Good morning. Welcome to 2026. The Morning brings you bad news every day: wars, mass shootings, congressional gridlock, bedbugs in France. At the beginning of a new year, we’re doing something different. We’re going to talk about the psychology of hope.
Your hopes
America has become a country of cynics. At least, that’s what studies show. People don’t trust each other, the media or the government. Most Americans, about 80 percent, don’t feel confident their children’s lives will be better than theirs. About half the country thinks America’s best days are in the past. “Cynicism is vastly on the rise,” said Jamil Zaki, the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. It’s a dangerous trend — but Zaki and other experts say it’s reversible if people cultivate hope that another future is possible. Hope, as a word, can be pat (does my barista really hope I have a good one?) and overly saccharine (think: the generic painted sign in an Airbnb). But it is also, experts tell me, an action verb. While optimism is the belief that the future will be better, hope is the belief “that we have the power to make it so,” said Chan Hellman, the director of The Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma. It is “one of the strongest predictors of well-being,” he said. It helps improve the immune system and aids recovery from illness. More hopeful people may actually grow taller than less hopeful people. To cultivate hope, people need three things, Zaki said: They first need to be able to envision a better future, either personally or collectively. Second, they need the willpower or motivation to move toward that future. And third, they must be able to chart “a path from where they are to where they want to be,” he added. How to be more hopefulThere are a few ways, experts say. People can set specific goals and then “begin brainstorming the pathways or road maps” to achieve them, ideally by writing them down, Hellman said. That can start small. “It is much better to set and focus on short-term goals rather than long-term, abstract goals,” he added. Another tactic is to “replace cynicism with skepticism,” Zaki said. “Skepticism is not believing that everything will turn out great, but also not prejudging things as terrible, either.” That can often mean speaking more positively about other people, as trust in others is an indicator of low levels of cynicism. People gossip three times as much about the selfish things others do than about the generous things they do, Zaki has found. To address that, he and his family practice “positive gossip.” “Each evening we try to share one story of something positive that somebody else did that day,” he said “The research finds that when you know you’re going to have to share something, you pay a lot more attention to it.” What you told usLet’s try some positive gossip, of sorts, for 2026. I wanted to know how we could be “good and proactive and even somewhat desperate” patients, as George Saunders once said, in seeking a more generous outlook. So we asked you what gives you hope, and more than 600 of you replied. Many of you spoke positively about others. Here’s what you said: Random acts of kindness
Children
History
Sports
Travel
Other sources
I hope, in 2026, we can all be more like Tim. Each week, I write about topics like this in Believing, a newsletter about how people find meaning in their lives now. You can subscribe to Believing here.
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