, and the orientation is the whole content of it.

That is not a large claim and I do not want to inflate it. Nobody is repaired by writing a sentence down. But it belongs to the same category as watering something in March, and people have been doing that for a very long time without any evidence it improves their mood.

The one thing I would guard against is letting hope quietly become expectation, because those behave very differently under pressure and confusing them causes avoidable pain. That difference has its own article. And if you have wished for something that did not arrive and are trying to work out what that leaves you with, there is a piece on wishes that do not come true.

For an account of how people actually carry this through long stretches rather than single bad days, there is an article on difficult seasons.